Been There, Done That Read online

  “Look,” Tim said. “I didn’t mean to offend you. Like I said, we’ll pay you for your time.”

  “I want you to go.” She was by the door now, opening it, and before we knew it, we were on the other side.

  I was ready to leave after that: pack it in, admit defeat. But Tim insisted we give it one more shot, so we headed back to the college. In the middle of the college green, he suddenly stopped. He put his hands on his hips and looked around, pivoting slowly.

  I finally surrendered to my curiosity. “Where are we going?”

  “I have no idea.” He said it proudly, savoring the challenge. “Okay, let’s think. Admissions office?”

  I looked at the imposing brick building. “Everyone who works there is in the system.”

  “Student Union?”

  “Staffed by kids, mostly. They might have information, but they’d be too likely to gab to their friends. Plus, there’s hardly anyone there since it’s summer.”

  “French Department? History Department?”

  “What would be the point? Faculty’s gone for the summer. There’s no one there but the janitors.” He smiled at me, waiting. “Right!” I sounded too girlish for my tastes. I lowered my voice. “They have to clean up after those scummy kids, probably make lousy money. I don’t know how much the ones who clean the academic buildings would know, though. We’d probably learn more from the janitors who work in the dorms.” For a brief moment, I basked in my genius. Then I looked at Tim’s pleased, crinkly eyes. With a shock, I realized he was beginning to develop crow’s feet. Then I realized that he’d been leading me through his own thought processes, teaching me against my will. For once, I was only one step behind him instead of the usual two. At the moment, that seemed like progress.

  We picked Nickerson House because it was the closest. From the name, I expected something stately and lush. Instead, it was a looming brick box set on grass trimmed too short. “Why do institutional buildings always look so, well, institutional?” I asked Tim as we climbed the concrete steps. “You just know the halls are going to be painted puke green or dingy yellow.” We’d reached the front door. It was enormous and painted a shiny brown. Tim pulled the handle. It was locked. I said, “A building like this, it’s so impersonal. A kid away from home for the first time, he needs something that looks more like home. Doesn’t have to be a house, necessarily, just something small, something unique and inviting. Someplace he can feel safe to become his own person.” I peered inside. “Okay. The walls are white, but it’s that really dingy white, with gray undertones. Depressing.”

  Tim started down the steps. “Let’s try the side door.”

  Along the side of the dorm ran a makeshift dirt path worn into the grass by thousands of sneakers. Waist-high rectangular windows allowed convenient access to thieves and rapists.

  At the end of the building, we came across an iron door painted the same dark brown as the front. It was heavy, but it opened. We stepped inside. The walls here were light yellow, after all. Tim neglected to mention my insight.

  Tim nodded down the hall. “You go this way. I’ll check upstairs.”

  “But what if I find someone? Should I call you?”

  He gave me a look of strained patience. “Surely you can handle this.”

  I glared at him, turned and started down the corridor. I heard him shuffling up the stairs.

  The doors were all open, the rooms being prepped for the new occupants. I slipped inside one to hide. Truly, I wanted Tim to track down a source before I did. I could strike up a conversation with anyone about paint (I was happy to see that the freshly painted rooms were bright white—uninspired, yes, but supremely inoffensive), but I had yet to master a Miss Manners-approved way of asking complete strangers about flesh-for-rent.

  My strategy backfired. Just as I was examining the wood laminate built-in desks, a voice behind me scolded. “Hey! What you doing in here? You’re not allowed in yet.”

  I turned and faced my potential source: a squat woman of about fifty, with frizzy graying hair held back in no particular style with bobby pins. Deeply etched lines in her face indicated that pissed-off was her normal state. She wore janitorial green and held a bottle of disinfectant in a hand that was dried and cracked from too much exposure to harsh chemicals.

  “I’m sorry,” I began. “I didn’t mean to intrude.” Miss Manners would be impressed. Tim would not.

  “You get the letter?”

  “Letter?”

  “They send it every year, tells you where you’re living, who you’re living with. Tells you when to show up. For freshmen, that’d be August twenty-eighth.”

  I stared at her. “Freshman? You think I’m a freshman?”

  “Or sophomore or junior or whatever. You think I really care?”

  I held up my hands, ready to spill all. After all, Tim felt it appropriate to reveal our true identity to Gerry the bartender. Surely it would be time for me to pull out my press badge if I had such a thing. “I guess I should explain myself. My name is—”

  There was a knock on the already-open door: Tim. “The place is looking great,” he informed Broomhilda. “You’re obviously working very hard.”

  The lines in her face softened. I can’t believe the kind of crap some people fall for. “It’s a big job,” she said. “Just gets harder”—she shot me any ugly look “—when the students try getting into their rooms early.”

  I grinned at Tim. “She thinks I’m a freshman.”

  He began to smirk, then froze. He stared at me. Something very, very bad had just happened but I didn’t yet know what it was. A slow smile crept across his face. “You must admit—you do look young for a junior.”

  nine

  I said no. He said chance of a lifetime. I said forget it. He said national exposure. I said absolutely not and let’s get on with things. He said my boss would be disappointed. I said Richard would never know.

  “Wouldn’t he?”

  “You’d tell Richard I wouldn’t go undercover?” I could feel my face growing hot. We were sitting on my couch. I clutched a throw pillow and pretended it was his neck.

  “Of course not.”

  “Then let’s talk about other ways to research this thing.” I released the pillow and retrieved my pad and pen from the coffee table.

  He stretched his arms up and folded them behind his head. He looked at the ceiling. “But it might creep into the conversation.”

  “I can’t believe you would do that to me! I can’t believe you’ve become that nasty!” My voice was getting tight and borderline tearful.

  “I was kidding.”

  “I don’t think you were.” I suggested we try Chantal again, but Tim was convinced she had nothing to do with the college—and might not even be a hooker. “Then what is she?” I asked.

  “Sex addict?” he tried.

  “Maybe that’s why she couldn’t keep her hands off you,” I snapped, remembering the way Chantal had edged away from Tim on the couch.

  It went on like this for days. Even after he returned to Washington, he would call me at odd hours. He wouldn’t even bother to say hello, just start in with, “I’d kill for an opportunity like this. I’d do it in a minute if I looked young enough.” He’d shame me. “For once in your life, live up to your potential.” He’d flatter me. “You’re a talented journalist. This is the perfect opportunity to showcase your talent.” He even sent me a FedEx package; inside was my picture glued to a cover of Time magazine, with “Woman of the Year” printed on the bottom. Tim had always been a closet cheeseball.

  I held strong. I pretended I didn’t like him calling me every day. And Tim didn’t share his plan with Richard. In the end, though, it was Richard himself who pushed me over the edge.

  Richard called the staff into his office for a meeting. Richard and Sheila were the only ones at Salad with offices. The rest of us lived in second-hand cubicles picked up from an Italian food products company that was going out of business. On hot days, the office smelle
d like garlic.

  Richard’s huge office, on the other hand, perpetually stank of Polo cologne. He looked very much the pampered executive, sitting behind his oversized mahogany desk, the bounty of a trade for ad space. His desk chair was standard swivel. The remaining chairs—the ones we sat in—were of molded plastic and looked like they belonged in a high school cafeteria.

  Richard had thin blond hair that I could swear was highlighted and a red, acne-scarred face prematurely wrinkled by sun, salt, wind and the other perils of the yachting life. Just short of fifty, he looked closer to sixty, albeit a fit sixty. Like his wife, he logged a lot of hours at the gym. Once he even turned up at our aerobics class, clad in a muscle shirt and royal blue spandex shorts, which yucked me out beyond belief. Mostly, he stuck to the weight room, working his delts, pecs, triceps and abs. His legs, he completely ignored. As such, he was so disproportionately muscular on top that when he stood up he always looked like he might fall over.

  Once we, his staff (behind his back we referred to ourselves as his subjects), were perched on our plastic chairs, he gave us the news: “I’m sorry to announce that Kristen will be leaving us.” We all made efforts to look both surprised and dismayed. In fact, it had been common knowledge that Kristen, head of advertising sales, had been offered twice her salary to work for a magazine geared toward kayakers. “I can’t wait to tell that cheap-shit Richard how much I’ll be making,” she had commented. We fellow drones all hoped that Richard would increase our salaries to keep pace with the competition.

  “I was shocked to hear what the going rate for ad sales-people has become,” he intoned. This was a man who thought teachers were overpaid. “Quite frankly, I don’t think we can afford to replace Kristen.” Richard was talking in the corporate, not-my-fault, “we.” That had to be bad. Our cross-the-board raises were fading fast. “Sheila and I—” He paused to give an adoring look to his wife, which she returned. “We discussed alternatives.”

  “We thought outside the box,” she piped in.

  Richard smiled. “Here’s what we came up with . . .”

  When he was done, we just sat there, staring. He had proposed—no, commanded—that the staff spend an hour a day selling ad space. He would handle the established accounts. We would make cold calls.

  ten

  I made two attempts to sell ad space. The first potential client hung up on me. The second screamed something about the Do Not Call registry. When she threatened a lawsuit, I hung up on her.

  Tim could have sounded a little more surprised. But when I made my announcement—“I’ll do it”—all he said was, “I knew you would.” That, of course, made me want to change my mind all over again. But when he added, “You’re too smart to turn down this kind of a story,” I forgave his smugness.

  He hopped on a plane almost immediately and called Richard from the airport to schedule a meeting. “I could have set the meeting,” I said. “I work twenty feet from the guy.”

  “I just wanted him to know how committed to the story New Nation is,” he assured me.

  Perched on the edge of Richard’s desk, he laid out his plan. I would call my old friend Dr. Archer, Mercer’s dean of admissions, and say something along the lines of, “I’ve got an idea for the neatest article! I’ll pretend to be a student so I can tell people what it’s like to be in college today—the dreams of college students, the friendships, part-time work and volunteer efforts. It would be a real upbeat piece, super publicity for Mercer!”

  I was aghast. “You want me to lie?”

  “It’s not lying,” Tim said. “It’s undercover investigating.”

  I crossed my arms. “You’d make a hell of a politician.” Richard’s Polo cologne was especially strong today. It was giving me a headache.

  “Come on, Kath,” Tim said. “If you can’t step around the truth on this one little thing, how are you going to convince all those eighteen-year-olds that you’re one of them?” He looked to Richard for backup. Richard merely frowned at one of his molded plastic chairs, as if willing Tim to move his butt to someplace other than the prized desk.

  “Lying to the kids is different,” I said. “I haven’t met them before. They never bought me lunch.”

  Tim stared at me. “The time you interviewed this guy, you let him pick up the lunch tab?”

  “Long story. At any rate, he’s a nice man. He already knows me as the adult me. It’s an ethics thing.” I smirked at him. “If you can imagine it.”

  I stared at the familiar tableau behind Richard’s desk: an assortment of his favorite Salad covers, expensively framed. Blurbs hinted at the crucial information within: “New England’s Best B&B’s,” “Taking the Confusion out of Countertops,” “What Your Child’s Test Scores Really Mean.”

  Richard’s enthusiasm for the story had already begun to wane. Perhaps he didn’t think we could pull it off. Or maybe, after his initial excitement, he just couldn’t think of a single advertiser to woo with the story. Also, he was starting to wonder how he was going to fill an entire magazine without my contributions. “Kathy’s going to have all that time at Mercer, pretending to write papers,” Tim assured him. “She can be cranking out articles instead.”

  So much for my complete focus on the story.

  “How much time are we talking about?” Richard asked. “A week? Two?”

  “It will take significantly longer than that for Kathy to establish herself and turn up any meaningful leads,” Tim said. “I think four months is a more reasonable time frame.”

  Richard gawked at him (as did I). “I guess we could get it done in three months. Though it would be tight.”

  “Four weeks,” Richard said.

  “Nine.”

  “Five.”

  “Eight.”

  “Six.”

  “Okay,” Tim sighed, crossing his arms. “Seven.”

  Seven it was. But there was still the issue of talking Dr. Archer into the plan. I hoped he was made of stronger stuff than Richard, or at least than me.

  Finally, Tim made the call. Passing himself off as the “assistant executive editor,” he phoned Dr. Archer. The dean didn’t like the idea; it seemed sneaky. He said no, and Tim hung up, looking defeated.

  I enjoyed maybe three minutes of relative inner peace before Cara, Richard’s assistant, buzzed him to say that there was a phone call for an assistant executive editor named Tim, and did Richard know what he was talking about, and if there were an editorial job opening, why hadn’t Richard considered her because she’d been a journalism major in college and didn’t intend to stay a secretary for the rest of her life.

  Archer had changed his mind. Applications had been falling for years, and the free publicity was tantalizing. “Just between you and me” he told Tim (and the rest of us who were listening on the speaker phone), his job could be on the line if he didn’t turn things around. Finally, he agreed to let me go undercover on the condition that no one know he was involved.

  Tim proposed a plan involving forged transcripts and SAT records (white-out played a key role, as computer hacking was, you know, “unethical”), an exemplary personal essay (he offered to write it), and glowing fake letters of recommendation.

  “That might work,” Dr. Archer said. “Or, I could just send Kathy’s name to the registrar.”

  It was the end of July. In a month, I would be entering college. I buried myself in an article about French language schools for preschoolers and tried not to think about it.

  eleven

  Her name was Tiffany Weaver. She was an Aries from Buffalo, New York, who loved her collie (Mr. Big), cookie dough ice cream (“Sometimes I dig right around the ice cream and just scoop out the dough!”), and talking on the telephone (“So you might want to bring ear plugs!”). She had already bought her bedspread (“I hope you like pink! Because that’s my favorite color!”) but couldn’t decide whether her milk crates should be just plain white or pink, too. (“Is that overdoing it?!”)

  Still clutching her rose-scented lett
er, I called Tim.

  “Dead,” I said when he answered.

  “Excuse me?”

  “We’re playing Jeopardy. The answer to the question is, ‘Dead.’”

  “Okay, okay.” He was quiet for a moment. “What does Elvis think the rest of us are?”

  “Try this: What are you going to be if you don’t get me a single room at Mercer College?”

  “Ah.”

  “You can’t expect me to live in a pink room with a girl named Tiffany.”

  “You know, Kathy,” he cooed. “Some reporters sleep in tents and bombed-out buildings because that’s where the story is.”

  “A bombed-out building can have a certain panache,” I snapped. “The distressed look is very in.”

  “You’re a freshman, and freshmen at Mercer have room-mates. You’d stick out if you had a single. We’re talking about seven weeks of your life. Think of it as your bunker.”

  He was right, and I knew it. “But I hate pink!” I whimpered.

  As recommended in my freshman packet, I called her. I didn’t get past “Hi, Tiffany, this is Katie O’Connor” (I’d always wanted to be called Katie, which sounded so much hipper than Kathy; O’Connor is my mother’s maiden name) when she started gushing. “I’m so excited that you called! Ever since I got my room assignment, I’ve been picturing you and wondering what you’re like and hoping we’ll be best friends. Since they used those living habits questionnaires for matching and all, you gotta think we’re a lot alike. I mean, the computer can’t be wrong, can it?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “Modern technology is pretty impressive.” I picked up a sponge and started working on a coffee stain on my counter.

  “Did you read 1984?”

  “What? Oh—Orwell. Yes.” I didn’t add that I’d actually read it in the eighties, when she was probably still chewing on board books.

  “That’s, like, so scary.”

  “It makes you think,” I ventured.

  “When you think about it, Big Brother is already out there. Like, the government knows so much about people.”