Size 12 Is Not Fat Page 9

  “Heather,” he says. “Remember when ‘Sugar Rush’ first came out, and all that fan mail started arriving at the Cartwright Records offices, and you insisted on reading it all, and personally answering it?”

  I bristle. I can’t help it.

  “Hello,” I say. “I was fifteen.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Cooper says. “Because in fifteen years, you haven’t changed. You still feel personally responsible for every person with whom you come in contact—even people you’ve never met. Like the reason you were put on earth is to look out for everybody else on it.”

  “That’s not true,” I say. “And it’s only been thirteen years.”

  “Heather,” he says, ignoring me. “Sometimes kids do stupid things. And then other kids, because they are, in fact, just kids, imitate them. And they die. It happens. It doesn’t mean a crime has been committed.”

  “Yeah?” I am bristling more than ever. “What about the key? What about that?”

  He still doesn’t look convinced.

  “I want you to know,” he says, “that I’m only doing this to keep you from making an even bigger mess out of things than they’re already in—something, by the way, at which you seem to excel.”

  “You know, Coop,” I say. “I appreciate that vote of confidence. I really do.”

  “I just don’t want you to lose your day job,” he says. “I can’t afford to give you health benefits on top of room and board.”

  “Thanks,” I say snarkily. “Thanks so much.”

  But it doesn’t matter. Because he comes with me.

  It’s a long, long walk up to Roberta Pace’s room at the sixteenth floor. We can’t, of course, take the elevator, because they’ve been shut down. The only sound I hear, when we finally reach the long, empty hallway, is the sound of our own breathing. Mine, in particular, is heavy.

  Other than that, it’s quiet. Dead quiet. Then again, it’s before noon. Most of the residents—the ones who hadn’t been awakened by the ambulance and fire engine sirens—are still sleeping off last night’s beer.

  I point the way with my set of keys and start toward 1622. Cooper follows me, looking around at the posters on the hallway walls urging students to go to Health Services if they’re concerned that they might have contracted a sexually transmitted disease, or informing them of a free movie night over at the student center.

  The RA on sixteen has this thing for Snoopy. Cut-out Snoopys are everywhere. There’s even this posterboard Snoopy holding a real little cardboard tray with an arrow pointing to it that says, “Free Condoms Courtesy of New York College Health Services: Hey, for $40,000 a year, students should get something free!”

  The tray is, of course, empty.

  On the door to 1622, there is a yellow memo board, the erasable kind, with nothing written on it. There’s also a Ziggy sticker.

  But someone has given Ziggy a pierced nose and someone else has written in a balloon over Ziggy’s head, “Where Are My Pants?”

  I raise my set of keys and bang on the door, hard, with them.

  “Director’s Office,” I call. “Anybody there?”

  There’s no response. I call out once more, then slide the key into the lock and open the door.

  Inside, an electric fan on top of a chest of drawers hums noisily, in spite of the fact that the room, like all the rooms in Fischer Hall, has central air conditioning. Except for the fan, nothing else moves. There is no sign of Roberta’s roommate, who is going to be in for quite a shock when she gets back from wherever she’s gone, and finds herself with a single room for the rest of the year.

  There’s only one window, six feet across and another five feet or so high, with twin cranks to open the panes. In the distance, past the garden rooftops and water towers, I can see the Hudson, flowing serenely along its way, the sun’s rays slanting off its mirrored surface.

  Cooper’s squinting at some family photographs on one of the girls’ bedstands. He says, “The dead girl. What’s her name?”

  “Roberta,” I say.

  “Then this bed’s hers.” She’s had her name done in rainbow letters on a sheet of scroll paper by a street artist. It is hanging over the messier bed, the one by the window. Both beds have been slept in, and neither roommate appears to have been much concerned with housekeeping. The sheets are tousled and the coverlets—mismatched, as roommates’ coverlets so often are—are awry. There is a strong Ziggy motif in the decorating on Roberta’s side of the room. There are Ziggy Post-it Notes everywhere, and a Ziggy calendar on the wall, and on one of the desks, a set of Ziggy stationery.

  Both girls, I notice, are Jordan Cartwright fans. They have the complete set of Easy Street CDs, plus Baby, Be Mine.

  Neither of them owns a single CD by yours truly. Which is no real surprise, I guess. I was always way more popular with the tween set.

  Cooper gets down onto his knees and starts looking under the dead girl’s bed. This is very distracting. I try to concentrate on snooping, but Cooper’s butt is a particularly nice one. Seeing it so nicely cupped by his worn Levi’s as he leans over, it is kind of hard to pay attention to anything else, even though, you know, this is very serious business, and all.

  “Look at this,” he says, as he pulls his head and shoulders from beneath Roberta’s bed, his dark hair tousled. I quickly readjust my gaze so it doesn’t look like I’d been staring below his waist. I hope he doesn’t notice.

  “What?” I ask intelligently.

  “Look.”

  Dangling from the end of a Ziggy pencil Cooper pulled from the pencil jar on Roberta’s desk is a pale, limp thing. Upon closer examination, I realize what it is.

  A used condom.

  “Um,” I say. “Ew.”

  “It’s pretty fresh,” Cooper says. “I’d say Roberta had a hot date last night.”

  With his free hand, he picks up an envelope from the pack of Ziggy stationery sitting on Roberta’s desk, then drops the condom into it.

  “What are you doing?” I ask in alarm. “Isn’t that tampering with evidence?”

  “Evidence of what?” Cooper folds the envelope over a couple of times, and sticks it in the pocket of his coat. “The police already determined there hasn’t been a crime committed.”

  “Well, so what are you saving it for?”

  Cooper shrugs and tosses away the pencil. “One thing I learned in this line of work: You just never know.”

  He looks around Roberta’s room and shakes his head. “It does seem weird. Who has sex, then goes elevator surfing? I could maybe see it if it were the other way around—you know, all the adrenaline, or whatever, from risking your life, making you randy. But before? Unless it’s some kinky sex thing.”

  I widen my eyes. “You mean like the guy likes to have sex with a girl, then pushes her off the top of the elevator?”

  “Something like that.” Cooper looks uncomfortable. He doesn’t like talking about kinky sex practices with me, and changes the subject. “What about the other girl? The first one. You said you checked, and she hadn’t signed anyone in the night she died?”

  “No,” I say. “But I checked just before you got here, and Roberta didn’t sign in anyone last night, either.” Then I think of something. “If…if there’d been something like that in Elizabeth’s room—a condom or something, I mean—the cops would have found it, right?”

  “Not if they weren’t looking for it. And if they were really convinced her death was accidental, like this last one, they wouldn’t have even looked.”

  I chew my lower lip. “Nobody’s moved into Elizabeth’s space. Her roommate has the place to herself now. We could go take a look at it.”

  Cooper looks dubious.

  “I will admit it’s weird about this kid dying the way she did, Heather,” he says. “Especially in light of the condom and the key thing. But what you’re implying—”

  “You implied it first,” I remind him. “Besides, we can look, can’t we? Who’s it going to hurt?”

  “Even
if we did, it’s been a week since she died,” he points out. “I doubt we’re going to find anything.”

  “We won’t know unless we try,” I say, starting for the door. “Come on.”

  Cooper just looks at me.

  “Why is proving that these girls didn’t cause their own deaths so important to you?” he demands.

  I blink at him. “What?”

  “You heard me. Why are you so determined to prove these girls’ deaths weren’t accidental?”

  I can’t tell him, of course. Because I don’t want to sound like what Sarah would be bound to brand me if she knew—a psychopath. Which is how I know I would sound, if I told him what I feel…which is that I owe it to the building—to Fischer Hall itself—to figure out what’s really going on in it. Because Fischer Hall has—like Cooper—saved my life, in a way.

  Well, okay, all they’ve saved me from is waitressing for the rest of my life at a Senor Swanky’s.

  But isn’t that enough? I know it doesn’t make any sense—that Sarah would accuse me of transferring my affection for my parents or my ex onto a pile of bricks built in 1850—but I really do feel that I have a responsibility to prove what’s happening isn’t Fischer Hall’s fault—the staff, for not noticing these girls were on a downward spiral, or whatever—or the girls, who seem too sensible to do something so stupid—or even the building itself, for not being homey enough, or whatever. The school newspaper had already run one “in-depth” report on the dangers of elevator surfing. Who knows what it was going to print tomorrow?

  See. I said it’s stupid.

  Still, it’s how I feel.

  But I can’t explain it to Cooper. I know there’s no point in my even trying.

  “Because girls don’t elevator surf” is all I can come up with.

  At first I think he’s going to walk out, the way Detective Canavan did, without another word, furious at me for wasting his time.

  But instead all he does is sigh and say, “Fine. I guess we’ve got another room to check.”

  9

  * * *

  Shake Your Pom-Pom

  Shake Your Pom-Pom

  Shake it, baby

  All night long

  “Shake It”

  Performed by Heather Wells

  Composed by O’Brien/Henke

  From the album Rocket Pop

  Cartwright Records

  * * *

  Elizabeth Kellogg’s roommate opens the door to 1412 at my first knock. She’s wearing a big white T-shirt and black leggings and she’s holding a portable phone in one hand and a burning cigarette in the other.

  I plaster a smile on my face and go, “Hi, I’m Heather. This is—”

  “Hi,” the roommate interrupts me to say, her eyes growing wide as she notices Cooper for the first time.

  Well, and why not? She’s a healthy red-blooded American girl, after all. And Cooper does bear more than a slight resemblance to one of America’s most popular male heartthrobs.

  “Cooper Cartwright,” Cooper says, flashing the roommate a grin that, if I hadn’t known better, I’d have sworn he’d practiced in the mirror and reserved only for extreme cases like this one.

  Except Cooper is not a practicing-smiles-in-the-mirror type of guy.

  “Marnie Villa Delgado,” the roommate says. Marnie’s a big girl like me, only larger in the chest than in the tush, with a lot of very dark, very curly long hair. I can tell she’s sizing me up, the way some women will, wondering if I’m “with” Cooper, or if he’s fair game.

  “We were wondering, Marnie, if we could have a word or two with you about your former roommate, Elizabeth,” Cooper says, revealing so many teeth with his grin, he nearly blinds me.

  But not Marnie, since, apparently deciding Cooper and I are not an item (how could she tell? Really? How come other girls—like Marnie and Rachel and Sarah—know how to do this, but I don’t?), she says, into the phone, “I gotta go,” and hangs up.

  Then, her gaze fastened hypnotically on Cooper, she says, “Come on in.”

  I slip past her, Cooper following me. Marnie, I see at once, has done a pretty fast job of redecorating after Elizabeth’s death. The twin beds have been shoved together to form one king-sized bed, covered by a giant tiger-striped bedspread. The two chests of drawers have been stacked one on top of the other so Marnie now has eight drawers all to herself, instead of four, and Elizabeth’s desk is currently being employed as an entertainment unit, with a TV, DVD player, and CD player all within arm’s reach of the bed.

  “I already talked to the police about her.” Marnie flicks ashes onto the tiger-striped throw rug beneath her bare feet and turns her attention momentarily from Cooper to me. “Beth, I mean. Hey. Wait a minute. Don’t I know you? Aren’t you an actress or something?”

  “Me? No,” I answer truthfully.

  “But you’re in the entertainment industry.” Marnie’s tone is confident. “Hey, are you guys making a movie of Beth’s life?”

  Before Cooper can utter a sound, I ask, “Why? You think, uh, Beth’s life has cinematic potential?”

  Marnie’s trying to play it cool, but I hear her cough as she takes a drag from her cigarette. She’s definitely a for-dramatic-effect-only smoker.

  “Oh yeah. I mean, I can see the angle you’d want to work from. Small-town girl comes to the big city, can’t take it, gets herself killed on a stupid dare. Can I play myself? I totally have the experience…”

  Cooper blows our cover, though, by going, “We’re not with the entertainment industry. Heather’s the assistant director of this building, and I’m a friend of hers.”

  “But I thought—” Marnie is really staring at me now, trying to remember where she’s seen me before. “I thought you were an actress. I’ve seen you somewhere before—”

  “At check-in, I’m sure,” I say hastily.

  “Your roommate,” Cooper says, looking up from a survey he seems to be making of the small kitchen area, in which Marnie has stowed a microwave, hot plate, food processor, coffee maker, and one of those scales people on diets use to measure the weight of their chicken breasts. “Where was she from?”

  “Well,” Marnie says. “Mystic. You know, Connecticut.”

  Cooper is opening cupboards now, but Marnie is so confused, she doesn’t even protest.

  “Hey, I know. You were on Saved by the Bell, weren’t you?” she asks me.

  “No,” I say. “You said Eliz—I mean, Beth—hated it here?”

  “Well, no, not really,” Marnie says. “Beth just didn’t fit in, you know? I mean, she wanted to be a nurse.”

  Cooper looks at her. I can tell he doesn’t hang around New York College students much, because he asks her, “What’s wrong with nurses?”

  “Why would anybody come to New York College to study to be a nurse?” Marnie’s tone is scornful. “Why pay all that money to study here when you can go some place, you know, cheap to study to be a nurse?”

  “What’s your major?” Cooper asks.

  “Me?” Marnie looks as if she wants to say the word Duh, but doesn’t want to be rude. To Cooper. Instead, she grounds out her cigarette in an ashtray shaped like a human hand and says, “Acting.” Then she sits down on her new king-sized bed and stares at me. “I know I’ve seen you somewhere before.”

  I pick up the hand ashtray to distract her—both from trying to place me and from noticing what Cooper is doing, which is some major snoopage.

  “Is this yours or Elizabeth’s?” I ask her, even though I already know the answer.

  “Mine,” Marnie says. “Of course. They took all of Beth’s stuff away. Besides, Beth didn’t smoke. Beth didn’t do anything.”

  “What do you mean, she didn’t do anything?”

  “What I said. She didn’t do anything. She didn’t go out. She didn’t have friends over. And her mother—what a trip! You hear what she did at the memorial service? The mother?”

  Cooper is scouting out the bathroom. His voice, as he calls out from there, is muf
fled.

  “What did she do?” he asks.

  Marnie starts fishing around in this black leather backpack on the bed.

  “Spent the whole thing saying she was going to sue New York College for not making the elevators more surf proof. And what are you doing in my bathroom?”

  “I understand Elizabeth’s mother wanted her daughter’s guest privileges to extend only to females,” I say, ignoring her question about Cooper’s presence in her bathroom.

  “Beth never said anything to me about that.” Marnie finds her cigarette pack. It is, thankfully, empty. She tosses it on the floor and looks annoyed. “But I wouldn’t be surprised. That girl was like from another century, practically. I don’t think Beth’d ever even kissed a guy until a week or two before she died.”

  Cooper appears in the bathroom doorway. He looks way too big to fit through it, but he manages, somehow.

  “Who?” I ask, before he has the chance to butt in. “What guy?”

  “I don’t know.” Marnie shrugs, bereft without her cigarettes. They made nice props, since she was playing the grieving roommate, and all.

  “There was this guy she was going on about, right before she…you know.” Marnie makes a whistling sound and points at the floor. “Anyway, they’d just met. But when she talked about him, her whole face kinda…I don’t know how to explain it.”

  “Did you ever see this guy?” I ask. “Do you know his name? Did he go to the memorial service? Was he the one who talked Elizabeth into elevator surfing?”

  Marnie balks. “Jesus, you ask a lot of questions!”

  Cooper comes to the rescue. As always.

  “Marnie, this is really important. Do you have any idea who this guy was?”

  For me, she balks. For Cooper, she is more than willing to try.

  “Let’s see.” Marnie screws up her face. She isn’t pretty, but she has an interesting face. Maybe good for character roles. The chubby best friend.

  Why is the best friend always chubby? Why isn’t the heroine ever chubby? Or, you know, not chubby, but a size 12? Or maybe even a 14? Why does the heroine always wear a size 2?