“Heather!” Magda, seeing me in the crowd, flings a heavily manicured hand toward me. “Oh, Heather! Is terrible!”
Magda is standing there in her pink cafeteria smock and leopard-print leggings, shaking her frosted curls and taking long, nervous drags on the Virginia Slim she’s got tucked between her two-inch-long nails. Each nail bears a mini replica of the American flag. Because even though Magda goes back to her native Dominican Republic every chance she gets, she is still very patriotic about her adopted country, and expresses her affection for it through nail art.
That’s how I met her, actually. Almost four months ago, at the manicurist. That’s also how I heard about the job in the dorm (I mean, residence hall) in the first place. The last assistant director before me—Justine—had just gotten fired for embezzling seven thousand dollars from the building’s petty cash, a fact which had enraged Magda, the dorm—I mean, residence hall—cafeteria’s cashier.
“Can you believe it?” Magda had been complaining to anyone who would listen, as I was having my toes done in Hot Tamale Red—because, you know, even if the rest of your life is going down the toilet, like mine was back then, at least your toes can still look pretty.
Magda, a few tables away, had been having mini Statues of Liberty air-brushed onto her thumbnails, in honor of Memorial Day, and was waxing eloquent about Justine, my predecessor.
“She order twenty-seven ceramic heaters from Office Supply and give them to her friends as wedding presents!”
I still have no idea what a ceramic heater is, or why anyone would want one as a wedding gift. But when I’d heard someone had been fired from Magda’s place of work, where one of the job benefits—besides twenty vacation days a year and full health and dental—is free tuition, I’d jumped on the information.
I owe Magda a lot, actually. And not just because she helped me with the job thing, either (or because she lets me eat free in the caf anytime I want—which might be part of the reason why I’m no longer a size 8, except in vanity sizing), but because Magda’s become one of my best friends.
“Mag,” I say, sidling up to her. “Who is it? Who died?”
Because I can’t help worrying it’s someone I know, like one of the maintenance workers who are always so sweet about cleaning up spilled bodily fluids, even though it’s not in their job description. Or one of the student workers I’m supposed to supervise—supposed tobeing the operative words, since in the three months I’ve worked at Fischer Hall, only a handful of my student employees have ever actually done what I’ve told them to (a lot of them remain loyal to the sticky-fingered Justine).
And when any of them actually do what I ask, it’s only because it involves something like checking every single room after the previous residents have moved out and cleaning out whatever they’ve left behind, generally half-full bottles of Jägermeister.
So then when I get to work the next day, I can’t get a single one of them to come downstairs and sort the mail, because they’re all too hung over.
But there are a couple kids I’ve genuinely come to love, scholarship students who didn’t come to school equipped with a Visa that Mom and Dad are only too happy to pay off every month, and who actually need to work in order to pay for books and fees, and so will take the 4 P.M. — midnight shift at the reception desk on a Saturday night with a minimum of begging on my part.
“Oh, Heather,” Magda whispers. Only she pronounces it Haythar. She is whispering because she doesn’t want the kids to know what’s really going on. Whatever it is. “One of my little movie stars!”
“A student?” I can see people in the crowd eyeing Magda curiously. Not because she’s weird-looking—well, she IS kind of weird-looking, since she wears enough makeup to make Christina Aguilera look as if she’s going au naturel, and she’s got those really long nails and all.
But since it’s the Village, Magda’s outfits could actually be considered kind of tame.
It’s the “movie star” thing people don’t get. Every time a student enters the Fischer Hall cafeteria, Magda takes his or her dining card, runs it through the scanner, and sings, “Look at all the byootiful movie stars who come to eat here. We are so lucky to have so many byootiful movie stars in Fischer Hall!”
At first I just thought Magda was trying to flatter the many drama students—and there are tons, way more than pre-med or business majors—that go to New York College.
Then one Fix Your Own Sundae day, Magda dropped the bomb that Fischer Hall is actually quite famous. Not for the reasons you’d think, like because it’s on historic Washington Square, where Henry James once lived, or because it’s across the street from the famous Hanging Tree, where they used to execute people in the eighteenth century. Not even because the park was once a cemetery for the indigent, so basically all those benches and hot dog stands? Yeah, they’re sitting on dead people.
No. According to Magda, Fischer Hall is famous because they shot a scene from the movie Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles there. Donatello or Raphael or one of the turtles—I can’t actually remember which one—swung from the Fischer Hall penthouse to the building next door, and the kids in the building all acted as extras, looking up and pointing amazedly at the stunt turtle’s feat.
Seriously. Fischer Hall has quite an exciting history.
Except that the kids who acted in the movie as extras have long since graduated and moved from Fischer Hall.
So I guess people think it’s weird that Magda is still bringing it up, all these years later.
But really, you can see how the fact that a scene from a major motion picture was shot at her place of work would be, to someone like Magda, just another of the many things that make America great.
But you can also see how, to someone who doesn’t know the story behind it, the whole “my little movie star” thing might seem a little… well, wacko.
Which probably explained why so many people were looking curiously our way, having overheard her outburst.
Not wanting the kids to catch on that something was seriously wrong, I take Magda by the arm and steer her toward one of the potted pines that sits outside the building—and which the students unfortunately tend to use as their own personal ashtray—so we can have a little privacy.
“What happened?” I ask her, in a low voice. “Rachel left a message that there’d been a death in the building, but that’s all she said. Do you know who? And how?”
“I don’t know,” Magda whispers, shaking her head. “I am sitting at my register, and I hear screaming, and someone says that a girl is lying at the bottom of the elevator shaft, and that she’s dead.”
“Oh my God!” I’m shocked. I’d been expecting to hear about a death from a drug overdose or violent crime—there are security guards on duty twenty-four hours a day in the building, but that doesn’t mean the occasional unsavory character doesn’t manage to slip inside anyway. It is New York City, after all.
But death by elevator?
Magda, moist-eyed, but trying valiantly not to cry—since that would tip off the students, who are prone to dramatics anyway, that something is REALLY wrong (it also wouldn’t do anything much for Magda’s many layers of mascara)—adds, “They say she was—what do you call it? Riding on top of the elevator?”
“Surfing?” I am even more shocked now. “Elevator surfing?”
“Yes.” Magda carefully inserts the tip of a finely crafted nail at the corner of her eye, and dashes away a tear. “That is why they are not letting anyone inside. The little movie stars need the elevator to get up to their dressing rooms, but they have to move the—”
Magda breaks off with a sob. I put my arm around her and quickly turn her toward me, as much to comfort her as to smother the sound of her crying. Students are glancing curiously our way. I don’t want them to catch on that anything is seriously wrong. They’ll find out, soon enough.