I smile back at him, then continue my slog to my office. I shouldn’t really call it a slog, though. I actually have a very short commute, which is good, since I have a problem getting up on time in the morning. If I lived in Park Slope or the Upper West Side or something, and had to take the subway to work every day, forget it (although, if I lived in Park Slope or the UWS, I’d be required by law to have a child, so it’s just as well). I guess I’m really lucky, in a way. I mean, sure, I can barely afford a café mocha, and thanks to all of the holiday parties I attended, I can’t fit into my size 12 stretch cords unless I’m wearing a pair of Spanx.
And okay, my ex is about to marry one ofPeople magazine’s 50 Most Beautiful People, and I don’t even own my own car, let alone my own home.
But at least I get to live rent-free in a kick-ass apartment on the top floor of a brownstone two blocks from where I work in the coolest city in the entire world.
And okay, I only took my job, as the assistant director of a New York College dormitory, in order to get tuition remission benefits and actually attain the BA I lied about already having on my résumé.
And yeah, all right, so I’m having a little trouble getting into the School of Arts and Sciences due to my SAT score, which was so low that the dean won’t admit me until I take—and pass—a remedial math course, despite my explaining to her that, in lieu of paying rent, I do all the billing for a very cute private detective, and have never once made an accounting error, that I know of.
But it is useless to expect a coldhearted bureaucracy—even the one you work for—to treat you as an individual.
So here I am, at nearly twenty-nine, about to learn the FOIL method for the first time (and let me tell you, I’m having a pretty hard time imagining a situation in which I might actually have to employ it).
And yeah, I write songs until late into the night, even though I can’t, for the life of me, find the guts to actually sing them in front of anyone.
But still. My commute only takes two minutes, and I get to see my boss/landlord, on whom I have a major crush, wearing nothing but a towel from time to time as he darts from the bathroom to the laundry
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room to look for a clean pair of jeans.
So life’s nottoo bad. In spite of Barista Boy.
Still, living super-close to my place of work has its drawbacks, too. For instance, people seem to have no compunction about calling me at home about inconsequential matters, like backed-up toilets or noise complaints. Like just because I live two blocks away, I should be able to come over at any hour to rectify matters my boss, the live-in building director, is supposed to handle.
But all in all, I like my job. I even like my new boss, Tom Snelling.
Which is why when I walk into Fischer Hall that arctic morning and find that Tom isn’t there yet, I’m kinda bummed—and not just because that means there’s no one to appreciate the fact that I’d made it in to the office before nine-thirty. No one except Pete, the security guard, who’s on the phone, trying to get through to one of his many children’s principals to find out about a detention one of them has been assigned for.
And I guess there’s the work-study student manning the reception desk. But she doesn’t even look up as I go by, she’s so engrossed in a copy ofUs Weekly she’s stolen from the mail-forwarding bin (Jessica Simpson’s on the cover. Again. She and Tania Trace are neck and neck for Tabloid Skank of the Year).
It’s not until I turn the corner and pass the elevators that I see the line of undergrads outside the hall director’s office. And I remember, belatedly, that the first day of spring semester is also the first day a lot of kids come back from Winter Break—the ones who didn’t stay in the dorm (I mean, residence hall) to party until classes started again today, the day after Martin Luther King Day.
And when Cheryl Haebig—a New York College sophomore desperate for a room change because she’s a bubbly cheerleader and her current roommate is a Goth who despises school spirit in all its guises, plus has a pet boa constrictor—leaps up from the institutional blue couch outside my office door and cries, “Heather!” I know I’m in for a morning of headaches.
Good thing I have my grande café mocha to keep me going.
The other students—each and every one of whom I recognize, since they’ve been in the office before due to roommate conflicts—scramble up from the cold marble floor on which they’ve been waiting, the couch being only a two-seater. I know what they’ve been waiting for. I know what they want.
And it’s not going to be pretty.
“Look, you guys,” I say, wrestling my office keys out of my coat pocket. “I told you. No room changes until all the transfer students are moved in. Then we’ll see what’s left.”
“That’s not fair,” exclaims a skinny guy with large plastic disks in his earlobes. “Why should some stupid transfer student get dibs on all the open spaces? We got here first.”
“I’m sorry,” I say. I really am, because if I could just move them all, I wouldn’t have to listen to their whining anymore. “But you’re going to have to wait until they’ve all checked in. Then, if there are any spaces left, we can move you guys into them. If you can just hang on until next Monday, when we know who’s checked in and who hasn’t shown up—”
I am interrupted by general moaning. “By next Monday I’ll be dead,” one resident assures another.
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“Or my roommate will,” his friend says. “Because I’ll have killed him by then.”
“No killing your roommate,” I say, having gotten the office door open and flicked on the lights. “Or yourself. Come on, guys. It’s just another week.”
Most of them go away, grumbling. Only Cheryl continues to hang around, looking excited as she follows me into my office. I see that she has a mousy-looking girl in tow.
“Heather,” she says again. “Hi. Listen, remember when you said if I found someone who would swap spaces with me, I could move? Well, I found someone. This is my friend Lindsay’s roommate, Ann, and she said she’d swap with me.”
I’ve peeled off my coat and hung it on a nearby hook. Now I sink into my desk chair and look at Ann, who appears to have a cold, from the way she’s sniffling into a wadded-up Kleenex. I hand her the box I keep handy in case of Diet Coke spills.
“You want to trade spaces with Cheryl, Ann?” I ask her, just to make sure. I can’t imagine why anyone would want to live with a person who painted the walls of her side of the room black.
Then again, it was probably annoying to Cheryl’s roommate that Cheryl’s side of the room was decorated with so many pansies, the New York College mascot.
“I guess,” Ann says, looking wan.
“She does,” Cheryl assures me brightly. “Don’t you, Ann?”
Ann shrugs. “I guess,” she says again.
I begin to sense Ann might have been coerced into agreeing to this room change.
“Ann,” I say. “Have youmet Cheryl’s roommate, Karly? You know she, er…likes the color black?”
“Oh,” Ann says. “Yeah. The Goth thing. I know. It’s okay.”
“And…” I hesitate to bring it up, because, ew. “The snake?”
“Whatever. I mean”—she looks at Cheryl—“no offense, or anything. But I’d rather live with a snake than a cheerleader.”
Cheryl, far from being offended, beams at me.
“See?” she says. “So can we do the paperwork for our swap now? Because my dad is here to help me move, and he wants to get back to New Jersey before this big blizzard hits.”
I pull out the forms, finding myself shrugging, just like Ann—it’s sort of catching.
“Okay,” I say, and hand them the papers they have to fill out to make the switch. When the girls—Cheryl giddy with excitement, Ann decidedly more calm—finish filling out their forms and leave, I look over last night’s briefing forms. Fischer Hall is staffed round-the-clock by a security guard, student front desk receptionists, and resident assistants, students who, in exchange for free room and board, act
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as sort of house mothers on each of the hall’s twenty floors. They all have to fill out reports at the end of their shifts, and my job is to read and follow up on these briefings. This always makes for an interesting morning.
The reports range from the ludicrous to the banal. Last night, for instance, six forty-ounce bottles of beer were hurled from an upper-story window onto the roof of a cab passing on the street below. Ten cops from the Sixth Precinct arrived and ran up and down the stairs a few times, unsuccessfully trying to figure out who the pitcher had been.
On the other end of the spectrum, the front desk apparently lost someone’s Columbia House CD of the Month, causing much consternation. One of the RAs somberly reports that a resident slammed her door several times, crying, “I hate it here.” The RA wishes to refer the student to Counseling Services.
Another report states that a small riot occurred when a cafeteria worker chastised a student for attempting to make an English muffin pizza in the toaster oven.
When my phone jangles, I pounce on it, grateful for something to do. I do love my job—really. But I have to admit it doesn’t tax my intellect overly much.
“Fischer Hall, this is Heather, how may I help you?” My last boss, Rachel, had been very strict about how I answered the phone. Even though Rachel’s not around anymore, old habits die hard.
“Heather?” I can hear an ambulance in the background. “Heather, it’s Tom.”
“Oh, hi, Tom.” I glance at the clock. Nine-twenty. Yes! I was in when he’d called! If not on time, then at least before ten! “Where are you?”
“St. Vincent’s.” Tom sounds exhausted. Being the residence hall director of a New York College dormitory is a very demanding job. You have to look out for about seven hundred undergraduates, most of whom, with the exception of summer camp or maybe a stint in boarding school, have never been away from home for an extended period of time before in their lives—let alone have ever shared a bathroom with another human being. Residents come to Tom with all of their problems—roommate conflicts, academic issues, financial concerns, sexual identity crises—you name it, Tom has heard it.
And if a resident gets hurt or sick, it’s the residence hall director’s job to make sure he or she is okay.
Needless to say, Tom spends a lot of time in emergency rooms, particularly on weekends, which is when most of the underage drinking goes on. And he does all this—is on duty twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and forty-three days a year (all New York College administrators get twenty-two vacation days)—for not much more than I make, plus free room and board.
Hey, is it any wonder my last boss only lasted a few months?
Tom seems pretty stable, though. I mean, as stable as a six-foot-three, two-hundred-pound former Texas A&M linebacker whose favorite movie isLittle Women and who moved to New York City so he could finally come out of the closet can be.
“Look, Heather,” Tom says tiredly. “I’m gonna be stuck here for a few more hours at least. We had a twenty-first birthday last night.”
“Uh-oh.” Twenty-first birthday celebrations are theworst . Inevitably, the hapless birthday boy or girl is urged to slam back twenty-one shots by his or her party guests. Since the human body cannot process
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that much alcohol in such a short period of time, most of the time the resident ends up celebrating his or her big day in one of our local emergency rooms. Nice, huh?
“Yeah,” Tom says. “I hate to ask, but would you mind going through my appointment books and rescheduling all my judicial hearings this morning? I don’t know if they’re gonna admit this kid or not, and he won’t let us call his parents—”
“No problem,” I say. “How long you been there?”
Tom exhales gustily. “He only got up to seven before he passed out. So since midnight, or thereabouts.
I’ve lost all track of time.”
“I’ll come spell you if you want.” When a student is in the emergency room but hasn’t been admitted, it’s policy that a New York College representative stay with him or her at all times. You can’t even go home to take a lousy shower unless there’s someone there to take your place. New York College does not leave its students alone in the ER. Even though the students themselves will frequently check out without even bothering to tell you, so you’re sitting there watching Spanish soaps for an hour before you find out the kid isn’t even there anymore. “Then at least you can get some breakfast.”
“You know, Heather,” Tom says, “I think I’ll take you up on that offer, if you really don’t mind.”
I say I don’t and am taking money out of petty cash for cab fare before I’ve even hung up. I love petty cash. It’s like having your own bank, right in the office. Unfortunately, Justine, the girl who’d had my position before me, had felt the same way, and had spent all of Fischer Hall’s petty cash on ceramic heaters for her friends and family. The Budget Office still scrutinizes our petty cash vouchers with an eagle eye every time I take them over for reimbursement, even though each and every one of them is completely legit.
And I still haven’t figured out what a ceramic heater is.
I finish rescheduling all of Tom’s appointments, then polish off my café mocha in a gulp.If you were thinner. You know what, Barista Boy? With those long nails you won’t trim because you’re too poor to afford a new guitar pick, you look like a girl. Yeah, that’s right. A girl. How do you likethat , Barista Boy?
Quick stop at the cafeteria to grab a bagel to eat on the way to the hospital, and I’ll be ready to go. I mean, café mochas are all well and good, but they don’t supply lasting energy…not like a bagel does.
Particularly a bagel smothered in cream cheese (dairy) over which several layers of bacon (protein) have been added.
I’ve grabbed my coat and am getting up to get my bagel when I notice Magda, my best work bud and the cafeteria’s head cashier, standing in my office doorway, looking very unlike her usual self.