Meg Cabot - Size 12 Is Not Fat

“We saw her roommate.” Brad—the guy with the misfortune to be the resident assistant on duty this weekend, meaning he has to stay in the building at all times, in case he’s needed… like in the event of a student death—drops his voice conspiratorially as he leans across the desk toward me. “She said she didn’t even know Beth—that’s the dead girl—she said she didn’t even know Bethknew about surfing. She said she had no idea Beth hung out with that crowd. She said Beth was kindapreppie.”

“Well,” I say, lamely. I can tell the kids are looking for some kind of words of comfort from me. But what do I know about helping kids cope with the death of a classmate? I’m as freaked as either one of them. “I guess it just goes to show you never really quite know someone as well as you think you do, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah, but going for a joyride on top of an elevator?” Tina shakes her head. “She musta been crazy.”

“Prozac candidate,” Brad somberly agrees, exhibiting some of that sensitivity training the housing department has drilled so hard into their RAs’ heads.

“Heather?”

I turn to see Rachel’s graduate assistant, Sarah, coming toward me, a thick file in her hands. Garbed as always in the height of New York College graduate student chic—overalls and Uggs—she grabs my arm and squeezes.

“Ohmigod,” Sarah says, making no attempt whatsoever to lower her voice so that it isn’t audible to everyone on the entire first floor. “Can you believe it? The phones are ringing off the hook back in the office. All these parents are calling to make sure it wasn’t their kid. But Rachel says we can’t confirm the deceased’s identity until the coroner arrives. Even though we know who it is. I mean, Rachel had me get her file and told me to give it to Dr. Flynn. And would you look at this file?”

Sarah waves the thickly packed manila file. Elizabeth Kellogg had a record in the hall director’s office, which means that she’d either gotten in trouble for something or been ill at some point during the school year…

… which is odd, because Elizabeth was a freshman, and the fall semester had only just begun.

“Getta loada this.” Sarah is eager to share all she knows with me, Brad, and Tina. The latter two are listening to her with wide eyes. Pete, over at the guard’s desk, is acting like he’s busy watching his monitors. But I know he’s listening, too. “Her mother called Rachel, all bent out of shape because we allow residents to have any guests they want, and she didn’t want Elizabeth to be able to sign in boys. Apparently Mom expected her daughter to remain a virgin until marriage. She wanted Rachel to make it so that Elizabeth was only to be allowed to sign in girls. Obviously there are issues at home, but whatever—”

It’s the job of the GA—or graduate assistant—to assist the director in the day-to-day operations of the residence hall. In return, GAs receive free room and board and practical experience in higher education, which is generally their chosen field.

Sarah’s getting a lot more practical experience in the field here in Fischer Hall than she’d bargained on, what with a dead girl and all.

“Clearly there was some major mother-daughter rivalry going on there,” Sarah informs us. “I mean, you could tell Mrs. Kellogg was jealous because her looks are fading while her daughter’s—”

Sarah’s undergrad degree is in sociology. Sarah thinks that I suffer from low esteem. She told me this the day she met me, at check-in two weeks earlier, when she went to shake my hand, then cried, “Oh my God, you’re that Heather Wells?”

When I admitted that I was, then told her—when she asked what on earth I was doing working in a college residence hall (unlike me, Sarah never messes up and calls it a dorm)—that I was hoping to get a BA one of these days, she said, “You don’t need to go to college. What you need to work on are your abandonment issues and the feelings of inadequacy you must feel for being dropped from your label and robbed by your mother.”

Which is kind of funny, since what I feel I need to work on most are my feelings of dislike for Sarah.

Fortunately Dr. Flynn, the housing department’s on-staff psychologist, comes hurtling toward us just then, his briefcase overflowing with paperwork.

“Is that the deceased’s file?” he demands, by way of greeting. “I’d like to see it before I talk to the roommate and call the parents.”

Sarah hands him the file. As Dr. Flynn flips through it, he suddenly wrinkles his nose, then asks, “What is that smell?”

“Um,” I say. “Mrs. Allington sort of—well, she, um… ”

“She yorked,” Brad says. “In the planter over there.”

Dr. Flynn sighs. “Not again.” His cell phone chimes, and he says, “Excuse me,” and reaches for it.

At the same moment, the reception desk phone rings. Everyone looks down at it. When no one else reaches for it, I do.

“Fischer Hall,” I say.

The voice on the other end of the phone isn’t one I recognize.

“Yes, is this that dormitory located on Washington Square West?”

“This is a residence hall, yes,” I reply, remembering, for once, my training.

“I was wondering if I could speak to someone about the tragedy that occurred there earlier today,” says the unfamiliar voice.

Tragedy?I immediately become suspicious.

“Are you a reporter?” I ask. At this point in my life, I can sniff them out a mile away.

“Well, yes, I’m with the Post— ”

“Then you’ll have to get in touch with the Press Relations Department. No one here has any comment. Good-bye.” I slam down the receiver.

Brad and Tina are staring at me.

“Wow,” Brad says. “You’re good.”

Sarah gives her glasses a push, since they’ve started to slide down her nose.

“She ought to be,” she says. “Considering what she’s had to deal with. The paparazzi wasn’t exactly kind, were they, Heather? Especially when you walked in and found Jordan Cartwright receiving fellatio from… who was it? Oh yes. Tania Trace.”

“Wow,” I say, gazing at Sarah with genuine wonder. “You really put that photographic memory of yours to good use, don’t you, Sarah?”

Sarah smiles modestly while Tina’s jaw drops.

“Heather, you went out with Jordan Cartwright?” she cries.

“You caught him getting head from Tania Trace?” Brad looks as happy as if someone’s just dropped a hundred-dollar bill in his lap.

“Um,” I say. It’s not like I have much of a choice. They can easily Google it. “Yeah. It was a long time ago.”

Then I excuse myself to go search for a soda, hoping a combined jolt of caffeine and artificial sweeteners might make me feel less like causing there to be yet another death among the building’s student population.

The closest soda machine is located in the TV lounge, where all of the college’s crisis management people are congregated. I don’t want to risk asking Magda for a free one from the café when she’s already in trouble with her boss.

I only recognize a few of the many administrators in the lounge, and then only from being interviewed by them when I’d applied for my job. One of them, Dr. Jessup, the head of the housing department, detaches himself from another administrator’s side when he notices me, and comes over, looking very different in his weekend wear of Izod shirt and Dockers than he did in his usual charcoal suits.

“Heather,” Dr. Jessup says, his deep voice gruff. “How’s it going?”

“Okay,” I reply. I’ve already jammed a dollar into the machine, so it’s too late to run away—though I’d like to, since everyone in the room is staring at me, like,Who is that girl? Don’t I know her from somewhere? And what’s she doing here?

Instead of running, I make a selection. The sound of the can hitting the slot at the bottom of the machine is loud in the TV lounge, where conversation is muted out of respect for both the deceased and the grieving, and where the TV, which normally blasts MTV 2 24/7, has been turned off.

I retrieve my can from the machine and hold it in my hands, afraid to open it and attract more undue attention to myself by making noise.

“How do the kids seem to you?” Dr. Jessup wants to know. “In general?”

“I just got here,” I say. “But everybody seems pretty shaken up. Which is, you know, understandable, considering the fact that there’s a dead girl at the bottom of the elevator shaft.”

Dr. Jessup widens his eyes and motions for me to keep my voice down, even though I hadn’t been speaking above a whisper. I look around, and realize there are some administrative bigwigs in the TV lounge. Dr. Jessup is hypersensitive about his department being perceived as a caring, student-oriented one. He prides himself on his ability to relate to the younger generation. I realized this during my first interview, when he’d narrowed his gray eyes at me and asked the inevitable question, the one that makes me want to throw things, but that I can’t seem to escape: “Don’t I know you from somewhere?”

Everyone thinks they’ve seen me somewhere before. They just can’t ever figure out where. I get “Didn’t you go to the prom with my brother?” a lot. Also, “Weren’t you and I in one of the same classes in college?”