Size 12 and Ready to Rock

by Meg Cabot

  “Why are you back there?” I ask, narrowing my eyes at Brad, since he’s leaning on the edge of the intercom system next to Gavin. I need to distract myself before I begin weeping in front of both of them.

  Brad looks startled, which is his normal expression.

  “It’s check-in,” he says. “I thought we all had to be here.”

  At least Brad hasn’t showered or dressed up. But then, Brad doesn’t need to. With a body like a Dolce & Gabbana cologne model from his strict workout routine—his fallback plan, if his physical therapy major doesn’t pan out—he’d look good wearing a paper bag. This has nothing to do with why Sarah and I hired him, of course.

  “Yeah,” I say, flipping open the binder. It’s divided into sections, first alphabetically by resident, then by floor. “Well, thanks for coming.” I wrinkle my nose. “What’s that smell?” I don’t mean the body spray. This is, if possible, stronger and more cloying.

  “Oh,” Gavin says. “That’d be the flowers. They’re for Tania. Her fans know this is where her rock camp is being held and Tweeted about it. They’ve been coming in and leaving ’em all morning, hoping they’re going to see her,” Gavin goes on. “But Pete’s been making them drop them off and get out, telling them they can’t hang around.”

  I look where he’s pointed and realize that lining the windowsill behind the Jordan Loves Tania film crew are enough bouquets of roses to make a florist jealous. Some of them have balloons attached.

  I groan. This is the last thing we need.

  “They’ve been leaving other stuff too,” Brad says excitedly, holding up a pink box. “Look! Ice-cream cake.” His tone turns reverential. “It’s Carvel.”

  “Ew,” I say, wrinkling my nose. “You are not eating that.”

  “Of course not,” Brad says, looking hurt. “It’s for Ms. Trace. Besides, I would never put all that processed sugar and flour into my body.”

  “I would,” Gavin declares. “I’m just waiting for Jamie to bring me a spoon from the caf. She’s been too busy dealing with Davinia’s meltdown—”

  “No,” I say firmly. “What is wrong with you? Didn’t your mother tell you not to accept candy from strangers? Throw that away right now before it melts and makes everything all sticky.”

  “No one’s throwing anything away,” Jared says, in a warning voice, suddenly paying attention to our conversation. “After Tania’s seen everything that’s been dropped off to her by her fans, we’ll gather it all up and take it over to one of the hospitals and donate it to the children’s wing. That’s what she likes us to do.”

  “Wait,” I say, noticing for the first time how he’s occupying his time while waiting for filming to begin, besides his horror film discussion. “What are you doing?”

  “Well, we obviously don’t donate the perishable items,” Jared says with his mouth full. “We eat those ourselves. Want one?” He tilts a pink-and-white polka-dotted bakery box toward me. “They’re good. From Pattycakes, that vegan bakery over on Bleecker Street.”

  “Oh, Pattycakes?” Muffy Fowler suddenly throws herself into the conversation, leaning against the desk beside me. “How sweet. You know Tania and Jordan used Pattycakes to make their wedding cake.”

  “That’s why no one but Jared will eat those nasty things,” Marcos, the sound guy, says with a snort. He’s got his hand in a bag of vegan pita chips that has a note—“For Tania, Divalicious”—taped to it. “Who wants a cupcake made with no eggs, dairy, or processed sugar?”

  “I’ll have you know,” Jared says, taking another bite from the heavily frosted cupcake in his hand, “that these cupcakes won Cupcake Wars on Food Network.”

  “They won Cupcake Wars?” Now Stephanie is interested. “Give me one.”

  “Oh, I’d like to try one too, please,” Simon says, bellying up to the desk.

  I can’t tell if it’s Stephanie that Simon is interested in or the cupcakes—they do look good, piled high with vanilla frosting and finished with a purple candied flower on top. But either way, I don’t like how this is going, especially given the fact that no one seems to remember there are fifty campers and their mothers waiting on the sidewalk outside and I’m working on a Saturday, hours for which I’m not paid overtime or compensated with time off.

  “Can we at least,” I say, “start check-in, since we’re all here?”

  “God no,” Stephanie says. “Let everyone finish breakfast in peace. The minute we let them in, they’ll start making demands. I’m surprised at you, Heather. I’d think you’d know a little something about pushy stage moms.”

  I smile humorlessly back at her. Ha ha.

  Gavin swivels on the desk chair to complain, as Jared passes Stephanie a cupcake, “How come they get to eat the stuff people have dropped off for Tania, and you won’t let us have any?”

  “Because,” I mutter—even more irritated when Christopher Allington saunters over to Stephanie and murmurs, “Gimme a bite, babe”—“in this building we have a policy. We don’t take—or eat—things that don’t belong to us.”

  “And Heather was right when she said that you don’t know where those came from,” Lisa points out. But I don’t miss the envious glow in her eye as she watches Stephanie take a bite.

  “We know exactly where these came from,” Stephanie says, chewing. “Tania’s fans. Let’s not forget, they’re the ones”—she makes a slight face—“paying our salaries.”

  Christopher walks over to the nearest trash can and spits out what was in his mouth, but Simon tries to be more discreet.

  “I think it’s quite good,” he says, chewing. “A bit dry maybe.” I notice, however, that he leaves the rest of his on the paper plate holding his fruit salad.

  Muffy looks disappointed. “Oh, now that’s a darn shame,” she says. “And I heard so many good things about them too.”

  President Allington has been holding his hand out across the desk. Now he withdraws it.

  “No thanks,” he says. “Trying to keep my girlish figure. No sense wasting calories on something that doesn’t taste as good as it looks.”

  I notice some of the basketball players have gathered in the lobby as well. Nothing would keep them away from a chance at grabbing some free food and perhaps a glimpse of Tania Trace, and they glance at one another with barely suppressed smirks on their faces.

  “Honestly, Jared, he’s right,” Stephanie says, oblivious to what’s going on behind her. “How can you sit there and eat those? They taste like cardboard.”

  “I don’t know,” Jared says. He seems to have lost some of his previous enthusiasm and is dabbing at his nose with his sleeve. “I was hungry. I skipped breakfast.”

  “Well, go get a bagel in the cafeteria,” Stephanie says irritably. “So what rooms are Cassidy and those other girls in?” she asks me.

  “Sixteen twenty-one,” I reply without checking the roster.

  Lisa smiles at me, impressed, but the truth is, I’ve known all along. I’ve been stalling for time in order to get a sense of what’s going on behind the desk. I have all the room assignments memorized, given that I did them myself. I can’t use the computer system—for which Muffy Fowler told me the college spent a “scandalous” amount of money—to do Fischer Hall’s room assignments because it makes too many mistakes, assigning people who’ve requested a room on a “low floor, south-facing window,” to a room on a high floor with windows that face north. It’s easier for me simply to do the assignments by hand.

  “There was a note telling me to put Bridget, Cassidy, and Mallory in the same room,” I explain to Stephanie. “So I did, with Cassidy’s mom in the outer room as chaperone. But now that I’ve met Mrs. Upton, I think she might not be too—”

  “Brilliant,” Stephanie says, not waiting for me to finish. “Those three girls got the highest TVQ ratings from the test audiences who viewed their audition tapes. If we could get a smackdown going on between them for the Rock Off, it’d be terrific.”

  My eyebrows go up, and I hear Lisa ask, “Wha
t?” in alarm.

  “Not a real smackdown,” Lauren the PA assures us. She hasn’t been in the television business long enough to have become as jaded as her boss. “She means a vocal smackdown. The Rock Off is the talent show we’re going to have the final night of camp to see who the most gifted performer is. The winner gets fifty thousand dollars and a recording deal with Cartwright Records.”

  “Those three girls all sang the same song when they auditioned for the show,” Stephanie says. I notice that she says “the show” and not “camp.” “It was ‘So Sue Me.’ ”

  “Oh, I love that song,” says Jamie, and the other female RAs, Tina and Jean and even Davinia, all nod enthusiastically.

  I don’t blame them. “So Sue Me” does have a different feel than any of Tania’s previous songs, and not just because it perfectly showcases her powerful voice, or because it’s the title track to her newest album and her first real Mariah-style power ballad. Although singers—especially popular ones like Tania—are often given cowriter credit for the songs they sing, it’s not always because they’ve actually written the song. Songwriters are guaranteed residuals by the label, but musicians and performers are not.

  Every word of “So Sue Me,” on which Tania has a cowriter credit, sounds like it means something personal to her, however, and is coming from a place deep within her soul. Since every time I hear her singing it I get chills, I can almost believe she wrote it herself.

  And so must everyone else, since it’s been the number-one song in the country—and Europe—for weeks.

  “That’s why we want the floor to have a rock ’n’ roll feel,” Lauren explains, more to Davinia than to me. “Mallory and Bridget will probably go edgy for their songs for the Rock Off. We can’t be sure about Cassidy, with that mother—”

  “We’ll get her agent to have her go pop,” Stephanie says firmly. “She’ll sing ‘So Sue Me,’ blow away all the competition, Tania will cry, Cassidy will win, and the sponsors will love it.”

  I’m starting to understand what Jared meant in my office when he said I’d be amazed at how little actual reality ends up in their “docu-reality” series.

  “Speaking of Cassidy,” I say, “when I met Mrs. Upton outside just now, I—”

  “Later, okay?” Stephanie says. “Lauren, what did Art say?”

  “Done,” Lauren says, checking her phone. “Can we print them out in your office, Lisa?”

  “Uh,” Lisa says uncertainly. “Sure, I guess—”

  “Fantastic,” Stephanie says and glances at Davinia. “It wasn’t that yours weren’t right, sweetie. They weren’t right for the show.”

  “I don’t feel so good,” Jared says from behind the desk.

  Gavin spins to face him on the tall front-desk chair. “Dude. You got a nosebleed.”

  This is the understatement of the summer—possibly of the year. Blood is flowing in two steady streams from Jared’s nostrils, dripping down onto his faded gray New York College T-shirt.

  I’m immediately alarmed, especially when Jared says sarcastically, “You think I don’t know that?” and raises his arm. He’s apparently been dabbing his nose for a little while, since the sleeve of his blue hoodie has turned black. “It won’t stop. And I think I’m going to throw up. If someone could just call my doctor—here, he’s in my important contacts . . .” He fumbles in his pocket for his iPhone, then drops it. “Shoot.”

  My mind darts to one of the many episodes of Freaky Eaters I’ve seen . . . and also one of the mandatory staff meetings I was forced to attend in the past few months.

  “Gavin,” I say, throwing open the door to the front desk, “call 911. Brad, get the first aid kit. There’s a bottle of hydrogen peroxide in it—”

  Gavin reaches for the phone. “Don’t let him hurl back here,” he says as he dials. “Take him to the bathroom.”

  “What is it?” Stephanie’s eyes are wide. “What’s wrong with him?”

  “I think it’s warfarin,” I say, grabbing a roll of toilet paper—toilet paper is one of the few things residents at Fischer Hall get for free—from beneath the desk and shoving it against Jared’s nostrils. “It’s an anticoagulant. It’s the active ingredient in a lot of rat poisons.”

  “Oh my God,” Lisa cries, following me. She snatches the bottle of hydrogen peroxide from Brad and rips off the top, shoving it toward Jared’s face. “How much should he drink?”

  I’m trying to remember. “I don’t know. Just make him throw up.”

  “Uh,” Dr. Jessup says, approaching the desk, Simon and Muffy close behind him. “Maybe this isn’t—”

  “Aw, jeez,” Jared is saying, pushing Lisa away. “Don’t worry. It’s not poison. It’s just a—”

  “Don’t stand up!” Lisa and I cry at the exact same time as Jared attempts to climb to his feet.

  It’s too late. His legs crumple beneath him as his eyes roll back into his head, and neither Lisa nor I is strong enough to support his weight as he collapses.

  Chapter 14

  Muffy Fowler decides—and Dr. Jessup agrees—that it’s not a good idea for the moms to see the show’s field producer being carted out of Fischer Hall covered in blood and on a stretcher. Nor does she think it’s a good idea for them to see Detective Canavan and the other law-enforcement officers from the Sixth Precinct who show up to question Gavin and anyone else who might have had contact with the individual who dropped off the cupcakes (though until there is a toxicology report proving they actually did contain a poisonous substance, we’re urged by Detective Canavan “not to make any assumptions”).

  It also seems wise to keep the campers and their moms from witnessing the breakdown that Simon Hague has in the middle of the lobby, shortly after Jared’s collapse.

  “I ate one!” he shrieks. “I swallowed a bite of one of those cupcakes too! Dear God in heaven, I don’t want to die!”

  That’s when Lisa and I force him—and Stephanie too—to swallow some hydrogen peroxide and vomit into various trash cans (so we can preserve the evidence).

  Then we send the RAs outside to invite all the campers into the cafeteria to enjoy breakfast and “bond” with one another. It seems to work. Not only do none of the moms notice the unconscious man being smuggled out of the building through a side exit into the waiting ambulance—or the staff members who leap into a taxi to follow it (Muffy feels that representatives from New York College should go along to the hospital to support Jared and Stephanie, and of course Simon)—but they seem unfazed by the announcement that filming has been postponed until tomorrow because of a “technical delay.” It helps that Magda does such a terrific job of telling them how “byootiful” they all look, like true movie stars, making sure they get all the fruit salad and nonfat yogurt they can eat.

  The rest of the staff do their own jobs amazingly as well, exactly the way they’ve been trained . . . well, except for the president, who leaves, muttering, “Glad I didn’t eat one of those things.”

  I’m sitting at my desk, waiting to give my statement to Detective Canavan and staring at a red spot on the sleeve of my white blouse—a spot, I realize, that is probably never going to come out, no matter how much stain remover I use, because it’s Jared Greenberg’s blood.

  Otherwise check-in has gone on as planned, just a couple of hours later than scheduled. All of the girls (and their mothers) seem happy with their rooms—which, given how much money CRT has spent on the decor, they should be. There are flat-screen TVs bigger than my desk in each room, as well as bucketloads of swag donated from Sephora and Bed, Bath & Beyond. Davinia reported having been able to hear the squeals of delight all the way down the hall in her own room.

  My phone rings, but it’s my cell, not my office phone.

  “I just heard,” Cooper says when I pick up. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine,” I lie. My fingers still haven’t stopped shaking, despite the two—nondiet—sodas and Reuben sandwich I’ve downed to cushion the shock. “I’m not the one who swallowed a vegan c
upcake dusted with rat poison.”

  “Thank God,” he says. “My dad says they’re doing everything they can for the guy, but that it’s not looking good. Stephanie Brewer seems to be in the clear, though, and so does the guy from the other residence hall—”

  I’ve forgotten all about Simon.

  “Too bad,” I say before I can stop myself. “If anyone deserves to die like a rat—”

  Then I clamp my mouth shut guiltily. I can’t wish that kind of death on anyone, not even Simon . . . especially when Sarah, sitting at her desk nearby, looks up in surprise from the hushed conversation she’s having on her cell phone. I feel ashamed of myself. I’m supposed to be a role model.

  “Heather, there’s no proof it was poison,” Cooper says. “The guy could have had a heart attack, for all you know.”

  “Cooper.” I lower my voice, conscious of Sarah’s gaze on me and the fact that Detective Canavan is in Lisa’s office with another officer, interviewing Gavin and Brad. Her office is separated from the outer office—where my desk is located—by only a half wall and a metal grate. Muffy’s given us all strict instructions that if a single word of what’s happened gets out, we’re going to lose our jobs. Even though I know Cooper isn’t going to run to the Post with what I’m telling him, I don’t want to get caught gossiping. “A heart attack? Are you kidding me? Blood was gushing out of the guy’s nose like a fountain. Just seconds before he was eating cupcakes some fan dropped off at the building for Tania.”

  “That doesn’t mean—”

  “Cooper, they taught us at a staff meeting not long ago what symptoms to look for in human poison ingestion. Nosebleeds and nausea were two of them. Jared was suffering from both before he passed out. Warfarin, the active ingredient in older rat poisons, is both odorless and tasteless. I saw an episode of Freaky Eaters about a woman who loved eating it, only in small amounts. It was killing her too, just much more slowly.”