Size 12 and Ready to Rock (Heather Wells 4)

“Can I do it?” Muffy asks Dr. Jessup, bouncing on the toes of her pumps. “Puh-lease, Stan?”

He smiles at her graciously. “Be my guest.”

I look up at Muffy. She and I are friends, if you can call it friendship to share a mutual desire not to see people get away with murder on the campus where we work and an attraction to the same guy (she’s currently dating my ex-boyfriend and remedial math teacher, Tadd Tocco).

Fortunately, Tadd and Muffy make a much better couple than Tadd and I ever did, mostly owing to Tadd’s commitment to veganism and my commitment to being in love with another man, namely Cooper Cartwright. Muffy told me at the last lunch we had together that she’s pretty sure Tadd is going to propose (because she informed him that at their age, if there isn’t forward momentum in a relationship after three months, it only makes sense to break up), but she’s on the fence about accepting.

“On the one hand,” she said over the healthy tuna salad wrap she purchased from the Pansy Café, “I’m not getting any younger, and since I definitely want kids, I might as well have them with Tadd. You know they’ll be smart because his IQ is through the roof, and we’ll save a lot on child care, since professors only work about three hours a week, so Tadd can stay home with them.”

I’d been forced to admit this was true.

“On the other hand,” Muffy said, “I’d always hoped to marry a rich man so I could be the one to raise the kids. I’m not sure what the girls back home will think when they hear I’m still working.”

“Who cares what anyone else thinks?” I asked with a shrug over my not-so-healthy Pansy Café burger and fries. “It’s your life, not theirs. You love your job, don’t you?”

“Yes,” Muffy said firmly.

“Good,” I said. “Just make sure you love Tadd too before you say yes when he asks you to marry him, or I don’t think your plan has a very good chance at working out.”

Now Muffy is looking at me with her perfectly made-up eyes glittering, bursting with eagerness to tell me whatever fabulous news it is she has to impart.

“Heather,” she says, “I know how sad you were that your residence hall was closed for the summer, and ya’ll were left with nothing to do but twiddle your thumbs. Now you can stop twiddling, because Fischer Hall’s being officially reopened this weekend to host the first ever Tania Trace Rock Camp!”

I glance quickly from Muffy to Dr. Jessup to Stephanie, then to Sarah, then back again.

“Wait,” I say intelligently. “What?”

“Yes,” Sarah says unsmilingly. “Fifty fourteen-year-old girls here in the city for two weeks, living their dream of getting mentored by none other than Tania Trace. Isn’t it great?”

“They’re fourteen to sixteen years old, actually,” Stephanie says. She’s sunk down into a chair covered with blue vinyl—I watched Carl reupholster it myself, after mice ate through the original orange upholstery—and opened her tote. She pulls a brochure from it and hands it to me. I thumb through it as she talks. It’s a wash of bright vibrant colors, like Tania herself when she isn’t suffering from exhaustion. “You remember, Heather. I told you about it last week. Unfortunately, the Catskills location simply isn’t going to work anymore.”

“Why?” I ask. “It looks perfect.” I point to a photo of a girl on horseback. “We don’t have horses.” I point to another photo. “Or an open-air amphitheater.”

“We have plenty of performance spaces,” Dr. Jessup says. “Our drama school is one of the best in the country. Our theaters aren’t open-air, but it’s my understanding that that is Ms. Trace’s preference—”

“Tania wants everything moved indoors,” Stephanie says crisply, plucking the brochure from my fingers.

I’m more confused than ever. “Then how is it camp?”

“It’s still camp,” Stephanie says. “It’s just inside camp.”

“What’s ‘inside camp’?” I ask, bewildered. “That doesn’t even make sense.”

“Of course it makes sense,” Stephanie insists. “It’s college camp. The girls are going to love it even more than they would have loved being at a resort in the Catskills. They’ll be experiencing life on a college campus years before their peers. And not just any college campus, but New York College, one of the top ten most-applied-to colleges in the country. Not to mention, of course, they’ll be spending every minute with Tania Trace. Or one of New York College’s prestigious music instructors. Mostly with one of them. But for at least an hour a day, they’ll be with Tania.”

I sit where I am, stunned, while everyone else except Sarah beams at me.

“Told you so, didn’t I, Heather?” Sarah asks me, leaning forward on her desk, her smile diabolical, but only I know her well enough to realize it. “Isn’t it great?”

I ignore her.

“We’re closed for renovations,” I say to Dr. Jessup. I’m not arguing because Tania Trace is my ex’s new wife and I don’t want anything to do with this. I genuinely can’t figure out how we’re going to make it happen. “None of the rooms is even close to ready for occupancy. The paint crew’s barely gotten through the top few floors. And most of those rooms haven’t been fully maintenanced yet. I mean . . .” I can’t believe I have to say this out loud, but I do it anyway. “What about the room to Narnia?”

Stephanie and the girl no one’s introduced to me stare at me blankly, but I’m confident that Dr. Jessup and Muffy know exactly what I mean, because the room to Narnia, like Pansygate, was scandalous enough to have made the New York Post. After spring checkout, we found a room in which the four male suitemates had built “a door to Narnia”—a hole they’d cut into the back of a college-issued wardrobe that, when opened, led to an extra room of their suite in which they’d assembled a “love dungeon” complete with wall-to-wall mattresses, lava lamps, bongos, and posters of the actor who played Prince Caspian on every vertical surface.

What was even more annoying was that the suitemates’ parents then had the nerve to refuse to pay the charges we billed them for the cost of repairing the hole in the wardrobe (and fumigation of the mattresses), even though I sent them photographic evidence of their sons’ unusual extracurricular activities.