Size 14 Is Not Fat Either (3 page)

“Morning, Magda,” I say to her. “You will never believe what Barista Boy said to me.”

But Magda, normally a very inquisitive person, and a big fan of Barista Boy, doesn’t look interested.

“Heather,” she says. “I have something I have to show you.”

“If it’s the front page of thePost, ” I say, “Reggie already beat you to it. And really, Mags, it’s okay.I’m okay. I can’t believe she took him back after that whole thing at the Pussycat Dolls with Paris. But, hey,
Page 11

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Conv
erter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

his dad owns her record label. What else is she going to do?”

Magda shakes her head.

“No,” she says. “Not thePost . Just come, Heather. Come.”

Curious—more because she still hasn’t cracked a smile than because I actually think she has something so earth-shattering to show me—I follow Magda down the hall, past the student government office—closed this early in the morning—and Magda’s boss’s office, which, oddly, is empty. Normally, the dining office is filled with kvetching cafeteria workers and cigarette smoke, Gerald Eckhardt, the dining hall director, being an unapologetic smoker. He’s only supposed to light up outside, but invariably I catch him puffing away at his desk, then blowing the smoke out the open window, like he doesn’t think anyone is going to catch on.

But not today. Today the office is empty—and smoke-free.

“Magda,” I say, as her pink smock disappears through the swinging doors to the cafeteria’s loud, steaming kitchen, “what is going on?”

But Magda doesn’t say anything until she’s standing beside the massive industrial stove, on which a single pot has been set to boil. Gerald is standing there as well, looking out of place in his business suit among his pink-smocked employees, dwarfing everyone else with his massive frame—a result of sampling his own recipe for chicken parm a little too often.

Gerald looks—well, there’s only one word for it: frightened. So does Saundra, the salad bar attendant, and Jimmy, the hotline server. Magda is pale beneath her bright makeup. And Pete—what’sPete doing here?—looks like he wants to hurl.

“Okay, you guys,” I say. I am convinced whatever is going on has to be a joke. Because Gerald, being in food services, is a prankster from way back, a master of the rubber rat in the desk drawer, and plastic spider in the soup. “What gives? April Fool’s isn’t for another three months. Pete, what are you doing back here?”

Which is when Pete—who’s wearing, for some reason, an oven mitt—reaches out and lifts the lid from the merrily boiling pot, and I get a good look at what’s inside.

2

What are these panties

Doing in my couch?

They’re not mine

No, there’s no doubt.

You won’t catch me

In a size S thong.

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Conv
erter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

So who’s been doing who

Here, all night long?

“Thong Song”

Written by Heather Wells

The Fischer Hall cafeteria is crowded, but not with students. We told the residents there was a gas leak—not one big enough to evacuate the whole building, but one that necessitated closing down the caf.

The sad thing is, they were all so bleary-eyed from partying the night before, the residents actually seemed to believe us. At least, no one protested—once I started handing out the free-meal voucher cards, so they could go eat in the student union.

Now the dining hall is still packed—but with college presidents, administrators, cafeteria workers, police officers, and homicide detectives, instead of hungry eighteen-year-olds.

Even so, the room is strangely hushed, so that the energy-saving bulbs in the chandeliers above our heads—casting reflections in the stained-glass windows near the edges of the high ceiling—seem to be humming more noisily than usual. Above the humming, I can hear Magda sniffling. She’s sitting on one side of the cafeteria with the rest of her fellow workers, in their hairnets and pink uniforms and French manicures. A city police officer is speaking to them in a gentle tone.

“We’ll let you go home soon as we get your fingerprints,” he says.

“What do you need our fingerprints for?” Magda’s chin is trembling with fear—or maybe indignation.

“We didn’t do anything. None of us killed that girl!”

The other cafeteria workers murmur in agreement. None of them killed that girl, either.

The police officer’s tone stays gentle. “We need all your fingerprints so we can ascertain which prints in the kitchen are yours, ma’am, and which are the killer’s. If he left any.”

“Ascertain away,” Gerald says, coming to the defense of his employees. “But I’m tellin’ you right now, none of my folks is a murderer. Am I right, people?”

Everyone in a pink smock nods solemnly. Their eyes, however, are shining with something a little more than just tears. I suspect it might be excitement: Not only had they found a murder victim in their kitchen, right there amid the corn dogs and peanut-butter-and-jelly bars, but now they are valuable witnesses to a crime, and as such are being treated not as cafeteria workers—untouchables, as far as the students they serve are concerned—but as actual thinking human beings.

For a few of them, this might actually be a first.

I spot the head of the Housing Department, Dr. Jessup, at a table with several other administrators, all looking dazed. The discovery of a corpse’s head on campus has worked as an expedient in getting the administrative staff to work before ten, despite the impending blizzard. Even the college president, Phillip Allington, is there, seated next to Steven Andrews, the new head basketball coach, who looks worried.

He has good reason to: The entire New York College varsity basketball team—not to mention the varsity cheerleading squad—is housed in Fischer Hall, thanks to the building’s close proximity to Winer Complex, the college sports center.

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Conv
erter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

After the two student deaths in this building during the first semester—winning Fischer Hall the nickname Death Dorm—all the university employees (including sport coaches) seem to be feeling a little jumpy.

And who can blame them? Especially President Allington. His tenure hasn’t been an easy one. No one knows that better than me, assistant director of Death Dorm.

And now it looks as if things have just gotten immeasurably worse, not just for the president, but for my boss’s boss, the head of Housing…and he knows it. The show-hanky tucked into his breast pocket is crumpled, as if someone—exercising my superlative investigative skills, I surmise that someone was Dr.

Jessup himself—has actually been using it. Sitting slumped in a chair at a sticky cafeteria table for the past half hour hasn’t done much for the creases in Dr. Jessup’s suit, either.

“Heather,” Dr. Jessup says to me, a little too heartily, as I come toward his table, having been summoned away from my desk—where I went directly after Pete’s revelation to begin calling everyone I could think of, including Dr. Jessup and my boss, Tom—by one of the police officers. “Detective Canavan wants to talk to you. You remember Detective Canavan from the Sixth Precinct, don’t you?”

Like I could forget.

“Detective,” I say, extending my right hand toward the slightly rumpled-looking middle-aged man with the graying mustache, who stands with one foot resting on the seat of an empty cafeteria chair.

Detective Canavan looks up from the cup of coffee he’s holding. His eyes are the color of slate, and the skin around them is wrinkled from overexposure to the elements. It’s no joke, being a New York City homicide detective. Sadly, not all of them look like Chris Noth. In fact, none of them do, that I’ve noticed.

“Nice to see you again, Heather,” the detective says. His grasp is as formidable as ever. “I understand you’ve seen it. So. Any ideas?”

I look from the detective to the head honcho of my department and back again.

“Um,” I say, not sure what’s going on. Wait—do Dr. Jessup and Detective Canavan actually want my help in solving this heinous crime? Because this is so the opposite of how they were about my helping them out last time…. “Where’s the rest of her?”

“That isn’t what Detective Canavan meant, Heather,” Dr. Jessup says, with a forced smile. “He meant, do you recognize…it?”

Carol Ann Evans, dean of students—yeah, the same one who won’t admit me into her college until I show her I can multiply fractions—happens to be seated nearby, and makes a kind of gagging noise and covers her mouth with a wadded-up tissue when she hears the wordit.

And, to my certain knowledge, she hasn’t even taken a peek at what’s inside that pot.

Oh. They don’t really want my help. Not THAT way.

I say, “Well, it’s kinda hard to tell.” No way am I going to announce, in front of all these people, that Lindsay Combs, homecoming queen and (now no longer) future roommate of her best friend Cheryl Haebig, had apparently been decapitated by person or persons unknown, and her head left in a pot on the stove in the Fischer Hall cafeteria.

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Conv
erter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

I know. Ew.

“Come, now, Heather,” Dr. Jessup says, with a smile that doesn’t quite reach his eyes. To Detective Canavan he says, loudly enough for everyone in the caf to hear, apparently in an effort to impress President Allington, who wouldn’t know me from Adam—though his wife and I were once nearly murdered by the same person—“Heather here knows every single one of Fischer Hall’s seven hundred residents by name. Don’t you, Heather?”

“Well, generally speaking,” I say uncomfortably. “When they haven’t been set on simmer for a few hours.”

Did that sound flip? I guess it did. Dean Evans is gagging again. I didn’t mean to be flip. It’s just that…comeon.

I hope the dean isn’t going to hold this against me. You know, admission-to-the-College-of-Arts-and-Sciences-wise.

“So who is she? The girl.” The detective seems unconscious of the fact that nearly everyone in the cafeteria is eavesdropping on our conversation. “A name would be nice.”

I feel my stomach roll a little, like it had back in the kitchen when Pete had lifted the lid and I’d found myself staring into those unseeing eyes.

I take a deep breath. The air in the cafeteria is pungent with ordinary breakfast smells…eggs and sausage and maple syrup. You can’t smellher.

At least, I don’t think so.

Still, I’m thankful that I haven’t had time this morning for my customary cream-cheese-and-bacon bagel breakfast. The café mocha has—so far—been more than enough. The parquet of the dining hall floor is swimming a little before my eyes.

I clear my throat. There. That feels a little better.

“Lindsay Combs,” I say. “She dates—dated—the Pansies’ point guard.” The Pansies is the (sad) name of the New York College Division III basketball team. They lost their real name, the Cougars, in a cheating scandal in the fifties, and have been stuck with being Pansies ever since—to the amusement of the teams they play, and their own everlasting chagrin.

Everyone in the room sucks in their breath. President Allington—dressed, as usual, in his interpretation of what one of his college’s students might wear (if it were 1955), a New York College letter jacket and gray cords—actually cries, “No!” Beside the president, Coach Andrews—as I’d known he would—goes pale.

“Oh, God,” he says. He’s a big guy—around my own age—with spiky dark hair and disarmingly blue eyes…what they call Black Irish. He’d be cute if he wasn’t so muscle-bound. Oh, and if he ever actually noticed I was alive.

Not that, if he did, anything would ever come of it, since my heart belongs to another.

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Conv
erter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

“Not Lindsay,” he says, with a groan.

I feel for him. I really do. Cheryl Haebig isn’t the only one who liked Lindsay…we all did. Well, everyone except our office graduate student assistant, Sarah. Lindsay was an immensely popular girl, the captain of the New York College cheerleading squad, with waist-length honey-colored hair and grapefruit-sized breasts that Sarah maintained were the result of plastic surgery. While Lindsay’s excessive school spirit could be annoyingly perky (to me, anyway) at times, it was at least a pleasant change from the usual type of New York College students we saw in our office—spoiled, dissatisfied, and threatening to call their lawyer father if we didn’t get them a single or an extra-long bed.

“Jesus Christ.” Dr. Jessup hadn’t believed it when I’d called to say that he needed to get to Fischer Hall as soon as possible, due to the fact that one of our residents had lost her head…literally. Now he looks as though it’s finally sinking in. “Are yousure, Heather?”

“Yeah,” I say. “I’m sure. It’s Lindsay Combs. Head cheerleader.” I swallow again. “Sorry. No pun intended.”

Detective Canavan has removed a notepad from his belt, but he doesn’t write anything in it. Instead, he flips slowly through the pages, not looking up. “How could you tell?”

I’m trying hard not to remember those unseeing eyes looking up at me—only not. “Lindsay wore contact lenses. Tinted. Green.” Such an unnatural shade of green that Sarah, back in the office, always asked, whenever Lindsay left, “Who the hell does she think she’s fooling? That color doesnot occur in nature.”

“That’s all?” Detective Canavan asks. “Tinted contact lenses?”

“And the earrings. She’s got three on one side, two on the other. She came down to my office a lot,” I say, by way of explaining how I was so familiar with her piercings.

“Troublemaker?” Detective Canavan asks.

“No,” I say. Most students who end up in the office of the residence hall director are either there because they’re in trouble, or they’ve got a problem with their roommate. Or, as in Lindsay’s case, because they want the free birth control I keep in a jar on my desk instead of Hershey’s kisses (lower in calories). “Condoms.”