Chapter Text
Thursday, October 25th 1984
A violent ringing gnarled in the awful metal headphones. Quickly they were pulled off Clover’s head, tangling in her ungovernable crimson waves. The sting of the pull somehow amplifies the noise clinging to the inside of her ears, its distorted words sending a chill down Clover’s spine. A violent knock tugs them out of their ringing filled daze. She knows she's supposed to be on air, but the violently horrible noise is making it a dreadful task.
“Thatcher, if you’re not on the air in ten seconds, I’m firing you for ruining the perception of this station.” The station manager’s guard dog voice barks through the door.
Clover shakes, she doesn’t even know why she’s so on edge. Feedback is normal. Feedback is just what happens when two receivers are too close to each other. Everything is normal.
She fiddles gently with the dial of the radio equipment, slowly propelling their presence onto the radio waves.
“Gooooood morning Mirfield, Oregon. This is your Lucky Clover reporting for duty once again,”
As the broadcast goes on, she finds herself wishing for a sound technician, but that’s not something she will admit aloud. So far she has tripped over two wires, played the wrong sound effect nine times, and told the wonderful town of Mirfield that it was going to be 99 degrees, which was only.. 68 degrees off. She grimaces looking out of the portal to the outside world as rain pounded down on the green grass outside. The thermometer very obviously said it was currently 31 degrees fahrenheit.
The woods were dark like they always were. Clover remembered being afraid of whatever hid in there as a young girl, before her strongwilled, ridiculous, radical, rationalization set into the forefront of her brain when she was about nine years old. She needs to stop thinking so hard. She needs to focus on the task at hand, but her eyes find themselves wandering back to the woods. She is not scared of them. She is not afraid of the woods. She is eighteen years old not seven, she knows the woods are not something to be afraid of.
This is a bad broadcast, maybe the worst she has ever given. She doesn’t know what she is doing wrong, why nothing in the radio station can ground her back into her uncomfortably hard roller chair. She finds herself lining up song after song on the records, without stopping to talk. She misses the ad breaks, which will for sure put her in some hot water with Peter “Guard Dog” Mcgill when she passes the torch back onto one of the other hosts.
Clover clocks off the air at 10 am, she has been able to secure a prime spot on peoples commutes to work in the morning: Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. When she walks out of her soundbooth the station manager, Guard Dog, stares at her, his face filled with a disapproval that makes Clover want to retreat into herself.
“It’s just an off day. It won’t happen again, Guard Dog,” she’s too proud to mumble but her voice in that moment was filled with doubt.
“People pay good money to be advertised on our station, Thatcher.” McGill barks at her, his unruly, grey eyebrows furrowing on his large, balding forehead.
“It won’t happen again,”
“It better not.”
She nods tersely, trying desperately to just get away from his unforgiving gaze. She drives home in silence because the idea of listening to anyone else’s broadcast fills her with shame she doesn’t know how to deal with. Her mind keeps regressing back to the sound that had blasted through her headphones. The more she thinks about it the more she tries to decipher the almost-words.
The drive feels particularly hypnotic. The rickety, cracked asphalt runs under the wheels of her car like a hamster in a wheel. Her mind does not feel like its own as she continues to coast through the cold unforgiving landscape, that is Oregon in October.
When she finally makes it home, her dad is home listening to the radio and fiddling with the fridge that is yet again broken to another powersurge. Guard Dog’s familiar gruffness echoes through the house.
“Who’s your favorite host?” In her head it sounds better than when spoken aloud. The conversation falls weird and flat, like any other conversation she’s had with him since she was little.
“McGill.” Maybe, for him, it is also supposed to be a joke but it still stings– even more than her awful headphones that feel forever indented in her scalp. Clover hates being home alone with him, she misses when her mom was always home. When they worked together in the garden and talked for hours. After her dad’s injury, she had to take up a full time job at the post office just to make ends meet.
“Did all the food spoil?”
She gets all but a grunt in response and decides that they have had enough father-daughter bonding for the next month. She walks into her small bedroom that has looked the same since she was a kid. The walls are a muted shade of yellow that she remembers insisting on because it looked like marshmallow peeps. The once sweet, sugary easter candy now tastes saccharine and sandpapery against Clover's tongue.
She hates the walls now, the yellow color making the entire room feel sickly and jaundiced. The bed frame is glorified plywood and does nothing but hold her mattress off the ground. After this year, this room is going to be filled with whatever her mom wants. The posters on the wall, the tapestry on the ceiling, every single thing that once made this room hers will be gone. She can’t stop thinking about what this room may become when she leaves for college. All of the things in this room that have changed with how she identifies herself will be taken off the wall, likely ripped or torn, carded away or thrown into a Portland State University dorm. She doesn’t want to begin to think about that dorm room, or her roommate, or anything and everything that will be new to her. She lays on her bed and forces herself to breathe in the familiar smell of the room. Its musky and stale combination of Febreze and mothballs pierce through her nostrils. Her red curls wrap around her head like a whirlpool of thoughts and ideas she so desperately wants to keep buried. The day already feels wasted, filled with a hollow sort of nothingness that bounces through the halls of the empty upstairs.
She decides she can’t be alone with her thoughts anymore, and decides to trudge back out in the Mirfield rain, in hopes of finding a book about power surges at the library. The radio dial goes completely untouched on the drive there. The thought of turning it on and reliving her embarrassment or worse that noise snuggles itself into the forefront of her mind. Her shoulders ache with a growing knot of tension just behind her left shoulder blade. It’s a reoccurring parasite in her body, filled with nothing but worry and shame.
When she finally gets to the library she finds herself reaching behind her back and rubbing at the knot in a circular motion. All of her efforts just make the knot dig deeper underneath her blade. The library smells like an impending sneeze, filled with dust and old ink. She finds a copy of the manual they have at the radio station. Its once colorful ink rubs off onto her hands, dying them like an easter egg.
She sits down in the aisle of bookshelves and tries to find anything in it about power surges affecting the radio waves. The library is desolate around her, the emptiness causing her mind to fill with paranoid and unreasonable thoughts. A librarian’s aid that looks about Clover’s age gives her a small smile while she is restocking shelves.
Clover finds herself looking at the girl. Her hair is pin straight and black and she has blunt cut bangs that fall just above her eyebrows. Her skin, revealed only by the striped, navy blue top, is pale and nearly purple from the coolness in the library. Her eyes are a hard to read manuscript. Everything about her draws Clover in in a way even Clover can’t even begin to explain.
She finds herself approaching the girl, her vocal cords rumbling in her throat without any distinction of what she is saying. Is it wrong to say she was bewitched? The girl's name is Genevieve and her black eyes look almost purple in the bright fluorescent light. Clover blacks out, she doesn’t know what she told the girl or why she went up to her in the first place. By the end of the conversation though, Clover receives a bookmark with ten numbers scribed on the back. Clover’s hand willingly takes the bookmark, her face squeezing into a smile, and slips it between the pages of the destroyed manual. She leaves the library with two things in mind: ‘what did I say to her?’ and ‘what do I say now?’
The rest of the day goes on in monotony, she eats dinner with her mom and dad. Her mom snaps at her for her posture at the table. The bags under her eyes looked like they could carry bodies to a morgue. Clover doesn’t try to talk or argue, just rolls her shoulders back and continues eating the bland chicken and burnt rice that she knows is her fault.
The sun tucks itself to bed at seven o'clock and Clover retires back to the four walls of yellow marshmallow peeps. She picks up the worn manual and out falls the bookmark, the back scribbled with nearly hieroglyphic numbers. She tries to remember what she said to the girl as she stares at the front of the bookmark decorated with people covered in sheets. She’s drawn to the eyes peaking through the sheet and the pair of beat up shoes peaking underneath. People try too hard to be scary at halloween, she doesn’t know how anyone can find ghost stories scary in the first place. They just seem like sob stories of people living incomplete journeys and dying with regrets. Living people must be really missing someone to pretend like their loved one’s ghost is watching over them. They must be lonely. They must be delusional.
Clover promised to call Genevieve and though she doesn’t remember what she said, she couldn’t stop thinking about her. The landline matched the awful peep walls, its jaundicedness sat on the side table twiddling its thumbs as it waited for its abilities to be used. She types in the number, picking up the receiver and pressing it to her ear. The dial tone pierces through her ears in a way that transports her back to this morning with the awful ringing that might as well have ruptured her eardrums.
“Hello? This is Genevieve,”
“Hey it's Clover, from the library.. I can’t remember if I told you my name or not.”
They talk for a long time and Clover forces herself to focus on their words. Genevieve was her high school's lead sound technician. When Clover looks back she doesn’t remember ever going to see one of the shows at the high school, but now she finds herself wishing she had. Clover really likes talking to her, Genevieve’s voice is petal soft and she has a clever whittiness to her that makes Clover laugh. Clover is incredibly drawn to her in a way she can’t even reason. She wants to know more about her, she wants to be around her, she wants to make her laugh.
“Hey, if you ever want to work at the radio station, I could really use a sound technician,”
“Actually?”
“Yeah, I mean I’m kinda helpless running a show by myself.” Clover pauses to think. “Do you maybe want a tour? You can see how you like it first.”
She can practically hear the smile over the phone. Clover’s previous knot in her back loosens slightly. Genevieve excitedly says yes and they agree to meet at the station the next day with Clover needing to clock onto the air at seven. After they hang up Clover forces herself to read some of her sociology textbook, she wishes she hadn’t taken a gap year now that she is actually in it. All of her friends had gone on to college and she is confined to her four yellow walls. She feels deserted, it’s miserable how lonely she has been since she finished school. She misses going to soccer practice everyday, slipping and falling in the wet Oregon grass. The sting of her knees still ghosts her caps when she thinks too hard about it. The textbook is interesting but horrible, in the silence of the house her ears ring, it ripples in her ears in stifling waves. The lamp on her desk keeps flickering, its brightness goes between the sun and moon in fast intervals. Her hands are tugging and picking at her waves as she forces herself to focus on the words on the page instead of the unwanted rave her lights decide to throw. The lights jolt violently and her lamp’s lightbulb shatters violently over her desk, the textbook and into her elbows.
She hisses a garbled swear, grabbing her elbow in pain. Blood beads onto her hands and the crimson stains her hands. The glass has cuddled itself into the thin skin, immediately she knows it’s going to be hell to get out. She really needs to stop calling herself a ‘Lucky Clover’