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Of course, the work isn’t exactly easy. Coop had said he thought it would total maybe ten hours a week, but it’s more like twenty. I usually spend all day Sunday and several nights a week trying to make sense out of the piles of scrap paper, notes scribbled on matchbooks, and crumpled receipts in his office.
Still, as rent goes, twenty hours a week of data entry is nothing. We’re talking a West Village floor-through that would easily go for three thousand a month on the open market.
And yeah, I know why he did it. And it’s not because deep down inside he has a secret penchant for size 12 ex—pop stars. In fact—like Jordan’s pounding on the door just now—it’s got nothing to do with me at all. Cooper’s motivation in letting me move in with him is that, in doing so, he’s really bugging the hell out of his family—primarily his little brother. Coop revels in annoying Jordan, and Jordan, in return, hates Cooper. He says it’s because Coop is irresponsible and immature.
But I think it’s really because Jordan’s jealous of the fact that Cooper, when his parents tried to pressure him into joining Easy Street by cutting him off financially, hadn’t seemed to mind being poor in the least, and had in fact found his own way in the world without the help of Cartwright Records. I’ve always suspected that Jordan—much as he loves performing—wishes he’d told his parents where to go, the way Cooper—and eventually me, too—had.
Cooper obviously suspects the same thing.
“Well,” he says, as in the background, we hear Jordan shout, “Come on, I know you guys are in there.” “Much as I’m enjoying sitting here listening to Jordan have a meltdown on my stoop, I have to get to work.”
I can’t help staring at him as he puts down his beer bottle and stands up. Cooper really is a choice specimen. In the fading sunlight, he looks particularly tanned. But it isn’t, I know, a tan from a can, like his brother’s. Coop’s tan is from sitting for hours behind some bushes with a telephoto lens pointed at a motel room doorway…
Not that Cooper has ever told me what, exactly, he does all day.
“You’re working?” I ask, squinting up at him. “On a Saturday night? Doing what?”
He chuckles. It’s like a little game between us. I try to trick him into letting slip what kind of case he’s working on, and he refuses to take the bait. Cooper takes his clients’ rights to privacy seriously.
Also, he thinks his cases are way too kinky for his kid brother’s ex-girlfriend to hear about. To Cooper, I think I’ll always be a fifteen-year-old in a halter top and ponytail, proclaiming from a mall stage that I’m suffering from a sugar rush.
“Nice try,” Cooper says. “What are you going to do?”
I think about it. Magda is pulling a double at the cash register in the café, and would want to go straight home afterward to wash the smell of Tater Tots out of her hair. I could call my friend Patty—one of my former backup dancers from the Sugar Rush tour, and one of the few friends I have left from back when I’d been in the music business.
But she’s married now, with a baby, and doesn’t have much time for her single friends anymore.
I realize I’m probably going to spend this night as I spend most other nights—either doing Cooper’s data entry or twiddling around with my guitar, a pencil, and some blank sheet music, trying to compose a song that, unlike “Sugar Rush,” doesn’t make me want to puke every time I hear it.
“Oh,” I say casually. “Nothing.”
“Well, don’t stay up too late doing nothing,” Cooper says. “If Jordan’s still out there when I leave, I’ll call the cops and have that Beemer of his towed.”
I smile at him, touched. When I do get my medical degree, one of the first things I’m going to do is ask Cooper out. He can’t seem to resist super-educated women, so who knows? Maybe he’ll even say yes.
“Thanks,” I say.
“Don’t mention it.”
Cooper goes inside, taking his radio with him, leaving Lucy and me alone in the slowly creeping shadows. I sit there for a while after he’s gone, finishing the rest of my beer, and gazing up at Fischer Hall. The building looks so homey, so tranquil. It’s hard to believe it had been the scene of so much sadness a little earlier in the day.
It isn’t until it has grown dark enough that lights begin appearing in the windows of Fischer Hall that I finally go inside.
And when I do, it hits me that Cooper’s warning when I’d told him I was going to do nothing tonight had been a bit on the wry side. Is it possible that he knows that I hadn’t really meant what I said? Is it possible that he knows what I do every night… and that it isn’t nothing? Can he hear my guitar all the way downstairs?
No way.
But then why had he said the word nothing like that? So… I don’t know.Meaningfully?
I can’t figure it out.
But then, let’s face it, guys have always been something of a mystery to me.
Still, when I get out my guitar that night, I play it extra softly, just in case Cooper does come home unexpectedly. I’m not about to let anyone—not even Coop—hear my latest stuff. Not after the way his dad laughed at me the day I played it for him, not too long before Jordan and I broke up.
Angry-girl rocker shit, Grant Cartwright called my songs.Why don’t you leave the songwriting to the pros, he’d said,and stick to doing what you do best, which is belting out top forty and power ballads? By the way, have you put on some weight?
One of these days, I’m going to show Grant Cartwright what an angry-girl rockerreally looks like.
Later, as I’m washing my face before bed, I look out the window and see Fischer Hall all lit up against the night sky. I can see the tiny forms of students, moving around in their rooms, and can hear, faintly, the sound of music being played from a few of those rooms.
It’s true someone in that building died today. But it’s also true that, for everyone else, life goes on.
And it’s going on now, as girls primp in front of their bathroom mirrors in preparation for going out, and boys chug Rolling Rocks as they wait for the girls.
Meanwhile, through the vents along the side of the building, I see intermittent flashes of light as the elevators glide silently up and down their shafts.
And I can’t help wondering what happened. What made her do it?
Or…
Who?
7
Rocket Pop
Like honey straight/From the hive
Rocket Pop
Only thing keeping/Me alive
Rocket Pop
Don’t knock it/Till you’ve tried it
Rocket Pop
You know you want it/Don’t deny it
Rocket Pop
When he’s around/I can’t stop
Rocket Pop
My eye-candy/My rocket pop
“Rocket Pop”
Performed by Heather Wells
Composed by Dietz/Ryder
From the album Rocket Pop
Cartwright Records
On Monday, Sarah and I let ourselves into Elizabeth’s room to pack up all her belongings.
This is because her parents are too distraught to do it themselves, and ask that the residence hall director’s office do it for them.
Which I can totally understand. I mean, the last thing you expect when you send your kid off to college is that three weeks later, you’re going to get a call informing you that your daughter is dead, and that you need to come to the city to pick up all her stuff.
Especially when your kid is as straitlaced as Elizabeth seemed to be… at least, judging from her things, which Sarah inventoried (so that later, if the Kelloggs noticed something missing, they couldn’t accuse us of having stolen it, something Dr. Jessup said had unfortunately happened before in cases of students’ deaths), while I packed. I mean, the girl had seven Izods. Seven! She didn’t even own a black bra. Her panties were all white cotton Hanes Her Way.
I am sorry, but girls who wear Hanes Her Way do not elevator surf.
Except that I am clearly in the minority in this belief. Sarah, as she records each item I pull from Elizabeth’s dresser, pontificates on the finer points of schizophrenia, the disease she’s currently studying in her psych class. Symptoms of schizophrenia don’t generally show up in its sufferers until they are the age Elizabeth was at her death, Sarah informs me. She goes on to say it’s probable that that’s what prompted Elizabeth’s uncharacteristic daring the night of her death. The voices she heard in her head, I mean.
Sarah could have a point. It certainly wasn’t Elizabeth’s alleged boyfriend, as Cooper had suggested. I know, because first thing Monday morning—before I even grabbed a bagel and coffee from the café—I checked the sign-in logs from Friday night.
But there’s nothing there. Elizabeth hadn’t signed anyone in.
While Sarah and I spend the entire day packing Elizabeth’s things—never encountering her roommate, who appears to spend every waking hour in class—Rachel is busy arranging the campus memorial service for the deceased, as well as getting the bursar’s office to refund Elizabeth’s tuition and housing fees for the year.
Not that the Kelloggs seem to appreciate it. At the me morial service in the student chapel later on that week (which I don’t attend, since Rachel says she wants an adult presence in the office while she’s out, in case a student needs counseling, or something—the residence hall staff is very concerned about how Elizabeth’s death might affect the rest of the building’s population, although so far they’ve shown no sign of being traumatized), Mrs. Kellogg assures all present, in strident tones, that the college isn’t going to get away with causing her daughter’s death, and that she herself isn’t going to rest until the parties responsible are punished (at least according to Pete, who pulled a double and was guarding the chapel doors at the time).
Mrs. Kellogg refuses to believe that any sort of reckless behavior on Elizabeth’s part might have brought about her own death, and insists that when her daughter’s blood work is returned in two weeks, we’ll see that she’s right: Elizabeth never drank, and certainly never did drugs, and so was not hanging out with a bunch of trippy elevator surfers the night of her death.
No, according to Mrs. Kellogg, Elizabeth was pushed down that elevator shaft—and no one’s going to tell her otherwise.
Mr. and Mrs. Kellogg weren’t the only ones going through a hard time in the aftermath of their daughter’s death, however. After seeing what Rachel went through that week, I started to understand what Dr. Jessup had meant. About the flowers, I mean. Rachel totally deserved some.
Really, what she deserves is a raise.
But, knowing the college’s general stinginess—there’s been a hiring freeze since the nineties, which is lifted only for emergency appointments, like my replacing Justine—I doubt a raise is forthcoming.
So on Thursday, the day after the memorial service, I slip out to the deli around the corner, and instead of buying my self a pack of Starburst, an afternoon pick-me-up latte, and a lottery ticket, as is my daily ritual, pick up instead their best bouquet of roses, which I then put in a vase on Rachel’s desk.
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