“Okay,” I say. “Let’s go then.”
Cooper, looking curious as well as annoyed now, follows me inside, ducking so as not to hit his head on the low jamb, and I pull the grate shut and yank back the power lever. As the elevator lurches upward with a groan, I put a foot on the side rails and, with a heave, grab the sides of the wide opening in the elevator’s roof where a ceiling panel has been removed. Through it, I can see the cables and bare brick walls of the elevator shaft, and high overhead, patches of bright light where the sun peeks in through the fire safety skylights.
Cooper’s curiosity quickly fades, so that all that’s left is annoyance.
“What,” he asks, “do you think you’re doing?”
“Don’t worry,” I say. “I’m okay. I’ve done this before.” My head and shoulders are already through the hole in the elevator’s ceiling, and with another heave, I wiggle my hips through it, too.
Then I have to rest. Because that’s a lot of upper body lifting for a girl like me.
“This is what you do all day?” Cooper, down below me, demands. “Where does it say in your job description that you are responsible for chasing after elevator surfers?”
“It doesn’t say it anywhere,” I reply, looking down at him in some surprise through the opening between my knees. The dark walls of the elevator shaft slip past me like water as we rise. “But somebody’s got to do it.” And if I don’t, how am I ever going to pass my six months’ probation? “What floor are we on?”
Cooper glances through the grate, at the painted numbers going by on the back of each set of elevator doors.
“Nine,” he says. “You know, one slip, and you could end up like those dead girls, Heather.”
“I know,” I say. “That’s why I have to stop them. Somebody might get hurt. Somebody else, I mean.”
Cooper says something under his breath that sounds like a curse word… which is surprising, because he so rarely swears.
One floor later, two walls of the shaft open up, so that I can see into the shafts of the building’s other elevators. One of the elevators is waiting at ten, and by craning my neck, I can see the other about five floors overhead.
The whooping is getting louder.
Right then, Elevator 2 starts to descend, and I see, perched on the cab’s roof, amid the cables and empty bottles of Colt.45, Gavin McGoren, junior, film major, die hard Matrix fan, and inveterate elevator surfer.
“Gavin!” I yell, as Elevator 2 slides past me. Unlike me, he’s standing upright, preparing to leap onto the roof of Elevator 1 as it goes by. “Get down from there right now!”
Gavin throws me a startled glance, then groans when he recognizes me between the cables. I see several flailing arms and legs as the friends he’s surfing with dive back down through the maintenance panel and into the elevator car, to save themselves from being ID’d by me.
“Aw, shit,” Gavin says, because he hadn’t been quick enough to escape, like his friends. “Busted!”
“You are so busted you’re gonna be sleeping in the park tonight,” I assure him, even though no one’s ever gotten thrown out of the hall for elevator surfing… at least until now. Who knew, in light of recent events, if the board of trustees would get a backbone? You have to do something really bad—like hurl a meat cleaver at your RA, as a kid had done last year, according to a file I’d found—to be asked to leave the residence halls.
And even then, the kid was allowed back the following fall, after proving he’d spent the summer in counseling.
“Goddammit!” Gavin screams into the shaft, but I don’t worry. That’s just Gavin.
“Do you think this is funny?” I ask him. “You know two girls died doing this in the past two weeks. But you just woke up this morning and thought you’d go for a joyride anyway?”
“They was amateurs,” Gavin says. “You know I got the creds, Heather.”
“I know you’re a jackass,” I reply. “And stop talking like you come from Bed-Stuy, everyone knows you grew up in Nantucket. Now get down. And if you aren’t in Rachel’s office by the time I’m downstairs, I’m having the locks changed on your door and confiscating all your stuff.”
“Shit!” Gavin disappears, slithering through the elevator cab’s roof and scraping the ceiling panel back into place behind him.
Elevator 2 begins its long descent to the lobby, and I sit for a minute, enjoying the darkness and the lack of noise. I really like the elevator shafts. They are the most peaceful places in the whole dorm—I mean, residence hall.
When people aren’t falling down them, anyway.
When I let myself down—and no judge would give me a ten for my dismount—Cooper is standing in one corner of the car, his arms folded across his broad chest, his features twisted into a scowl.
“What was that?” he asks, as I reach for the control lever and start bringing us back down to the main floor.
“That was just Gavin,” I say. “He does that all the time.”
“Don’t give me that.” Cooper sounds genuinely angry. “You did that on purpose. To show me what areal elevator surfer is like, and how much the two dead girls don’t fit the bill.”
I glare at him. “Oh, right,” I say. “You think I prearranged that whole thing with Gavin? You think I knew in advance you were going to come over to shove my ex’s engagement announcement in my face, and I called Gavin and was like, ‘Hey, why don’t you take a spin on Elevator Two and I’ll come up and bust you to prove to my friend Cooper the difference between real elevator surfers and wannabes’?”
Cooper looks slightly taken aback… but not for the reason I think.
“I didn’t come over to shove it in your face,” he says. “I wanted to make sure you saw it before some reporter from the Star sprang it on you.”
Realizing I’d maybe been a little harsh, I say, “Oh yeah. You said that.”
“Yeah,” Cooper says. “I did. So. Do you do that a lot? Climb on top of elevator cars?”
“I wasn’t climbing. I was sitting,” I say. “And I only do it when someone reports hearing someone in the shafts. Which is another reason it’s so weird about Elizabeth and Roberta. No one reported hearing them. Well, until Roberta fell—”
“And you’re the one who has to go after them?” Cooper asks. “If someone hears them?”
“Well, we can’t ask the RAs to do it. They’re students. And it isn’t in the maintenance workers’ union contract.”
“And it’s in yours?”
“I’m nonunion,” I remind him. I can’t help wondering what he’s getting at. I mean, is he actually worried about me? And if so, is it just as a friend? Or as something more? Is he going to throw on the brake and stop the elevator and snatch me into his arms and whisper raggedly that he loves me and that the thought of losing me makes his blood run cold?
“Heather, you could seriously injure, if not kill, yourself doing something that stupid,” he says, making it pretty obvious that the snatching me into his arms thing isn’t going to happen. “How could you—” Then his blue eyes crinkle into slits as he narrows them at me. “Wait a minute. You like it.”
I blink at him. “What?” Yeah, that’s me. Miss Ready with a Comeback.
“You do.” He shakes his head, looking stunned. “You actually enjoyed that just now, didn’t you?”
I shrug, not sure what he’s talking about. “It’s more fun than doing payroll,” I say.
“You like it,” he goes on, as if I hadn’t even said anything, “because you miss the thrill of standing up in front of thousands of kids and singing your guts out.”
I stare at him for a second or two. Then I burst out laughing.
“Oh my God,” I manage to get out, between guffaws. “Are you serious with this?”
Except that I can tell by his expression that he is.
“Laugh all you want,” he says. “You hated singing the schlock the label gave you to sing, but you got a kick out of performing. Don’t try to deny it. It gave you a thrill.” His blue eyes crackle at me. “That’s what all this is about, isn’t it? Trolling for murderers and chasing elevator surfers. You miss the excitement.”
I stop laughing and feel color heating up my face again. I don’t know what he’s talking about.
Well, okay, maybe I did. It’s true I’m not one of those people who get nervous about performing in front of a crowd. Ask me to make small talk with thirty people at a cocktail party, and you might as well ask me to define the Pythagorean theorem. But give me a song set and stick me in front of a microphone? No problem. In fact…
Well, I sort of enjoy it. A lot.
