Size 12 and Ready to Rock

by Meg Cabot

  “My God!” I hear Sarah’s voice shout from my hand. I’ve forgotten I’m still holding my phone. “You’re still eight blocks away? They’re going to be here any minute!”

  “Stall them,” I lift the phone to my face to instruct her. “Tell them I went to Disbursements. Tell them—”

  “Oh,” I hear Sarah say. “Hi, Dr. Jessup. You’re here already?”

  Then she hangs up on me.

  I’m so dead.

  Chapter 7

  Haters

  Take a picture

  Write it down

  I don’t give a ****

  I know you think

  You’ll take me down

  Well, boy, I wish you luck

  I got haters

  All around me

  Up and in my face

  You think you’re gonna

  Take me down

  Get into my space

  Well here’s a tweet

  A super text

  An e-mail voice iCall

  Take more than you

  To bring me down

  So write that on your wall

  “Haters”

  Performed by Tania Trace

  Written by Weinberger/Trace

  So Sue Me album

  Cartwright Records

  Eleven consecutive weeks

  in the Top 10 Billboard Hot 100

  I jump out of the cab as soon as it pulls up in front of Fischer Hall, throwing a ten-dollar bill into the front seat. The driver, still on his phone call, is once again startled, but I don’t stop to wait for change, and he certainly doesn’t stop to give it.

  “Thanks!” he cries. “Have a great day!”

  Too late.

  I’m confused to see a fleet of delivery trucks outside the building. Moving men are unloading bubble-wrapped furniture, using the gray plastic carts reserved for Fischer Hall residents only.

  This sight sets my already overtaxed heart beating unsteadily. When I see some of the men pushing the carts toward the Fischer Hall handicapped-accessible ramp, I begin to have palpitations.

  “Excuse me,” I go up to one of the men and say, “but who is this delivery for?”

  He’s as sweaty as I was a few minutes ago. He’s been working hard for some time apparently and hasn’t had a nice air-conditioned cab ride to cool off.

  He looks down at his clipboard. “Heather Wells,” he says, a bit impatiently, “Fischer Hall, 55 Washington Square West,” and goes back to pushing his cart, which appears to be filled with an unassembled Ikea bedroom set.

  “Wait a minute,” I say, catching his arm, which is quite buff, if a bit moist with perspiration. “There must be some mistake. I didn’t order any of these things.” There are literally five trucks in front of me. “And this building is closed for renovations.”

  The man shrugs. “Well, this person here signed for it,” he says, pointing at the bottom of his clipboard. “So you’re getting it whether you ordered it or not.”

  I look at the cursive scrawl he’s pointing to.

  Stephanie Brewer.

  Now instead of palpitations, my heart feels as if it’s exploding.

  How could this be happening? And on the day my new boss is arriving?

  I follow the men pushing the cart through the door to find Pete sitting at the security desk, on the interoffice phone. He puts his hand over the mouthpiece and asks, “Where have you been? Do you have any idea what’s been going on here? Do you know who’s in your office?”

  “I think I can guess,” I assure him sarcastically. A gray plastic cart piled high with accessories from Urban Outfitters rolls by. “Where are they taking all this stuff?” I ask him.

  “Upstairs,” he says, with a shrug.

  “The penthouse?” I can’t imagine what Eleanor Allington is going to want with a lava lamp.

  “All I know is upstairs,” he says. He seems supremely unconcerned. “Magda says hi.” He indicates the phone. He and Magda, my best friend from Dining Services, have become a pretty hot item in recent months, but lately their flirting has to be carried out via telephone because Magda has been transferred over to the Pansy Café while the Fischer Hall cafeteria, where she normally works, is being renovated.

  “Tell her hi back,” I call vaguely over my shoulder as I begin wandering toward my office. I have to duck when I encounter Carl, the chief building engineer, striding down the hallway carrying an eight-foot ladder on his shoulder.

  “Hey,” he says cheerfully. “Look where you’re going. What d’ya want, another body?”

  “Not funny,” I say to him. “What’s going on here?”

  “Don’t know,” he says. “Got a call from Facilities that I’m supposed to go up to the seventeenth floor to change all the lightbulbs in the vanity mirrors above the bathroom sinks to sixty-watt bulbs from the forty-watt energy-efficients that are in there. So that’s what I’m doing.”

  I’m perplexed by this information. “We have sixty-watt regular lightbulbs?”

  He snorts. “Been hoarding them for years. I saw this energy-saving bulb thing coming a decade ago. I knew it wouldn’t go over well with you women. You like your lighting bright in the bathroom so you can see to put your makeup on.”

  I blink at this, not sure how to react.

  “Oh,” I say. “Well, good. I guess.”

  I walk away shaking my head. What is going on?

  Then I round the corner into the hall director’s office and find Stan Jessup standing there. Beside him is a young woman in jeans and a T-shirt who I’ve never seen before; Muffy Fowler, the head of the college’s media relations department; Sarah; and Stephanie Brewer from Cartwright Records Television.

  I freeze in the doorway, feeling all the sweat that dried up during the nice cool cab ride begin to prickle my skin again.

  “W-what’s happening?” I stammer, dumbfounded.

  “Well, hey there,” Muffy Fowler says in her southern accent. As usual, she’s dressed to the nines, in white high-heeled pumps, a cream-colored linen pencil skirt, and a polka-dotted silk blouse. “So nice of you to join us. Can’t believe you went for such a long lunch and didn’t invite me. I thought we were friends.”

  I want to melt into a puddle on the floor.

  “I didn’t,” I say. “I wasn’t. I was at Disbursements.”

  “I’m just kidding,” Muffy says, bursting into loud guffaws. “Would ya’ll look at her face? Bless her heart. Heather, I think you’ve met Stephanie. She says you two had a little run-in the other night.”

  “I wouldn’t call it a run-in,” I say quickly, coming into the office.

  “More like we had the pleasure of meeting,” Stephanie says, reaching out to shake my hand. She looks a lot more pleasant than she did the last time I saw her. Her face is wreathed in smiles. She’s wearing a light-gray business suit and clutching a designer tote that probably cost more than I make in a month. “So nice to see you again, Heather. I was just telling everyone how accommodating you were. Tania hasn’t been able to stop raving about you.”

  I’m confused. “She what?”

  “Heather,” Dr. Jessup says, stepping forward. If I’m hot, he must be even more so, having surely walked all the way across the park from the Housing Office in that dark charcoal suit he’s wearing, even though Sarah’s set the office air conditioner on full blast. I can see a telltale sheen around the edges of his still-thick head of dark hair, peppered at the temples with gray. “We have some great news. So great I had to deliver it personally.”

  “Yeah,” Sarah says from her desk over by the photocopier. She’s wearing her everyday uniform of black T-shirt and overalls, but she’s blown her usual mass of frizzy curls dry against the New York humidity and actually put on a bit of eyeliner. Sarah used to leave her face untouched by anything remotely resembling makeup, thinking it was a violation of feminist ethics to enhance what the Mother Goddess gave us, until I pointed out to her that if the Mother Goddess didn’t want us to wear makeup, she would not have given some o
f us eyelashes so blond they are practically invisible, making us resemble white rabbits without our mascara on. “Wait until you hear this news, Heather. It couldn’t be more great. It’s truly great.”

  It’s clear from Sarah’s tone that she doesn’t think the news is great at all. Unless you knew her as well as I do, you wouldn’t pick up on the sarcasm.

  “Fantastic,” I say. “I’m so excited to hear this great news. Do I need to sit down?”

  “Probably,” Sarah says. “I would. Because this news is so great, you’re going to want to be sitting down when you hear it or you might pass out from excitement.”

  I go around the side of my desk and sit down, glaring at her. She’s pushing it a little far.

  “Anyone else?” I ask, indicating the couch across from my desk, as well as the other chairs I rescued from the cafeteria before they began painting in there.

  “Thanks,” says the girl I don’t recognize. “Don’t mind if I do. My dogs are barking.” She sits. I notice Sarah glaring at her. I don’t know if it’s because of the “my dogs are barking” remark (which admittedly was odd, but possibly as sarcastic as Sarah’s “you might pass out from excitement”), or because they’ve had some kind of disagreement before I got here. They appear to be the same age and are dressed in a similarly slovenly style—though I realize I’m not one to talk—so I can’t imagine what they could have found to disagree on, though the visitor’s hair is definitely more neatly styled.

  “Can I do it?” Muffy asks Dr. Jessup, bouncing on the toes of her pumps. “Puh-lease, Stan?”

  He smiles at her graciously. “Be my guest.”

  I look up at Muffy. She and I are friends, if you can call it friendship to share a mutual desire not to see people get away with murder on the campus where we work and an attraction to the same guy (she’s currently dating my ex-boyfriend and remedial math teacher, Tadd Tocco).

  Fortunately, Tadd and Muffy make a much better couple than Tadd and I ever did, mostly owing to Tadd’s commitment to veganism and my commitment to being in love with another man, namely Cooper Cartwright. Muffy told me at the last lunch we had together that she’s pretty sure Tadd is going to propose (because she informed him that at their age, if there isn’t forward momentum in a relationship after three months, it only makes sense to break up), but she’s on the fence about accepting.

  “On the one hand,” she said over the healthy tuna salad wrap she purchased from the Pansy Café, “I’m not getting any younger, and since I definitely want kids, I might as well have them with Tadd. You know they’ll be smart because his IQ is through the roof, and we’ll save a lot on child care, since professors only work about three hours a week, so Tadd can stay home with them.”

  I’d been forced to admit this was true.

  “On the other hand,” Muffy said, “I’d always hoped to marry a rich man so I could be the one to raise the kids. I’m not sure what the girls back home will think when they hear I’m still working.”

  “Who cares what anyone else thinks?” I asked with a shrug over my not-so-healthy Pansy Café burger and fries. “It’s your life, not theirs. You love your job, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” Muffy said firmly.

  “Good,” I said. “Just make sure you love Tadd too before you say yes when he asks you to marry him, or I don’t think your plan has a very good chance at working out.”

  Now Muffy is looking at me with her perfectly made-up eyes glittering, bursting with eagerness to tell me whatever fabulous news it is she has to impart.

  “Heather,” she says, “I know how sad you were that your residence hall was closed for the summer, and ya’ll were left with nothing to do but twiddle your thumbs. Now you can stop twiddling, because Fischer Hall’s being officially reopened this weekend to host the first ever Tania Trace Rock Camp!”

  I glance quickly from Muffy to Dr. Jessup to Stephanie, then to Sarah, then back again.

  “Wait,” I say intelligently. “What?”

  “Yes,” Sarah says unsmilingly. “Fifty fourteen-year-old girls here in the city for two weeks, living their dream of getting mentored by none other than Tania Trace. Isn’t it great?”

  “They’re fourteen to sixteen years old, actually,” Stephanie says. She’s sunk down into a chair covered with blue vinyl—I watched Carl reupholster it myself, after mice ate through the original orange upholstery—and opened her tote. She pulls a brochure from it and hands it to me. I thumb through it as she talks. It’s a wash of bright vibrant colors, like Tania herself when she isn’t suffering from exhaustion. “You remember, Heather. I told you about it last week. Unfortunately, the Catskills location simply isn’t going to work anymore.”

  “Why?” I ask. “It looks perfect.” I point to a photo of a girl on horseback. “We don’t have horses.” I point to another photo. “Or an open-air amphitheater.”

  “We have plenty of performance spaces,” Dr. Jessup says. “Our drama school is one of the best in the country. Our theaters aren’t open-air, but it’s my understanding that that is Ms. Trace’s preference—”

  “Tania wants everything moved indoors,” Stephanie says crisply, plucking the brochure from my fingers.

  I’m more confused than ever. “Then how is it camp?”

  “It’s still camp,” Stephanie says. “It’s just inside camp.”

  “What’s ‘inside camp’?” I ask, bewildered. “That doesn’t even make sense.”

  “Of course it makes sense,” Stephanie insists. “It’s college camp. The girls are going to love it even more than they would have loved being at a resort in the Catskills. They’ll be experiencing life on a college campus years before their peers. And not just any college campus, but New York College, one of the top ten most-applied-to colleges in the country. Not to mention, of course, they’ll be spending every minute with Tania Trace. Or one of New York College’s prestigious music instructors. Mostly with one of them. But for at least an hour a day, they’ll be with Tania.”

  I sit where I am, stunned, while everyone else except Sarah beams at me.

  “Told you so, didn’t I, Heather?” Sarah asks me, leaning forward on her desk, her smile diabolical, but only I know her well enough to realize it. “Isn’t it great?”

  I ignore her.

  “We’re closed for renovations,” I say to Dr. Jessup. I’m not arguing because Tania Trace is my ex’s new wife and I don’t want anything to do with this. I genuinely can’t figure out how we’re going to make it happen. “None of the rooms is even close to ready for occupancy. The paint crew’s barely gotten through the top few floors. And most of those rooms haven’t been fully maintenanced yet. I mean . . .” I can’t believe I have to say this out loud, but I do it anyway. “What about the room to Narnia?”

  Stephanie and the girl no one’s introduced to me stare at me blankly, but I’m confident that Dr. Jessup and Muffy know exactly what I mean, because the room to Narnia, like Pansygate, was scandalous enough to have made the New York Post. After spring checkout, we found a room in which the four male suitemates had built “a door to Narnia”—a hole they’d cut into the back of a college-issued wardrobe that, when opened, led to an extra room of their suite in which they’d assembled a “love dungeon” complete with wall-to-wall mattresses, lava lamps, bongos, and posters of the actor who played Prince Caspian on every vertical surface.

  What was even more annoying was that the suitemates’ parents then had the nerve to refuse to pay the charges we billed them for the cost of repairing the hole in the wardrobe (and fumigation of the mattresses), even though I sent them photographic evidence of their sons’ unusual extracurricular activities.

  “No worries,” Muffy says cheerfully. “We already received a list from Facilities of the rooms that need the least work—”

  “Facilities?” Then I remember bumping into Carl in the hallway, with his ladder. “Of course,” I murmur. “The lightbulbs.”

  “Exactly,” Stephanie says. “Our girls are going to need good lighting
to put their makeup on in the morning for the cameras.”

  “Cameras?” I fling a panicky look at Dr. Jessup, but it’s Muffy who answers.

  “New York College has been offered a tremendous opportunity, for which I’m told we have you to thank, Heather,” she says.

  I know what’s coming, but I’m still hoping there’s been some kind of mistake. “What opportunity?”

  Stephanie’s smile isn’t reflected in her eyes.

  “Tania felt like you handled the little crisis she had while she was here the other night so competently, she says the only place she can feel safe right now while filming Jordan Loves Tania—with Bear laid up in the hospital—is in Fischer Hall.”

  “This is going to do wonders to boost Fischer Hall’s reputation when the show airs,” Muffy says enthusiastically. “So long, Death Dorm! Hello, most-sought-after residence hall in the country! Everyone is going to want to live in the building where they hosted Tania Trace Rock Camp.”

  “But . . .” I look at Dr. Jessup in desperation. “But filming is not permitted in any New York College residence hall without proper authorization.”

  Dr. Jessup has his hands buried in the pockets of his suit trousers. He’s rocking back and forth on his heels.

  “What can I tell you, kid?” he says, his smile grim. “They got authorization, straight from the president’s office.”

  I glance at Stephanie. Her own smile has gone catlike. “I told you President Allington is a big fan of Cartwright Rec-ords Television.”

  I frown. More like President Allington’s son is a big fan of Stephanie and used his influence on his dad—who has no idea what’s happening on his own campus because he’s hiding in the Hamptons during Pansygate.