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 room to look for a clean pair of jeans.
So life’s not too 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 of Us 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.
“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.