Meg Cabot - Size 12 Is Not Fat

“No,” he says. “That’s not true. It can’t be.”

And suddenly I know that I’ve made a horrible mistake.

Don’t ask me how. I mean, it’s not like I have any experience in this kind of thing.

But I know anyway. Know it the way I know the fat content in a Milky Way bar.

Christopher Allington didn’t kill those girls.

Oh, he’d slept with them, all right. But he hadn’t killed them. That was done by someone else. Someone far, far more dangerous…

“Okay,” says a deep voice behind me. A heavy hand falls on my bare shoulder.

“Sorry, Heather,” Cooper says. “But we have to go now.”

Where’d he come from? I can’t go. Not now.

“Um,” I say. “Yeah, just a sec, okay?”

But Cooper doesn’t look too ready to wait. In fact, he looks like a man who’s getting ready to run for his life.

“We have to go,” he says, again. “Now.”

And he slips a hand around my arm, and pulls.

“Cooper,” I say, wriggling to get free. I can see that Chris is still in shock. It’s totally likely that if I stick around awhile longer, I’ll get something more out of him. Can’t Cooper see that I’m conducting a very important interview here?

“Why don’t you go get something to eat?” I suggest to Cooper. “I’ll meet you over at the buffet in a minute—”

“No,” Cooper says. “Let’s go. Now.”

I can understand why Cooper is so anxious to leave. Really, I can. After all, not everybody deals with their exes by, you know, sleeping with them on the foyer floor.

Still, I feel like I can’t leave yet. Not after I’ve made this total breakthrough. Chris is really upset—so upset that he doesn’t even seem to notice that there’s a private eye looming over his dance partner. He’s turned away, and is sort of stumbling off the dance floor, in the general direction of the elevators.

Where’s he going? Up to the twelfth floor, to his father’s office, to hit the real liquor—or just to use the phone? Or up to the roof, to jump off? I feel like I have to follow him, if only to make sure he doesn’t do anything stupid.

Except when I start to go after him, Cooper won’t let me.

“Cooper, I can’t go yet,” I say, struggling to free myself from his grip. “I got him to admit he knew them! Roberta and Elizabeth! And you know what? I don’t think he killed them. I don’t think he even knew they were dead!”

“That’s nice,” Cooper says. “Now let’s go. I told you I have an appointment. Well, I’m late for it as it is.”

“An appointment? An appointment?” I can hardly believe what I’m hearing. “Cooper, don’t you understand? Chris said—”

“I heard you,” Cooper says. “Congratulations. Now let’s go. I said I’d bring you here. I didn’t say I could stay all night. I do have actual paying clients, you know.”

I realize it’s futile. Even if Cooper did change his mind and let me go, I don’t have any idea where Chris has disappeared to. And how smart would it have been, really, for me to follow him? I mean, considering what happened to the last couple of girls with whom he’d—how had I put it? Oh yeah, dallied. Hey, maybe I should be an English major. Yeah. A novelist, AND a doctor. AND a detective. AND a jewelry designer…

Cooper and I slip outside. I don’t even have a chance to say good-bye to anyone, or congratulate Rachel on her Pansy. I’ve never seen a guy so eager to get out of one place.

“Slow down,” I say, as Cooper hustles me to the curb. “I got heels on, you know.”

“Sorry,” Cooper says, and drops my arm. Then he put his fingers to his mouth and whistles for a cab that’s cruising along West Fourth.

“Where are we going?” I ask curiously, as the cab pulls to the corner with a squeal of its brakes.

“You’re going home,” Cooper says. He opens the rear passenger door and gestures for me to get inside, then gives the driver the address of his grandfather’s brownstone.

“Hey,” I say, leaning forward in the seat. “It’s just right across the block. I could’ve walked—”

“Not alone,” Cooper says. “And I have to head in the other direction.”

“Why?” I don’t miss the fact that Marian the Art Historian has just slipped out the library doors behind us.

But instead of walking over and joining Cooper on the curb, she shoots him an extremely unfriendly look, then hurries off on foot toward Broadway.

Cooper, whose back is to the library, doesn’t see the professor, or the dirty look.

“I’ve got to see a man,” is all Cooper will say to me, “about a dog. Here.” He shoves a five-dollar bill at me. “Don’t wait up.”

“What dog?” The cab starts to move. “Cooper, what dog? Are you getting another dog? What about Lucy? What’s wrong with Lucy?”

But we’re already gliding out into traffic. Cooper has turned and strode off towards West Third Street. Soon I can’t see him at all.

What had all that been about? I mean, really. I know Cooper’s clients are important to him, and stuff. And I know he thinks this whole thing with me and the deaths in my building is like a figment of my imagination, or whatever.

But still. He could at least have listened to me.

That’s when the cab driver, who appears to be Indian—like from India, not Native American—says, helpfully, “I believe that’s an expression.”

I look at his reflection in the rear view mirror. “What is?”

“See a man about a dog,” the cab driver says. “It’s an American expression. Like rolling stone gathers no moss. You know?”

I slump back into my seat. No, I didn’t know. I don’t know anything, apparently.

Well, I guess I knew that. I mean, isn’t that why I’m working at New York College? To get an education?

Well, I’m getting one, all right. And I haven’t even started classes yet.

After Cooper and I—and Chris Allington—left the Pansy Ball, Rachel Walcott was awarded a Pansy for exemplary service to the college.

She shows me the little flower-shaped pin the next morning, pride gleaming in her pretty brown eyes. She wears it on the lapel of her black linen suit jacket as if it were a medal of valor or something.

I guess maybe to her it kind of is. I mean, in a single semester, she’s had to deal with way more tragedy than most administrators have to face in their entire careers.

I’ve never won anything in my entire life. Well, okay, a recording contract, but that’s it. I know they don’t generally give out Grammys for songs like “Sugar Rush.” But hello, I never even won like a People’s Choice Award. Not even Teen People’s Choice.

And I was totally the Queen of Teen. At least, up until I stopped being one.

But I try not to let Rachel see my jealousy over her award. Not that I’m even that jealous. Just, you know.

I’d been the one who’d dragged all the boxes up from the basement. The boxes we’d packed up Roberta’s and Elizabeth’s things in. I’d been the one who’d packed them, too. And I’d been the one who’d dragged them to Mail Services, and had them shipped. I think I should get something for that. Not a Pansy, maybe, but like a Dandelion, maybe.

Oh well. When I’m able to prove that the girls’ deaths were the result of murder, and not accidental, and when I find out who their real killer is, maybe I’ll win like the key to the city, or something. Really! And the mayor’ll give it to me himself, and it will be broadcast on New York One, and Cooper will see it and realize that even though I’m not an art history professor or a size zero, I’m still totally smart and cute, and he’ll ask me out and we’ll get married and have Jack, Emily, and Charlotte Wells-Cartwright…

Well, a girl can dream, right?

And I am happy for Rachel. I congratulate her and sip my coffee as she describes what it had been like, winning this prestigious award in front of all her peers. She tells me how Dr. Jessup had hugged her and how President Allington had personally thanked her for services above and beyond the call of duty. She chatters excitedly about how she’s the first administrator in the history of New York College to receive seven separate nominations for the award, the most any one person has ever garnered—and she’d gotten them all in just her first four months of employment! She says how glad she is that she’d gone into higher education instead of business or law, like so many of her fellow Yale grads.

“Doesn’t it feel good,” she asks me, “to know you’re making such a difference in people’s lives, Heather?”

“Um,” I say. “Sure.”

Although I’m pretty sure the people whose lives I’m making the biggest difference in—the student workers—just wish Justine would come back.

While Rachel winds down from her Pansy-induced high, I get on the phone and take care of a few things that I feel I’ve been neglecting.

First I call Amber in her room. When her sleepy voice croaks, “Yeah?” into the phone, I gently put the receiver back into the cradle. Okay, Amber’s still alive. Check.

Then I call St. Vincent’s to see how Jordan is doing. He is, I learn, doing better, but they still want to hold him for observation for another night. I don’t really want to, but I figure I should speak to him—you know, seeing as how it’s my fault he got hurt in the first place.

But when the switchboard puts my call through to his room, a woman answers. Tania. I can’t deal with fiancées early in the morning, so I hang up. I feel guilty about it though, and order a half-dozen get well balloons from a local florist, instructing them to be delivered to St. Vincent’s with the highly personal message,Get Well Soon, Jordan. From Heather. Likely they will get lost in all of the other gifts his fans are no doubt sending him—an overnight candlelight vigil also took place outside St. Vincent’s ambulance bay, apparently—but at least I can say I tried.

Thinking about Jordan and his cracked skull reminds me of Christopher Allington. A real detective would, of course, follow up on the conversation we’d had the night before.

So I decide to take another crack at him. I tell Rachel I’m going to the bathroom. But really I go to the elevator and take it up to the twentieth floor.

No one’s supposed to go up to the twentieth floor but the Allingtons and their guests, which is why the carpet in the hallway outside the penthouse is really one big motion detector that goes off whenever somebody steps on it, including the Allingtons. This alarm causes a camera to be switched on, which then conveys an image of the interloper on a viewing screen at the guard’s desk in the lobby.

But since the guard on duty that day is Pete, I’m not too worried about being busted. We’ve caught any number of freshmen on the twentieth floor, most of whom have been sent there by conniving upper classmen in search of the “Fischer Hall pool.” The elusive Fischer Hall pool did once exist, but in the basement, not the penthouse, and it’s a favorite senior prank to send unsuspecting first-years to the twentieth floor in search of it, knowing they’ll trigger the motion detectors and get busted for being outside the president’s apartment.

I step boldly onto the nondescript carpeting and lift a finger to poke at the doorbell to the Allingtons’ apartment. I can hear a strange whistling sound beyond the door, and realize that this must be Mrs. Allington’s birds, the cockatoos about whom she worries so incessantly when she’s had too much to drink. When I press on the doorbell, the whistling turns into maniacal shrieking, and for a minute, I panic. Really. I forget all about being a detective slash novelist slash physician slash jewelry designer, and want to run back to the elevator…

But before I have a chance to ding and ditch, the door swings open, and Mrs. Allington, bleary-eyed and dressed in a green velour caftan, blinks at me.

“Yes?” she demands, in a remarkably unfriendly manner, considering the fact that just two weeks or so ago, I’d held her hand while she barfed into one of the lobby planters. Behind her, I catch a glimpse of a six-foot-tall wicker cage, within which two large white birds scream at me.

“Uh, hi,” I say brightly. “Is Christopher here?”

Mrs. Allington’s puffy eyelids widen a little, then go back to normal. “What?”

“Chris,” I repeat. “Your son, Christopher. Is he here?”