Welcome back to Teeny Bopper TV Breakdown! Today we recap Radio Free Roscoe, episode 10, “Crush Me.”

Lily grabs a tab off a flyer for guitar lessons at Mickey’s. At that moment, Ray finally works up the courage to ask her out, but of course it’s right when she’s on the phone scheduling her first lesson for right now. He walks her to the classroom, but she might have a crush on her teacher instead!

Sure enough, at school, Ray continues to try and hint his way to asking Lily out, but she’s busy with either lessons with Jack (the guitar teacher) or working on what Jack has taught her. She starts getting down on herself about how Jack would never see her as more than a pathetic 14-year-old; Ray hypes her up, but instead of realizing that’s actually how Ray feels, she just sees the surface level “Jack is lucky to have me!” So when Jack invites Lily to come see him play at Mickey’s the next night, it’s a pretty sure bet that Lily is going to read more into it than he actually means.

Supposedly nonathletic Travis beats Robbie at HORSE, which means he gets to “torpedo” Robbie (kind of like a one-hit dodgeball game), which Robbie hasn’t lost in ages, but he does this time, and is the biggest sore loser there ever was, even airing it out on RFR. Robbie tries to get back at Travis by arm wrestling, but Travis wins that too, and Robbie doesn’t take it well. They then fight to see who can hold their breath the longest, on RFR, making for terrible radio.

Lily, still in the Jack haze, dedicates a song on RFR to “a cool friend on a special night.” Ray had also asked her if she “wanted to do something later” and she said yes - does he think it’s about him? Probably, because when Ray later asks Lily what she wants to do that night, and she says “Go to Mickey’s to see Jack play at open mic,” he looks pretty devastated. And then he has to watch her listen to Jack sing, “I’ve never felt this way before” and other love song lyrics, which must be a special kind of torture. Another kind of torture: when you give your guitar teacher a box you decorated to keep his guitar pics in and then his girlfriend comes up, kisses him and says, “Babe, I love it when you play that song.” Oh, Lily.

The mood of the music on the next day’s RFR has shifted from love songs to angsty breakups. She rants to the others, “One day, you’ll fall for someone and they won’t even see you,” - I think Ray knows a little bit about how that feels. He even gives her “flicorice” (flowers made of licorice) later and says “One day you’ll turn around and your soulmate will be right behind you.” But when she grumbles, “He’ll never be as cool as Jack,” Ray says, “If that’s how you feel, then you deserve to be hurt, because you don’t have a clue about anyone else’s feelings except your own.”

The next day, though, Ray apologizes, wishing he could take his words back and saying, “The truth is, I admire what you did. You felt a certain way about Jack and you let him know.” Lily retorts, “Yeah, and look where it got me,” to which Ray responds, “You could have been stuck in a crush going nowhere, but now you’re free. I wish I had your courage.” She asks what he’s afraid of, and he says “You…” but immediately turns that into a babble about yew trees. He tells her to “write a kickin’ song about this experience,” and she kisses him on the cheek when she thanks him for cheering her up - he’s so done for.

Robbie and Travis have another HORSE-Torpedo rematch, but even though Travis wins HORSE and has the chance to torpedo Robbie, Robbie catches Travis’s ball, which means he wins that part of the game and all is right in his world again. Did Travis perhaps let him win to save their friendship? More likely than not.

Don’t change that channel! We’ll be right back on Teeny Bopper TV Breakdown.

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