by Meg Cabot
This kind of false thinking is, of course, how their laptops, cell phones, and expensive leather jackets get stolen all the time by guests other residents have signed in.
In the case of 401, the open door turns out to be to a suite. Bill Bigelow’s room, 401A, shares a common room containing a kitchen, bathroom, and small living area with rooms 401B and 401C. It’s the door to this living area that is open. The pounding music is coming from 401A, Bill’s room, the door to which is closed.
I step into the common room. It’s depressingly bare, the college-issued furniture—a vinyl-covered couch and chairs—having seen better days. There are no posters on the walls, but there are Chinese food delivery bags stuffed into the single trash can, as well as a significant number of bottles of Mike’s Hard Lemonade.
“Well,” Tom says snobbishly, “it’s clear no one in this suite cares very much about recycling, do they?”
The doors to 401B and C are both wide open, the rooms unoccupied, their single beds stripped, their walls, like the walls of the common room, bare. No one has lived in them in a while.
“Looks like old Bill Bigelow’s got a single,” Tom says. He doesn’t bother to whisper. There’s no way anyone could hear us over that music. “This would be a nice setup for an undergrad. You get your own room and only have to share a bathroom and kitchen with two other guys.”
Steven is of a different opinion. “But that view?” He points out the windows of the unoccupied rooms, then shudders. “The poor girl. She’d have been better off losing it in a car with the captain of the football team back in her hometown than with this.”
Tom smiles at him. “You big romantic fool.”
The view is depressing. The gravel-strewn rooftop, immense water tower, and air ducts of the building next door to Wasser Hall are so close that, if the windows opened, residents could go out onto the roof and sunbathe.
“Let’s do this,” Pete says. He looks angry, perhaps thinking about his own daughters after Steven’s remark.
“Allow me,” I say and stride up to 401A to pound on the door with my fist.
“Residence hall director,” I yell in order to be heard over the music, which seems to have been set on repeat. Tania is daring us, once again, to sue her. “Mr. Bigelow? We know you’re in there. Please open the door.”
There is no response. I pound again, harder this time.
“Bridget? It’s me, Heather Wells, from Fischer Hall. You aren’t in trouble.” She is in so much trouble. “Please open up.”
Bridget does know me, albeit only a little, from when I gave the rock-and-roll tour. She’d even asked a question. She’d wanted to know if we could go to that store where Madonna bought the jacket in the movie Desperately Seeking Susan. My answer, sadly, had been no. That store, Love Saves the Day, had shut down due to the landlord’s having raised the rent so outrageously. It is now home to a noodle shop.
“Bridget?” I try the knob. The door is locked.
If Simon or the assistant hall director had been at work, we’d have had one of them escort us up here with the master key and unlock the door so we could go in. If I’d had any luck finding someone at the front desk who knew what they were doing, I’d have asked them for the key to 401A. But the only person in Wasser Hall who had access to the key cabinet, I was informed, was “on a break.”
“Should I go back downstairs and ask the desk to call the building engineer?” I ask Pete worriedly. “Surely he’ll have a master key, or at the very least a drill to take out the core—”
Pete puts his hands on my shoulders and moves me gently out of the way.
“Allow me,” he says. And then, in a voice that is much deeper than the one he usually uses, he bellows, “This is New York College Campus Protection Officer Rivera speaking. You have until the count of three to open this door or I and my fellow officers will knock it down. One. Two—”
There is a sound of breaking glass. Not like a single drinking glass breaking because someone has dropped it, but like a windowpane shattering because something—or someone—has been flung through it.
“Oh my God,” I cry, my hands flying to my face. What have we done?
Tom has rushed into 401C and is looking out the window. “He used the desk chair to—Jesus, he’s climbing onto the roof! Oh my God, if it weren’t for these stupid window guards—”
“That’s it,” Pete says, backing up. He looks at Steven. “You ever done this before?”
Steven sighs. “Unfortunately,” he says, with a shrug. “Let’s go.”
Pete and Steven hit the door to 401A with their shoulders. Because Wasser Hall was so shoddily constructed, the door splinters easily beneath their combined weight, causing both men to stagger. Through the now-open doorway, I see a trim, blond-haired man, dressed all in black, darting across the roof of the building next door to Wasser Hall. He disappears behind the water tower.
“Got him,” Steven says and dashes through the room, then hoists himself up over the air-conditioning unit and out the window. “You guys call 911!”
“Be careful!” Tom calls after him. “He could be armed!” He looks at Bridget, who is sitting cross-legged in the middle of the bed, regarding us with a frightened expression on her face. “Is he armed?”
Bridget shakes her head. “No,” she says, wide-eyed.
“I got my Taser,” Pete says, scrambling up after Steven. “If Coach catches him, I can subdue him.” Glass crunches beneath Pete’s thick-soled shoes. He seems to be having some problems getting through the window. “Look out,” Tom says, helping him get around the remaining shards of glass.
Meanwhile, I try to take in what I’m seeing. Bill Bigelow’s room has been decorated to resemble the inside of a maharajah’s tent. From the fluorescent light fixture and ceiling he’s hung so many rich, colorful silk scarves and strands of imitation gold coins and crystals that it’s almost impossible to see the room’s original paint color. The bed is covered in jewel-toned silk sheets and pillows, and the dresser and desk have also been draped in scarves. Even Bridget herself, sitting so quietly on the bed in her white cami-top, blue denim shorts, and flip-flops, has a silk scarf wrapped loosely around her neck, half hidden beneath her long dark hair.
Ah. Now I get why she’s been wearing the scarf. Not to pop on camera or, as Cassidy so cruelly suggested, to draw attention away from her blemished skin, but because it was given to her as a gift by someone special.
I sit down on the bed beside her. The coverlet, of imitation silk, feels slick beneath my fingers.
“Bridget,” I say carefully. “You remember me, don’t you? Heather, from Fischer Hall. Are you all right?”
“Me?” The girl tears her gaze away from the window. Her tone is mildly surprised, as if there might be some other Bridget in the room I could be referring to. “I’m fine.”
The thumping beat of “So Sue Me” pulses from a set of stereo speakers on the desk nearby, but she doesn’t appear to be bothered by it, or by the fact that a man has thrown the desk chair through a window and then climbed out after it, and that two other men have leapt through it in pursuit of him.
Tom walks over to the MP3 player in its dock and switches off the music. A blessed silence descends over the room, except for the distant sound of shouting from the rooftop outside, and then Tom’s voice as he pulls out his phone and says, “Yes, I need the police and an ambulance at Wasser Hall at New York College right away. That’s 14 College Place between Broadway and—”
Bridget, appearing worried, asks, “He’s not calling the police about Mr. Bigelow, is he? Because he didn’t do anything wrong. He was only helping me. I know it was wrong, but—”
I send Tom a warning look. He nods, getting the message, and leaves the room, the cell phone still pressed to his ear.
“Well,” I say to Bridget, “Mr. Bigelow”—did she really just call him this?—“broke a window. That’s destruction of college property, and that’s very serious. He also didn’t answer the door when we knocked, and that
’s a violation of New York College residence hall rules and regulations.”
Bridget, still appearing fearful—but for Mr. Bigelow, not herself—nods. “Oh,” she says. “Okay. I-I guess. I know what we were doing was wrong, but we didn’t mean to hurt anyone.”
“Of course you didn’t,” I say, reaching up to push some of Bridget’s dark hair from her eyes so I can check her pupils. I think she must be in shock. There don’t appear to be any cuts or bruises on her face, arms, or legs, or anywhere else that I can see. She appears pale, but otherwise in good health. She’s begun to tremble, though.
“If all Mr. Bigelow was doing was helping you, like you said,” I ask, “why didn’t you open the door when we knocked? And why did he run away?”
“Well,” Bridget says, wrapping her arms around herself and curling into the same ball in which I’d seen her sitting earlier in the library, “I guess we were violating the rules—”
My heart is thumping harder than ever. “What rules?” I ask.
“He was coaching me,” Bridget says. Now her large dark eyes fill with tears. She doesn’t appear to be in pain, however. They seem to be tears of shame. “Okay? Please don’t tell. Do you promise? I’ll die if Cassidy and Mallory find out. They’ll tell Stephanie, and then I’ll get disqualified.”
“Disqualified?” The voices from the rooftop are getting closer. Through the broken window, I see Steven and Pete returning . . . unfortunately, Bill Bigelow is not with them. Pete is limping, Steven’s arm around his waist. “Disqualified from what?”
“Mr. Bigelow knows a lot about communicating emotion through musical performance—he’s an expert in it,” Bridget goes on, as if she hasn’t heard my question. She’s speaking very quickly, like she’s had a lot of caffeine. “He used to teach it professionally. And he said he could teach me some tricks that would help me beat Cassidy and all those other girls in the Rock Off.”
Tom’s come back, waving something through the splintered remains of the door that he wants me to see. “No,” he’s saying to the 911 operator, “I won’t hold. I don’t think you really understand—”
What he’s waving is a cupcake pan that he’s apparently found in the kitchen.
It doesn’t prove anything, but I feel the blood in my veins freeze all the same.
“So,” I say, trying to stay focused on Bridget, “Mr. Bigelow was your teacher?”
She nods, seeming relieved that I’ve finally caught on. “Yes,” she says. “Yes. He’s really, really good.”
“Then why,” I say, feeling a little sick to my stomach, “did you tell your roommates that he was your boyfriend?”
Color swiftly suffuses her cheeks, turning them the shade of her scarf, and she glances down and away, at the bare knees she’s hugging to her chest.
“Because I didn’t want them to know what we were really doing together,” she says, still speaking so quickly that her words run over themselves, like water from an overflowing hydrant. “They’d think it was cheating. But it wasn’t, really. Mr. Bigelow says it’s important to do whatever you have to in order to get a competitive edge. I mean, Cassidy, she has an agent. I don’t. We don’t have agents in my town. So Mr. Bigelow said he was going to be my agent, and my private coach and manager—”
I don’t know what compels me to reach up and gently unwind the hot-pink scarf from her neck as she’s speaking. But when I do, both Tom and I see them at the same time. I know because I hear the gasp that comes from Tom’s direction—the gasp that he, like me, tries quickly to stifle.
Forming a perfect circle all around Bridget’s throat—as if she were wearing a necklace of amethyst stones—are bruises. They’re in the exact shape and size of a man’s fingers.
We must not do a very good job of hiding our horror, since Bridget seems to realize right away what we’ve seen. She reaches for the scarf lying limply in my hands and says matter-of-factly as she wraps the silk material back around her neck, her voice a distant, horrifying echo of Tania’s that night in the Cartwrights’ media room, “Oh, never mind about those. They’re my fault. Sometimes Mr. Bigelow gets stressed when I don’t hit the notes right. Please don’t blame him. I need to work harder, he says.”
Chapter 25
Spice of Life
Girl, you are so sweet
I love you desperately
But that doesn’t mean
I wanna date exclusively
I’m a man who needs variety
It’s the spice of life, ya see?
Girl, you know we’ll always be
Together for eternity
Babe, you know I’d never say good-bye
You’ll always be my favorite ride
But I need freedom in my life
From that fact, we just can’t hide
I’m a man who needs variety
It’s the spice of life, ya see?
Girl, you know we’ll always be
Together for eternity
Girl, you must believe
I’ll be here for you any day of the week
But that doesn’t mean
I want to date exclusively
I’m a man who needs variety
It’s the spice of life, ya see?
Girl, you know we’ll always be
Together for eternity
“Spice of Life”
Performed by Easy Street
Written by Larson/Sohn
Girl, U So Fine album
Cartwright Records
One week in the Top 10
Billboard Hot 100
“Don’t worry,” Cooper says. “Canavan said there was blood on the cardboard boxes in the Dumpster that Steven said he saw him jump into. That means he’s injured. With the new description of him that’s gone out everywhere, Hall won’t be able to get far.”
“Don’t worry?” I echo in disbelief. I’m standing on the window seat in Cooper’s bedroom, attempting to adjust his curtains so that when the sun comes up in the morning it won’t blind us, but I’m not having much luck. “The guy turns out to have been living in Wasser Hall this whole time. He registered for a summer class and managed to convince everyone he was twenty-nine simply by losing fifty pounds and dying his hair blond. He brainwashed a fifteen-year-old girl from my building into thinking that choking her with his bare hands is an appropriate teaching method. And you’re telling me not to worry?”
“Okay,” Cooper says, with a glance at the ceiling. “Keep worrying. But maybe not so loudly.”
“Sorry,” I say, lowering my voice. “I forgot for a minute that we’re running a safe house for the victims of Gary Hall.”
“Just his main victim.” Cooper is sitting on his bed, the sheets of which I still need to change because I can’t remember how long it’s been since either of us have slept in it, but the amount of dog hair accumulated there indicates it’s become Lucy’s favorite place to nap. “And I thought you said you didn’t mind.”
“Of course I don’t mind.” I climb down from the window seat. The curtains appear to be a lost cause. “I just think she should be in the hospital with Bridget, not here. We’re not qualified to give Tania the mental health care she obviously needs, Cooper.”
“I’m aware of that.” He looks down at the ice at the bottom of the glass of whiskey he’s been nursing all night. One glass only. He told me he wants to stay alert. For what, I’m not allowing myself to think. “But this is the only place I could get her to go, she was so terrified when she heard what happened. What else was I supposed to do?”
I sink down onto the bed beside him. I don’t blame Cooper. None of it’s his fault.
I place the blame squarely on Christopher Allington’s shoulders. He’s the jerk who heard the news about Gary Hall’s being discovered in Wasser Hall—he was in his father’s office, no doubt asking for a loan—then rushed over to Fischer Hall to “make sure Stephanie was all right.”
Tania overheard the two of them talking about what had happened—how I had gone with the wounded prote
ction officer and the “girl from Tania Trace Rock Camp” to Belle-vue Hospital—and promptly went into hysterics.
Cooper, in an attempt to get her away from the startled gazes of the campers and their mothers before they could figure out what was going on, asked Tania where he could take her.
“That’s the part I still don’t understand,” I say. “What made her want to come here? She’s never been here before. How did she even think of it?”
Cooper looks uncomfortable. “I may have suggested it as an option.” Seeing my expression, he says, “Look, I was desperate. I suggested her place, my parents’ place, even her and Jordan’s place in the Hamptons . . . every place I could think of, and she kept saying no, no. No place I suggested was ‘safe’ enough. She kept saying Gary was going to find her. And she was crying . . . I’ve never seen anybody cry that much. I didn’t know how to handle it. All I could think was that if you’d been there, you’d have known what to do. And all I wanted to do was come here . . . home. I have a bad feeling I may have said something to that effect, and she latched on to it . . . next thing I know, she was saying something about this being the last place he’d ever look for her. It made her stop crying anyway, enough to get her out the door and into the car. I didn’t think much more about it after that, I was so relieved.” He looks at the ceiling. “I didn’t think she was going to move in.”