Meg Cabot - Big Boned

Instead, I look into the sudsy brown water in the sink.

Then I sigh.

“Let me think about it, Dad, okay?”

I don’t see Dad smile, because of course I’m not looking at him. But I sense the smile anyway.

“Sure thing, honey,” he says. “Just don’t think about it too long. Opportunities like this don’t last forever. Well… you know that from last time.”

Do I ever.

I don’t have a clue anything out of the ordinary is taking place over on Washington Square West until I round the corner of Waverly Place the next morning, sleepily slurping the whipped cream topping off my grande café mocha. (About which, as Gavin would put it, whatevs. Like I totally didn’t go running yesterday. I deserve a little whipped cream. Besides, whipped cream is dairy, and a girl needs dairy to fight off osteoporosis. Everyone knows this.)

I’m licking off my whipped cream mustache when I see it—or think I see it, anyway: a giant rat.

And I don’t mean your everyday, gray-brown, cat-sized subway rat, either. I mean a GIANT, twelve-foot, inflated, semi-lifelike replica of a rat, standing on its hind legs and snarling directly across the street from Fischer Hall’s front door.

But how can this be? What would a twelve-foot inflatable rat be doing in front of my place of work? Could I be seeing things? It’s true I only just woke up. Relishing the fact that I got to sleep in this morning—no running for me—I rolled out of bed at eight-thirty, and, forgoing my morning shower—well, okay, bath. Who bothers with a shower when you can bathe lying down? — I just pulled on a fresh pair of jeans and shirt, ran a brush through my hair, washed my face, slapped on some moisturizer and makeup, and was out the door at five of nine. Time to spare for that grande café mocha. I didn’t even see Cooper or my dad. Both of them being early birds, they were already up and out—Dad had even taken Lucy for her morning walk. I was definitely going to miss that when Dad was gone, that was for sure.

But it doesn’t matter how many times I stand there and squeeze my eyes shut, then reopen them again. The rat doesn’t disappear. I’m fully awake.

Worse, marching back and forth in front of the rat, carrying picket signs that said things like New York College Doesn’t Care About Its Student Employees and Health Care Now! were dozens—maybe hundreds—of protesters. Many of them were raggedy-looking grad students, baggy-pantsed and dreadlocked.

But many more of them were in uniform. Worse, they were in New York College campus security, housekeeping, and engineering uniforms.

And that’s when it struck. The cold, hard terror that crept around my heart like icy tentacles.

Sarah had done it. She had convinced the GSC to strike.

And she’d convinced the other major unions on campus to strike along with it.

If my life were a movie, I’d have tossed my grande café mocha to the sidewalk just then, and sunk slowly to my knees, clutching my head and screaming, “Nooooooooo! WHY???? WHYYYYYY????????”

But since my life isn’t a movie, I settle for tossing my drink—which I suddenly feel way too queasy to finish—into the nearest Big Apple trash receptacle, then crossing the street—after looking both ways (even though it’s one way, of course—you can never be too sure on a college campus if a skateboarder or Chinese food delivery guy on a bike is heading the wrong way)—cutting between the many news vans parked along the sidewalk until I reach a tight circle of reporters clustered around Sarah, who is giving the morning news shows all her best sound bites.

“What I’d like to know,” Sarah is saying, in a loud, clear voice, “is why President Phillip Allington, after assuring the student community that their tuition wouldn’t be raised and that neither he nor his trustees would receive a salary increase this year, went on to raise tuition by six point nine percent, then received a six-figure salary increase—making him the highest paid president of any research college in the nation—while his graduate student teachers are not offered stipends equal to a living wage or health benefits that enable them even to use the student health center!”

A reporter from Channel 7 with hair almost as big as Sarah’s has gotten from lack of sleep (and Frizz-Ease—although I assume the reporter’s hair pouf is on purpose) spins around and points her microphone into a surprised-looking Muffy Fowler’s face. Muffy’s only just stumbled onto the scene… literally stumbled, on her four-inch heels, having just arrived via a cab, clutching a red pocketbook to her tightly cinched Coach trench, and trying to pull stray curls of hair from her heavily glossed lips.

“Ms. Fowler, as college spokesperson, how would you respond to these allegations?” the reporter asks, as Muffy blinks her wide Bambi eyes.

“Well, I’d have to check m-my notes,” Muffy stammers. “B-but it’s my understanding the president donated the difference in his salary between this year and last year b-back to the college—”

“To what?” Sarah calls with a sneer. “The Pansies?”

Everyone laughs. President Allington’s support of the Pansies, New York College’s less than stellar Division Three basketball team, is legendary, even among the reporters.

“I’ll have to check into that,” Muffy says stiffly. “But I can assure you, President Allington is very concerned about—”

“Not concerned enough, apparently,” Sarah goes on, loudly enough to drown Muffy out, and cause every microphone in the vicinity to swing back toward her. “He’s apparently willing to let students at his own college suffer through the last six weeks of their semester without assistant teaching instructors, security guards, and trash removal—”

“That’s not true!” Muffy cries shrilly. “President Allington is totally willing to negotiate! What he won’t be is held hostage by a group of radical leftist socialists!”

I know even before Sarah sucks in her breath that Muffy’s said exactly the wrong thing. The reporters have already lost interest—the networks have moved on to their mid-morning programming anyway, so they’ve begun to pack up their equipment. They’ll be back—maybe—for an update at noon.

But Sarah’s already rallying her troops.

“Did you hear that?” she roars at her fellow picketers. “The president’s spokesperson just called us a bunch of radical leftist socialists! Just because we want fair wages and a health care package! What do you have to say to that?”

There is some confused muttering, mostly because it seems to be so early in the morning, and no one really knows what they’re doing yet. Or possibly because no one heard Sarah properly, on account of all the noise from the news teams packing up. Sarah, apparently realizing this, jumps off the wooden platform she was standing on and heaves a megaphone to her lips.

“People,” she cries, her voice crackling loudly enough that, over in the chess circle, the old men enjoying their first game of the morning hunch their shoulders and glare resentfully over at us. “What do we want?”

The picketers, marching dolefully around the giant rat, reply, “Fair wages.”

“WHAT?” Sarah yells.

“FAIR WAGES,” the picketers reply.

“That’s more like it,” Sarah says. “And when do we want them?”

“NOW,” the picketers reply.

“Holy Christ,” Muffy says, looking at the picketers in a defeated way. I can’t help feeling a little sorry for her. The rat—which has painted-on drool dripping down from its bared, yellow fangs—does look really intimidating, as it sways gently in the soft spring breeze.

“Hang in there,” I say, patting her softly on the shoulder.

“This is because they arrested the kid,” she says, still staring at the rat. “Right?”

“I guess so,” I say.

“But he had a gun,” she says. “I mean… of course he did it. He had a gun.”

“I guess they don’t think so,” I say.

“I’m gonna get fired,” Muffy says. “They hired me to keep this from happening. And now I’m gonna get fired. And I’ve only had this job three weeks. I paid twenty grand in broker’s fees for my place, too. I sold my wedding china for it. I’ll never see that money again.”

I whistle, low and long. “Twenty grand. That must have been some wedding china.”

“Limoges,” Muffy says. “Banded. Eight-piece settings for twenty. Including finger bowls.”

“Man,” I say, appreciatively. Finger bowls. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a finger bowl before. And what does banded mean? I think, dimly, that this is stuff I better start learning about if Tad and I are going to… you know.

This thought makes me feel a little nauseous. Maybe it’s just all that whipped cream on an empty stomach, though. Or the sight of that enormous rat.

That’s when I notice something that makes me forget about my upset stomach.

And that’s Magda, hurrying out of Fischer Hall in her pink smock, and inching her way across the street through the backed-up cabs and toward the picket line, carefully balancing a steaming mug of coffee in her hands…

… which she presents to a picketer in a gray New York College security guard’s uniform, who stops marching, lowers his The Future of Academia Is ON THE LINE sign, and beams at her appreciatively…

And whom I realize is none other that Pete.

Who is not behind his desk like he is supposed to be.