Size 12 and Ready to Rock

by Meg Cabot

  Even now, sitting by herself in her brown leather pants—so inappropriate for summer—and six-inch heels, white-sequined tank top, and smoky eye shadow, Tania looks like something ethereal.

  The girls seated at the base of her stool can’t stop gazing at her. Neither can Sarah.

  Tell story about time when you felt most emotional, I see Sarah scribble in her notebook. Like time when Sebastian went to Israel and tore your heart out.

  Cassidy also notices that Sarah is taking notes and leans over to whisper something to Mallory, and the two of them giggle again. I kick the leg of their couch, and they both turn to scowl at me. I scowl back.

  “Pay attention,” I whisper.

  Cassidy gives me the finger. I look for her mother, but she’s nowhere to be seen. Most of the chaperones consider “class” time to be “me” time—as opposed to “performance” time, when they’re always present to cheer on their little darlings, or “meal” time, when the cameras are almost always on. They run off to shop, work out at the Winer Sports Complex, get their hair and nails done, or—as in the case of at least a couple of the moms—drink as many Cosmos as they can at the bar in the lounge of the Washington Square Hotel down the street.

  “Write about the person you love the most,” Tania goes on, strumming the guitar that Lauren the PA has suddenly handed her. “Write about the person you hate.”

  I notice that when Tania says the words “person you hate,” Cassidy begins to scan the room for someone. Who does she hate this week, I wonder? Last week it was Mallory, but now the two of them are best friends forever . . .

  Ah. Bridget. Cassidy’s gaze falls on the pretty dark-haired girl, curled by herself in one of the charmingly Victorian chairs purchased by CRT for the filming. Bridget is gazing dreamily out the casement windows, paying no attention to what’s going on around her. Cassidy, noticing this, elbows Mallory and nods toward their roommate. Mallory rolls her eyes, and Cassidy smirks.

  Hmmm. So this week, both Cassidy and Mallory are ganging up on Bridget. I wonder if this has anything to do with the hot-pink silk scarf Bridget has taken to wearing, Bollywood style, around her neck.

  “She’s doing it to pop on camera,” I’d overheard Mallory complaining to some of the other girls as they stood outside my office the other day, waiting for the elevator to arrive. “Especially in HD.”

  “No. I know why she’s doing it,” Cassidy said authoritatively. “She’s got so many zits, she thinks a scarf will draw attention away from her face. But I’m sorry, it isn’t working. And she doesn’t have enough talent to draw attention away from that pizza face either. If she thinks she has a chance in hell of winning the Rock Off, she’s sadly deluded.”

  The other girls agreed.

  I’ve come to the conclusion that, aside from Nazis, the Taliban, and possibly the honey badger, there is no one on the planet more merciless than a teenage girl once she’s decided she dislikes you.

  “Write about what would happen if you lost the person you loved most in the entire world,” Tania goes on, strumming on the guitar. I hadn’t known she could play, but she does, quite competently. “Write about what would happen if the person you hate more than anyone else in the world”—Tania’s expression grows faraway—“suddenly started threatening that he was going to kill the person you love more than anything else in the entire world. How would that make you feel?”

  Uh-oh. I glance over at Cooper, who is standing discreetly out of camera range. He meets my gaze, raising his dark eyebrows. This has taken an unexpected turn.

  “Would you lie awake every night, thinking of how empty and alone you’d feel without that person? How meaningless life would be without him or her?” Tania is strumming the guitar strings with unnecessary force. “What would you do? Would you kill yourself? But maybe you can’t, because you’ve got a dog, and that dog needs you—”

  “Okay, cut,” Stephanie yells, looking a little red-faced. “Great.” She pulls off the headset she was wearing. “Sorry, everyone. Tania, that was fantastic, can we just go back to writing about what you love and concentrate more on the part about . . .” She drops her voice and turns her back on the rest of us, speaking to Tania so softly that we can no longer hear what she’s saying.

  The girls, growing restless from the hour they’ve already spent filming this workshop, stretch, then begin to whine for a break. They don’t seem to have been affected by Tania’s trip to the dark side, or even to have paid much attention to it.

  “Wow,” a masculine voice says from beside me, “if this is what it’s like to work on a professional film production, I might have to rethink my chosen career path.”

  I turn to find Gavin leaning against the wall.

  “How’d you get in here?” I demand.

  “I saved you from dying once last year, remember?” Gavin nods at Cooper. “He told me that gives me a free pass for life, as far as he’s concerned.”

  I try to repress a smile but fail. “Cooper said that?”

  “Yeah,” Gavin says. “But I have to watch myself, or he’ll knock me around. What’s so wrong with me being here, anyway? I don’t exactly fit this Gary Hall’s description, do I?”

  I frown. “No,” I say. “You don’t.”

  Though Tania hadn’t liked it one bit, going to Detective Canavan had turned out to be the right thing to do . . . not, of course, that the police were having any better luck finding Gary Hall than Cooper was. Aside from locating a more recent photo of him on file with the New York State Department of Motor Vehicles from when Gary had gone to get a new driver’s license—in which he seemed to have put on a good deal of weight, dyed his hair red, donned a pair of thick-framed black glasses that made him look, if anything, even more unhinged, and added a goatee, also dyed red, in some sort of misguided effort to look younger—there appeared to be no sign of the guy whatsoever.

  “How is that possible?” I’d asked Cooper when days passed and the police still had no leads, despite their having plastered the photo everywhere.

  “Easy, actually,” he explained. “There are over eight million people in this city. All he has to do is shave off the goatee, dye his hair back to its original color, ditch the glasses, not use a credit card to pay for anything, and no one’ll ever find him.”

  “But what about ATMs?” I asked. “You said—”

  “The last time this guy made a withdrawal,” Cooper said, “was nine weeks ago. Guess how much is left in that account?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “You said he probably doesn’t pay taxes, so I’m assuming a lot—”

  “Zero,” Cooper said. “He withdrew it all. The guy is carrying a ton of cash on him . . . either that or he’s opened another account under another name, probably an alias, that we can’t locate.”

  “But on TV—”

  “If you say, ‘But on TV . . .’ one more time,” Cooper said, “I will refuse to discuss this further with you. Real life isn’t like TV. On TV the police have computers with facial recognition software that can hook up to security cameras in banks and scan photos of people, then match those photos up with a national database of known criminals. In real life, not only do most police stations not have this kind of technology, but even if they did, all the criminals would have to do is slightly alter their looks or even keep their faces in profile the whole time, and the whole thing would go kaplooey.”

  “So . . .” I was stumped. “What about the IP address from his e-mail?”

  “Nothing,” Cooper said. “He used a bunch of Internet cafés here in the city, just as I suspected. You know, I couldn’t find the divorce record between those two on file anywhere.”

  “What?” I asked. “Didn’t you use your insouciance with the court clerks?”

  “Every ounce I possess,” he said. “Plus multiple fifty-dollar bills and Tania’s real name and her stage name. But I came up with bupkus. I’m starting to wonder if they even—”

  “ ‘If they even’ what?” I asked when he fell silent.
>
  “Nothing,” he said. “Never mind. It doesn’t matter.”

  “No, really,” I said. “You can tell me. If they even what?”

  But he only shook his head. “Tania has enough to worry about.”

  She certainly did. After our trip to the Children’s Hospital of New York went so well—despite Cassidy and Mallory sulking all the way through it—word got out almost immediately that Tania Trace Rock Camp was going to “Rock On” (in the words of the Post) despite yet another tragedy in “Death Dorm.” I won’t say that that’s why I planned the whole thing, but it might have been in the back of my mind.

  Stephanie Brewer got wind of our field trip—and of the tour we took to New York City’s greatest female-centric rock-and-roll sights afterward—and finally decided to get out of bed and convince the network executives (namely, Grant Cartwright) not to cancel Jordan Loves Tania preemptively.

  I was never quite certain how she managed this, but once Gary Hall’s driver’s license photo got plastered all over the local papers and newscasts—which of course meant Cartwright Records had to make up a story about his being “an overly zealous longtime fan” of Tania’s, a story which was immediately picked up by every gossip website and media outlet known to man—the whole thing had avalanched well out of Tania’s control anyway. I don’t think anyone, with the exception of Cooper, Detective Canavan, and of course Tania herself, knew the truth about her relationship to Gary. But the media was hungry for more information.

  As a result, we couldn’t walk outside the doors to Fischer Hall without running into paparazzi asking if we felt we were taking our lives into our own hands by living and working there.

  “We’re taking it in stride,” I’d overhear the girls from the camp say from time to time. (They’d received extensive media coaching from Cartwright Records Television publicists, and of course there’d been some hasty salary negotiations to convince them and their chaperones to stay despite the fact that a psychotic killer was stalking their camp’s hostess. Three more girls had bowed out anyway, despite the new incentives.)

  “It’s actually good training,” I’d overheard Cassidy say to a reporter from Entertainment Tonight, “for when I’m famous and have my own stalker.”

  Not to be outdone, Mallory elbowed Cassidy out of the way and said, “Tania’s a really good role model of how you can’t let something like this keep you from living your life. I really admire her.” This sound bite was quoted in numerous newspapers and used over and over again online, to Cassidy’s fury.

  “Not in my cafeteria,” I caught Magda saying to a CNN reporter. “The food we serve is always fresh and byootiful, and we never have any rats, ever!”

  “Uh, Magda,” I’d whispered to her as we walked into the building together, “you know we actually do get rats sometimes, right?”

  “Yes, of course,” she said. “But we put traps out for them, not poison.”

  This really was the truth, so even if enterprising journalists had bothered to look into it, they couldn’t have corrected her. But of course none did. They were more interested in writing sensational pieces about how everyday items in your home might contain poison, such as those supposedly healthy vitamins you bought at the drugstore.

  Tania may have seemed to others as if she were taking it all in stride—well, except for today’s filming—but those of us who knew her well could see that she was slowly crumbling under the pressure. Every day she appeared thinner and more fragile. Cooper reported that she barely ate—his sister Nicole had accused her of being “pregnorexic”—and Jordan said she couldn’t sleep.

  Of course, neither Nicole nor Jordan knew the truth about Gary Hall. But the more Tania fretted that it was going to come out, the less likely it seemed it was going to. No one had yet made the connection between the New York Gary Hall, with the thick glasses and red hair and goatee, and the Florida Gary Hall, with the clip-on tie and conductor’s baton. The only way anyone might ever catch on was if Gary Hall himself spilled the beans.

  And to do that, he’d have to come out of hiding, like one of those cockroaches Tania said used to live under the refrigerator in the first apartment she shared with him.

  As soon as that happened, there were 36,000 NYPD officers—not to mention my boyfriend and me—waiting to squash him.

  In the Fischer Hall library, Tania says “Okay,” with a nod as Stephanie backs away from her. “I got it.”

  “Great,” Stephanie says. “All right, everybody,” she says to the girls, “I know it’s hot in here and you’re tired, but I really like the energy we’ve got going right now. We’ll break for lunch right after this.”

  All the girls groan . . . except for Sarah, who looks eager to get back to her note-taking.

  “Come on,” says Chuck, the assistant camera operator, in an attempt to jolly them along. “Lunch. It’s fajita day. Who can resist a delicious fajita?”

  The girls titter because Chuck has made the word “fajita” sound vaguely lascivious. Sarah looks confused. “It’s just meat and vegetables in a tortilla,” she says.

  “I actually came up here for a reason,” Gavin says to me as Marcos gets the boom back in place, “besides wanting to watch the collapse of the American entertainment industry. Lisa wants to see you down in the office.”

  “Why?” I ask, straightening up.

  “I don’t know,” Gavin says, with a shrug. “She saw me walking by in the hall and told me to come find you. She says it’s important.”

  I nod and leave the room quietly, just as Tania is saying, “Write about what you wish would happen to you, your hopes and dreams, what you wish you’d done differently, what you wish you could change but how, if those things hadn’t happened to you, you might not be the strong person you are today—”

  Hopes and dreams, I see Sarah scribble as I’m leaving.

  That’s it, Stephanie, I think as I softly close the door to the library behind me. Keep her mind off the dark stuff. Can’t have Tania breaking down now, when the Rock Off is just a week away and she’s so close to the finish line.

  The funny thing is that I had no idea how close we all were to the finish line as I was thinking this. Particularly me.

  Chapter 22

  Lisa is at her desk and Davinia, the resident assistant from the sixteenth floor, is sitting in a chair beside her when I walk into our office. Neither of them looks too happy.

  “Hey,” Lisa says to me gloomily.

  “Hey,” I say back. “Gavin said you needed to see me?”

  “Yeah,” Lisa says. “Davinia thinks we’ve got a problem.”

  I sit down at my desk, then spin my chair around so I can look at them both through Lisa’s open office door. “We had a guy die of cupcake poisoning last week, and TMZ is hiding in the bushes this week,” I say. “What could possibly be worse?”

  “Well, this isn’t necessarily worse,” Lisa says. “But it has to do with the girls in 1621.” She lifts an incident report that’s sitting on her desk. “Need I say more?”

  “Oh jeez,” I say. “I was just with them in the library. Cassidy was being her usual charming self, but nothing out of the ordinary. What’s going on now?”

  “Mallory and Cassidy requested a meeting with me early this morning—very top secret,” Davinia says. “They even made sure none of the film crew was around to film it, if that’s any indication of how serious they think the situation is. They say they’re worried about Bridget.”

  I knit my brows. “Worried about her?” I recall the way Cassidy searched the library for Bridget when Tania mentioned writing about someone you hate. “Jealous of her is more like it. I think they may be trying to eliminate the competition.”

  “Could be,” Davinia says. “But according to Mallory and Cassidy, Bridget’s got a boyfriend—”

  “Wait.” I don’t believe a word of it. “She’s sneaking out? I can’t believe, after last time, that any of those girls would dare—”

  “That’s what I asked,” Davinia says. �
�They say she’s not sneaking out at night. She sees him during the day whenever there’s time off from filming and the other girls are practicing their solos for the Rock Off and the chaperones are busy—”

  “—doing other things,” I finish for her, knowing all about happy hour at the Washington Square Hotel. “Who’s the guy? Not Magnus,” I say, suddenly feeling my heart begin to race. “Please not one of the basketball players—”

  “He is attending summer classes here at New York College,” Davinia says. “But he doesn’t live in this building. Mallory says he lives in Wasser Hall, across the park. She and Cassidy only found out because Bridget has been texting someone nonstop for the past week and wouldn’t tell them who, so one day when they were all supposed to be going into rehearsal they followed her—”

  “Weasels,” I say, not in the least surprised.

  “—and they saw her go to Wasser Hall and get signed in by him. Obviously, later on, they confronted her—off camera, thank God—and Bridget begged them not to tell, because apparently the boy is Orthodox Jewish and not allowed to date outside the faith, so if their relationship gets shown on camera and his family ever sees the show, he’ll be disowned.”

  “Oh please,” Lisa says with disgust. “Is she kidding?”

  I tap my front teeth, thinking. “This could actually be true,” I say. “One of the reasons Wasser Hall is so popular is because some of the suites on the lower floors have kitchens, so residents who keep kosher can cook in them, and they don’t have to use the elevator to get to them on the Sabbath. The dining hall is also big enough to serve both kosher and non-kosher meal plans. So if he is Orthodox, it’d make sense for him to live in Wasser Hall.”

  “How does Bridget say they met?” Lisa asks, looking at Davinia.

  Davinia shrugs. “How does anyone hook up with anyone around here? In the park, of course. That’s why the girls came to me. They say they feel like they’re being ‘disloyal’ to Tania by keeping this huge secret, but this show is supposed to be about ‘reality,’ and the ‘reality’ is, Bridget isn’t being real.”