Jamie is slumped behind the front desk, still in her pajamas. She’s thumbing sleepily through leftover magazines since the post office will allow us to forward only first-class mail.
“Hey,” Jamie says in surprise when she looks up and sees me. “What are you doing here?”
“Don’t even ask,” I say. “How did things go last night after I left?”
Jamie shrugs. “Not bad, I guess. Wynona could probably tell you more.”
I glance questioningly at Wynona, but she only shakes her head and says, “Mmm-mmm-mmm,” over her coffee, her signal that she’s not ready to speak about it. I turn back to Jamie.
“Four service requests and one incident report,” Jamie says, pulling the administrative forms from the residence hall director’s in-box. “Looks like there was a leaky sink in 1718. The engineer on duty fixed it. The rest of the stuff was kids asking to get the guards taken off their windows so they could open them wider than two inches to take a picture of the fountain in the park. Like that will happen. Oh,” she adds—and it’s an “Oh” that’s accompanied by a face crinkled with concern—“one thing . . .”
I do not like the sound of that.
“What,” I say flatly.
“Well, it looks like a group of girls from one of the suites ditched their chaperone after she fell asleep and snuck downstairs—”
“What?” I demand, taking the incident report from her and scanning it. As I do, my heart begins to thump. The form, which is in triplicate, has been filled out in blue ink by Rajiv—he was the resident assistant who’d been alerted to the situation—is extremely detailed, and goes on for some pages. The girls are named. The first name I see is Cassidy Upton.
“Why?” I ask. “Where did they think they were going to go? Didn’t we relieve them of their IDs last night?” This was a plan Lisa and I had hatched. In order to keep the girls from sneaking out of the building at night, we were requiring them to surrender their New York College–issued photo IDs to the resident assistant on duty every evening. That way, if they did sneak out, they’d have to notify the RA in order to get back into the building.
“Yeah,” Jamie says. “Well, it didn’t matter, because the girls didn’t leave the building. They ran into some of the basketball players in the lobby—”
I drop my head onto the desk with a groan. “Don’t even tell me.”
“I’m afraid so,” Jamie says.
“Please say”—I lift my head to beg Jamie— “that they made popcorn, watched a Glee marathon in the lounge, and went to bed. In separate rooms.”
“I can’t,” Jamie says. “Because they didn’t. You know Magnus, the really tall one? Well, he bought them some beer from that deli around the corner. Then they all went downstairs to the game room to drink and play foosball and pool.”
I continue to scan Rajiv’s cramped handwriting, anxious to find out what happened next. “This is not appropriate Tania Trace Rock Camp for Girls behavior,” I mutter under my breath.
“No, I’d say not,” Jamie says, looking vaguely amused. “Wynona was watching them the whole time, of course, on the security monitors.”
I glance over at Wynona, who looks up from her coffee and says mildly, “You should have seen those girls’ faces when I went down there and asked what in the hell they thought they were doing.”
I want to walk over and throw my arms around Wynona’s neck. But I realize that would be inappropriate.
“Were they surprised?” I ask her instead.
“I don’t know what kind of place they think we’re running here,” Wynona says. “One of them was actually standing on the pool table, doing a kind of stripper dance for the boys. ‘Does this look like a Hooters?’ I asked her. And those boys. They know better than that. I asked them, ‘Aren’t you in enough trouble already? Do you really want the president of this college finding out you’re buying beer for girls who are in the ninth grade?’ ”
“Then what happened?” I ask.
“Well, of course, the boys claimed the girls told them that they were twenty-one. But what twenty-one-year-old wears Hello Kitty underwear? I said to the girl on the pool table, ‘Baby, put your clothes back on. You know I got that entire stripper dance you just did on my security camera? I’m of half a mind right now to give that tape to your mama. And if you were my child, I would slap you from here to Newark.’ ”
“Let me guess,” I say, not even having to glance down at the incident report form to check the name. “That was Cassidy Upton?”
“How would I know?” Wynona demands. “They all look the same to me, with those skinny bodies and all the makeup. I called for Rajiv, took away the beer, and sent for the coach.”
My eyes nearly pop out of my head.
“You called Steven—I mean, Coach Andrews?”
“You best believe I did. He posted his private cell number right here”—she points to a slip of paper taped to the guard’s desk—“with a note that says, ‘Call if boys get out of hand.’ So I called, because I knew he’d want me to. He came over, got those boys down from their rooms, took them outside, and when they came back—probably two hours later—I have never seen anyone look as dog-tired. He made them run around the square fifty times.”
Whoa. I had tried to run around the square once and had been pretty sure my uterus was going to fall out.
“What I want to know is,” Wynona asks after taking a sip of her coffee, “what’s going to happen to those girls? What those boys did was wrong, but those girls weren’t exactly innocent flowers either, if you ask me.”
I nod. She’s right about that. Rajiv had noted in his report that, after he escorted the girls back upstairs, a fight broke out. Mallory St. Clare had called Cassidy Upton “a stuck-up bitch.” Cassidy responded by calling Mallory “a dirty whore who needs to take a shower in order not to be so dirty.”
All three girls, of course—along with the basketball players, despite Steven’s punishment—would be having a mandatory meeting with Lisa after such antics. The question was whether Lisa would tell Mrs. Upton what had gone on. As the girls were minors, it seemed likely.