by Meg Cabot
Maybe when I pass my six months’ review, and I’m finally able to enroll in school, I’ll become a pre-med major. Yeah, it’ll be hard to do with a full time job—not to mention Cooper’s billing. But I’ll find a way to make it work.
And then maybe later I’ll get like a scholarship or something to medical school. And then, when I graduate, I can take Lucy with me on rounds, and she can calm down all of my patients. I’ll totally eradicate heart disease, just by having my patients pet my dog. I’ll be famous! Like Marie Curie!
Only I won’t wear uranium around my neck and die of radiation poisoning like I read that Marie Curie did.
I don’t mention my new plan to Cooper. Somehow, I don’t think he’d fully appreciate its many facets. Although he’s a pretty open-minded guy. Arthur Cartwright, Cooper’s grandfather, angered by the way the rest of the family had treated him after he’d revealed he was gay, had left the majority of his vast fortune to AIDS research; the entirety of his world-class art collection to Sotheby’s to auction, with the provision that all proceeds from the sales go to God’s Love We Deliver; and almost all the property he’d owned to his alma mater, New York College…
…all except his beloved pink brownstone in the Village, which he’d willed to Cooper—along with a cool million bucks—because Cooper had been the only member of the Cartwright family to have said, “Whatever floats your boat, Gramps,” when he’d heard the news about his grandfather’s new boyfriend, Jorge.
Not that Jordan and the rest of the Cartwrights had been overly worried by Arthur’s cutting them off. There’d still been plenty of money left in the Cartwright family bank vault for everyone else.
Still, it hadn’t exactly made Cooper, already the family scapegoat for getting himself thrown out of multiple high schools and choosing college over a place in Easy Street—not to mention his tendency to date highly attractive heart surgeons or art gallery owners named Saundra or Yokiko—the most popular member of the Cartwright clan.
Which truthfully doesn’t seem to bother him. I’ve never met anyone who seems more content with his own company than Cooper Cartwright.
He doesn’t even look like the rest of his family. Dark-haired, whereas the rest of them are blond, Cooper does have the requisite Cartwright good looks and ice blue eyes.
Though his eyes are where any resemblance to his brother Jordan ends. Both are tall, with gangling, athletic builds.
But whereas Jordan’s muscles have been honed by a personal trainer several hours a day at his personal home gym, Coop’s are from playing aggressive rounds of one-on-one down at the public basketball courts on Sixth and West Third, and from—though he won’t admit this—high-speed on-foot pursuits through Grand Central on behalf of whatever client he’s currently employed by. I know the truth because, being the one who does his client billing, I see the receipts. There is no way someone can go from a cab—a six-dollar trip ending at 5:01—to a Metro North ticket booth—round-trip ticket to Stamford, departing at 5:07—without running.
Because of all this—the niceness, the eyes, the weekend-hoops thing…not to mention the jazz—of course I’ve fallen madly in love with Cooper.
But I know it’s completely futile. He treats me with the kind of friendly nonchalance you’d normally reserve for your kid brother’s girlfriend, which is what I am apparently destined to remain to him, since, compared to the women he dates, who are all waiflike, gorgeous, and professors of Renaissance literature or microphysicists, I’m like vanilla pudding, or something.
And who wants vanilla pudding when they can have crème brûlée?
I’m going to fall in love with someone else just as soon as I can. I swear. But in the meantime, is it so wrong that I enjoy his company?
Taking a long sip from his beer, Cooper studies the tops of the buildings around us…one of which happens to be Fischer Hall. You can see the twelfth to twentieth floors, including the president’s penthouse, from Arthur Cartwright’s backyard garden.
You can also see the vents to the elevator shaft.
“So,” Cooper says. “Was it bad?”
He doesn’t mean my encounter with Jordan. This is obvious by the way he nods his head in the direction of the college campus.
I’m not surprised he knows about the dead girl. He would have heard all the sirens and seen the crowds. For all I know, he could even have a police scanner tucked away somewhere.
“It wasn’t pretty,” I say, taking a sip of my beer while massaging Lucy’s pointed ears with my free hand. Lucy is a mutt I’d picked up from the ASPCA shortly after my mother took off. I’m sure Sarah would say I adopted Lucy as some sort of surrogate family member, since I’d been abandoned by all of mine.
But since I’d been touring all the time, I’d never been able to have a pet, and I just felt like the time had come to get one. Part collie and seemingly part fox, Lucy has a laughing face I’d been unable to resist—even though Jordan had wanted a pure breed, if possible a cocker spaniel. He hadn’t been too happy when, instead of Lady, I’d come home with the Tramp.
But that had been all right, because Lucy never liked Jordan anyway, and had promptly shown her disapproval of him by eating a pair of his suede pants.
Strangely, she doesn’t seem to have a problem with Cooper, a fact I attribute to Cooper’s never having thrown a copy of Us Weekly magazine at her for chewing on his Dave Matthews Band CDs. Cooper doesn’t even own any Dave Matthews Band CDs. He’s a Wynton Marsalis fan.
“Anybody know how it happened?” Cooper wants to know.
“No,” I say. “Or, if someone does, they aren’t exactly coming forward with the information.”
“Well.” He takes a swig of beer. “They’re just kids. Probably afraid they’ll get into trouble.”
“I know,” I say. “It’s just that…how could they have just left her there? I mean, she had to have been there for hours. And they just left her.”
“Who left her?”
“Whoever she was with.”
“How do you know she was with anybody?”
“Nobody goes elevator surfing alone. The whole point is that a bunch of kids climb on top of the elevator through the maintenance panel in the ceiling, and dare one another to jump off the roof of their car they’re riding on, onto the roof of a second car as it passes by. If there’s no one to dare you, there’s no point.”
It’s easy to explain things to Cooper, because he’s a very good listener. He never interrupts people, and always seems genuinely interested in what they have to say. This is another character trait that sets him apart from the rest of his family.
It’s also one that I suspect aids him in his line of work. You can learn a lot from letting other people talk, and just listening to what they have to say.
At least, it said this once in a magazine I read.
“The whole point is that kids dare each other to make bigger and braver leaps,” I say. “You would never elevator surf alone. So she had to be with someone. Unless—”
Cooper eyes me. “Unless what?”
“Well, unless she wasn’t elevator surfing at all,” I say, finally voicing something that’s been nagging at me all day. “I mean, girls don’t, generally. Elevator surf. At least, I’ve never heard of one, not at New York College. It’s a drunk-guy thing.”
“So.” Cooper leans forward in his lawn chair. “If she wasn’t elevator surfing, how did she fall to the bottom of the shaft? Do you think the elevator doors opened, but the car didn’t come, and she stepped out into the shaft without looking?”
“I don’t know. That just doesn’t happen, does it? The doors won’t open unless the car is there. And even if they did, who would be stupid enough not to look first?”
Which is when Cooper says, “Maybe someone pushed her.”
I blink at him. It’s quiet in the back of his brownstone—you can’t hear the traffic from Sixth Avenue, or the rattling of bottles from Waverly Place as homeless people go through our garbage. Still, I think I might not ha
ve heard him correctly.
“Pushed her?” I echo.
“That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it?” Cooper’s blue eyes reveal no emotion whatsoever. This is what makes him such an excellent PI. And why I continue to believe there might be hope for him and me romantically after all—because I’ve never seen anything in his eyes to lead me to believe otherwise. “Maybe she didn’t slip and fall. Maybe she got pushed.”
The thing is, that is EXACTLY what I’d been thinking.
But I’d also been thinking that this sounded…well, too nuts ever to mention out loud.
“Don’t try to deny it,” Cooper says. “I know that’s what you’re thinking. It’s written all over your face.”
It’s a relief to burst out with, “Girls don’t elevator surf, Coop. They just don’t. I mean, maybe in other cities, but not here, at New York College. And this girl—Elizabeth—she was preppie!”
It’s Cooper’s turn to blink. “Excuse me?”
“Preppie,” I say. “You know. Clean-cut. Preppie girls don’t elevator surf. And let’s say that they did. I mean, they just LEFT her there. Who would do that, to a friend?”
“Kids,” Cooper says, with a shrug.
“They aren’t kids,” I insist. “They’re eighteen years old.”
Cooper shrugs. “Eighteen’s still a kid in my book,” he says. “But let’s say you’re right, and she was too, um, preppie to be elevator surfing. Can you think of anyone who’d have a reason to want to push her down an elevator shaft…providing they could figure out how to do this in the first place?”
“The only thing in her file,” I say, “is that her mom called and asked her to restrict her guest sign-in privileges to girls only.”
“Why?” Cooper wants to know. “She got an abusive ex-boyfriend the mom wanted PNG’d?”
A PNG, also known as a persona non grata memo, is issued to the dorm security guards whenever a resident—or her parents, or a staff member—requests that a certain individual be denied entry to the building. Since you have to show a student or staff ID, driver’s license, or passport to be let into the hall, the guards can easily deny entry to anyone on the PNG list. Once, my first week, the student workers issued a fake PNG against me. As a joke, they said.
I bet they never did that to Justine.
Also, I can’t believe Cooper has been paying such close attention to my ramblings about my crazy job at Fischer Hall that he even remembers what a PNG is.
“No,” I say, flushing a little. “No boyfriend mentioned.”
“Doesn’t mean there isn’t one. The kids have to sign guests in, right?” Cooper asks. “Did anyone check to see if Elizabeth had a boyfriend—maybe one Mom doesn’t know about—over last night?”
I shake my head, not taking my gaze off the back of Fischer Hall, which is glowing red in the rays from the setting sun.
“She had a roommate,” I explain. “She’s not going to be having some guy spend the night with a roommate right there in the bed across the room.”
“Because preppie girls don’t do things like that?”
I squirm a little uncomfortably. “Well…they don’t.”
Cooper shrugs. “Roommate could’ve stayed the night with someone else.”
I hadn’t thought of this. “I’ll check the sign-in logs,” I say. “It can’t hurt.”
“You mean,” Cooper says, “you’ll tell the police to check the sign-in logs.”
“Police?” I am startled. “You think the police are going to get involved?”
“Probably,” is Cooper’s mild reply. “If they harbor the same ‘preppie girls don’t do that’ suspicions you seem to.”
I make a face at him just as the doorbell rings and we hear Jordan bellow, “Heather! Come on, Heather! Open up!”
Cooper doesn’t even turn his head in the direction of the front door.
“His devotion to you is touching,” Cooper remarks.
“It’s got nothing to do with me,” I explain. “He’s just trying to annoy you. You know, get you to throw me out. He won’t be happy until I’m living in a cardboard box on the median of Houston Street.”
“Sounds like it’s over between you two, all right,” Cooper says, wryly.
“It’s not that. He doesn’t still like me. He just wants to punish me for leaving him.”
“Or,” Cooper says, “for having the guts to do your own thing. Which is something he’ll never have.”
“Good point.”
Cooper’s a man of few words, but the words he does use are always the exactly right ones. When he heard about my walking in on Jordan and Tania, he called my cell and told me that if I was looking for a new place to live, the top-floor apartment of his brownstone—where his grandfather’s houseboy had lived—was available. When I explained how broke I was—thanks to Mom—Cooper said I could earn my keep by doing his client billing and entering the piles of receipts he had lying around into Quicken, so he didn’t have to pay his accountant $175 an hour to do it.
Simple as that, I left the Park Avenue penthouse Jordan and I had been sharing, and moved into Cooper’s place. After only a single night there, it was as if Lucy and I had never lived anywhere else.
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 caf, 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?
