Meg Cabot - Size 12 Is Not Fat

The girl in the hot tub pouts. “But, Chris—”

“Go on, honey.”

“But my name’s Hope, not Faith.”

“Whatever.” Chris slaps her on the backside as she climbs, dripping like a mermaid, from the hot tub. She has on a bathing suit, but it’s a bikini, and the top is so skimpy and her boobs so large that the tiny Lycra triangles seem like mere suggestions.

Cooper notices the bikini phenomenon right away. I can tell by his raised eyebrows. It so pays to be a trained investigator.

Her rear proves as impressive as her front. Not an ounce of cellulite. I wonder if she, like Rachel, had StairMastered it all away.

“So, Chris,” Cooper says, as soon as the girl is gone. “What’s the deal with you and Rachel Walcott?”

Chris chokes on the sip of Chardonnay he’d been taking.

“Wh-what?” he coughs, when he can speak again.

But Cooper’s just looking down at Chris the way he might have looked down at a really interesting but kind of gross bug that he’d found in his salad.

“Rachel Walcott,” he says. “She was the director of the dorm—I mean, residence hall—you lived in your senior year at Earlcrest. Now she’s running Fischer Hall, where your parents live, and where Heather here works.”

Fumbling for a pack of cigarettes and a lighter he had left by the side of the Jacuzzi, Chris pulls one out with trembling fingers and lights it. He inhales, and in the semi-darkness, the tip of the cigarette glows redly.

“Shit” is all he says.

I’m not a trained detective and all, but even I think this answer is kind of… suspicious.

“So what gives between the two of you?” Cooper asks. “You and Rachel. I mean, you might not have noticed, but people are dying—”

“I’ve noticed,” Chris says sharply. “Okay? I’ve noticed. What the fuck do you think?”

Cooper apparently doesn’t think this last part is all that necessary. You know, the bad language.

Because he says to Chris, in a much harsher voice than he’s spoken in before, “You knew? How long?”

Chris blinks up at him through the steam from the bubbling jets. “What?” he asks, like someone who isn’t sure he was hearing things right.

“How long?” Cooper demands again, in a voice that makes me glad it’s Chris he’s talking to, and not me. It also makes me doubt his story. You know, about not hitting people in his line of work. “How long have you known that Rachel was the one killing those girls?”

I can see that Chris has gone as pale as the watery lights beneath the surface of the pool, and it isn’t from the cigarette smoke.

I don’t blame him. Cooper’s scaring me a little, too.

“I didn’t know,” Chris says, in a choked voice that is quite different from the cocky one he’d used previously. “I didn’t put it together until last night, when you”—he looks at me “when you and I danced, and you told me Beth and Bobby were… were the ones who—”

“Oh, c’mon, Chris,” Cooper says. “You expect us to believe that with all the publicity on campus after those supposed accidents—”

“I didn’t know!” Chris splashes one hand into the water to emphasize his words, and gets Lucy’s paws wet. She looks down at them quizzically, then goes to work with her tongue. “I swear to God, I didn’t know. I don’t exactly have a lot of free time, and what I do have I’m not going to waste reading the newspapers. I mean, of course I heard two girls in Fischer Hall had died, but I didn’t know they were my two girls.”

“And you didn’t notice that neither of the girls was returning your calls?”

Chris ducks his head. Shamefacedly, I think.

“Because you never called them again.” Cooper’s voice is cold as ice.

Chris looks defensive. “Do you?” he demands, of Cooper. “Do you always call the next day?”

“If I want there to be a next time,” Cooper replies, without missing a beat.

“Exactly.” Chris’s voice drips with meaning. At first I don’t get what he means.

Then I do.

Oh.

Cooper shakes his head, looking as disgusted as I feel. Well, almost, anyway. “You expect me to believe that you never knew those girls were dead until you heard it from Heather the other night?”

“That’s right,” Chris says, and suddenly he flicks his cigarette into the rhododendrons and hauls himself out of the Jacuzzi. All he has on is a pair of baggy swim trunks. His frame is lean but muscular, his skin tanned to a light gold. There isn’t a single patch of body hair on him, unless you count what curls out from beneath his arms.

“And when I heard about it, the first thing I did was, I came here.” Chris stands up, wrapping himself in a wide, pale pink towel. “I needed to get away, I needed to think, I needed to—”

“You needed to avoid being hauled in for questioning by the cops,” Cooper finishes for him.

“That, too. Look, so I slept with ’em—”

I can stand it no longer. Really. I feel sick—and not just because of all the Indian food we’d eaten in the car on the way over, either.

No, this isn’t just indigestion. It’s disgust.

“Don’t act like it’s no big deal, Chris,” I say. “Your sleeping with those girls, then not calling them again. Not even telling them your real name in order to keep them from knowing who your father is. Because it is a big deal. Or it was, to them. You used them. You used them because you know you… you know you’ve got… well, performance inadequacies.”

“What?” Chris looks shocked. “I do not!”

“Of course you do,” I say, knowing I sound like Sarah, and not caring. “Why else were you looking for girls who don’t have any sexual experience—until Hope here—so they don’t have anything to measure your performance by?”

Chris looks as stunned as if I’d hit him.

And maybe, in a way, I have.

Cooper tugs on my sleeve and whispers, “Whoa, tiger. Simmer down. Let’s not get our roles here confused. I’m the bad cop. You’re the good one.”

Then, patting me gently on the back—the way I pat Indy when I want him to calm down—Cooper says to a red-faced Chris, “Listen, nobody’s accusing you of murdering anybody. What we want to know about is your relationship with Rachel Walcott.”

“Why?” Chris is over being scared, and back to being surly. My remark about performance inadequacies has upset him. Undoubtedly because it’s true.

Chris strides past Cooper, heading for the pool. “What about it?”

“Was there one?” Cooper wants to know.

“A relationship?” Dropping the towel, Chris climbs onto the diving board. A second later, he’s sprung into the pool, hardly making a splash as his long, lean body arcs through the water. He swims up to the side of the pool we’re standing on, then surfaces, seeming to have had a change of heart under water.

“All right,” he says. “I’ll tell you everything I know.”

“Okay,” Chris says, through chattering teeth. “Okay. So I slept with her for a few months. It’s not like I asked her to marry me, or anything. But she went fucking psycho on me, okay? I thought she was going to cut my balls off.”

I scoop up Chris’s towel and drape it over his shivering shoulders. He doesn’t seem to notice. He’s on a roll. He’s climbed from the pool and has started walking toward the house, Cooper and Lucy and I following behind, like an entourage after…

Well, some famous rock star.

“It started my junior year,” Chris says. Now that he’s started talking, it’s like he can’t stop. Or even slow down. You have to admire Cooper’s technique. Not hitting the guy had done the trick. “A bunch of guys and I got in trouble for smoking pot in the dorm, you know, and we had to go see the dorm director—Rachel—for sanctioning. We all thought we were gonna get kicked outta school. So some of the guys, they were like, ‘Chris, put the moves on her,’ ’cause, I dunno, I was a little older than they were, and I had this reputation with the girls, you know?”

I envision Rachel—in her Manolo Blahniks and tailored Armani—being hit on by this smooth-talking, golden-haired Adonis. No, he isn’t the suave businessman she’d been hoping to attract with her rock-hard glutes and blown-out hair.

But he has to have been the closest thing she was likely to get to it in Richmond, Indiana.

“Anyway, she let us off. For the pot-smoking thing, you know? Said it would be our little secret.” There’s a smirk in Chris’s voice. But it isn’t a happy smirk. “At first I thought it was because of whom my father is. But then we started running into each other in the cafeteria and stuff. More like—well, she’d run into me, you know? And the guys were like, ‘Go for it, man. You start going with the dorm director, we can get away with anything we want.’ And I had nothing else going on, you know, lady-wise, so I figured, ‘Why not?’ And one thing led to another, and then, well, we were an item, I guess.”

He ducks under an archway, and we follow, through an open sliding glass door and into a dimly lit, sunken living room, where the primary decorating theme appears to be black leather. The couches are black leather. The ottomans are black leather. Even the mantel appears to be encased in black leather.

But surely not. I mean, wouldn’t that catch on fire?

“Turns out, I was her first,” Chris explains, going to the mantel and twisting a dial. Suddenly the room is bathed in an unearthly pink light. If I hadn’t known better, I’d have thought we’d walked into a bordello. Or maybe one of those oxygen bars in SoHo. “She wasn’t always as… put together as she looks now. She was actually kinda… well, when I knew her, back in Richmond, Rachel was kinda fat.”

I blink at him. “What?”

Cooper throws me a warning glance. Chris is on a roll, and Cooper doesn’t want me interrupting.

“You know.” He shrugs. “She was fat. Well, not fat, really. But like… chubby. And she wore sweats all the time. I don’t know what happened to her, you know, between now and then, but she slimmed down, majorly, and got, I don’t know, like a makeover, or something. Because back then… I don’t know.”

“Wait.” I am having trouble processing this. “Rachel was fat?”

“Yeah.” He shrugs. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe there is less… pressure being with someone who doesn’t have anyone else to measure you by. There was definitely something—I dunno—exciting about being with this older chick who was so smart in some ways, and so dumb in others… ”

“She was fat?” I am seriously stunned. “She runs like four miles a day! She eats nothing but lettuce. With no dressing!”

“Well,” Chris says, with another shrug. “Maybe now. Not back then. She told me she’d been heavy her whole life, and that’s why she’d never… you know. Had a guy before.”

Whoa. Rachel had still been a virgin post—grad school? Hadn’t she metanyone in high school? In college, even?

Apparently not.

“So how long did this go on? This affair,” Cooper asks, apparently in an effort to get me off the Rachel was fat? thing.

Chris sinks down onto one of the black leather couches, not seeming to care whether he got the cushions wet. When you’re as rich as he is, I guess things like that don’t matter.

“Till midway through my senior year. That’s when I realized I had to start really studying, you know, to get decent scores on my LSATs. After letting me goof off through most of my twenties, my parents were riding me, you know, to get into law school. I told her—Rachel—that I was going to hafta play it cool for a while. It seemed like a good time to break it off. I mean, it wasn’t like it could go anywhere, her and me, after I graduated. No way was I sticking around Richmond.”

“Did you tell her that?” Cooper asks.

“Tell her what?”

I see a muscle in Cooper’s jaw twitch. “Did you tell Rachel that it couldn’t go anywhere?” he elaborates, with forced patience.

“Oh.” Chris doesn’t meet either of our gazes. “Yeah.”

“And?”

“And she flipped on me, man. I mean, really flipped. Started screaming, tearing stuff up. She picked up my computer monitor and threw it across the quad, no joke. I was so scared, I moved in with some buddies of mine off-campus for the rest of the year.”