The note said, “I want to meet this guy.”
Below it, in handwriting that was not Josh’s and written in a different color ink: “I’ll get you his number, but don’t call him yet.”
Josh: “I won’t. Duh. Does he have a picture? I want to know what he looks like.”
[Who?]: “If he doesn’t I can get one.”
Josh: “What’s his name?”
And then nothing more. Diane wondered who the boy was Josh was interested in. She didn’t know if he had ever been on a date with anyone. He had never been willing to talk about dating with her.
Diane wondered how to bring this up to Josh, and then she wondered if this was even the kind of thing you bring up with a teenager.
“So you’re interested in dating?” she could ask, but expecting what? A yes? Then what?
“What’s his name?” she followed up in her daydreamed conversation.
“I don’t know. Someone else knows,” she projected him saying as he looked down his thin beak at his hands, which had twice as many fingers as her own.
“You wanted to ask what the boy’s name was. Why didn’t you pass the paper back to your friend?” she imagined herself asking.
“Why are you reading my notes?” she pictured him shouting. His eyes pink, his long teeth bared. He was crying, his wings flapping.
She imagined this conversation a few times at her desk, and it never ended any better.
She stuffed the note in her pocket and lied to Catharine that she was having a migraine (Catharine had said: “I can see that.” Diane didn’t understand how someone could even see a migraine.) and left work early—sometime between the hours of eleven and four.
She was anxious and driving fast, listening to the radio turned up to a loud but sensible volume. Cecil Palmer was talking to that scientist, who was explaining how clouds are made of moisture and aren’t cover for alien crafts or appendages of a great sky being. It seemed ridiculous, like most things on the radio these days. He was bending facts to create an absurd argument just to get listeners stirred up.
She was disappointed, because Cecil and the scientist were dating, and interviewing your partner for a news program seemed to be a conflict of interest. And, more important, the scientist was talking nonsense.
“… tiny, tiny droplets that are invisible individually, but as a whole form a puffy white cloud,” the scientist said.
That was when she heard sirens, which at first she thought were muncipal censorship to spare regular citizens from having to hear this kind of talk on community airtime, but then she realized were actually on the road behind her.
She was doing almost fifty in a thirty zone. Okay, she thought, so this I deserve.
As she pulled her car over, she looked at the clock on her dashboard and realized there was no way she was going to get to the theater in time to see Troy. A feeling that had risen to the top of her chest slipped back down into her belly. She couldn’t tell what that feeling was or if it was good or bad.
There are no regular police in Night Vale. There used to be, but it was decided that a regular police force wasn’t secure enough. Everyone knew that the regular police existed; someone could use that information against Night Vale somehow. No one was sure how, but the threat was enough. There had been community meetings and then the police had vanished with no official explanation. A couple days later, the Sheriff’s Secret Police force appeared around town, driving dark red sedans with gold racing stripes and black seven-pointed stars on the sides that say SECRET POLICE on them, staffed by the exact same people who had previously been regular police officers. Everyone felt much safer after that.
Which is why it was so odd that the car that had pulled her over was an old-fashioned police cruiser, light bar on top and Crown Victoria body. The officer getting out of the vehicle was wearing just a regular police uniform without the cape or blowgun belt.
She dug around in her glove compartment for her insurance card and registration, and then in her pocket for her license. She pulled out Josh’s crumpled-up note.
She stared at the note. She must have stared at it for a while; she wasn’t sure.
There was a loud tapping in her left ear.
She looked up, confused. There was a knuckle rapping on the window a few inches from her face.
She screamed, but she wasn’t scared. Her body screamed before she could do anything about it. The knuckle stopped hitting the glass.
She held her hand to her chest. Her other hand pressed the window button.
“I’m sorry,” she said, exhaling, long, slow breaths.
“License and registration, please.”
The voice was vaguely familiar, but she was too in her own thoughts to care.
“Here you go.”
Silence. Diane saw khaki pants, khaki shirt, a black leather belt, and elbows as he read her documentation, and elbows as he wrote out a ticket.
This took several minutes because, by law, police are required to describe the nature of the sunlight at the time of the infraction in verse, although meter and rhyme are optional.
“Searing, yellow, and there’s a sort of purplish halo around it before it fades into the mundanity of sky. It is a reminder—this sun—of our near-infinite smallness in a near-infinite universe. But today, as I write this speeding ticket, I feel I could crush the sun like a grape underfoot, and that the universe is an umbrella that I may fold up and put away,” the officer wrote on Diane’s ticket.
Diane thanked the officer when he handed her the ticket, but her eyes were on Josh’s note on the passenger seat.
“Just be careful, umm… Diane,” he said, and her head cleared enough to recognize where she knew that voice from. She looked up.
He was blond and his teeth shone. They briefly made eye contact—or she assumed they made eye contact through his mirrored shades—and then he was gone, walking quickly back to his cruiser.
She tried to breathe in and missed.
It was Troy.
THE VOICE OF NIGHT VALE
CECIL: “… ALL HAIL, ALL PLANT YOUR FACE INTO THE FALLOW EARTH AND WEEP IT INTO PROSPERITY,” it concluded, before cutting the ribbon to officially open the new downtown roller rink. A big thanks to the Glow Cloud for its speech, and, of course, all hail the mighty Glow Cloud.
A warning to our listeners: There have been reports of counterfeit police officers on the roads, who, instead of looking after our interests, work under arbitrary authority to unfairly target and extort those who are least able, societally, to fight back. If you see one of these FalsePolice, act right away by shrugging and thinking What am I gonna do? and then seeing if anything funny is on Twitter.
And now some sobering news. Station intern Jodi was asked to alphabetize everything in the station as part of the Sheriff’s Secret Police’s daily census of every single item in Night Vale. Unfortunately, Jodi was so assiduous in her work that she alphabetized herself as well, and what was once a helpful and hardworking intern is now a pile of limbs and organs, arranged part by gory part from A to Z.
To the family and friends of Intern Jodi: She will be missed. Especially since she alphabetized herself early in the process, and so most of the station still needs doing. If you need college credit or a place to hide from the dangerous world outside, come on down to the station today, and start a long and healthy life in radio.