Size 12 Is Not Fat

9

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 re semblance 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 muffled.

“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?

“Yeah, she said his name was like Mark, or something,” Marnie says, breaking in on my thoughts on sizeism in the entertainment industry. “But I never saw him. I mean, they started going out just a week or so before she died. He took her to the movies. Some foreign film at the Angelika. That’s why I thought it was so strange—”

“What?” I shake my head. “That what was so strange?”

“Well, I mean, that a guy who liked, you know,foreign films would be into elevator surfing. That’s so… juvenile. The freshmen guys are into it. You know, the ones with the baggy pants, who look about twelve years old? But this guy was older. You know. Sophisticated. According to Beth. So what was he doing, encouraging her to jump around on top of an elevator?”

I sit down next to Marnie on the enormous bed.

“Did she tell you that?” I ask. “Did she tell you he wanted her to go elevator surfing with him?”

“No,” Marnie says. “But he had to have, right? I mean, she’d never have gone alone. I doubt she even knew what it was.”

“Maybe she went with some of those freshmen guys you mentioned,” Cooper suggests.

Marnie makes a face. “No way,” she says. “Those guys’d never have invited her along with them. They’re too cool—or think they are—to be interested in someone like her. Be sides, if she’d been with them, she wouldn’t have fallen. Those guys wouldn’t have let her. They’re good at it.”

“You weren’t here, were you, the night she died?” I ask.

“Me? No, I had an audition. We aren’t supposed to audition as freshmen, you know”—she looks sly—“but I figured I had a good shot. I mean, come on. It’s Broadway. If I got into a Broadway show, I’d quit this place in a New York minute.”

“So Elizabeth had the room to herself that night?” I ask.

“Yeah. She was having him over. The guy. She was real excited about it. You know, she was making a romantic dinner for two on the hot plate.” Marnie looks suspicious. “Hey—you’re not going to tell, are you? That we have a hot plate? I know it’s a fire hazard, but—”

“The guy, Mark,” I interrupt. “Or whatever his name was. Did he show? That night?”

“Yeah,” Marnie says. “At least, I assume he did. They were gone by the time I got home, but they left the dinner plates in the sink. I had to do them, to keep them from attracting bugs. You know, you would think for what we’re paying to live here, you guys would have regular exterminators—”

“Did anyone else meet him?” Cooper interrupts. “This Mark guy? Any of your mutual friends?”

“Beth and I didn’t have any mutual friends,” Marnie says, a bit scathingly. “I told you, she was a loser. I mean, I was her roommate, but I wouldn’t have hung out with her. I didn’t even find out she was dead until, like twenty-four hours after the fact. She never came back to the room that night. I just figured, you know, she was over at the guy’s place.”

“Did you tell this to the police?” Cooper asks. “About Elizabeth having the guy over the night she died?”

“Yeah,” Marnie says, with a shrug. “They didn’t seem to care. I mean, it’s not like the guy murdered her. She died because of her own stupidity. I mean, I don’t care how much wine you’ve had, you don’t jump around on top of an elevator—”

I suck in my breath. “They were drinking? Mark and your roommate?”

“Yeah,” Marnie says. “I found the bottles in the trash. Two of them. Pretty expensive, too. Mark must have brought them. They were, like, twenty bucks each. The guy’s a big spender, for someone who lives in a hellhole like this.”

I catch my breath.

“Wait—he lives in Fischer Hall?”

“Yeah. I mean, he’d have to, wouldn’t he? ’Cause she never had to sign him in.”

Good grief! I’d never thought of this! That Beth might actually have had a boy in her room, but that there was no record of her having signed one in, because he hadn’t had to be signed in. He lives in the building! He’s a resident of Fischer Hall, too!

I look up at Cooper. I’m not sure where all this was leading, but I have a pretty good idea that it’s leading somewhere… somewhere important. I can’t tell if he feels the same, though.

“Marnie,” I say. “Is there anything, anything else at all that you can tell us about this guy your roommate was seeing?”

“All I can tell you,” Marnie says, sounding annoyed, “is what I already said—that his name is Mark or something, he likes foreign films, has expensive taste in wine, and that I’m pretty sure he lives here. Oh, and Beth kept saying how cute he was. But how cute could he be? I mean, why would a cute guy be interested in Beth? She was a dog.”

The student-run newspaper, the Washington Square Reporter, had run a photo of Elizabeth the Monday after her death, a photo from the freshmen class yearbook, and Marnie, I’m sorry to say, wasn’t exaggerating. Elizabeth hadn’t been a pretty girl. No makeup, thick glasses, outdated, Farrah Fawcett—style hair, and a smile that was mostly gums.

Still, photos by school-hired photographers are never all that flattering, and I had assumed that Elizabeth was actually prettier than this photo indicated.

But maybe my assumption was wrong.

Or maybe, just maybe, Marnie’s jealous because her roommate had a boyfriend, and she didn’t.

Hey, it happens. You don’t need a sociology degree—or a private investigator’s license—to know that.

Cooper and I thank Marnie and leave—though we couldn’t escape without Marnie launching, once again, into a chorus of I-know-I-know-you-from-somewhere. By the time we make it out into the hallway, I’m cursing, as I do nearly every day, my decision—or, I should say, my mom’s decision—to forgo my secondary education for a career in the music industry.

Trudging back down the stairs in silence, I wonder if Cooper is right.Am I crazy? I mean, do I really think there’s some psycho stalking the fresh women of Fischer Hall, talking them into elevator surfing with him after having his way with them, then pushing them to their deaths?

When we reach the tenth-floor landing, I say, experimentally, “I once read this article in a magazine about thrill killers. You know, guys who murder for the fun of it.”

“Sure,” Cooper says dryly. “In the movies. It doesn’t happen so often in real life. Most crimes are crimes of passion. People aren’t really as sick as we like to imagine.”

I look at him out of the corner of my eye. He has no idea how sick my imagination is. Like how at that very moment I was imagining knocking him down and ripping off all his clothes with my teeth.

I wasn’t. Well, not really. But I could have been.

“Somebody should probably speak to the other girl’s roommate,” I say, resolutely pushing away my fantasy about Cooper’s clothes and my teeth. “You know, the one who died today. Ask her about the condom. Maybe she knows who it belonged to.”

Cooper looks down at me, those ultra-blue eyes boring into me.

“Let me guess,” he says. “You think it might belong to a guy named Mark who likes foreign films and has expensive taste in Bordeaux.”

“It won’t hurt to ask.”

“You got a guy on your staff who fits that description?” Cooper wants to know.

“Well,” I say, thinking about it. “No. Not really.”

“Then how’d he get the key from behind the reception desk?”

I frown.

“Haven’t worked that part out yet, have you?” Cooper asks, before I can reply. “Look, Heather. There’s more to this detective stuff than snooping around, asking questions. There’s also knowing when there’s actually something worth snooping around about. And I’m sorry, but I’m just not seeing it here.”

I suck in my breath. “But… the condom! The mystery man!”

Cooper shakes his head. “It’s sad about those girls. It really is. But think about how you were when you were eighteen, Heather. You did crazy things, too. Maybe not as crazy as climbing onto the roof of an elevator on a dare, but—”

“They didn’t,” I say, fiercely. “I’m telling you, those girls did not do that.”

“Well, they ended up at the bottom of a shaft somehow,” Cooper says. “And while I know you’d like to think it’s be cause some evil man pushed them, there are nearly a thousand kids who live in this dorm, Heather. Don’t you think one of them might have noticed a guy shoving his girlfriend down an elevator shaft? And don’t you think that person would have told someone what they’d seen?”

I blink a few more times. “But… but… ”

But I can’t think of anything else to say.

Then he looks at his watch. “Look. I’m late for an appointment. Can we play Murder, She Wrote again later? Because I’ve got to go.”

“Yeah,” I say, faintly. “I guess.”

“Okay. See you,” he says. And continues down the stairs at a clip so fast, there’s no way I’ll catch up with him.

Though on the landing below, he stops, turns, and looks up at me. His eyes are amazingly blue.

“And just so you know,” he says.

“Yes?” I lean eagerly over the stair railing.The reason I’m so against you investigating this on your own, I am expecting—well, okay, hoping—he’ll say,is because I can’t stand the thought of you putting yourself in harm’s way. You see, I love you, Heather. I always have.

“We’re out of milk,” is what he says instead. “Pick some up on your way home, if you remember, okay?”

“Okay,” I say weakly.

And then he’s gone.