Size 12 Is Not Fat

10

“Who was that?” Sarah wants to know. “That guy who left just now?”

“That?” I slip behind my desk. “That was Cooper.”

“Your room-mate?” I guess Sarah has overheard me on the phone with him or something.

“House-mate,” I say. “Well, landlord, really. I live in the top floor of his brownstone.”

“So he’s cute and rich?” Sarah is practically salivating. “Why haven’t you jumped his bones?”

“We’re just friends,” I say, each word feeling like a kick in the head. We’re. Kick. Just. Kick. Friends. Kick. “Besides, I’m not exactly his type.”

Sarah looks shocked. “He’s gay? But my gaydar didn’t go off at all—”

“No, he’s not gay!” I cry. “He just… he likes accomplished women.”

“You’re accomplished,” Sarah says, indignantly. “Your first album went platinum when you were only fifteen!”

“I mean educated,” I say, wishing hard we were talking about something—anything—else. “He likes women with, you know, a lot of degrees. Who are stunningly attractive. And skinny.”

“Oh,” Sarah says, losing interest. “Like Rachel, you mean.”

“Yeah,” I say, my heart sinking, for some reason. “Like Rachel.”

Is that really true?Does Cooper like women like Rachel—women whose handbags match their shoes? Women who understand what PowerPoint is, and know how to use it? Women who eat their salad with the dressing on the side, and can do hundreds of sit-ups without getting out of breath? Women who went to Yale? Women who shower instead of bathe, the way I do, because I’m too lazy to stand up that long?

Before I have a chance to really think about it, Rachel comes running in, her dark hair mussed, but still sexy-looking, and says, “Oh, Heather, there you are. Where have you been?”

“I was upstairs with one of the investigators,” I say. It’s even true. Sort of. “They needed to get into the dead girl’s room—”

“Oh,” Rachel says, losing interest. “Well, now that you’re back, could you call counseling services and see if they can see someone right away? Roberta’s roommate is in a state—”

I perk right up.

“Sure,” I say, reaching for my phone, my promise to Cooper that I would quit playing Murder, She Wrote promptly forgotten. “No problem. You want someone to walk her over there?”

“Oh, yes.” Rachel may have been dealing with a tragedy, but you would never have known it to look at her. Her Diane von Furstenberg wrap dress clings to her lithe figure in all the right places, and none of the wrong ones (the way wrap dresses do on me) and there are bright spots of color in her cheeks. “Do you think you can find someone?”

“I’d be happy to help,” I say.

Sure, I feel a twinge of guilt as I say it. I mean, that my willingness to lend a hand has more to do with a desire to question the dead girl’s roommate than actually to help her.

But not enough to stop myself.

I call counseling services. Of course they’ve already heard about “the second tragedy,” so they tell me to bring the roommate, Lakeisha Green, right over. One of my job responsibilities is personally to escort students who’ve been referred to counseling services to the building that houses it, because once a student who was sent over by herself got lost on the way and ended up in Washington Heights wearing her bra on her head and insisting that she was Cleopatra.

Seriously. You can’t make this stuff up.

Lakeisha is sitting in a corner of the cafeteria under a kitten poster Magda had hung on the wall to brighten the place up, since, as Magda puts it, antique stained glass windows and mahogany wainscoting are just plain “ugly on the eye.” Magda is there, too, trying to coax Lakeisha into eating some Gummi Bears.

“Just a few?” Magda is saying, as she dangles a plastic bag full of them in front of Lakeisha’s face. “Please? You can have them for free. I know you like them, last night you bought a bag with your friends.”

Lakeisha—just to be polite, you can tell—takes the bag. “Thank you,” she murmurs.

Magda beams, then, when she notices me, whispers, “My poor little movie star. She won’t eat a thing.”

Then, in an even lower voice, Magda asks, “Who was that man Pete and I saw you with today, Heather? The handsome one?”

“That was Cooper,” I say, since I’ve told Magda all about Cooper… as one does, naturally, discuss hotties over sloppy joes on one’s lunch break.

“That was Cooper?” Magda looks aghast. “Oh, honey, no wonder—”

“No wonder what?”

“Oh, never mind.” Magda pats me on the arm in a gesture that would have been comforting if I hadn’t, you know, been terrified of being poked by one her nails. “It will turn out all right. Maybe.”

“Uh, thanks.” I’m not at all sure what she was talking about… or that I wanted to know. I turn my attention to Roberta Pace’s roommate.

Lakeisha looks really, really sad. Her hair is done up in braids all over her head, and at the end of each braid is a brightly colored bead. The beads click together whenever Lakeisha moves her head.

“Lakeisha,” I say, gently. “I understand you have an appointment to speak to someone at counseling services. I’m here to walk you there. Are you ready to go?”

Lakeisha nods. But she doesn’t stand up. I glance at Magda.

“Maybe she wants a rest,” Magda says. “Does my little movie star want a rest?”

Lakeisha hesitates a moment. Then she says, “No, it’s okay. Let’s go.”

“You sure you don’t want a DoveBar?” Magda asks. Because DoveBars are, actually, the solution to nearly every problem in the universe.

But Lakeisha just shakes her head, causing her hair beads to rattle musically.

Which is surely how she stays so skinny. Refusing DoveBars when offered, I mean. I can’t remember ever turning down an offer of free ice cream. Especially a DoveBar.

Our walk out of the building is slow-paced and somber. They are letting students back into the building a few at a time, with the warning that they’ll have to use the stairs to get to their rooms. As one might expect in such a small community, word of another death has spread fast, and when the students see Lakeisha and me leaving the building together, there is a lot of whispering—“That’s the roommate,” I hear, and someone else responding, “Oh, poor thing.” Lakeisha either doesn’t hear it or chooses to ignore it. She walks with her head held high, but her gaze lowered.

We’re standing on the street corner, waiting for the crossing sign to change, when I finally get the courage to bring up what I want to know.

“Lakeisha,” I say. “Do you know if Roberta had a date last night?”

Lakeisha looks over at me like she’s seeing me for the first time. She’s a tiny little thing, all cheekbones and knees. The little bag of Gummi Bears Magda had pressed on her, and which she still carries, seems to be weighing her down.

She says, “Excuse me?” in a soft voice.

“Your roommate. Did she have a date last night?”

“I think so. I don’t really know,” Lakeisha replies, in an apologetic whisper that’s hard to hear above the sound of all the traffic. “I went out last night—I had dance rehearsal at eight. Bobby was asleep by the time I got back. It was real late, after midnight. And she was still asleep when I went down to breakfast this morning.”

Bobby. Had they been close, Lakeisha and her Ziggy-loving roommate? They must have been, if she’d called her Bobby. What am I doing, interrogating the poor girl this way, after she’s had such a shock?

Is Jordan right? About what he’d accused me the other day. Had I turned hard?

I guess so, since next thing I knew, I was trying again.

“The reason I ask, Lakeisha—” I feel like a total and complete heel. Maybe it’s all right, you know, if you feel like a jerk. Know what I mean? I mean, I’ve read that crazy people—sorry, I mean mentally disturbed people—never consider themselves mentally disturbed. So maybe real jerks never consider themselves jerks. So the fact that I feel like a jerk means that I couldn’t possibly be one…

I’ll have to remember to ask Sarah.

“The reason I ask is that the police”—slight lie, but oh well—“the police found a used condom under Roberta’s bed this morning. It was, uh, pretty fresh.”

This seems to clear a little of the fog out of Lakeisha’s head. She looks at me, and this time, I can tell she really sees me.

“Excuse me?” she asks, in a stronger voice.

“A condom. Under Roberta’s bed. It had to have been from last night.”

“No way,” Lakeisha says, firmly. “There is no way. Not Bobby. She’s never—” She breaks off and studies her Nikes. “No,” she says, again, and shakes her head with such force that the beads on the ends of her braids click like castanets.

“Well, someone had to have left that condom,” I say. “If it wasn’t Roberta, who—”

“Oh my God” Lakeisha suddenly interrupts, with actual excitement in her voice. “It had to be Todd!”

“Who’s Todd?”

“Todd is the man. Bobby’s man. The new man. Bobby never had a man before.”

“Oh,” I say, somewhat taken aback by this information. “She was… um—”

“A virgin, yeah,” Lakeisha says, distractedly. She’s still trying to digest the information I’ve given her. “They must have—they must have done the deed after I left. He must have come over! She musta been so excited.”

Then Lakeisha’s excitement dies and she shakes her head again. “Then she had to go and do something so stupid—”

Okay. Now we were getting somewhere.

I slow down my pace, and Lakeisha slows hers as well, unconsciously. We are within two blocks of the counseling center.

“So elevator surfing wasn’t something your roommate did regularly?” I ask, even though I already know the answer.

“Bobby?” Lakeisha’s voice breaks. “Elevator surf? No! Never. Why would she go and do something so stupid? She’s a smart girl—was a smart girl,” she corrects herself. “Too smart for that, anyway. Besides,” she adds. “Bobby was afraid of heights. She never even wanted to look out the window, she thought we were up too high as it was.”

I knew it. I knew it. Someone had pushed her. It’s the only explanation.

“So this Todd guy,” I say, trying not to let my eagerness show. Also the fact that my heart had begun slamming a mile a minute inside my chest. “When did Roberta meet him?”

“Oh, last week, at the dance.”

“Dance?”

“The dance in the cafeteria.”

We’d ended up not canceling the dance that had been planned for the night of Elizabeth’s death. Sarah hadn’t been the only one to throw a fit at the suggestion—the student government had rebelled as well, and Rachel had caved. The dance ended up being very well attended and there’d only been a single moment of unpleasantness, and that was when some Jordan Cartwright fans got all riled up over the music selection, and nearly came to blows with some residents who preferred Justin Timberlake.

“Todd was there,” Lakeisha says. “He and Bobby started hanging out together that night.”

“This Todd,” I say. “Do you know his last name?”

“No.” Lakeisha looks momentarily troubled. Then her face brightens. “He lives in the building, though.”

“He does? How do you know?”

“ ’Cause Bobby never had to sign him in.”

“And this Todd guy—” I’m practically holding my breath. “You met him?”

“Not met him, but Bobby pointed him out to me at the dance. He was kinda of far away, though.”

“What’d he look like?”

“Tall.”

When Lakeisha doesn’t go on, I prompt, “That’s it? He was tall?”

Lakeisha shrugs.

“He was white,” she says, apologetically. “White guys… they all. You know.”

Right. Everyone knows all white guys look the same.

“Do you think this Todd guy”—now Lakeisha is calling him “this Todd guy,” too—“had something to do with… what happened to Bobby?”

“I don’t know,” I say. And as I say it, I realize we’re at the building that houses the campus counseling services. So fast! I’m disappointed. “Oh. Well, Lakeisha, this is it.”

Lakeisha looks up at the double doors without seeming really to see them. Then she says to me, “You don’t think—you don’t think this Todd guy… pushed her, or anything, do you?”

My heart slows, then seems to stop altogether.

“I don’t know,” I say carefully. “Why? Do you? Did Roberta mention that he was… abusive?”

“No.” Lakeisha shakes her head. The beads click and rattle. “That’s just it. She was so happy. Why would she do something so dumb?” Lakeisha’s eyes fill with tears. “Why would she do a thing like that, if she’d found the guy of her dreams?”

My feelings, exactly.