You wouldn’t think it would turn out to be so hard to find someone to run a seven-hundred-bed residence hall in exchange for thirty grand a year and free housing in Greenwich Village, which has some of the highest rents in the country.
But when there’ve been several murders in that residence hall over the course of a mere nine months, garnering that building the nickname Death Dorm, you’d be surprised how few candidates express a willingness to work there.
It’s a shame, because Fischer Hall is actually a kick-ass building. It’s one of the biggest on Washington Square Park, and still maintains a lot of its mid-nineteenth-century grandeur, with its marble floors and fire-placed lounges. I mean, aside from the fact that most of the rooms have been carved up into double-triples (two bedrooms adjoined by a bathroom, with three residents in each room, making for a total of six students sharing one toilet), and the other day I found human waste (of the scatological variety) in one of the ornately carved mahogany phone booths in the lobby.
I can’t imagine why every higher ed grad in the country isn’t clamoring for the position.
Anyway, in the meantime, we’re saddled with Owen, who’s totally nice and all, but super old school. Like, he wears a suit to work every day. In a place where people poop in phone booths. Go figure.
And he’s way strict about following college guidelines for every little thing. Like, he actually said something to me when we ran out of the paper for the photocopier, and I sent our graduate assistant, Sarah, down the hall to borrow some from the dining hall office. Owen was all “Heather, I do hope you don’t make a habit of borrowing supplies from other offices. Part of your job is to make sure our office is at all times fully stocked with the items we need.”
Um. Okay.
Plus, Owen’s way involved in the current campus brouhaha involving the graduate student workers unionizing in order to protest cuts in their pay and medical benefits packages. He’s supposed to be acting liaison between the students and the president’s office—which basically means that half the time he’s in his office in the residence hall, he’s arguing over school policy with angry graduate students who don’t even live here.
So you can see why I’m extra careful to keep my relationship with Tad on the down low, with Owen around.
Which is a shame, because Tad’s really helped me to become a better employee. Not only do I make fewer math mistakes when I’m calculating payroll these days, but I’m always a few minutes early to work on the mornings after I’ve spent the night at Tad’s, because Tad’s college-subsidized studio apartment is a block closer to Fischer Hall than Cooper’s brownstone. My best friend Patty wants to know how I managed to find and hook up with the one man who lives closer to my place of employment than I do, and just how large a part this played in my decision to pursue him romantically.
My best friend Patty is surprisingly cynical, for a happily married young mother.
The morning of my first training session—and possible prelude to a marriage proposal—with Tad, I actually managed to get to the hall director’s office before Owen, which is quite a feat. I’d been starting to wonder if maybe my new interim boss lives in the office, since he never seems to leave it.
I’m not the only one who’s surprised to find the office door still closed and locked that morning. A resident, whom I recognize as spring semester transfer student Jamie Price, blond, broad-shouldered, and blue-eyed, scrambles up from the institutional-style couch that sits outside my office, looking anxious.
“Hi?” Jamie’s one of those girls who ends almost every single statement with a question mark, even when it isn’t a question. “I had an appointment? With Dr. Veatch? For eight-thirty? But he isn’t here? I knocked?”
“He’s probably just running a little late,” I say, taking my keys out from the pocket of my backpack. I always carry a backpack, and not a purse, because backpacks are roomy enough to fit all my makeup, hairstyling equipment, spare changes of underwear, etcetera, which has never come in handier more than now that I’m splitting my time between my apartment and my remedial math assistant professor’s place. I just need to remember to buy a travel hair dryer. I’ve kind of got the living-on-the-go thing down. Well, I should, considering how many years I spent on the road, living out of a suitcase with my mom, doing the teen-pop-star-singing-sensation mall-tour thing (no stage was too small for Heather Wells!), slowly moving my way up to bigger venues, like state fairs, until I reached that pinnacle of success, opening for the boy band Easy Street, where I met the then love of my life, Jordan Cartwright, whose father signed me to the mega record deal that made Heather Wells a household name…
… for about five minutes, before I decided I wanted to have my own voice and write my own songs, instead of singing the sugary crap the studio handed to me, and Jordan’s dad finally gave me the boot…
… and Mom took off to Argentina with my manager, and all my money.
Although these are not the sort of things upon which I like to dwell before nine in the morning. Or ever, really.
“I’m sure he’ll be here in a minute,” I tell Jamie.
Unlike whoever gets hired to replace him, Owen doesn’t live in the building. The Fischer Hall director’s apartment has sat empty since the old director, Tom, moved out of it last month, having been transferred into a far swankier apartment in the frat building, Waverly Hall, across the park, where he was currently happily nesting with his new live-in boyfriend, the basketball coach. Owen has a college-subsidized apartment just like Tad, but in a much nicer building on the north side of Washington Square Park.