by Meg Cabot
I notice Chantelle and Nishi exchange glances as they kneel beside Tricky, who is basking in their attention. Amiable! they mouth to each another in delight. They can’t get enough of the prince’s good looks and royal manners.
I’m probably the only one in the room who immediately thinks, Acquainted with the young lady in question? She hasn’t slept in her room a single night all week. Just how acquainted with Ameera is the prince?
“Could my car be of service?” he asks. “It’s quite roomy. Perhaps it could help transport the young lady to the hospital?”
“That’s what we have ambulances for,” Lisa says coldly. She isn’t impressed with his princely ways any more than Sarah was. “We’ll call one if we need one.” She seems to realize how mean she sounds, and adds, in a gentler tone, “I appreciate the offer, but it’s our job to handle these kinds of situations. You don’t need to get involved . . . Shiraz.”
“I can’t say I’m surprised about any of this.” It may not have surprised Mrs. Harris, but she seems to be relishing the drama. “I knew when you said Ameera didn’t come home last night, Kaileigh, that something like this was going to happen—”
“But we don’t actually know that anything’s happened, do we?” Lisa interrupts, sounding mean again. She’s weaving a little on her feet, as if the industrial carpeting is swaying before her eyes, but manages to stay erect. “So let’s reserve judgment until we do, okay?”
“Yeah, Mom,” Kaileigh says, narrowing her eyes at her mother.
“But I really don’t think Kaileigh should have to put up with this kind of stress, especially when classes start.” Mrs. Harris is like Tricky when he’s got hold of one of his treats. She isn’t going to let go, no matter what. “What’s all this worrying going to do to her grades?”
“Mom,” Kaileigh says sharply. “I’m fine. What’s the big deal? Ameera partied a little too hard last night, and now she’s—wait.” Kaileigh narrows her eyes at her mother. “Is that why you’re in here? You came down to complain about Ameera? Oh my God, I can’t believe you. I happen to like my room, Mom, and my roommates. I’m in college now. Why can’t you let me live my own life?”
“Excuse me,” Lisa says, a greenish tint having suddenly overtaken her. She darts back into her office, slamming the door closed behind her. Thanks to the metal grate, we can hear all too clearly why she needed to be excused.
“Poor thing,” Carl comments from the top of his ladder, making a tsk-tsking sound with his tongue. “Lots of people coming down with that stomach flu. My guys had to snake two toilets this morning. Everybody, wash your hands.” Carl wags his drill with grandfatherly emphasis. “That’s the only way to keep it from spreading.”
Everyone looks down at their hands, including the prince’s bodyguards. Even Shiraz looks as if he’s lost some of his self-proclaimed chill.
“Well,” he says, beginning to back out the door, “if I can’t be of any use here, I’d best be going. No offense, but I can’t afford to get sick right now. I’ve got tickets to the U.S. Open this weekend. Not playing, just as a spectator—” Seeing the looks his bodyguards exchange, he adds, in a deeper, mock-serious tone, “Plus with the course load I’m going to be taking, I know Father would want me to stay healthy for my studies . . .”
“We’ll go with you,” Nishi says, reluctantly releasing Tricky and climbing to her feet. “There’s no reason we need to stick around, right? You’ll take care of Ameera if anything is wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong with Ameera,” I assure her, “but of course we’ll take care of her if anything is.”
Is it my (overactive) imagination, or does the prince look as relieved to hear this as the girls?
“Thanks,” Kaileigh says, smiling at me gratefully. The look she throws her mother, however, is the opposite of grateful. “I’ll call you and Daddy later, Mother,” she adds icily.
“Good-bye, Mrs. Harris, Miss Wells, sir,” the prince says, with polite nods to Kaileigh’s mother, me, and even Carl, who salutes back with his drill. “I hope you feel better,” he calls to Lisa through the metal grate. Her only response is a groan.
Whatever else they might say about the heir to the throne of Qalif, he’s unfailingly polite. He and Kaileigh and the rest of their entourage begin to file out of my office, just as a tall, devastatingly handsome man with thick dark hair and piercing blue eyes comes striding in.
Whenever Cooper Cartwright enters a room, I’m always amazed that the sight of him doesn’t cause every other woman in the vicinity to swoon, the way I feel like doing. Maybe they’re just better at hiding the shattering effect his rugged masculinity has on them. Mrs. Harris barely even glances in his direction, which I find completely perplexing, since he seems to emanate testosterone in his nonskinny jeans and unclingy sports coat in a way Prince Rashid never could.
Then again, we all know how Mrs. Harris feels about sex, so I guess it’s no wonder.
Cooper watches the prince and his entourage without comment until, after they’re gone, he asks, “His Royal Highness, the VIR, I take it?”
“He prefers to be called Shiraz,” I correct Cooper. “Because he’s best served chilled.”
“It’s nice to know he’s assimilating,” Cooper says drily, lowering himself onto the visitors’ couch.
Only Tricky greets Cooper the way I believe he should be greeted . . . and would greet him myself if we weren’t surrounded by observers. The dog throws himself onto the couch, lays his paws upon Cooper’s chest, and enthusiastically begins lapping Cooper’s five o’clock shadow (even though it’s lunchtime) with his tongue.
“Whoa,” Cooper says, attempting unsuccessfully to fight off the dog’s advances. “I’m happy to see you too, Trix, but I can tell one of us didn’t brush his teeth this morning, and it wasn’t me.”
Mrs. Harris, still failing to notice my fiancé, says to me, “Kaileigh’s father is on his way over. He says for the money we’re paying—over fifty thousand dollars a year—Kaileigh should have a roommate who is serious about her studies.”
I raise my eyebrows. “Mrs. Harris, I already told you we don’t have any other rooms—”
“That’s why we want to speak to someone in charge.” She nods at Lisa’s closed office door. “Not Miss Wu. Her supervisor. The director of housing.”
“Mrs. Harris,” I say, in a tone I can’t keep from becoming sharp. “I’ll be happy to direct you to the Housing Office, where you can make an appointment with Dr. Stanley Jessup, the director of housing, but before I do, keep in mind that I’ll be calling his office myself to tell him that your daughter stood in front of me just five minutes ago and said she liked her room and her roommates and requested that you allow her to live her own life.”
Mrs. Harris’s face turns pink. I’ve called her bluff, and she knows it. Cooper, meanwhile, is smiling into Tricky’s fur. He loves it when I get bossy with the parents. He says it turns him on. I hope he can control himself until we get outside the building and into a taxi to the Plaza, where we’ll be meeting our extremely hard-to-get-an-appointment-with wedding planner.
“Kaileigh was admitted to New York College,” I go on, “one of the best colleges in the country”—“best” is a leap; but it’s certainly one of the most expensive—“because she’s clearly very intelligent. As a parent, you need to start trusting her to handle her own problems, and let her make her own decisions. I personally think they’ll be great ones, not only because she’s attending a fine school and at eighteen is now a legal adult, but because she was raised by a fantastic mom. You, Mrs. Harris. Kaileigh’s going to do great in college because she had you as a role model. You gave her the wings she needs to fly. Now, why don’t you let her spread them?”
At the end of this long speech—which, I have to admit, I got out of a greeting card and I’ve delivered approximately four times already this week—I give Mrs. Harris my most dazzling smile, the one that Cooper says knocks his socks off. I’ve noticed that it frequently knocks his pants off as well.
Unfortunately—or fortunately, since we’re in an office setting—this time it does neither. Mrs. Harris keeps both her pants and socks on as well.
But she does look touched.
“Oh,” she says, reaching into her purse and pulling out a tissue with which she dabs at the corners of her eyes. “That’s so nice of you to say. Her father and I have tried so hard with her. She has a younger brother, you know, and let’s just say we won’t be allowing him to go to Haiti to build houses for Habitat for Humanity, even though it’s such a worthy cause, because he simply hasn’t shown the same kind of responsibility that Kaileigh has. But then they say boys don’t mature as quickly as—”
Mercifully, my office phone rings before she can go on much longer. I see on the caller ID that it’s Sarah.
“I’m so sorry,” I say apologetically to Mrs. Harris. “I have to get this. Maybe we could talk another time?”
Mrs. Harris nods her understanding and mouths Thank you so much for everything as I pick up the receiver and say, “Hello, Fischer Hall director’s office, how may I help you?”
“I know you know it’s me,” Sarah says. Her voice sounds weirdly congested. “Is Kaileigh’s mom still sitting there?”
“Yes, this is Heather Wells,” I say, smiling brightly at Mrs. Harris as she waves from my office door on her way out.
“Oh, crap,” Sarah says. “I can’t believe she’s still there. It’s bad, Heather. Really, really bad.”
I keep the smile plastered on my face, but shift my glance to Cooper now that Mrs. Harris is finally gone. He’s scratching Tricky’s ears, but when he sees my expression, his fingers still, his gaze locking on mine.
“Really?” I ask. Even though Mrs. Harris is gone, I keep my tone businesslike. There are still people milling around outside the door. “How bad?”
“It’s not fair,” Sarah says. She’s crying now. “Classes haven’t even started yet, Heather. Classes haven’t even started yet.”
Behind me, I hear Lisa’s office door open. This time I don’t think it’s because of anything she’s overheard, because I’ve kept my end of the conversation so neutral.
I think my new boss might actually have some kind of extrasensory perception.
“Heather?” Lisa asks in a soft voice. “What is it? Is that Sarah?”
I nod, picking up a pen and lowering my gaze to the At-A-Glance calendar on my desk. Slowly, I begin to cross out Lunch w/ Coop and Perry. Lunch with the outrageously exclusive and expensive wedding planner is definitely canceled.
“Sarah,” I say into the phone. “Take a deep breath. Whatever it is, we’ll handle it—”
“I don’t understand it.” Sarah is babbling into the phone. “I just saw her at dinner last night. She was fine. We had falafel. We had freaking falafel together last night in the caf. How can she be dead?”
I knit my brows. Sarah isn’t making any sense. “You ate dinner with Kaileigh’s roommate Ameera last night in the cafeteria?”
“No!” Sarah cries with a sob. “Not Ameera! Ameera is fine, we checked on her, she’s fine, just hungover or something. I’m talking about Jasmine, the fourteenth-floor RA. You told me to look in on her, so when we knocked and she didn’t answer her door, we keyed into her room to make sure she was all right, because I could hear music playing. Why would she have left her music on if she wasn’t in the room? Well, she’s here, but she isn’t all right. She’s dead, Heather. She’s dead!”
5
It is New York College policy that no registered student in need of emergency medical attention will be left unaccompanied. No student shall be left alone in a hospital emergency room.
A representative of the school must be with any sick or injured student at all times until he or she has been admitted to the care of a physician in a licensed hospital.
In the event of a student’s death, an administrator shall be with a deceased student at all times until his or her body has been released to the OCME (Office of the Chief Medical Examiner).
—excerpted from the newly revised New York College Housing and Residence Life Handbook
Lisa insisted she come upstairs and sit with Jasmine’s body, but I had my doubts this was the wisest course of action.
“You’re sick, Lise,” I say when I call downstairs to report my findings. Sarah is a mess when I arrive, and the RA on duty, Howard Chen, is nowhere to be seen. That’s because—I soon discover—he’s in the trash chute room down the hall, throwing up.
Howard isn’t vomiting because of the sight that met him and Sarah in room 1416, though. Jasmine looks perfectly peaceful in her white tank top and green terry shorts, her tawny-colored hair fanned out prettily against the pillow beneath her head, her eyes closed. She could have been sleeping . . . except for the fact that she isn’t breathing, and her skin is as cold as ice.
Howard’s apparently vomiting for the same reason as Lisa: the stomach flu really does seem to be making the rounds.
I send Howard back to his room to recover, then send Sarah downstairs to the front desk to wait for the police before calling Lisa.
“I don’t think you’re going to be any help up here,” I go on, trying to be as tactful as possible. “In fact, you may be more of a hindrance. I don’t think Jasmine was murdered, but you never know.”
“Just say it, Heather,” Lisa says bitterly. “You don’t want me barfing all over the crime scene.”
“Well, you said it, not me. What I think you should do is go home and get in bed. I’ll call the Housing Office and tell Dr. Jessup what’s happened. Although he’s probably going to want you to call Jasmine’s parents.”
Lisa’s voice cracks. “Oh God, Heather.”
“I know. But you knew Jasmine better than anyone, since she went through RA training with you. The news will be best coming from you. I know it’s going to suck, but . . .”
Jasmine has framed photos by the side of her bed. She has her arms around a happy-looking older couple—no doubt Mom and Dad—and a panting golden retriever. They appear to be camping.
I have to look away. I have no such photos of myself with my parents. We never had pets when I was growing up. My mom said it was too hard to take them on the road when I was touring.
Then Mom left. So.
“I understand. It’s just . . .” Lisa’s voice cracks again. “She was so young.”
“I know,” I say again, looking around Jasmine’s room, anywhere but at the family photo and Jasmine’s pretty face. She had been young . . . and so full of promise.
Jasmine had painted the walls of her room a cheerful powder blue—painting your room is a housing violation, unless you paint the walls white again before you move out—and covered them with cutouts of white clouds and photos of women she’d admired . . . mostly TV journalists like Diane Sawyer and Katie Couric.
That’s when I remember what Gavin had asked over the phone a little earlier:
Is she the hot white Jasmine who’s studying communications?
She was.
Only now her dream of being the next Diane Sawyer is never going to come true.Something pricks at the corners of my eyes—tears, I realize. I turn my back on Jasmine and her room and lift the blinds. We aren’t supposed to touch anything in the deceased’s room, since it could be a crime scene, but I have to look at something that isn’t going to make me cry.
I can’t believe the only real contact I ever had with Jasmine was her snarky comment about my emergency phone list. I’d kind of disliked her for it.
Now I’ll never have a chance for another interaction with her, because she’s dead. The least I can do is try to figure out why, even though that isn’t part of my job description.
It isn’t not part of my job description, though, which is to assist the hall director in all matters pertaining to the smooth functioning of the building. Certainly figuring out how Jasmine died would fall under that category.
I concentrate on Jasmine’s view—which is spectacular—of the busy streets and rooftop
s of the West Village. Between the treetops I occasionally catch a glimpse of the Hudson River.
So many of the kids who come to New York College arrive with dreams of making it big in Manhattan, having spent their youth watching Sex and the City reruns or reading The Amazing Spider-Man. Something had happened to cut Jasmine down dead before she ever had a chance of living out her dream, however.
What was it?
Lisa is wondering the same thing.
“How could something like this happen, Heather? Our first week, before classes have even started?”
“I don’t know,” I say, relieved my tears aren’t affecting my voice. “If it helps, whatever happened to her”—brain aneurysm? drugs? poisoned apple?—“I don’t see any signs that she suffered.”
“It doesn’t help,” Lisa says gloomily into the phone.
“Yeah,” I say. It never does. “Look, Lisa, this is bad, but it isn’t as bad as it could be. You could say something to her parents like that Jasmine died during the happiest, most exciting time of her life. She got the RA job . . . she was a role model to so many people—”
Lisa makes a gagging noise, and I realize I’ve made her throw up. Literally.
“Yeah,” I say. “I know. Cheesy. Look, you sound like you’re getting worse. Go to bed. I’ll call Dr. Jessup.”
“No,” Lisa says weakly. “I’ll do it. Then I’m coming up there. The police are going to want to talk to me—”
“Lisa, don’t be ridiculous. The police aren’t even here yet. I mean it. Go home. Get in bed. This is a horrible tragedy, but it’s going to be all right.” I steal a glance at Jasmine, then look back out the window at the river and lower my voice—which is ridiculous, since Jasmine can’t hear me—and say, “Jasmine was an RA, but she was new to the building, and she didn’t work here for very long. None of us really knew her.”
“Heather!” Lisa cries. “How can you—?”
“Because it’s true. She didn’t really know us either, or most of her residents, since the majority of the students on her floor are upperclassmen, so most of them haven’t even checked in yet. They won’t get here until next weekend. Classes don’t start until after Labor Day.”
