Before I have a chance to say anything in defense of my kind, however, one of the maintenance workers comes rushing in.
“Haythar,” Julio cries, wringing his hands. He’s a little guy, in a brown uniform, who without being asked to, daily cleans the bronze statue of Pan in the lobby with a toothbrush.
“Haythar, that boy is doing it again.”
I blink at him. “You mean Gavin?”
“Sí.”
I glance over at Rachel. She’s gushing into the phone, “Oh, President Allington, please don’t worry about me. It’s the students I feel for—”
I sigh resignedly, push back my chair, and stand up. I’m just going to have to face that fact that where Cooper is concerned, I’m always going to look like the world’s biggest spaz.
And there’s nothing I can do about it.
“I’ll take care of it,” I say.
Julio glances at Cooper, and, still wringing his hands, asks nervously, “You want I should come with you, Haythar?”
“What is this?” Cooper looks suspicious. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing,” I say to him. “Thanks for dropping by. I have to go now.”
“Go where?” Cooper wants to know.
“I just have to deal with this one thing. I’ll see you later.”
Then I hurry out of the office and head for the service elevator, which is reserved for use of the maintenance staff only, and has one of those metal gates inside the doors to keep students out…
Only I know which lever to push to throw the gate back. Which I push, then turn to say, “Ready when you are” to Julio—
Only it isn’t Julio who’s followed me. It’s Cooper.
“Heather,” he says, looking annoyed. “What’s this all about?”
“Where’s Julio?” I squeak.
“I don’t know,” Cooper says. “Back there, I guess. Where are you going?”
From inside the elevator shaft, I can hear whooping. Why me? Why, God, why?
There’s nothing I can do about it, though. I mean, it’s my job. And it will mean a free medical degree, eventually, if I can stick it out.
“Can you work a service elevator?” I ask Cooper.
He looks even more annoyed. “I think I can figure it out.”
More whooping from inside the shaft.
“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 siderails 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, diehard 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.