Size 12 Is Not Fat Read online

  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 rocker really 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?

  7

  * * *

  Rocket Pop

  Like honey straight/From the hive

  Rocket Pop

  Only thing keeping/Me alive

  Rocket Pop

  Don’t knock it/Till you’ve tried it

  Rocket Pop

  You know you want it/Don’t deny it

  Rocket Pop

  When he’s around/I can’t stop

  Rocket Pop

  My eye-candy/My rocket pop

  “Rocket Pop”

  Performed by Heather Wells

  Composed by Dietz/Ryder

  From the album Rocket Pop

  Cartwright Records

  * * *

  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 caf—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 memorial 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 myself 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, b
egging 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…

  That’s what was really freaking me out.

  Of course, Cooper is probably right. Probably, whoever was with Elizabeth at the time of her death doesn’t want to come forward because he’s afraid he’ll get in trouble.

  And I suppose it’s even possible Sarah’s right, and Elizabeth could have been suffering from the early stages of schizophrenia, or even a clinical depression, brought out by a hormone imbalance, or something, and that’s what made her do it.

  But we’re never going to know. That’s the thing. We’re never going to know.

  And that just isn’t right.

  But it doesn’t seem to bother anybody but Mrs. Kellogg.

  And me.

  That Friday—nearly a week after Elizabeth’s death—Sarah and I are sitting in the hall director’s office, ordering stuff from Office Supply. Not ceramic heaters to give away to our friends, but actual stuff we need, like pens and paper for the copy machine and stuff.

  Well, okay, I’m doing the ordering. Sarah is lecturing me about how my weight gain probably represents a subconscious urge to make myself unattractive to the opposite sex, so that none of them can hurt me again the way Jordan hurt me.

  I am refraining from pointing out to Sarah that I am not, in fact, fat. I have already told her, several times, that size 12 is the size of the average American woman, something Sarah should well know, since she is, in fact, a size 12, too.

  But it’s pretty clear to me by now that Sarah just likes to talk to hear the sound of her own voice, so I let her go on, since she has no one else to talk to, Rachel being in the cafeteria attending a breakfast reception for the New York College basketball team, the Pansies.

  Yes, that’s really their name. The Pansies. They used to be called the Cougars or something, but about twenty years ago a bunch of them got caught cheating, so the NCAA dropped them from Division I to Division III, and made them change their name.

  As if being called the Pansies isn’t embarrassing enough, President Allington is so hot to win the Division III championship this year that he’s recruited the tallest players he can find. But since the good ones all went to Division I or II schools, he just got the leftovers, like the ones with the worst academic records in the country. Seriously. Sometimes the players write notes to me about things that are wrong with their rooms, in barely legible handwriting, with many spelling errors. Here’s an example:

  “Deer Heather. Theirs something wrong with my toilet. It wont flosh and keeps making this sond. Pleaze help.”

  Here’s another:

  “To who it conserns: My bed is not long enuf. Can I have new bed. Thanx.”

  I swear I am not making this stuff up.

  Sarah and I don’t hear the scream, although later we hear that she apparently screamed the whole way down.

  What we do hear are running footsteps in the hallway, and then one of the RAs, Jessica Brandtlinger, skids into the office.

  “Heather!” Jessica cries. Her normally pale face has gone white as paper, and she is breathing hard. “It happened again. The elevator shaft. We heard a scream. You can see her legs through the crack between the floor and the car—”

  I am up before she’s gotten half a sentence out.

  “Call nine-one-one,” I yell to Sarah, on my way out. “Then find Rachel!”

  I follow Jessica down the hall toward the guard desk and the stairs to the basement. Pete, I see, is not at his desk. We find him already in the basement, standing in front of the elevator bank, shouting into his walkie-talkie as Carl, one of the janitors, is trying to pry open the elevator doors with a crowbar.

  “Yes, another one,” Pete is yelling into his walkie-talkie. “No, I’m not joking. Get an ambulance here fast!” Seeing us, he lowers the walkie-talkie, points at Jessica, and shouts, “You: Go back upstairs and call this car”—he slaps the door to the left-hand cab—“to the first floor and hold it there. Don’t let anyone on or off, and whatever you do, don’t let the doors close until the fire department gets here and turns it off. Heather, find the key.”

  I curse myself for not grabbing it on my way downstairs. We keep a set of elevator keys behind the reception desk: an override key, like the ones the Allingtons were issued when they moved in, so they can bypass floors on their way to the penthouse; a key to the motor room for repairs; and a key that opens the doors from the outside.

  “Got it!” I yell, and tear back up the stairs, right behind Jessica, who has run back up the stairs to call the elevator to the first floor and hold it there.

  When I get to the reception desk, I tear open the door and rush through it, heading straight for the key cabinet, which is supposed to remain locked at all times—only the desk worker on duty is allowed to hold the key.

  But with the building maintenance staff, and resident assistants constantly borrowing keys so they can make repairs, clean, or let locked-out students into their rooms, the key cabinet is rarely, if ever, locked, the way it’s supposed to be. I find the doors to it yawning wide open as I flash by Tina, the desk worker on duty.

  “What’s going on?” Tina asks, nervously. “Is it true there’s another one? At the bottom of the elevator shaft?”

  I ignore her. That’s because I’m concentrating. I’m concentrating because I have found the elevator override key, and the key to the motor room.

  But the key to the elevator doors is gone.

  And when I check the sign-out sheet hanging on the door to the key cabinet, there is no signature for it, or any indication it was ever checked out in the first place.

  “Where’s the key?” I demand, swinging on Tina. “Who has the elevator door key?”

  “I—I d-don’t know,” Tina stammers. “It wasn’t there when I came on duty. You can check my duty sheet!”

  Another change to the way Justine had run things that I’d implemented upon being hired—besides the key sign-out sheet—was forcing the desk workers to keep a log of what happened during the shift. If someone borrowed a key—even if they signed it out—the desk worker was still supposed to record the fact on his or her duty sheet. And the first thing a desk worker was supposed to do upon arriving at the desk was jot down which keys were in and which were out.

  “Then who has it?” I cry, grabbing the logbook and flipping to the previous desk worker’s duty sheet.

  But while there are entries for every other key taken during the previous worker’s shift, there’s nothing about the elevator door key.

  “I don’t know!” Tina’s voice is rising to dangerously hysterical levels. “I swear I didn’t give it out to anyone!”

  I believe h
er. But that doesn’t help the situation.

  I whirl around to run back downstairs and tell Carl to break down the doors, if he has to. But my way is blocked by President Allington who, along with some other administrative types, has come out of the cafeteria to see what all the commotion’s about.

  “We’re trying to have an event in there, you know,” is what he snaps to me.

  “Yeah?” I hear myself snapping back. “Well, we’re trying to save someone’s life out here, you know.”

  I don’t stick around to hear what he has to say in reply to that. I’ve grabbed the first aid kit from the desk and am racing back down the stairs…only to encounter Pete, looking pale, making his way slowly back up them.

  “I couldn’t find the key,” I say. “Someone’s got it. He’s going to have to force the doors open…”

  But Pete is shaking his head.

  “He already did,” Pete says, taking my arm. “Come on back upstairs.”

  “But I’ve got the kit,” I say, waving the red plastic case. “Is—”

  “She’s gone,” Pete says. Now he’s pulling on me. “Come on. And don’t look. You don’t want to look.”

  I believe him.

  I let him steer me up the stairs. As we enter the lobby, I see that the president is still there, standing around with some basketball players and the same administrators in their gray suits. Beside them, Magda, who has emerged from behind her cash register to see what’s going on, makes a bright splash of color in her pink smock and fuchsia hot pants.

  Magda takes one look at my expression, and her face crumples. “Oh no! Not another of my movie stars!”

  Pete ignores her, goes to the phone by the security desk, and holding up a key chain, on which is attached a student ID card—and a little rubber replica of the cartoon character Ziggy—begins reading the information from the ID card to his superiors at the security office.

  “Roberta Pace,” he reads tonelessly. “Fischer Hall resident. First year. ID number five five seven, three nine—”