I don't own Fresh Air or Terry Gross. WNYC and Lehgih Valley Public Radio are real, and those are their actual broadcast times. I also don't own Cyrano. And obviously, My So Called Life does not belong to me.
Chapter 1: On the Radio
In high school, especially after she became friends with Rayanne and Ricky, Angela sometimes felt ridiculously bourgeois and naive in her privilege. Now the teenagers on her caseload race through her radio presets in search of rap or hip hop and tease her for being such a yuppie, but Angela only laughs. She is a (not so) Young Urban Professional, and she likes NPR. Therefore, when the music station segues into yet another commercial break, she flips towards the lower end of the dial.
At home WNYC rebroadcasts Fresh Air at 7pm and Angela listens to it over dinner. Apparently Lehigh Valley Public Radio does it at noon because that's Terry Gross's voice saying "let's play it now--" and a moment later a song starts. It's weirdly familiar. This isn't the indy pop that Angela prefers, and it's a class above the Top Forty hits that seem to blast in every store, so she can't imagine why it feels as though she's heard the artist before. When the music ends Terry begins questioning her interviewee about his experience growing up with dyslexia.
Dyslexia makes Angela think of her Uncle Neil. She's looking forward to seeing her father's younger brother on this visit home, and hopes she'll have time to actually talk with him. Tomorrow the Chases are cooking Thanksgiving dinner for eleven. Any moment not occupied with chopping, stirring, eating, or doing dishes will certainly be monopolized by Neil's eight-year-old twins.
The man (why does his voice sound so familiar?) explains that for a long time he and everyone he knew thought he was stupid because he couldn't read. He was actually held back twice, until his high school girlfriend signed him up for tutoring and he realized that he simply had a learning disability. He'd worked hard to build up his vocabulary after that, and fallen in love with complex words, which Terry says really shines through in his lyrics. Jordan Catalano, Angela thinks, I wonder if things have turned out half as well for Jordan Ca-- and then she must be going crazy because Terry Gross is saying "--talano, from 4.2 Light Years to Alpha Centauri, after the break."
Angela slams the radio off in the middle of the show's list of sponsors-- "National Endowment for the Arts--" and plunges into memories.
***
They'd gotten back together after the Sex-with-Rayanne thing and their surreal attempt at emulating Edmund Rostand's most famous play. It'd been good for a while. When Angela thinks back, however, she can remember there being a lot of things contributing to their eventual breakup. She'd forgiven him for sleeping with Rayanne, but neither of them had forgotten it, and his guilt and her suspicion stood between them. By the start of senior year she was seriously focused on getting into college and he manifestly wasn't. He was jaded and she was naive and the sex, when they'd finally started having it, wasn't actually all that great (she didn't have an orgasm until halfway through her first year at university). The haystack that smashed the camel's spine, however, was her dad admitting that he was having an affair with Hallie Lowenthal, his restaurant partner.
Angela had looked at Jordan's home-life, with his missing mom and his occasionally abusive alcoholic of a father, and thought that in comparison her family, even with the addition of Graham's infidelity, wasn't something she could complain about. Which basically just resulted in her being upset and him feeling irritated at his inability to do anything about it. And then Rayanne, who was working part time at the restaurant, turned out to be really supportive. The two girls' move back toward friendship only made Jordan awkward. Eventually all of the tension had exploded into one of Angela and Jordan's rare but blistering fights and she'd cried herself to sleep. When he came by her house the next day to talk things through they'd ended up agreeing that breaking up, rather than making up, was probably the best solution.
And that had been that.
After their first pseudo-relationship had ended he'd opened her locker and she'd done his homework and there'd been all sorts of unfinished business between them. The second time, even though it'd been mutual and necessary and things were utterly and completely over between them (maybe... maybe because they were utterly and completely over), it hurt to look at him. By Christmas her parents were trying to make things work and Graham had moved back home, but Jordan and Angela didn't talk at all.
Rayanne heard through Tino that Jordan was planning to move to California after school let out to try to make it in the music scene (he figured he could work on cars until he broke through) and if he wanted to know where Angela was going to college he just had to look her up in the graduation program. It would be a lie to say she hadn't thought of him since then, because she had, occasionally, when she reminisced about high school or saw a red convertible or broke up with her latest boyfriend, but it had been thirteen years.
PLEASE review. This is a small fandom; if you don't no one will! Constructive criticism is especially appreciated but even a "this is cool" or "this sucks" would be great. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE. Also, I'm looking for a beta (this is my first try at a real chaptered work and I'm not sure if I can do it).