Meg Cabot - Size 12 Is Not Fat

“Oh, wow, Rachel,” I say, amending my previous thought. She’s definitely crazy. Nuts, even. “That’s really funny. But you know what? I have to go now. Cooper’s waiting by the guard’s desk. If I’m gone too long, he’s bound to come back here, looking for me.”

“He can look all he wants,” Rachel says with a shrug. “He doesn’t have a key. And we aren’t going to let him in. We’re working, Heather. We have a lot of important work to do.”

“Well, you know what, Rachel?” I say. “If we don’t open the door, Cooper’ll just have Pete call one of the RAs to let him in—”

“But the RAs don’t have keys to the office anymore. I had the lock changed.” Rachel’s cheeks have twin spots of color in them now, and her eyes sparkle every bit as brightly as the thin volt of electricity that leaps from the prongs of the weapon clenched in her hand.

“That’s right,” she says happily. “I had the lock changed yesterday, while you were in the hospital, and I’m the only one with a key.” Then she turns those too-bright eyes on me and says, “You understand, don’t you, Heather? I mean, this isn’t a career for you. This is just a job. Assistant director to Fischer Hall. It’s just a rest stop between gigs, isn’t it? A steady paycheck until you get the guts to go on the road again after your little dispute with your record company. That’s all this position is to you. Not like me. Higher education is my life. My life, Heather. Or at least it was. Until—”

She stops speaking suddenly, her gaze, which had become a little unfocused, fastening on me like a vise. “Until him,” she says, simply.

I want to sit down. My knees shake every time I glance at the weapon in Rachel’s hand.

But I don’t dare. Seated, I’m an even easier target. No, somehow I have to distract her from whatever it is she intends to do to Sarah and me—and I have a pretty good idea what that is.

“Him, Rachel?” I ask, trying to sound friendly, like we’re just chatting over cups of coffee in the cafeteria, something we’d actually done, once or twice, before the killing had begun. “You mean Christopher, don’t you?”

She laughs bitterly, and that laugh makes me more afraid than anything so far, even the stun gun.

“Christopher,” she says, rolling the word on her tongue like it’s a piece of chocolate—something Rachel never allowed herself to enjoy. Too fattening. “Yes. Chris. You wouldn’t understand about Christopher, Heather. You see, I love him. You’ve never loved anyone before, Heather, except yourself, so you can’t know what it’s like. No, you can’t know what it’s like to feel that all your happiness in life is dependent on one single individual, and then—and then to have that individual turn around and reject you—”

The look she gives me could have frozen a hot buttered bagel. I think about mentioning that I know exactly what she’s talking about… that this is how I’d felt about Jordan, who is at this very moment probably playing Mad Libs with Tania Trace in his hospital bed.

But somehow I don’t think she’d listen.

“No, you wouldn’t understand that,” Rachel says. “You’ve always had everything you’ve ever wanted, haven’t you, Heather? Handed to you on a silver platter. Some of us have had to work for what we want, you know. Take me, for example. You think I always looked this good?” Rachel runs a hand up and down her lean, hard, thousand-crunches-a-day abs. “Hell, no. I used to be fat. A real lard ass. Kind of like you are now, actually. A size twelve.” She laughs. “I drowned my sorrows in candy bars, never worked out, like you. Do you know I never got asked out—never, not once, until I turned thirty? While you were strutting around like a little slut for Cartwright Records, I had my nose buried in my books, studying as hard as I could, because I knew no one was going to swoop down and offer me a recording contract. I knew if I wanted out of my hellhole of a life, I was going to have to use my head.”

I glance at Sarah. She’s looking out the window, desperately hoping, I can tell, that someone will walk by and notice what’s going on inside.

But it’s raining so hard, no one is on the street. And the few people who are out hurry past with their heads tucked beneath umbrellas.

“It was the same with him,” Rachel says. “I wanted him, so I did what I had to in order to get him. I knew I wasn’t his type. I figured that out after he… left me. Which is when I knew. I knew I had to make myself over to be his type. You wouldn’t understand that, of course. You and Sarah, you think men should want you because of your personality, don’t you? But men couldn’t care less about your personality. Believe me. If you hadn’t let yourself go the way you did, Heather, you’d still have Jordan Cartwright, you know. All that fuss about wanting to sing your own songs. My God, you think he cared about that? Men don’t care about smarts. After all, what’s the difference between a blond and a mosquito?”

I shake my head. “Honest to God, Rachel, I don’t—”

“A blond keeps on sucking, even after you slap her.” Rachel throws back her head and laughs some more.

Oh yeah. I’m a dead woman. No doubt about it.

She’s crazy. I mean, only a lunatic would stand there, telling me dumb blond jokes, while threatening me with a stun gun.

I’ve dealt with lunatics before. I worked in the music industry all those years. Nine out of every ten people I’d met back then had probably been clinically insane, including my own mother.

Can I talk Rachel out of trying to kill me?

Well, I can try.

“Seems to me,” I say carefully, “that the person you ought to be angry with is Christopher Allington. He’s the one who did you wrong, Rachel. He’s the one who betrayed you. How come you’ve never tried to toast him?”

“Because he’s my future husband, Heather.” Rachel glares at me. “God, don’t you get it? I know you think men are disposable. I mean, things didn’t work out with Jordan, so you’ve just moved on to his brother. But I, unlike you, believe in true love. Which is what Christopher and I have. I just need to get rid of a few distractions, and then he’ll come around.”

“Rachel,” I say, appealing to whatever is left that might still be normal inside her. “Those distractions. They’re human beings.”

“Well, it’s not my fault the poor things were so heartbroken when Christopher dumped them that they did something as reckless as attempt to elevator surf. I tried my best to counsel them. You, too, Heather. Although no one will be very surprised to see you’ve chosen to take your own life. You don’t have that much to live for anymore, after all.”

Her thought process is so skewed that I can’t quite follow it. But now that she’s made it clear that I’m her next victim, I’m doing some pretty fast talking, let me tell you.

“But, Rachel, it will never work. I already went to the cops—”

“And did they believe you?” Rachel asks calmly. “When they find your broken, bleeding body, they’ll know you just did the whole thing to get attention—planted that bomb, then killed yourself when you realized you’d been discovered. And it won’t even be so hard to understand, since your life’s been in such a downward spiral lately. Jordan getting engaged to that other girl. His brother—well, his brother just doesn’t seem interested, does he, Heather? And you and I both know how much you’re in love with him. It’s written all over your face every time he walks into the room.”

Is that true? Does everyone know I love Cooper? Does Cooper know I love Cooper? God, how embarrassing.

Wait a minute. What am I listening to this lunatic for, anyway?

“Fine, Rachel,” I say, playing along because it seems like the only way out. “Fine. Kill me. But what about Sarah? I mean, what’s poor Sarah ever done to you? Why don’t you let Sarah go.”

“Sarah?” Rachel glances at her graduate assistant as if she’s only just remembered she’s in the room. “Oh, right. Sarah. You know, I think Sarah’s going to just… disappear.”

Sarah lets out a frightened hiccup, but a stony look from Rachel silences her.

“Yes,” Rachel say. “I think Sarah is going to go home for a few weeks to recover from the horror of your death, Heather. Only she’s not going to make it. She’s going to disappear somewhere along the way. Hey. It happens.”

“Oh no, Rachel, please,” Sarah chokes. “Please don’t make me disappear. Please—”

“Shut up,” Rachel screams. She raises a hand to hit Sarah again, but freezes when the phone on my desk rings, jangling so loudly that Rachel jumps, and the blue streak of lightning between the blades of the gun sways dangerously close to me. I leap back, falling against the door, and spin around to grasp the knob.

In a split second, Rachel is on me, a spindly arm going around my neck, choking me. She’s surprisingly strong for such a slight woman. But even so, I could have shaken her off…

… could have if it hadn’t been for the sputtering stun gun, which she shoves beneath my nose, hissing, “Don’t try it. Don’t even think about it. I’ll blast you, Heather, I swear it. And then I’ll kill you both.”

I freeze, breathing hard. Rachel is plastered to my back like a cape. The phone keeps on ringing, three times, four. I can tell by the ring that it’s an on-campus call. I whisper, my voice rough with fear, “Rachel, that’s probably the reception desk calling. You know I told Cooper to wait outside for me. He’s at the guard’s station.”

“In that case,” Rachel says, releasing her stranglehold on my neck but keeping the stun gun within inches of my throat, “we’ll be on our way. I’ll deal with you”—she flings a warning look in Sarah’s direction—“later.”

Then she opens the office door and, glancing furtively left and right, shoves me out into the empty hallway…

… but not far enough that she isn’t within blasting range. She directs me to the elevators across from our office door—the elevators that were, unfortunately for me, unscathed by yesterday’s explosion in the service shaft—and pounds on the up button. I pray that the doors will open and the entire basketball team will emerge and tackle Rachel for me.

But no such luck. The cab has been sitting empty on the first floor, and when the doors slide apart, there’s no one inside.

“Get in,” Rachel orders, and I do as she says. Rachel follows, then inserts her pass key and presses twenty.

We’re going to the penthouse. And there won’t be any other stops along the way.

“Girls like you, Heather,” Rachel says, not looking at me. “I’ve been dealing with girls like you my whole life. The pretty ones are all alike. You go through life thinking everybody owes you something. You get the record contracts and the promotions and the cute guys, while people like me? We’re the ones who do all the work. Do you know that Pansy is the first award I’ve received in my field?”

I glare at her. This woman is going to kill me. I don’t see any reason to be polite to her anymore.

“Yeah,” I say. “And you got it for cleaning up after your own murders. That stuff in those girls’ files—about Elizabeth’s mom wanting her sign-in privileges revoked, and Mrs. Pace not liking Lakeisha—that stuff never even happened, did it? Those women never called you. You made all that stuff up, as a way to justify your meetings with those girls. What did you talk about when you were meeting with them, anyway? What kind of twisted, sick stuff were you terrorizing them with?”

“Heather.” Rachel looks at me critically. “You’ll never understand, will you? I’ve worked hard all my life for what I have. I never got anything easily, like you. Not anything, men, jobs, friends. What I do get, I keep. Like Christopher, for instance. And this job. Do you have any idea how hard it was to get myself a position at this school, in the same building as him? So you understand why you have to die. You’re jeopardizing too much for me. If you hadn’t started snooping around, I’d have let you live. We made a nice team, you and I, I always thought. I mean, when I stand next to you, I look extra thin. That’s a real bonus in an assistant.”