by Meg Cabot
“Let me find you some accessories,” the saleswoman says. It’s like she’s read my mind. “A cardi, in case it gets chilly. And how do you feel about headbands? Maybe one with a bow!”
Really, what can I say? When you spend your lunch hour in a store that specializes in preppy clothes that—you realize belatedly—really look good only on the stick-thin models they always show in the catalogs that are forever sliding through the mail slot of your house, you pretty much get what you deserve. Headbands? Sure. A bow? Why not?
Fortunately, my cell phone starts whooping Beyoncé’s “Run the World.”
“Oh,” I say, glancing at the caller ID. “That’s work. Looks like I gotta get back. Maybe another time.”
The saleswoman looks disappointed. That’s her commission off two hundred whole bucks down the drain. I feel kind of bad, except that she’d been trying to talk me into buying a dress in which I looked like a walking roll of toilet paper.
“Oh,” the saleswoman says, smiling brightly. “Well, come back when you have more time. And bring a friend. Or your mom. It’s a big decision to make on your own.”
I try to keep my own smile in place. Most brides’ mothers haven’t stabbed their daughters in the back, the way mine did. It’s not the saleswoman’s fault.
“Sure,” I say. “Thanks, I will.”
But I won’t be back. The company this woman works for obviously doesn’t make dresses that look good on girls who are a size 12. Or possibly larger.
Safely back out onto the street, a little breathless from my narrow escape, I start down my favorite route back to the office. It’s one that takes me past the window of a small antiques store on Fifth Avenue.
I’m not really a jewelry person, but there’s a display of vintage jewelry in the window of this particular shop that really is breathtaking. And there’s one particular ring in the display that I can’t help staring at longingly every time I walk by.
As I call Sarah back I pause in front of the shop and see that the ring is still there, an oval sapphire with clusters of tiny diamonds on either side of it, set on a platinum band. It’s sitting by itself on a dark green velvet pillow in one corner of the window.
“What’s going on?” I ask Sarah when she picks up.
“Where are you?” she asks. “You’ve been gone forever. Are you looking at that ring again?”
“No,” I say, startled, and turn away from the window. How does she know? “Of course not. Why would I be doing that?”
“Because you make me go by that store on our way to Barnes & Noble so you can stand and stare at that ring, even though it’s completely out of our way. Why don’t you just buy it? You do have a job, you know. Two of them, as a matter of fact. What do you work so much for, if not to buy yourself stuff?”
“Are you kidding?” I laugh so nervously I sound like a hyena. “It’s an engagement ring.”
“It doesn’t have to be,” Sarah says. “It can be whatever kind of ring you want it to be. You can be the boss of the ring.”
“I can also admire something and not buy it,” I say. “Especially if it’s not practical and probably costs a fortune.”
“How would you know? You won’t even go inside to ask how much it is, even though I’ve told you a million times—”
“Because it doesn’t matter,” I say, cutting her off, “since I don’t really want it. It’s not my style. It’s too fancy. And you never answered my question. What’s going on?”
“Oh,” Sarah says. “I got a call from Dr. Jessup’s assistant over at Central. It looks like they did it.”
I have no idea what she’s talking about. “Did what?”
“They picked the new hall director for Fischer Hall. What else?”
“Holy crap!” I freeze in my tracks.
I’m standing on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Eighteenth Street. A Sex and the City double-decker tour bus is going by, taking summer tourists to see all the places where Carrie Bradshaw and the girls used to have Cosmos and cupcakes.
People glance at me, alternately concerned and annoyed. New Yorkers aren’t as hardened as the media makes them out to be. If I were to fall down in a dead faint on the sidewalk right now because of Sarah’s news, I’m positive several good Samaritans would stop to call 911 and maybe even prop up my head to make sure I had an open airway. But only because I’m wearing clean clothes and don’t appear to be intoxicated. If I were drunk and covered in my own vomit, people would continue to step over me until the smell became too intolerable to bear. Then they might call the cops.
“Are you kidding me?” I yell into the phone. “Who? Who is it? Is it Simon? I swear to God, if it’s Simon, I’m going to jump in front of this bus—”
“I don’t know who it is,” Sarah says. “Dr. Jessup’s assistant called and said he’s coming by right now with some people so he can make the introduction in person and tell us some news about the building—”
“Now?” I break into a jog. Big mistake. I’m not wearing a jogging bra. I don’t even own a jogging bra. What am I thinking? I slow down. “Why didn’t you tell me sooner? Are you sure he said ‘make the introduction’? Because if he said that, it can’t be Simon. We already know Simon. Why would he introduce us to Simon?”
“Maybe he means make the introduction as in, ‘This is your new boss, Simon,’ ” Sarah says. “ ‘You might know him as the former director of Wasser Hall, but now he’s the director of Fischer Hall. Have a nice day, losers.’ ”
My heart feels as if it has sunk to my knees, where my boobs are, because I’ve been running in a bra not made for that kind of physical exertion.
“Oh God,” I say, trying not to gag. “No. Anyone but Simon.”
“Of course,” Sarah says, “it could also be this woman I saw coming out from Dr. Jessup’s office over at the Housing Office earlier today when I went to drop off the time sheets. Either way, we’re dead.”
“Why?” I ask, panicking. “Why are we dead if it’s her? Did you look her up on the FBI’s Most Wanted? Is she on there?”
“She just looked so . . . so . . .” Sarah seems unable to find the word she’s looking for.
I start running again. I don’t care how many tourists from the Sex and the City tour buses get photos of me holding my boobs up with one arm.
“Corporate? Stick up her butt?” I try to think of all the kinds of women I’d least like to work with. “Wants to marry for money? Sociopath?”
“Perky,” Sarah finishes.
“Oh,” I say. I can’t run anymore, and I’ve only reached Fifth and Fifteenth Street. A ribbon of sweat is trickling down my chest, always an attractive look when meeting your new boss for the first time. “Perky is good,” I say between pants. “Perky is better than Simon, who’s . . .” I can’t even think of a word to describe Simon, my hatred for him is so blinding.
“Not this kind of perky,” Sarah says. “She looked like a sorority girl. The bad kind. Like she majored in perk. The I-want-to-cram-my-fist-down-her-throat-she’s-so-perky kind of perky.”
“Sarah,” I say. It doesn’t seem possible, but her attitude is scarier than the idea of Simon becoming my boss. “She can’t be that bad. What’s wrong with you?”
Sarah’s been in a horrible mood all week—more than a week, actually—and she hasn’t explained why, at least not in a way that makes sense. She’s tried to blame it on everything from the cafeteria in the building being closed so she has to walk all the way across the park to get her coffee at the Pansy Café, to the fact that I hired too many females to work in the office, which isn’t even remotely true, because it’s only the two of us and Brad, a resident whose father told him not to bother coming home for the summer when he found out Brad is gay, so Brad had nowhere to live, being a work-study student on a very limited income.
That’s how Brad became another one of the misfit toys, when it was unanimously decided by myself and Sarah that Brad would be offered a free room in Fischer Hall for the summer in exchange for working twent
y hours a week in the office, covering our lunch shifts.
So when Sarah starts complaining over the phone as I’m standing there on Fifth Avenue, “Our ovulation cycles have synchronized. Everyone knows this happens when women spend too much time together. And this woman Dr. Jessup has hired is only going to make things worse. I almost wish he’d hired Simon,” I nearly burst a blood vessel.
“Sarah,” I snap, “Professor Lehman in my Psych 101 class says there’s no such thing as menstrual synchrony. Its existence was debunked long ago—all the studies alleging to prove it later were shown to have faulty data and poor statistical analyses. Since you’re a psychology major, I’m surprised you don’t know that. Furthermore, there aren’t only women working in the office, and you know it. There’s Brad—”
“Gay,” Sarah says. “Doesn’t count.”
“—and I’m on continuous-cycle birth control pills,” I go on, ignoring her, “so I don’t ovulate or have my period anymore.”
“Well,” Sarah says, sounding taken aback, “that can’t be good for you.”
“How would you know?” I ask, keeping my patience with an effort. “Are you my doctor? No. So you can’t really make a judgment like that, can you?”
“Okay,” Sarah says. “Sorry. I didn’t know, all right?”
I take a deep breath, trying to remain calm. Sarah’s right, she didn’t know. It’s not like we sit around the office discussing these things, like women do on those stupid commercials. “Well, I haven’t ovulated in months, thanks to having gone on Exotique, the pill where you get your period only four times a year.”
At my most recent checkup—the one last week—when my gynecologist asked how things were going in my romantic life and I mentioned I was secretly engaged (I guess it’s starting not to be such a secret anymore), my doctor said, “Good for you, Heather! Though when you think you might be ready to start having children—which I hope at your age will be sooner rather later—we’re probably going to have to have a talk. Evidence shows that for women like you it can sometimes be difficult to conceive.”
“What do you mean, ‘women like me’?” I asked, suspiciously. “Big girls?”
“No,” my doctor said, shaking her head. “Actually, it can be harder for thinner women to conceive. Your BMI is in the overweight range but your blood pressure and cholesterol are both perfectly healthy. I meant women like you who suffer from chronic endometriosis.”
“Endo-what-now?” I said.
“We discussed this last year, Heather,” she reminded me with a sigh. “That’s why I put you on the continuous-cycle contraceptive, and we agreed you’d start skipping your periods entirely. This reduces the tendency for your body to produce endometrial cysts. Remember those polyps I removed from your cervix?”
How could I forget? At least my dentist gives me nitrous oxide when I get a cleaning. My gynecologist had stuck a metal tube up my hoo-ha, and I didn’t get so much as an ibuprofen.
“You said the polyps were normal,” I pointed out to her.
“They were normal,” my doctor said, “in that they were benign. What’s abnormal is that they’re endometrial polyps. Honestly, there’s nothing to worry about yet, but after you go off the pill, if you have trouble conceiving, we’ll probably need to go in for a look laparoscopically. That’s all I’m saying.”
I left her office feeling as if Jack, Emily, and Charlotte—the names I’d picked out long ago for my future children with Cooper—were little ghost kids who’d slipped away before I ever got the chance to introduce them to their dad.
The doctor said if I have trouble conceiving, not when. That doesn’t mean I’m going to have trouble.
Still, I made the mistake of going online afterward to see how bad the odds are.
I should not have looked.
Now I suppose I’ve got to tell Cooper. Only how? When? Is there a right moment to tell your fiancé you have a strong chance of never being able to get pregnant, even with medical intervention?
It’s more fun to hang out in preppy stores, trying on wedding dresses that look completely terrible, than face that kind of reality.
Maybe that’s why I snapped when Sarah gave me her latest lame excuse for her bad mood.
“No,” I say, scraping my fingers through my hair, “I’m the one who’s sorry, Sarah. I know you didn’t know. Back to this woman you saw at the Housing Office. She can’t be that bad. Not worse than Simon. No one is worse than Simon—”
“I wouldn’t be so sure,” Sarah says. “Why else would Dr. Jessup say he has some news he can’t wait to tell us and he wants to be sure to deliver it in person? Where are you anyway? I know we’re closed, but that was the longest lunch break in the history of—”
“I’m coming,” I say. “I’m just over on Fifth.” I don’t mention the cross street since it’s so scandalously far. “I’ll be right there.” Then it hits me. “News? Besides the fact that he’s hired someone as hall director? What kind of news?”
It can’t be good news. When has Dr. Jessup ever stopped by anyone’s building to give them good news?
I can’t think of a single time. As a vice president—there is only one president at New York College, but there are several dozen vice presidents, all heads of nonacademic divisions of the college—Dr. Jessup is too busy to personally deliver good news. He has his assistant send it to us via e-mail.
Bad news, however, inevitably gets delivered by him via staff meeting—like the time we found out that, because of the hiring freeze and recession, there would be no merit raises. (Which didn’t affect me. As a new employee, I’m not eligible for a merit raise until next year. But Simon took it very hard.)
“I would imagine the news probably has something to do with what happened last week,” Sarah says. “Remember?” She’s being purposefully vague. Brad must be in the office with her. The two of us have managed to keep the fact that Jordan Cartwright and Tania Trace were ever in Fischer Hall a secret (one I shared with her only out of necessity, since she caught me destroying the page from the Protection Services log on which Christopher signed them in).
So far the only mentions of the shooting outside of Epiphany have been on entertainment news shows, like Jordan and Tania’s interview on Access Hollywood (“America’s Favorite Musical Couple Talks About Their Brush with Death”), and in gossip magazines. (In one photograph captioned “Tania Trace Visits Beloved Bodyguard in Hospital,” Tania is in a hospital room passing a large bouquet of “Get Well” balloons to an extremely large black man sitting up in bed. His gigantic hand makes hers look even tinier as he reaches out to accept the bouquet from her.)
“We didn’t do anything wrong,” I remind Sarah. “The paintball guns were bad, I’ll admit, but they’re owned by the college. No one got hurt. At least,” I add after a second thought, “no students.”
Cooper had reported back from his trip to Beth Israel Medical Center that Tania’s bodyguard’s injuries were a little more extensive than Stephanie led us to believe. Though Bear was expected to make a full recovery, not only had he had to have his spleen removed, but the bullet had gone straight through it and into his foot. He had weeks of physical therapy ahead of him.
Nevertheless, according to Cooper, it looked as if the shooting really had been completely random. The police found a shell casing they thought matched the bullet that struck Bear, but it was on the rooftop of an apartment building across the street from Epiphany that was littered with shell casings from dozens of other bullets as well . . . not to mention the remains of numerous firecrackers, discarded condoms, empty forty-ounce bottles of beer, and even a hibachi grill. This rooftop was obviously a popular hangout for kids, in addition to being accessible by residents of all the buildings across the street from Epiphany. (Access one roof and it was an easy leap to another.)
Other than from Cooper and Access Hollywood, I had heard nothing more about the incident. I saw neither Christopher nor Stephanie Brewer again in Fischer Hall, though I checked the sign-in logs for both
of them every morning. There was no record of them having come back, though, and no mention in the press of anything related to Fischer Hall.
“I don’t know,” Sarah says. “Do you think Simon told about the beer? And the vodka?”
I grit my teeth. “Everyone was over twenty-one—”
“Well, whatever the deal is, it doesn’t make a very good impression to be caught taking a two-hour lunch on your new boss’s first day.”
She’s right about that. I need to get it together—
As if in answer to an unspoken prayer, I see a yellow streak out of the corner of my eye. At first I’m sure it can only be an illusion, a hallucination brought on by nerves. Then it slides into focus, and I realize my luck might actually be changing for the better: it’s a New York City cab with the light on its roof glowing bright yellow, indicating that it’s unoccupied. This is as rare a sight in this part of town as a hundred-dollar bill floating down from the heavens.
I leap upon it just as quickly. I don’t shout “Taxi!” like they always show New Yorkers doing in movies and on TV shows, because that only alerts the unsuspecting people around you that there’s a vacant cab nearby. Then the people closest to it will try to snag it before you can.
Instead, I make a run for it, yanking on the handle of its back passenger door as the light turns green and the cab begins to move.
“Sorry,” I say to the driver as he jams on the brakes and looks around, startled to find a passenger climbing into his backseat. “I need to go to 55 Washington Square West. Can you take me there?”
The driver pauses in the conversation he’s having on his hands-free cell phone long enough to say, “That’s only eight blocks from here.”
“I know,” I say.
I try not to feel as if he’s judging me. He probably isn’t. He’s probably thinking I’m a tourist who doesn’t know how close she is to her destination.
“It’s eight long blocks,” I say. “And I’m super late. And it’s so hot.”
The driver smiles, hits the meter, and continues his cell-phone conversation in his native Farsi. I relax, feeling the cool air conditioning blast from the little vent at my feet. I actually might have died and gone to heaven. Maybe everything’s going to be all right . . .