Chapter Text
When you received your first lunch money from your parents, it was near the end of your high school year.
It made you happy at the time, but years later, now that you're in college, the first thing you bought with your hard-earned savings was a cheap hand-held, portable radio transceiver from your uncle's junkyard. Its matte-black color wasn't temptingly flashy, with stickers still stuck on it.
Your uncle's shop was loud with advertisements. Everywhere, there were stickers that yelled 'The country's BEST and TOP-SELLING COOLER!', 'FOR SALE!' and 'WE DON'T SELL TO RUSSIANS.'
You once asked about that latter sticker, and he told you it's a story for another day.
It was difficult to not buy the transceiver because of it. It was larger than the telephone handset at your house and had a long, swaying antenna mounted on top of it. You bought it without hesitation, handing over your grimy fifty dollars to your uncle in a hurry - but still managing to skip your 9 AM Biology class - unbeknownst to your mother and father.
Of course, the decision couldn't have been settled without the mind-boggling doubts. You had rethought of the possibilities of what you could do with the transceiver. You had thought of the what ifs - what if I used it for my lunch instead? What if I didn't buy it and just stole it? God, what if, what if -
Either way, your parents would kill you if they knew you used the money for anything else other than food for your stomach. You decided on hiding the truth - hiding the fact that you had been wasting fifty dollars of a week's worth of lunch money - to avoid death from the hands of your parents.
"Oh. A single walkie-talkie." The employee at the cashier removed the stickers, folded and lowered the antenna to its base, and placed the walkie-talkie carefully in a brown bag. His face had infinite questions written on it, but one that you were sure of was why is this college student making such a stupid transaction?
Well, curiosity may kill the cat.
"Be careful with it," he told you. "That's not something you see everyday in university. Make sure they don't see that or they'll think of you as a spy, or something."
"Su-u-ure," you mocked. You kept the transceiver inside your shoulder bag, careful not to break it.
By the time you had returned to your college building, it was just in time for, ironically, lunch. Your Biology teacher and your friends asked you where you had been, to which you had lamely answered "toilet... and the bread store, across town" and was given a much more difficult homework for Biology that had numbers that existed for no explainable reason, one hundred and three noogies, a red face, and a detention card.
You arrived home late too, but that was to be blamed on your grease-monkey uncle. When you passed by his stink-hole of a junkyard, he immediately spotted you from far away, like an eagle hunting for its prey. He then ordered you around the place either to disassemble car parts or slam down a customer that was trying to negotiate a five-dollar price from a bronze statue that costed seven dollars. These "business" negotiations were hard to disaffirm - usually, the customer would breakdown and cry - but your strategy was usually grabbing them by the back of their neck and plastering a giant sticker with a giant NO on a poor man's forehead.
By 6 PM, you had reached the point of burnout. The sun had almost completed its setting, shining over the junkyard. You rested your back on a 60's model refrigerator, much to the chagrin of the junkyard employees who had told you that you could potentially ruin the pristine condition of the Collector's Edition fridge. You were certain that a fridge had more value than your worth.
You played with your thumbs, circling each fingernail. "Uncle Fern, if you give me more things to do, I might slowly turn into you," You laughingly told him, who was by one of the cashier counters flipping each paper dollar with his fat, grabby fingers.
He licked his thumb then continued to count the dollars on hand. "What, industrious? Handsome? Wealthy?"
"No..." You pretended to think hard, tapping a finger under your chin. "...boring."
You received a playful smack on the head with a newspaper after You said that. Fortunately, it wasn't all too painful.
Without anything else to do, you twirled your fingers on your red hair, not minding the dirt under your fingernails. You pulled the walkie-talkie from the bag by the cashier counter. "Thanks for letting me buy this thing for cheap, by the way," you told him. Uncle Ferdinand Dewey wasn't the kindest nor the most easygoing person in town, but he was one of the easiest people to negotiate a price with. But this negotiation power works only with and if they were you. "Also, how do you use it without breaking it? The walkie-talkie, I mean?"
He groaned, muttering words under his breath. You had a feeling it was about the way you called walkie-talkies in such a manner that you knew had nothing wrong with it. He wiped his dirty and oiled hands against the apron hanging around his waist. An oil slick marked a stain on the whiteness of the apron. "Hand-held radio transceivers are so-o-o simple. What you have to do is turn this thing, take this thin fiber, like this..." He pulled out the what you knew as the antenna. "And then once you hear this sorta swi-i-i-ish sound, it's good to go. You gotta press that little button over there to talk, then release once you're done. Now try asking if there're any ghosts around."
You sneered your eyes at him. "Funny," you said. Somehow, you felt your heart slammed a single beat against your chest.
"No kidding!" Uncle Fern laughed. "Sometimes, the junkyard gets visited by some God-awful, overly face-powdered men who claim to be ghost hunters." He air-quoted the last two words. "Acting like some aliens. They even looked like they'd been soaking in snow. It's the funniest shit I've ever seen in my entire life."
You lowered the antenna and tucked the walkie-talkie inside your bag. "Do I get to have a warranty in case this one gets broken?"
"This is a junkyard, (Y/N)." Your uncle was one of the few people who called you by that, since you had been disgusted by the longer version of your name. "You don't get warranties here. It seems like you forgot the first rule of Junk Club."
"But it's fifty dollars." Your eyes drifted over the vehicle plate which his uncle jabbed a finger at that read 'NO REFUNDS!' spray-painted in a screaming color of red against white. You turned to him and pouted.
He reconsidered for a minute. "Although... I may give you one free repair." He grinned, flashing his missing teeth. He lightly tapped on your head with his palm, getting your attention when you'd almost drowned in marveling at the transceiver. "Why did you wanna buy that transceiver, anyway? It's supposed to have a pair."
You smiled at him and shrugged. "Don't know. I guess I kind of missed talking with people."
"You think someone will reply on the other end? And no one in your farm is cool enough like me for you to get any single transmission, (N/N)."
You rolled your eyes. You hated it when you get called by that; it rolled off the tongue like an insult to you. Your uncle had dropped the word to make you seem to give up. He himself knew the story why - the last time you had been called by that nickname was from a boy, a classmate, in your seventh grade. He had pulled on your leg and snickered at the uniqueness of your hair. A few minutes later, it ended with him losing one of his front teeth when you decided to settle the bullying with a fist to his face. After that day, all the boys in your class, and in the years that followed, started avoiding you in fear of losing a perfectly white tooth.
And so, you've worn that nickname like a badge. Although it was hard to admit that it was earned from an immature point of your life.
"We'll see," you numbly replied.
"Whatever you say, (N/N)," he repeated the nickname much to your chagrin. "Just avoid any transmissions from the Russians, yeah?"
You decided to head home after that, taking your share from the wages - though admittedly, you took a quarter from your cousin's share, who was an employee as well. When the junkyard's metal gate closed behind you, you had made sure to clutch the bag with easiness just so your uncle wouldn't see that you were infuriated. If he ever did, however, he might have given you an extra hour to waste.
When you got home, the first welcoming message that you received were your mother's, chattering on and on about how you had arrived home late. Your father was absent from the sofa in front of the TV, which was playing live broadcast soccer, and you suspected he was in the garage, away from bothering you. You rubbed your eyes and placed your coat on the rack. You had heard of the same chatter before, and it always concluded with the same reason.
"Uncle Fern," you simply said. "Junkyard. Errands. Don't worry, I got paid as usual."
Your mother nodded her head in a sense of apology, but sighed in disappointment as if to say, here goes Ferdinand again; typical. It had been the same routine again and again, and the family had forgotten the last time you had any excuse other than pointing to your uncle giving out errands like a commander in war. After pinching the bridge of her nose, she asked you, "What did you eat for lunch?"
A pregnant pause.
"Well?" Your mother continued to ask.
You pulled your university I.D. over your head and placed it on the cabinet table by the front door. You knew what this meant. Your mother was a strict overseer, and always demanded to know what you did with your "lunch" money since high school. You pursed your lips for a second. "Yes," you numbly said, licking your suddenly dried lips. You faced away from her to avoid slipping the truth about where you had used the money for. "I mean, yes I ate for lunch. Chicken and beans. It was delicious."
She didn't believe it for a second. But you were a good liar – you’d lied many times about any avoidable topic ever since that one incident with the death of your pet goldfish who lived in a literal bowl for soups - but refused to lie when it came to your after-school whereabouts. There was no use to lie when your uncle was the overseer of their farm. After a second of silence, she finally gave in - "Okay then," she said, supposed to be followed by another question, but noticed her daughter's rush and so she decided to hold her tongue - and you headed straight to your room in the attic, where you were better locked away from anyone in the house.
Your spider cobweb-littered room was not the most comfortable place on the world, but this was where your childhood both started and ended. On those days, your room had never given you a wave of nostalgia let alone a whiff of melancholy since it was nothing more than just your habitat. It had an eerie, welcoming atmosphere, and it had been the same since the beginning of high school. You took a look around: wooden frames that your father had nailed in to hold the entire room, a roof that looked as if it was about to collapse, all set up over outdated posters of different artists and marker graffiti on the wall, disorderly dispersed piles of clothes, and a strange odor of a mix of vanilla candles and barbecue chips. It looked exactly the same as the lone wolf, teenage girl's cave in the movies, but you refused to be called so.
The hand-held, portable radio transceiver was taken out from your bag, along with the brown bag that it was placed in, your pencil box, a bunch of other stationery, and a minuscule first-aid kid that you had squeezed in "in case of emergency". You placed it delicately on your bed and reached for the screwdriver on a table of your own accord. The screwdriver seemed to be looking over the transceiver as you turned it over and over on another hand to analyze its structure, its details, and even the tiniest dents on the surface.
When that wasn't enough to satisfy your doubts about the transceiver's condition, you picked up the black-inked marker on your work table and scribbled your observations directly on the wooden walls of your room. With shaky fingers, you held it firmly on your hand, turned the switch to turn it on, and pulled its antenna up, extending it enough to at least catch the slightest signals.
The first sound that came out was the same sound as their television set when it was delivered to their living room and turned on for the first time. It gave off a heavy water flow-like sound, or something like a sharp hissing, similar to the waterfall that you and your family visited in your childhood. You sat on your bed for a while, the transceiver on one hand near your lips and the screwdriver clutched in a fist on your lap, for a considerable amount of time, as if waiting for something. The Christmas lights on your walls blinked. Other than the electric cry coming from the object on your hand, you could hear your own breath.
Finally, you pushed the button on the side and said, "Can anyone hear me?"
When you released the button, the hissing sound returned. You thought, would anyone on the other side of the radio transceiver have heard it?
Again, there was silence on your radio, and you were pulled back into your lonely universe.
You sighed with a sense of disappointment, but you had expected it in the first place. Fifty dollars for a measly walkie-talkie all gone to waste. Somehow, the hissing managed to annoy you in an unspoken way, and you were tempted to throw it against the wall. Even the Christmas lights faded its color for a while and represented the void vividness of your thoughts.
And then it happened - the first strange crackle. This sudden anomaly of a noise came out scattered at first, like multiple child-safe exploding fireworks on the street grounds, then came a long, electronic beep. The latter sound was haunting, but enticingly scary. It lasted for two seconds before repeating itself once more. A few minutes after that passed when letters came out in different intervals, then became numbers. Soon, you could make out a single word or two.
You had not expected it to happen. After all, they lived in the middle of a farmland in Connecticut. Your walkie-talkie shouldn't be able to pick up transmissions - as your uncle had said, who knew electronic devices best - especially at midnight when You knew you were the only owner of this kind of device in their area. It was the year of 1998, and not everyone had purchased walkie-talkies from the stores. It simply was a luxury... or that no one else considered it a decoration.
After what seemed to be an eternity, the incomprehensible language became comprehensible, but anyone could have mistook it for gibberish.
"H... he," it started, then followed with: "...He... hello? Hello?"
Shit, you thought, should I say hello back?
The crackles returned for a brief moment until the speaker emitted a human voice again.
Oh shit, you thought again, with a much more desperate tone in your inner voice, someone is ANSWERING on the other side of the walkie-talkie!
"...Unbelievable. Oh... GOD!" The voice called out from the speaker of your walkie-talkie. It was a man - you had presumed from the obvious manliness of it, plus he was in his late twenties - and he sounded oddly desperate. His voice sounded isolated, like in a room, and he was frantic. There was a hint of an accent, but you couldn't place what kind of accent it was with your finger. "I picked up this signal. Please, respond - do you copy?"
Your uncle would have known what to do. The respondent could have been someone in the junkyard trying to prank you. But then it was night, the junkyard's gates were strictly closed to anyone except your uncle - supposed it was your uncle, the voice did not sound like him at all - and all of the employees might have gone home. You coughed, your throat scratchy and airy, and the air in your lungs had suddenly increased in volume. Grasping the transceiver on your hand firm and tight, you swallowed an invisible lump in your throat, and took a deep breath. When it came out, you had accidentally released a sudden squeak.
"Is anybody alive out there? Don't stay silent, I'm begging you! Do you copy?" The voice asked once more.
No reply. Not yet.
You pressed the button.
"Hello. This is (N/N). I can hear you, over."
On the May of 1998, your walkie-talkie did something weird: it contacted someone you didn't intended to reach out to, and you replied to the voice on the other end of the line.