Page 1 of Yearning Difficulties

One

Face for Radio

Today’s Track: ‘I Need More (Radio Edit)’ by Haley Bennett

They say the soul is written across the eyes. If true, my ex-boyfriend’s soul was full of utter disbelief and revulsion.

‘You shouldn’t be here, Zella.’

As I glared at Dave Valvert, I wondered how my own face would look splashed across the front of a newspaper: Promising Soon-to-be Graduate Dismembers Arrogant Ex-Boyfriend. Bright Young Student Walked Out of Lake Pristine High School in Handcuffs.

But I had too many grand plans and most of them would be ruined if I committed a violent – if entirely justifiable – homicide against the boy who’d wasted a year of my life. Dating him had been a cry for help. I often looked into his face and wondered what on earth I’d been thinking. There was little to love about him because, like so many young men, he wasn’t fully cooked yet.

But bettering people is a thankless job, and I’d finally come to my senses and handed in my notice before the summer break.

Back when we’d been the school’s golden couple, we’d agreed to the job of co-hosting Lake Pristine High School’s radio station: Radio Panache. It had seemed like a fun venture.

Now, with Dave Valvert sitting across from me in the small studio space we would have to share for a year, it felt like a state-sanctioned punishment.

‘You shouldn’t be here,’ Dave repeated. ‘You only got this job because you were with me. Now you’re not, and the listeners will be able to smell the poverty coming off you through the radio waves. You should resign.’

I snorted inelegantly. ‘Me, resign? Never. Impeachment only. If you don’t like this, you leave.’

He glared, jerkily trying to adjust his swivel chair so he could look taller than me.

I watched in amusement as he bobbed up and down in his seat. ‘Need a little grease for that chair, comrade?’

‘I need this gig for my college applications,’ he spat. ‘That dolt from admissions at Mapesbury said—’

‘That your below-average test scores aren’t good enough?’

‘Zella!’

‘Your sunburns look ridiculous, by the way. Did no one explain the physics of sun damage to you? You have to take the ski goggles off sometimes, Dave.’

‘At least my family can afford to leave this stupid little asylum of a town for a bit. The Alps were beautiful, by the way. Not that you’ll ever get to see them.’

I winced. Dave always knew just where to land the blow. He didn’t know how to be witty; he’d only ever mastered words when it came to being cruel.

Maybe things were so bad between us now because we’d never been friends in the first place. Maybe a relationship without friendship was a flightless bird.

‘Guys,’ Priya, our radio producer, and a former friend of mine, spoke to us from the other side of the studio. ‘You both swore you would keep things civil.’

‘Yeah,’ I said bitterly. ‘On air!’

I lost Priya in the breakup.

All of our friends had chosen Dave. To be fair to them, I had been a bit of a loner when he’d plucked me from obscurity and deigned to date me. They were technically his friends before they were mine.

It looked like my final year of high school was going to be another very lonely one.

‘We go live as soon as this song is done,’ Priya told us. She wore a stern expression, one that promised retribution should either of us bring our argument into the broadcast.

‘I’m ready,’ I said, sliding on my headphones.

Within minutes, it became very clear that Dave Valvert would not be allowing me a word in edgeways. He prattled and he drawled, hauling the invisible listeners through a dreary ten-minute rant – a laundry list of his complaints about Lake Pristine. The girls weren’t as pretty as the ones he’d seen in France. The internet was too slow. The events the town put on were always too cutesy and weird.

‘I would just like to interrupt this diatribe,’ I finally said, cutting Dave off without any warning, ‘to say that I love this town and the people in it. You know. Just for some balance.’