I plaster a smile on my face and go, “Hi, I’m Heather. This is—”
“Hi,” the roommate interrupts me to say, her eyes growing wide as she notices Cooper for the first time.
Well, and why not? She’s a healthy red-blooded American girl, after all. And Cooper does bear more than a slight re semblance to one of America’s most popular male heartthrobs.
“Cooper Cartwright,” Cooper says, flashing the roommate a grin that, if I hadn’t known better, I’d have sworn he’d practiced in the mirror and reserved only for extreme cases like this one.
Except Cooper is not a practicing-smiles-in-the-mirror type of guy.
“Marnie Villa Delgado,” the roommate says. Marnie’s a big girl like me, only larger in the chest than in the tush, with a lot of very dark, very curly long hair. I can tell she’s sizing me up, the way some women will, wondering if I’m “with” Cooper, or if he’s fair game.
“We were wondering, Marnie, if we could have a word or two with you about your former roommate, Elizabeth,” Cooper says, revealing so many teeth with his grin, he nearly blinds me.
But not Marnie, since, apparently deciding Cooper and I are not an item (how could she tell? Really? How come other girls—like Marnie and Rachel and Sarah—know how to do this, but I don’t?), she says, into the phone, “I gotta go,” and hangs up.
Then, her gaze fastened hypnotically on Cooper, she says, “Come on in.”
I slip past her, Cooper following me. Marnie, I see at once, has done a pretty fast job of redecorating after Elizabeth’s death. The twin beds have been shoved together to form one king-sized bed, covered by a giant tiger- striped bedspread. The two chests of drawers have been stacked one on top of the other so Marnie now has eight drawers all to herself, instead of four, and Elizabeth’s desk is currently being employed as an entertainment unit, with a TV, DVD player, and CD player all within arm’s reach of the bed.
“I already talked to the police about her.” Marnie flicks ashes onto the tiger-striped throw rug beneath her bare feet and turns her attention momentarily from Cooper to me. “Beth, I mean. Hey. Wait a minute. Don’t I know you? Aren’t you an actress or something?”
“Me? No,” I answer truthfully.
“But you’re in the entertainment industry.” Marnie’s tone is confident. “Hey, are you guys making a movie of Beth’s life?”
Before Cooper can utter a sound, I ask, “Why? You think, uh, Beth’s life has cinematic potential?”
Marnie’s trying to play it cool, but I hear her cough as she takes a drag from her cigarette. She’s definitely a for-dramatic-effect-only smoker.
“Oh yeah. I mean, I can see the angle you’d want to work from. Small-town girl comes to the big city, can’t take it, gets herself killed on a stupid dare. Can I play myself? I totally have the experience… ”
Cooper blows our cover, though, by going, “We’re not with the entertainment industry. Heather’s the assistant director of this building, and I’m a friend of hers.”
“But I thought—” Marnie is really staring at me now, trying to remember where she’s seen me before. “I thought you were an actress. I’ve seen you somewhere before—”
“At check-in, I’m sure,” I say hastily.
“Your roommate,” Cooper says, looking up from a survey he seems to be making of the small kitchen area, in which Marnie has stowed a microwave, hot plate, food processor, coffee maker, and one of those scales people on diets use to measure the weight of their chicken breasts. “Where was she from?”
“Well,” Marnie says. “Mystic. You know, Connecticut.”
Cooper is opening cupboards now, but Marnie is so confused, she doesn’t even protest.
“Hey, I know. You were on Saved by the Bell, weren’t you?” she asks me.
“No,” I say. “You said Eliz—I mean, Beth—hated it here?”
“Well, no, not really,” Marnie says. “Beth just didn’t fit in, you know? I mean, she wanted to be a nurse.”
Cooper looks at her. I can tell he doesn’t hang around New York College students much, because he asks her, “What’s wrong with nurses?”
“Why would anybody come to New York College to study to be a nurse?” Marnie’s tone is scornful. “Why pay all that money to study here when you can go some place, you know,cheap to study to be a nurse?”
“What’s your major?” Cooper asks.
“Me?” Marnie looks as if she wants to say the word Duh, but doesn’t want to be rude. To Cooper. Instead, she grounds out her cigarette in an ashtray shaped like a human hand and says, “Acting.” Then she sits down on her new king-sized bed and stares at me. “I know I’ve seen you somewhere before.”
I pick up the hand ashtray to distract her—both from trying to place me and from noticing what Cooper is doing, which is some major snoopage.
“Is this yours or Elizabeth’s?” I ask her, even though I already know the answer.
“Mine,” Marnie says. “Of course. They took all of Beth’s stuff away. Besides, Beth didn’t smoke. Beth didn’t do anything.”
“What do you mean, she didn’t do anything?”
“What I said. She didn’t do anything. She didn’t go out. She didn’t have friends over. And her mother—what a trip! You hear what she did at the memorial service? The mother?”
Cooper is scouting out the bathroom. His voice, as he calls out from there, is muffled.
“What did she do?” he asks.
Marnie starts fishing around in this black leather backpack on the bed.
“Spent the whole thing saying she was going to sue New York College for not making the elevators more surf proof. And what are you doing in my bathroom?”
“I understand Elizabeth’s mother wanted her daughter’s guest privileges to extend only to females,” I say, ignoring her question about Cooper’s presence in her bathroom.
“Beth never said anything to me about that.” Marnie finds her cigarette pack. It is, thankfully, empty. She tosses it on the floor and looks annoyed. “But I wouldn’t be surprised. That girl was like from another century, practically. I don’t think Beth’d ever even kissed a guy until a week or two before she died.”
Cooper appears in the bathroom doorway. He looks way too big to fit through it, but he manages, somehow.
“Who?” I ask, before he has the chance to butt in. “What guy?”
“I don’t know.” Marnie shrugs, bereft without her cigarettes. They made nice props, since she was playing the grieving roommate, and all.
“There was this guy she was going on about, right before she… you know.” Marnie makes a whistling sound and points at the floor. “Anyway, they’d just met. But when she talked about him, her whole face kinda… I don’t know how to explain it.”
“Did you ever see this guy?” I ask. “Do you know his name? Did he go to the memorial service? Was he the one who talked Elizabeth into elevator surfing?”
Marnie balks. “Jesus, you ask a lot of questions!”
Cooper comes to the rescue. As always.
“Marnie, this is really important. Do you have any idea who this guy was?”
For me, she balks. For Cooper, she is more than willing to try.
“Let’s see.” Marnie screws up her face. She isn’t pretty, but she has an interesting face. Maybe good for character roles. The chubby best friend.
Why is the best friend always chubby? Why isn’t the heroine ever chubby? Or, you know, not chubby, but a size 12? Or maybe even a 14? Why does the heroine always wear a size 2?
“Yeah, she said his name was like Mark, or something,” Marnie says, breaking in on my thoughts on sizeism in the entertainment industry. “But I never saw him. I mean, they started going out just a week or so before she died. He took her to the movies. Some foreign film at the Angelika. That’s why I thought it was so strange—”
“What?” I shake my head. “That what was so strange?”
“Well, I mean, that a guy who liked, you know,foreign films would be into elevator surfing. That’s so… juvenile. The freshmen guys are into it. You know, the ones with the baggy pants, who look about twelve years old? But this guy was older. You know. Sophisticated. According to Beth. So what was he doing, encouraging her to jump around on top of an elevator?”
