Текст книги "Size 12 Is Not Fat"

Автор книги: Meg Cabot

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8

Gonna get ’im

Gonna get ’im

Gonna get that boy

Wait and see me

You’ll wanna be me

When I get him

Gonna get ’im

Gonna get ’im

Gonna get that boy

“That Boy”

Performed by Heather Wells

Composed by Valdez/Caputo

From the album Rocket Pop

Cartwright Records

He says he’ll be here in five minutes, but he’s in the lobby in less than three.

He’s never been inside the building before, and looks strangely out of place in it… maybe because he isn’t tattooed or pierced like everyone else who passes by the desk.

Or maybe it’s just because he’s so much better-looking than everybody else, standing there with his bed-rumpled hair (although I know he’s been up for hours—he runs in the morning) and his banged-up leather jacket and jeans.

“Hey,” he says when he sees me.

“Hey.” I try to smile, but it’s impossible, so I settle for saying, instead, “Thanks for coming.”

“No problem,” he says, glancing over to the TV lounge, just outside the cafeteria door, where Rachel, who’d been joined by an ashen-faced Dr. Jessup, along with a half-dozen panicked residence hall staffers, are milling around, looking tight-faced and upset.

“Where’d the cops go?” he asks.

“They left,” I say, trying to keep the bitterness from my voice. “There’s been a triple stabbing in an apartment over a deli on Broadway. There’s just that one left, guarding the elevator shaft until the coroner can get here to take her away. Since they decided her death was accidental, I guess they figured there was no reason to stay.”

I think this is a very diplomatic response, considering what I want to say about Detective Canavan and his cronies.

“But you think they’re wrong,” Cooper says. A statement, not a question.

“Someone took that key, Coop,” I say. “And put it back when no one was looking. I’m not making it up. I’m not insane.”

Although, the way my voice rises on the word insane, that claim may actually be debatable.

But Cooper’s not here to debate it.

“I know,” he says gently. “I believe you. I’m here, aren’t I?”

“I know,” I say, regretting my outburst. “And thanks. Well. Let’s go.”

Cooper looks hesitant. “Wait. Go where?”

“Roberta’s room,” I say. I hold up the master key I’ve swiped from the key box. “I think we should check her room first.”

“For what?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “But we have to start somewhere.”

Cooper looks at the key, then back at me.

“I want you to know,” Cooper says, “that I think this is a bad idea.”

“I know,” I say. Because I do.

“So why are we doing it?”

I am about five seconds from bursting into tears. I’ve felt this way since Jessica first burst into my office with the news about another death, and my humiliation in front of Detective Canavan hasn’t helped the matter any.

But I struggle to keep the hysteria from my voice.

“Because this is happening in my building. It’s happening to my girls. And I want to be sure it’s happening the way these cops and everyone are saying it’s happening, and that it’s not… you know. What I’m thinking.”

“Heather,” he says. “Remember when ‘Sugar Rush’ first came out, and all that fan mail started arriving at the Cartwright Records offices, and you insisted on reading it all, and personally answering it?”

I bristle. I can’t help it.

“Hello,” I say. “I was fifteen.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Cooper says. “Because in fifteen years, you haven’t changed. You still feel personally responsible for every person with whom you come in contact—even people you’ve never met. Like the reason you were put on earth is to look out for everybody else on it.”

“That’s not true,” I say. “And it’s only beenthirteen years.”

“Heather,” he says, ignoring me. “Sometimes kids do stupid things. And then other kids, because they are, in fact, just kids, imitate them. And they die. It happens. It doesn’t mean a crime has been committed.”

“Yeah?” I am bristling more than ever. “What about the key? What about that?”

He still doesn’t look convinced.

“I want you to know,” he says, “that I’m only doing this to keep you from making an even bigger mess out of things than they’re already in—something, by the way, at which you seem to excel.”

“You know, Coop,” I say. “I appreciate that vote of confidence. I really do.”

“I just don’t want you to lose your day job,” he says. “I can’t afford to give you health benefits on top of room and board.”

“Thanks,” I say snarkily. “Thanks so much.”

But it doesn’t matter. Because he comes with me.

It’s a long, long walk up to Roberta Pace’s room at the sixteenth floor. We can’t, of course, take the elevator, because they’ve been shut down. The only sound I hear, when we finally reach the long, empty hallway, is the sound of our own breathing. Mine, in particular, is heavy.

Other than that, it’s quiet. Dead quiet. Then again, it’s before noon. Most of the residents—the ones who hadn’t been awakened by the ambulance and fire engine sirens—are still sleeping off last night’s beer.

I point the way with my set of keys and start toward 1622. Cooper follows me, looking around at the posters on the hallway walls urging students to go to Health Services if they’re concerned that they might have contracted a sexually transmitted disease, or informing them of a free movie night over at the student center.

The RA on sixteen has this thing for Snoopy. Cut-out Snoopys are everywhere. There’s even this posterboard Snoopy holding a real little cardboard tray with an arrow pointing to it that says, “Free Condoms Courtesy of New York College Health Services: Hey, for $40,000 a year, students should get something free!”

The tray is, of course, empty.

On the door to 1622, there is a yellow memo board, the erasable kind, with nothing written on it. There’s also a Ziggy sticker.

But someone has given Ziggy a pierced nose and someone else has written in a balloon over Ziggy’s head, “Where Are My Pants?”

I raise my set of keys and bang on the door, hard, with them.

“Director’s Office,” I call. “Anybody there?”

There’s no response. I call out once more, then slide the key into the lock and open the door.

Inside, an electric fan on top of a chest of drawers hums noisily, in spite of the fact that the room, like all the rooms in Fischer Hall, has central air conditioning. Except for the fan, nothing else moves. There is no sign of Roberta’s roommate, who is going to be in for quite a shock when she gets back from wherever she’s gone, and finds herself with a single room for the rest of the year.

There’s only one window, six feet across and another five feet or so high, with twin cranks to open the panes. In the distance, past the garden rooftops and water towers, I can see the Hudson, flowing serenely along its way, the sun’s rays slanting off its mirrored surface.

Cooper’s squinting at some family photographs on one of the girls’ bedstands. He says, “The dead girl. What’s her name?”

“Roberta,” I say.

“Then this bed’s hers.” She’s had her name done in rainbow letters on a sheet of scroll paper by a street artist. It is hanging over the messier bed, the one by the window. Both beds have been slept in, and neither roommate appears to have been much concerned with housekeeping. The sheets are tousled and the coverlets—mismatched, as room mates’ coverlets so often are—are awry. There is a strong Ziggy motif in the decorating on Roberta’s side of the room. There are Ziggy Post-it Notes everywhere, and a Ziggy calendar on the wall, and on one of the desks, a set of Ziggy stationery.

Both girls, I notice, are Jordan Cartwright fans. They have the complete set of Easy Street CDs, plus Baby, Be Mine.

Neither of them owns a single CD by yours truly. Which is no real surprise, I guess. I was always way more popular with the tween set.

Cooper gets down onto his knees and starts looking under the dead girl’s bed. This is very distracting. I try to concentrate on snooping, but Cooper’s butt is a particularly nice one. Seeing it so nicely cupped by his worn Levi’s as he leans over, it is kind of hard to pay attention to anything else, even though, you know, this is very serious business, and all.

“Look at this,” he says, as he pulls his head and shoulders from beneath Roberta’s bed, his dark hair tousled. I quickly readjust my gaze so it doesn’t look like I’d been staring below his waist. I hope he doesn’t notice.

“What?” I ask intelligently.

“Look.”

Dangling from the end of a Ziggy pencil Cooper pulled from the pencil jar on Roberta’s desk is a pale, limp thing. Upon closer examination, I realize what it is.

A used condom.

“Um,” I say. “Ew.”

“It’s pretty fresh,” Cooper says. “I’d say Roberta had a hot date last night.”

With his free hand, he picks up an envelope from the pack of Ziggy stationery sitting on Roberta’s desk, then drops the condom into it.

“What are you doing?” I ask in alarm. “Isn’t that tampering with evidence?”

“Evidence of what?” Cooper folds the envelope over a couple of times, and sticks it in the pocket of his coat. “The police already determined there hasn’t been a crime committed.”

“Well, so what are you saving it for?”

Cooper shrugs and tosses away the pencil. “One thing I learned in this line of work: You just never know.”

He looks around Roberta’s room and shakes his head. “It does seem weird. Who has sex, then goes elevator surfing? I could maybe see it if it were the other way around—you know, all the adrenaline, or whatever, from risking your life, making you randy. But before? Unless it’s some kinky sex thing.”

I widen my eyes. “You mean like the guy likes to have sex with a girl, then pushes her off the top of the elevator?”

“Something like that.” Cooper looks uncomfortable. He doesn’t like talking about kinky sex practices with me, and changes the subject. “What about the other girl? The first one. You said you checked, and she hadn’t signed anyone in the night she died?”

“No,” I say. “But I checked just before you got here, and Roberta didn’t sign in anyone last night, either.” Then I think of something. “If… if there’d been something like that in Elizabeth’s room—a condom or something, I mean—the cops would have found it, right?”

“Not if they weren’t looking for it. And if they were really convinced her death was accidental, like this last one, they wouldn’t have even looked.”

I chew my lower lip. “Nobody’s moved into Elizabeth’s space. Her roommate has the place to herself now. We could go take a look at it.”

Cooper looks dubious.

“I will admit it’s weird about this kid dying the way she did, Heather,” he says. “Especially in light of the condom and the key thing. But what you’re implying—”

“You implied it first,” I remind him. “Besides, we can look, can’t we? Who’s it going to hurt?”

“Even if we did, it’s been a week since she died,” he points out. “I doubt we’re going to find anything.”

“We won’t know unless we try,” I say, starting for the door. “Come on.”

Cooper just looks at me.

“Why is proving that these girls didn’t cause their own deaths so important to you?” he demands.

I blink at him. “What?”

“You heard me. Why are you so determined to prove these girls’ deaths weren’t accidental?”

I can’t tell him, of course. Because I don’t want to sound like what Sarah would be bound to brand me if she knew—a psychopath. Which is how I know I would sound, if I told him what I feel… which is that I owe it to the building—to Fischer Hall itself—to figure out what’s really going on in it. Because Fischer Hall has—like Cooper—saved my life, in a way.

Well, okay, all they’ve saved me from is waitressing for the rest of my life at a Senor Swanky’s.

But isn’t that enough? I know it doesn’t make any sense—that Sarah would accuse me of transferring my affection for my parents or my ex onto a pile of bricks built in 1850—but I really do feel that I have a responsibility to prove what’s happening isn’t Fischer Hall’s fault—the staff, for not noticing these girls were on a downward spiral, or whatever—or the girls, who seem too sensible to do something so stupid—or even the building itself, for not being homey enough, or whatever. The school newspaper had already run one “in-depth” report on the dangers of elevator surfing. Who knows what it was going to print tomorrow?

See. I said it’s stupid.

Still, it’s how I feel.

But I can’t explain it to Cooper. I know there’s no point in my even trying.

“Because girls don’t elevator surf” is all I can come up with.

At first I think he’s going to walk out, the way Detective Canavan did, without another word, furious at me for wasting his time.

But instead all he does is sigh and say, “Fine. I guess we’ve got another room to check.”

9

Shake Your Pom-Pom

Shake Your Pom-Pom

Shake it, baby

All night long

“Shake It”

Performed by Heather Wells

Composed by O’Brien/Henke

From the album Rocket Pop

Cartwright Records

Elizabeth Kellogg’s roommate opens the door to 1412 at my first knock. She’s wearing a big white T-shirt and black leggings and she’s holding a portable phone in one hand and a burning cigarette in the other.

I plaster a smile on my face and go, “Hi, I’m Heather. This is—”

“Hi,” the roommate interrupts me to say, her eyes growing wide as she notices Cooper for the first time.

Well, and why not? She’s a healthy red-blooded American girl, after all. And Cooper does bear more than a slight re semblance to one of America’s most popular male heartthrobs.

“Cooper Cartwright,” Cooper says, flashing the roommate a grin that, if I hadn’t known better, I’d have sworn he’d practiced in the mirror and reserved only for extreme cases like this one.

Except Cooper is not a practicing-smiles-in-the-mirror type of guy.

“Marnie Villa Delgado,” the roommate says. Marnie’s a big girl like me, only larger in the chest than in the tush, with a lot of very dark, very curly long hair. I can tell she’s sizing me up, the way some women will, wondering if I’m “with” Cooper, or if he’s fair game.

“We were wondering, Marnie, if we could have a word or two with you about your former roommate, Elizabeth,” Cooper says, revealing so many teeth with his grin, he nearly blinds me.

But not Marnie, since, apparently deciding Cooper and I are not an item (how could she tell? Really? How come other girls—like Marnie and Rachel and Sarah—know how to do this, but I don’t?), she says, into the phone, “I gotta go,” and hangs up.

Then, her gaze fastened hypnotically on Cooper, she says, “Come on in.”

I slip past her, Cooper following me. Marnie, I see at once, has done a pretty fast job of redecorating after Elizabeth’s death. The twin beds have been shoved together to form one king-sized bed, covered by a giant tiger-striped bedspread. The two chests of drawers have been stacked one on top of the other so Marnie now has eight drawers all to herself, instead of four, and Elizabeth’s desk is currently being employed as an entertainment unit, with a TV, DVD player, and CD player all within arm’s reach of the bed.

“I already talked to the police about her.” Marnie flicks ashes onto the tiger-striped throw rug beneath her bare feet and turns her attention momentarily from Cooper to me. “Beth, I mean. Hey. Wait a minute. Don’t I know you? Aren’t you an actress or something?”

“Me? No,” I answer truthfully.

“But you’re in the entertainment industry.” Marnie’s tone is confident. “Hey, are you guys making a movie of Beth’s life?”

Before Cooper can utter a sound, I ask, “Why? You think, uh, Beth’s life has cinematic potential?”

Marnie’s trying to play it cool, but I hear her cough as she takes a drag from her cigarette. She’s definitely a for-dramatic-effect-only smoker.

“Oh yeah. I mean, I can see the angle you’d want to work from. Small-town girl comes to the big city, can’t take it, gets herself killed on a stupid dare. Can I play myself? I totally have the experience… ”

Cooper blows our cover, though, by going, “We’re not with the entertainment industry. Heather’s the assistant director of this building, and I’m a friend of hers.”

“But I thought—” Marnie is really staring at me now, trying to remember where she’s seen me before. “I thought you were an actress. I’ve seen you somewhere before—”

“At check-in, I’m sure,” I say hastily.

“Your roommate,” Cooper says, looking up from a survey he seems to be making of the small kitchen area, in which Marnie has stowed a microwave, hot plate, food processor, coffee maker, and one of those scales people on diets use to measure the weight of their chicken breasts. “Where was she from?”

“Well,” Marnie says. “Mystic. You know, Connecticut.”

Cooper is opening cupboards now, but Marnie is so confused, she doesn’t even protest.

“Hey, I know. You were on Saved by the Bell, weren’t you?” she asks me.

“No,” I say. “You said Eliz—I mean, Beth—hated it here?”

“Well, no, not really,” Marnie says. “Beth just didn’t fit in, you know? I mean, she wanted to be a nurse.”

Cooper looks at her. I can tell he doesn’t hang around New York College students much, because he asks her, “What’s wrong with nurses?”

“Why would anybody come to New York College to study to be a nurse?” Marnie’s tone is scornful. “Why pay all that money to study here when you can go some place, you know,cheap to study to be a nurse?”

“What’s your major?” Cooper asks.

“Me?” Marnie looks as if she wants to say the word Duh, but doesn’t want to be rude. To Cooper. Instead, she grounds out her cigarette in an ashtray shaped like a human hand and says, “Acting.” Then she sits down on her new king-sized bed and stares at me. “I know I’ve seen you somewhere before.”

I pick up the hand ashtray to distract her—both from trying to place me and from noticing what Cooper is doing, which is some major snoopage.

“Is this yours or Elizabeth’s?” I ask her, even though I already know the answer.

“Mine,” Marnie says. “Of course. They took all of Beth’s stuff away. Besides, Beth didn’t smoke. Beth didn’t do anything.”

“What do you mean, she didn’t do anything?”

“What I said. She didn’t do anything. She didn’t go out. She didn’t have friends over. And her mother—what a trip! You hear what she did at the memorial service? The mother?”

Cooper is scouting out the bathroom. His voice, as he calls out from there, is muffled.

“What did she do?” he asks.

Marnie starts fishing around in this black leather backpack on the bed.

“Spent the whole thing saying she was going to sue New York College for not making the elevators more surf proof. And what are you doing in my bathroom?”

“I understand Elizabeth’s mother wanted her daughter’s guest privileges to extend only to females,” I say, ignoring her question about Cooper’s presence in her bathroom.

“Beth never said anything to me about that.” Marnie finds her cigarette pack. It is, thankfully, empty. She tosses it on the floor and looks annoyed. “But I wouldn’t be surprised. That girl was like from another century, practically. I don’t think Beth’d ever even kissed a guy until a week or two before she died.”

Cooper appears in the bathroom doorway. He looks way too big to fit through it, but he manages, somehow.

“Who?” I ask, before he has the chance to butt in. “What guy?”

“I don’t know.” Marnie shrugs, bereft without her cigarettes. They made nice props, since she was playing the grieving roommate, and all.

“There was this guy she was going on about, right before she… you know.” Marnie makes a whistling sound and points at the floor. “Anyway, they’d just met. But when she talked about him, her whole face kinda… I don’t know how to explain it.”

“Did you ever see this guy?” I ask. “Do you know his name? Did he go to the memorial service? Was he the one who talked Elizabeth into elevator surfing?”

Marnie balks. “Jesus, you ask a lot of questions!”

Cooper comes to the rescue. As always.

“Marnie, this is really important. Do you have any idea who this guy was?”

For me, she balks. For Cooper, she is more than willing to try.

“Let’s see.” Marnie screws up her face. She isn’t pretty, but she has an interesting face. Maybe good for character roles. The chubby best friend.

Why is the best friend always chubby? Why isn’t the heroine ever chubby? Or, you know, not chubby, but a size 12? Or maybe even a 14? Why does the heroine always wear a size 2?

“Yeah, she said his name was like Mark, or something,” Marnie says, breaking in on my thoughts on sizeism in the entertainment industry. “But I never saw him. I mean, they started going out just a week or so before she died. He took her to the movies. Some foreign film at the Angelika. That’s why I thought it was so strange—”

“What?” I shake my head. “That what was so strange?”

“Well, I mean, that a guy who liked, you know,foreign films would be into elevator surfing. That’s so… juvenile. The freshmen guys are into it. You know, the ones with the baggy pants, who look about twelve years old? But this guy was older. You know. Sophisticated. According to Beth. So what was he doing, encouraging her to jump around on top of an elevator?”

I sit down next to Marnie on the enormous bed.

“Did she tell you that?” I ask. “Did she tell you he wanted her to go elevator surfing with him?”

“No,” Marnie says. “But he had to have, right? I mean, she’d never have gone alone. I doubt she even knew what it was.”

“Maybe she went with some of those freshmen guys you mentioned,” Cooper suggests.

Marnie makes a face. “No way,” she says. “Those guys’d never have invited her along with them. They’re too cool—or think they are—to be interested in someone like her. Be sides, if she’d been with them, she wouldn’t have fallen. Those guys wouldn’t have let her. They’re good at it.”

“You weren’t here, were you, the night she died?” I ask.

“Me? No, I had an audition. We aren’t supposed to audition as freshmen, you know”—she looks sly—“but I figured I had a good shot. I mean, come on. It’s Broadway. If I got into a Broadway show, I’d quit this place in a New York minute.”

“So Elizabeth had the room to herself that night?” I ask.

“Yeah. She was having him over. The guy. She was real excited about it. You know, she was making a romantic dinner for two on the hot plate.” Marnie looks suspicious. “Hey—you’re not going to tell, are you? That we have a hot plate? I know it’s a fire hazard, but—”

“The guy, Mark,” I interrupt. “Or whatever his name was. Did he show? That night?”

“Yeah,” Marnie says. “At least, I assume he did. They were gone by the time I got home, but they left the dinner plates in the sink. I had to do them, to keep them from attracting bugs. You know, you would think for what we’re paying to live here, you guys would have regular exterminators—”

“Did anyone else meet him?” Cooper interrupts. “This Mark guy? Any of your mutual friends?”

“Beth and I didn’t have any mutual friends,” Marnie says, a bit scathingly. “I told you, she was a loser. I mean, I was her roommate, but I wouldn’t have hung out with her. I didn’t even find out she was dead until, like twenty-four hours after the fact. She never came back to the room that night. I just figured, you know, she was over at the guy’s place.”

“Did you tell this to the police?” Cooper asks. “About Elizabeth having the guy over the night she died?”

“Yeah,” Marnie says, with a shrug. “They didn’t seem to care. I mean, it’s not like the guy murdered her. She died because of her own stupidity. I mean, I don’t care how much wine you’ve had, you don’t jump around on top of an elevator—”

I suck in my breath. “They were drinking? Mark and your roommate?”

“Yeah,” Marnie says. “I found the bottles in the trash. Two of them. Pretty expensive, too. Mark must have brought them. They were, like, twenty bucks each. The guy’s a big spender, for someone who lives in a hellhole like this.”

I catch my breath.

“Wait—he lives in Fischer Hall?”

“Yeah. I mean, he’d have to, wouldn’t he? ’Cause she never had to sign him in.”

Good grief! I’d never thought of this! That Beth might actually have had a boy in her room, but that there was no record of her having signed one in, because he hadn’t had to be signed in. He lives in the building! He’s a resident of Fischer Hall, too!

I look up at Cooper. I’m not sure where all this was leading, but I have a pretty good idea that it’s leading somewhere… somewhere important. I can’t tell if he feels the same, though.

“Marnie,” I say. “Is there anything, anything else at all that you can tell us about this guy your roommate was seeing?”

“All I can tell you,” Marnie says, sounding annoyed, “is what I already said—that his name is Mark or something, he likes foreign films, has expensive taste in wine, and that I’m pretty sure he lives here. Oh, and Beth kept saying how cute he was. But how cute could he be? I mean, why would a cute guy be interested in Beth? She was a dog.”

The student-run newspaper, the Washington Square Reporter, had run a photo of Elizabeth the Monday after her death, a photo from the freshmen class yearbook, and Marnie, I’m sorry to say, wasn’t exaggerating. Elizabeth hadn’t been a pretty girl. No makeup, thick glasses, outdated, Farrah Fawcett—style hair, and a smile that was mostly gums.

Still, photos by school-hired photographers are never all that flattering, and I had assumed that Elizabeth was actually prettier than this photo indicated.

But maybe my assumption was wrong.

Or maybe, just maybe, Marnie’s jealous because her roommate had a boyfriend, and she didn’t.

Hey, it happens. You don’t need a sociology degree—or a private investigator’s license—to know that.

Cooper and I thank Marnie and leave—though we couldn’t escape without Marnie launching, once again, into a chorus of I-know-I-know-you-from-somewhere. By the time we make it out into the hallway, I’m cursing, as I do nearly every day, my decision—or, I should say, my mom’s decision—to forgo my secondary education for a career in the music industry.

Trudging back down the stairs in silence, I wonder if Cooper is right.Am I crazy? I mean, do I really think there’s some psycho stalking the fresh women of Fischer Hall, talking them into elevator surfing with him after having his way with them, then pushing them to their deaths?

When we reach the tenth-floor landing, I say, experimentally, “I once read this article in a magazine about thrill killers. You know, guys who murder for the fun of it.”

“Sure,” Cooper says dryly. “In the movies. It doesn’t happen so often in real life. Most crimes are crimes of passion. People aren’t really as sick as we like to imagine.”

I look at him out of the corner of my eye. He has no idea how sick my imagination is. Like how at that very moment I was imagining knocking him down and ripping off all his clothes with my teeth.

I wasn’t. Well, not really. But I could have been.

“Somebody should probably speak to the other girl’s roommate,” I say, resolutely pushing away my fantasy about Cooper’s clothes and my teeth. “You know, the one who died today. Ask her about the condom. Maybe she knows who it belonged to.”

Cooper looks down at me, those ultra-blue eyes boring into me.

“Let me guess,” he says. “You think it might belong to a guy named Mark who likes foreign films and has expensive taste in Bordeaux.”

“It won’t hurt to ask.”

“You got a guy on your staff who fits that description?” Cooper wants to know.

“Well,” I say, thinking about it. “No. Not really.”

“Then how’d he get the key from behind the reception desk?”

I frown.

“Haven’t worked that part out yet, have you?” Cooper asks, before I can reply. “Look, Heather. There’s more to this detective stuff than snooping around, asking questions. There’s also knowing when there’s actually something worth snooping around about. And I’m sorry, but I’m just not seeing it here.”

I suck in my breath. “But… the condom! The mystery man!”

Cooper shakes his head. “It’s sad about those girls. It really is. But think about how you were when you were eighteen, Heather. You did crazy things, too. Maybe not as crazy as climbing onto the roof of an elevator on a dare, but—”

“They didn’t,” I say, fiercely. “I’m telling you, those girls did not do that.”

“Well, they ended up at the bottom of a shaft somehow,” Cooper says. “And while I know you’d like to think it’s be cause some evil man pushed them, there are nearly a thousand kids who live in this dorm, Heather. Don’t you think one of them might have noticed a guy shoving his girlfriend down an elevator shaft? And don’t you think that person would have told someone what they’d seen?”

I blink a few more times. “But… but… ”

But I can’t think of anything else to say.

Then he looks at his watch. “Look. I’m late for an appointment. Can we play Murder, She Wrote again later? Because I’ve got to go.”

“Yeah,” I say, faintly. “I guess.”

“Okay. See you,” he says. And continues down the stairs at a clip so fast, there’s no way I’ll catch up with him.

Though on the landing below, he stops, turns, and looks up at me. His eyes are amazingly blue.

“And just so you know,” he says.

“Yes?” I lean eagerly over the stair railing.The reason I’m so against you investigating this on your own, I am expecting—well, okay, hoping—he’ll say,is because I can’t stand the thought of you putting yourself in harm’s way. You see, I love you, Heather. I always have.

“We’re out of milk,” is what he says instead. “Pick some up on your way home, if you remember, okay?”

“Okay,” I say weakly.

And then he’s gone.