Meg Cabot - Size 12 Is Not Fat

I can’t help staring at him as he puts down his beer bottle and stands up. Cooper really is a choice specimen. In the fading sunlight, he looks particularly tanned. But it isn’t, I know, a tan from a can, like his brother’s. Coop’s tan is from sitting for hours behind some bushes with a telephoto lens pointed at a motel room doorway…

Not that Cooper has ever told me what, exactly, he does all day.

“You’re working?” I ask, squinting up at him. “On a Saturday night? Doing what?”

He chuckles. It’s like a little game between us. I try to trick him into letting slip what kind of case he’s working on, and he refuses to take the bait. Cooper takes his clients’ rights to privacy seriously.

Also, he thinks his cases are way too kinky for his kid brother’s ex-girlfriend to hear about. To Cooper, I think I’ll always be a fifteen-year-old in a halter top and ponytail, proclaiming from a mall stage that I’m suffering from a sugar rush.

“Nice try,” Cooper says. “What are you going to do?”

I think about it. Magda is pulling a double at the cash register in the café, and would want to go straight home afterward to wash the smell of Tater Tots out of her hair. I could call my friend Patty—one of my former backup dancers from the Sugar Rush tour, and one of the few friends I have left from back when I’d been in the music business.

But she’s married now, with a baby, and doesn’t have much time for her single friends anymore.

I realize I’m probably going to spend this night as I spend most other nights—either doing Cooper’s data entry or twiddling around with my guitar, a pencil, and some blank sheet music, trying to compose a song that, unlike “Sugar Rush,” doesn’t make me want to puke every time I hear it.

“Oh,” I say casually. “Nothing.”

“Well, don’t stay up too late doing nothing,” Cooper says. “If Jordan’s still out there when I leave, I’ll call the cops and have that Beemer of his towed.”

I smile at him, touched. When I do get my medical degree, one of the first things I’m going to do is ask Cooper out. He can’t seem to resist super-educated women, so who knows? Maybe he’ll even say yes.

“Thanks,” I say.

“Don’t mention it.”

Cooper goes inside, taking his radio with him, leaving Lucy and me alone in the slowly creeping shadows. I sit there for a while after he’s gone, finishing the rest of my beer, and gazing up at Fischer Hall. The building looks so homey, so tranquil. It’s hard to believe it had been the scene of so much sadness a little earlier in the day.

It isn’t until it has grown dark enough that lights begin appearing in the windows of Fischer Hall that I finally go inside.

And when I do, it hits me that Cooper’s warning when I’d told him I was going to do nothing tonight had been a bit on the wry side. Is it possible that he knows that I hadn’t really meant what I said? Is it possible that he knows what I do every night… and that it isn’t nothing? Can he hear my guitar all the way downstairs?

No way.

But then why had he said the word nothing like that? So… I don’t know.Meaningfully?

I can’t figure it out.

But then, let’s face it, guys have always been something of a mystery to me.

Still, when I get out my guitar that night, I play it extra softly, just in case Cooper does come home unexpectedly. I’m not about to let anyone—not even Coop—hear my latest stuff. Not after the way his dad laughed at me the day I played it for him, not too long before Jordan and I broke up.

Angry-girl rocker shit, Grant Cartwright called my songs.Why don’t you leave the songwriting to the pros, he’d said,and stick to doing what you do best, which is belting out top forty and power ballads? By the way, have you put on some weight?

One of these days, I’m going to show Grant Cartwright what an angry-girl rockerreally looks like.

Later, as I’m washing my face before bed, I look out the window and see Fischer Hall all lit up against the night sky. I can see the tiny forms of students, moving around in their rooms, and can hear, faintly, the sound of music being played from a few of those rooms.

It’s true someone in that building died today. But it’s also true that, for everyone else, life goes on.

And it’s going on now, as girls primp in front of their bathroom mirrors in preparation for going out, and boys chug Rolling Rocks as they wait for the girls.

Meanwhile, through the vents along the side of the building, I see intermittent flashes of light as the elevators glide silently up and down their shafts.

And I can’t help wondering what happened. What made her do it?

Or…

Who?

On Monday, Sarah and I let ourselves into Elizabeth’s room to pack up all her belongings.

This is because her parents are too distraught to do it themselves, and ask that the residence hall director’s office do it for them.

Which I can totally understand. I mean, the last thing you expect when you send your kid off to college is that three weeks later, you’re going to get a call informing you that your daughter is dead, and that you need to come to the city to pick up all her stuff.

Especially when your kid is as straitlaced as Elizabeth seemed to be… at least, judging from her things, which Sarah inventoried (so that later, if the Kelloggs noticed something missing, they couldn’t accuse us of having stolen it, something Dr. Jessup said had unfortunately happened before in cases of students’ deaths), while I packed. I mean, the girl had seven Izods. Seven! She didn’t even own a black bra. Her panties were all white cotton Hanes Her Way.

I am sorry, but girls who wear Hanes Her Way do not elevator surf.

Except that I am clearly in the minority in this belief. Sarah, as she records each item I pull from Elizabeth’s dresser, pontificates on the finer points of schizophrenia, the disease she’s currently studying in her psych class. Symptoms of schizophrenia don’t generally show up in its sufferers until they are the age Elizabeth was at her death, Sarah informs me. She goes on to say it’s probable that that’s what prompted Elizabeth’s uncharacteristic daring the night of her death. The voices she heard in her head, I mean.

Sarah could have a point. It certainly wasn’t Elizabeth’s alleged boyfriend, as Cooper had suggested. I know, because first thing Monday morning—before I even grabbed a bagel and coffee from the café—I checked the sign-in logs from Friday night.

But there’s nothing there. Elizabeth hadn’t signed anyone in.

While Sarah and I spend the entire day packing Elizabeth’s things—never encountering her roommate, who appears to spend every waking hour in class—Rachel is busy arranging the campus memorial service for the deceased, as well as getting the bursar’s office to refund Elizabeth’s tuition and housing fees for the year.

Not that the Kelloggs seem to appreciate it. At the me morial service in the student chapel later on that week (which I don’t attend, since Rachel says she wants an adult presence in the office while she’s out, in case a student needs counseling, or something—the residence hall staff is very concerned about how Elizabeth’s death might affect the rest of the building’s population, although so far they’ve shown no sign of being traumatized), Mrs. Kellogg assures all present, in strident tones, that the college isn’t going to get away with causing her daughter’s death, and that she herself isn’t going to rest until the parties responsible are punished (at least according to Pete, who pulled a double and was guarding the chapel doors at the time).

Mrs. Kellogg refuses to believe that any sort of reckless behavior on Elizabeth’s part might have brought about her own death, and insists that when her daughter’s blood work is returned in two weeks, we’ll see that she’s right: Elizabeth never drank, and certainly never did drugs, and so was not hanging out with a bunch of trippy elevator surfers the night of her death.

No, according to Mrs. Kellogg, Elizabeth was pushed down that elevator shaft—and no one’s going to tell her otherwise.

Mr. and Mrs. Kellogg weren’t the only ones going through a hard time in the aftermath of their daughter’s death, however. After seeing what Rachel went through that week, I started to understand what Dr. Jessup had meant. About the flowers, I mean. Rachel totally deserved some.

Really, what she deserves is a raise.

But, knowing the college’s general stinginess—there’s been a hiring freeze since the nineties, which is lifted only for emergency appointments, like my replacing Justine—I doubt a raise is forthcoming.

So on Thursday, the day after the memorial service, I slip out to the deli around the corner, and instead of buying my self a pack of Starburst, an afternoon pick-me-up latte, and a lottery ticket, as is my daily ritual, pick up instead their best bouquet of roses, which I then put in a vase on Rachel’s desk.

It’s actually scary how excited she gets when she walks in from whatever meeting she’s been attending, and finds them.

“For me?” she asks, tears—I’m not kidding—practically springing from her eyes.

“Well,” I say. “Yes. I feel bad about all you’ve been going through—”

The tears dry up pretty quick after that.

“Oh, they’re from you,” she says, in a different voice.

“Um,” I say. “Yeah.”

I guess maybe Rachel thought the flowers were from a guy, or something. Maybe she met one recently at the gym. Though if she had, I’m sure Sarah and I would have heard about it. Rachel’s way serious about it—finding a guy to settle down with, I mean. She fully stays on top of her weekly manicure and pedicure appointments, and she gets her roots done twice a month (she’s a brunette, so she says her gray really shows). And of course she exercises like a demon, either at the college gym, or by running around Washington Square Park. I guess four times around the park is a mile or something. Rachel can go around like twelve times in half an hour.

I have pointed out that she can get the same health benefits from walking around the park that she can from running around it, while avoiding shin splints and knee problems in later life. But every time I mention this, she just looks at me.

“It’s been hard on all of us, Heather” is what Rachel says now, slipping an arm around my shoulders. “It hasn’t been easy for you, either. Don’t deny it.”

She’s right, but not for the reasons she thinks. She thinks it’s been hard on me because I’ve had to do a lot of the grunt work—you know, begging for boxes from Maintenance to put Elizabeth’s stuff in, then packing them, then dragging them to Mail Services to ship them, not to mention rescheduling all of Rachel’s judicial hearings, dealing with the whiny student workers (who insist they should get bereavement days off from doing the mail, even though none of them actually knew the deceased—Justine would have given them time off, they claim).

But to tell the truth, none of that had been as hard as admitting to myself that Fischer Hall, which I’d come to think of, since I’d starting working there, as one of the safest places in the world, is actually… not.

Oh, not that I have any proof that Elizabeth did get pushed, the way Mrs. Kellogg thinks. But the fact that she’d died at all… that part has me fully wigging. The students who go to New York College are pretty spoiled, for the most part. They have no idea how good they have it, these kids… loving parents, a stable source of income, nothing to worry about except passing midterms and snagging a ride home for Thanksgiving break.

I myself haven’t been as carefree as they are since… well, since the ninth grade.

And the fact that one of them did something so incredibly stupid as jump on top of an elevator and try to ride it—or worse, jump from the top of one car to another—and that someone else—someone in this building—was there at the time, and witnessed it—saw Elizabeth slip and fall to her death, and yet hadn’t come forward…