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Pierre keeps the website in an unlabeled bookmark on his browser. It’s just the pixelated music note icon for the hosting service, which is some kind of web 2.0 internet radio site that he swears will break any day now. It’s not that he’s embarrassed about it, trying to hide it. He just wouldn’t want to share this with anyone else out of selfishness.
Okay, maybe there’s a little bit of self-consciousness too. Nobody under the age of seventy still listens to the radio, even if it’s online, even if it’s the university station. No one listens to the university station. They got their broadcast license taken away in the nineties and now they only exist to blast the worst of French rap across the campus at all times of the day. But Pierre listens to it. He listens on Mondays and Wednesday evenings, always a few minutes before the show is actually meant to start, because sometimes DJ Roulette is eager and starts early.
The music isn’t always great. In fact, it’s often pretty bad, in line with the station’s reputation. But what makes this show different is that instead of some bored first-year letting a Spotify playlist run for the hour, DJ Roulette talks. He half-whispers, uncomfortably close to the microphone, about the songs and why he chose them. There’s no way he should expect anyone to be listening, but he talks like he’s reaching an audience of thousands. Sometimes he’ll crack a joke and then laugh a little to himself, and those are the times that Pierre laughs too and then he has to take out his headphones and remind himself he’s being weird.
Because it is weird, right? To schedule time in your day to listen to a stranger talk in little thirty-second bursts. To not exactly keep it a secret, but also not to tell anyone else about it and feel like it’s your thing. DJ Roulette plays one song but recommends the entire album. Pierre listens to the whole thing and then deletes it from his Spotify search history afterward.
All the university’s DJs are pseudonymous, but sometimes in the chat between the songs DJ Roulette drops details about himself. He’s not French, despite the accent. He’s worried he’s failing Fluid Mechanics, but he’s also not reading the textbook. One Monday night he claims to still be hungover from the day before, and it should be eye-rolling and ridiculous but the confession feels so human that Pierre’s chest aches a little. So yeah, maybe it’s a crush. He’s got a crush on a faceless university DJ with bad music taste who gets wasted on Sundays. His mother would be proud.
It’s the last show before Christmas break. The residence halls are almost all empty. Pierre would be gone too, except his Animal Behavior professor hates him and scheduled the exam for the last possible block. Pierre stares despondently at the stack of textbooks crowding his desk. He makes a deal with himself: he’ll study during the songs and take breaks in between.
Pierre follows the bookmark on his laptop and opens up his study guide. The broadcast is silent. Not early today then. Usually, DJ Roulette’s presence is first announced by the soft white noise of the studio, even before he can even say hello to all the listeners out there. Tonight, though, the stream jumps directly into a distorted trap beat, making Pierre jump. He looks out the dark window in the general direction of the radio station. Maybe Roulette’s gone home and someone’s picked up his slot.
He considers closing the tab but decides to stick around to the end of the song. It’s a good thing he does, because once the Booba finally ends there’s the ambient studio sound, the soft scrape of an office chair against the floor. “Good evening, listeners. I hope this broadcast finds you well, whether you are still here or at home.” He sighs, seeming uncommonly frazzled. Usually he rambles confidently about nothing at all before getting around to the next song. “I was thinking we could have a bit of a different show tonight. Well, actually I forgot to prepare a show for tonight, so I will be following every lazy DJ’s favorite formula and taking calls.” Another pause. “If there are no calls I can always play music, but there will also be a lot of clicking around, deciding what to play. It’s your choice, listener.”
Pierre looks longways at his phone. He’d left it across the room to minimize the distraction, but now going to pick it up feels like a big deal. Like he really wants to call in, which he’s not sure he does. How creepy would that be, calling in to the guy he listens to every week and has imagined asking out, if he ever finds out what he looks like? He has to suppress a full-body cringe. No, he should study.
There’s a long, long minute of white noise, punctuated by the staccato click of a mouse. Another sigh. It’s distracting. He should really just close the tab for good.
“So no takers?” Roulette sounds genuinely disappointed. Does he really think people listen to this? It’s almost sweet. It’s vastly more interesting than studying. “You don’t want to hear the sound of your own voice on air? Well, that’s alright, I can fill the time. I’ve been listening to this guy from Marseilles and—”
Pierre doesn’t know what exactly possesses him to grab his phone in that moment, but before he knows it he’s punching in the number from the website and the line is ringing. He never makes phone calls anymore. It reminds him of being a kid and calling his friends, even when they lived down the block. He moves from the desk to sit on his bed and look out across the shadows of the campus.
“Hello?” Roulette’s voice comes from the phone speaker first, then the laptop. Pierre scrambles to mute the website while trying to respond like a normal human being.
“Oh, hey. What’s up?” he says, as casually as he can. He doesn’t really sound like himself, but he never does when he’s nervous.
“You know what I’m up to, just in the studio, failing to put on a show. The real question is what’s up with you, listener. What’s your name?”
“Pierre.”
“Pierre,” Roulette says, drawing out the syllables like he’s savoring them. Pierre feels exposed, even though the two of them on the call are surely the only people listening to the broadcast as well. What was just his weird, private fascination with a DJ is now technically public knowledge. It makes Pierre blush, even though he’s alone. “What are you up to tonight, Pierre?”
“It’s just, fucking exams, man,” he says, surprising himself. He doesn’t usually swear when talking to strangers, but sometimes Roulette does and at this point he doesn’t feel like that much of a stranger. “I’m the last one on my floor still here. It’s weird.”
Roulette laughs a little, even though Pierre hadn’t made a joke. “Me too! I only decided to come to the studio and do a show to get out of the residence. It is so creepy man, I swear my floor is haunted.”
It’s odd to think of Roulette as someone who actually exists outside of the station, who sleeps in a dorm room that looks like Pierre’s and maybe walks the same paths between classes. Still, it’s more comfortable to listen to Roulette talk, that’s how this relationship has always worked, so Pierre keeps the conversation on him. “Which residence? How do you know it’s haunted?”
“The west block. It’s crazy, no one on the floor believes me but one time it was like three in the morning and I was drunk in the kitchen and—” Roulette keeps talking, but Pierre doesn’t register it. The west block. Roulette’s room looks a lot like Pierre’s then. Every room in the building looks the same. Fuck, Pierre’s probably seen him within the last week. What were the chances that of all the buildings on campus, Roulette would live here? Random chance dictates that he should live in one of the innumerable other buildings, preferably one far enough away that Pierre never has to let his weird internet crush materialize into a real human who he might meet and fuck things up with.
There’s silence on the other end of the line. Shit, what had Roulette said last? He bites his lip and thinks quick. “Sorry, I didn’t hear that, what did you say?”
“I said where are you?”
“I’m in the west block too.” Pierre kicks himself immediately. It would have been so easy to lie. Why the hell didn’t he lie? His mother always bragged to her friends that she had the most honest, responsible son anyone could ask for. It had always felt like a compliment, until now. Pierre tries not to read too much into Roulette’s little surprised gasp.
“Oh, then I can show you. The ghost, I mean. She likes to scare new people. What are you doing after the show? Hell, according to my screen it looks like you’re the only listener I’ve got right now. I can just come over there now if you don’t want to study. Hello? Pierre?”
Pierre’s mouth has gone a bit dry listening to Roulette get more and more excited about the idea of dropping the show and taking Pierre on a supernatural investigation. Is this really his life? The carefully constructed wall between him and this crush has proved to be made of paper, now crumpled up and thrown in the bin. He clears his throat.
“Oh, you’re still there!” Roulette laughs again. Is he nervous too? Pierre supposes if this goes wrong he will lose 100% of his listeners.
Pierre spares a final glance at the abandoned textbooks. “I’m on the third floor at the end of the hall. Come by whenever’s best. Now’s fine, if you want.”
There’s a shuffling of something on Roulette’s side of the call, and the ambient noise cuts out. Dead silence again. The page for the stream goes gray: This station is not currently live. It’s abrupt and a bit rude and Pierre wants to complain but then he sees a slight figure hurrying down the path towards the front entrance to the residence. Pierre can’t recognize him from this distance, but it’s no matter. A few seconds later and there’s a sharp rap on the door.
“Ciao,” a familiar voice calls, loud enough that it would bother his neighbors, if there were any around to annoy. What the hell has Pierre gotten himself into? “Pierre? It’s Charles, from the radio.”
Pierre closes the tab with the radio before he opens the door.
⁂
In the toolbar of Pierre’s browser, there’s a bookmark with a pixelated music note icon, labeled with a simple ♡. He’s not embarrassed or trying to hide anything; it’s just what Charles named it when he used Pierre’s laptop one time. It’s the only label Pierre needs, really.
The broadcast starts like it always did, hello to all the listeners out there, but by the end, it’s always thanks for listening, Pierre.