Size 12 Is Not Fat (30 page)

I gulp. And nod.

Well, what else am I going to say?

“See,” Rachel says. “Now that’s just sad. Because nice girls, they always finish last. I’ll actually be doing the world a favor by killing you. It’s natural selection, really. One less blond to watch go to waste.”

With that, Rachel comes at me, diving across the bed, stun gun first.

I whirl around and throw back the curtains. I unlatch the first set of French doors I reach and hurl myself out onto the terrace.

It’s still raining—harder than ever, actually. The sky is a leaden gray all around me.

I’ve never realized it before, but Fischer Hall is the tallest building on the west side of the park, and the penthouse terrace affords spectacular views of Manhattan on four sides, of the Empire State Building to the north, just visible through the mist, the fog-shrouded void where the World Trade Center had once stood to the south, the sodden East and West Villages.

An excellent place, I realize, to shoot a scene from a movie.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
, perhaps.

Except that this is no movie. This is real life.
My
life. For however much longer it lasts.

The wind up on the twentieth floor is strong, and drizzle spits in my face. I have a hard time figuring out just where I’m headed, since everywhere I look, I see only geranium planters precariously perched on low stone balustrades over which I can picture my body very easily tumbling.

Not knowing where else to go, I duck my head and start running around the sides of the Allingtons’ apartment, to the opposite side of the terrace. With no sign of Rachel following, I have a minute to pause and open my backpack, still hanging from its strap across my shoulders, and fumble inside it for that canister of pepper spray I could swear was still in it. I have no idea if the thing will still work, but at this point, anything that will keep me from meeting the volts from that stun gun is worth a try.

I find it. I release the safety catch when a deafening crash occurs just behind me, and in a shower of splintering wood and flying glass, Rachel leaps through a set of French doors—like Cujo, or a teenage mutant ninja turtle—not even bothering to unlatch them first. She hits me with the full force of her body, and we both go down onto the wet flagstones.

I land solidly on my sore shoulder, effectively knocking all the breath from my chest. But I try to keep rolling, over shards of wood and glass, to get away from her.

She’s on her feet before I am, and coming toward me at full charge. Through it all, she’s managed to hang on to the Thunder Gun.

But I still clutch the pepper spray, hidden in my fist. When she bends over me, her dark hair already becoming plastered to her face by the rain, her lips are curled back in a snarl not unlike Lucy’s when she’s riled by a tennis ball or a Victoria’s Secret catalog.

“You’re so weak,” Rachel sneers at me, and she waves the stun gun under my nose. “How can you tell a brunette?”

I try to maneuver myself into a position from which I can spray her directly in the face. I don’t want the wind whipping the stuff back at me.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I wheeze, still breathless from the impact of my fall. God. I can’t believe I once bought this woman
flowers.

And okay, they were only from the deli. But still.

“You know how you can tell a brunette?” Rachel grins, her face just inches from mine. “Turn a blond upside down!”

As she lunges to blast 120,000 volts into my right hip, I lift my hand and launch a stream of pepper spray into her face. Rachel shrieks and backs up, throwing an arm up to protect her face…

Only the nozzle won’t push all the way down. So instead of a jet of chemical poison hitting her in the eye, the stuff just foams down the side of the canister, soaking into my stitches and burning me badly enough to make me go, “Ow!”

Rachel, realizing she hasn’t been hit after all, starts to laugh.

“Oh God,” she brays. “Could you
be
more pathetic, Heather?”

But this time, when she lunges at me, I’ve rolled to my feet, and I’m ready for her.

“Rachel,” I say, as she comes at me. “There’s something I’ve been wanting to tell you for a long time. Size twelve”—wrapping my stinging fingers around the hard canister, I slam my fist as hard as I can into Rachel’s face—“is not
fat
.”

My knuckles explode in pain. Rachel screams and staggers back, both her hands going to her nose, from which an astonishing amount of blood is spurting.

“My nose!” she shrieks. “You broke my nose! You fucking bitch!”

I’m barely able to stand, my shoulder is throbbing so badly, my hands feeling as if they’re on fire from the pepper spray. I have shards of glass stuck to my back, the knuckles on my right hand are numb, and blood is coming from a cut somewhere in the vicinity of my forehead: I’m blinking both rainwater and my own blood from my eyes. All I want to do is go inside and lie down for a while and maybe watch the Food Network, or something.

But I can’t. Because I have my psycho boss to deal with.

She’s standing there, holding her nose with one hand, and the stun gun in the other, when I tackle her, flinging my arms around her narrow waist and bringing her down like a hundred and twenty pounds of Manolo Blahniks. She falls, writhing in my grasp, while I desperately try to snatch the stun gun from her hands.

And all the time, she’s sobbing. Not with fear, like she should have been—because, make no mistake about it, I have every intention of killing her—but with anger, her dark eyes glittering with such intense hatred of me that I wonder how I missed seeing it there before.

“Nice girls finish last, huh?” I say, as I kick her as hard as I can in the knee. “How’s this, then? Is this
nice
enough for you?”

Except that it’s like I’m kicking one of those crash test dummies. Rachel seems impervious to pain…unless it’s something to do with her face. Her precious nose, for example.

And she’s strong—so much stronger than I am, despite my killing rage, and my advantage in height and weight. I can’t budge the gun from her hands. I’ve read about people who, in moments of desperation, develop the strength of someone twice their size—mothers who lift cars off their injured infants, mounted cops who pull their beloved horses out of
sinkholes, that kind of thing. Rachel has the strength of a man…a man who sees his life disintegrating before him.

And she’s not going to give up until someone’s dead.

And I’m starting to get a very bad feeling that that someone is going to be me.

It’s all I can do to keep my hands fastened over hers on the grip of the stun gun. My fingers are slick with rain and blood, and sore from the stitches and the pepper foam. It’s hard to hold on. Rachel has managed to climb to her feet in spite of my attempt to kick her legs out from under her, and now the two of us struggle in the pouring rain for mastery of the weapon. The force of our struggle has sent us staggering dangerously close to the terrace wall.

Somehow, Rachel manages to twist herself so that it’s
my
back that’s pressed up against a overflowing geranium planter not unlike the one that nearly killed Jordan. My face toward the sky, I can’t see with all the rain streaming down. I close my eyes and concentrate on the nearly impossible task of keeping Rachel’s arms high above me, not letting those buzzing prongs anywhere near my body. I feel the planter wobble, and then I feel it give, and though I don’t open my eyes, I hear the enormous crash it makes seconds later as it hits the sidewalk below.

The most frightening part, however, is the length of time that elapses between the moment the planter careens off the terrace and the sound of the impact as it strikes the earth. I count to nearly ten.

Ten seconds of freefall. Ten seconds to contemplate death.

My arms are weakening. I know I’m crying, because the salt from my tears stings the cuts on my face.

And above me, Rachel laughs, sensing my weakening.

“See,” she’s saying. “I told you, Heather. You’re too nice to win. Too weak. Not in good enough shape. Because size
twelve
is
fat. Oh, I know what you’re going to say. It’s the size of the average American woman. But guess what? The average American woman is fat, Heather.”

“Oh my God.” I spit rainwater and blood from my mouth. “Rachel, you’re sick. There’s something really wrong with you! Let me get you some help—”

“What have you got to live for, anyway?” Rachel asks, as if she hasn’t heard me. Because she probably hasn’t. “Your music career’s in the toilet. Your boyfriend dumped you. Your own mother stabbed you in the back. You should have died yesterday, in the elevator. And you should have died the day before, only my aim was off. Just give it up, Heather. Nice girls never win—”

On the word
win
, Rachel begins slowly bending my arms. I can’t fight her superior strength much longer. I’m weeping openly now, struggling against her, trying not to listen to her singsong voice as it coos, “Think about it. Your death’ll make MTV News. Maybe not the
Times
, but the
Post
for sure. Who knows? They might even do an
E! True Hollywood Story
about you…one-hit wonders who didn’t live to see thirty…”

I open my eyes and glare at her, unable to speak, since every bit of strength I have is concentrated on keeping her from electrocuting me.

And it’s when I feel the tremble in my arms, the shaking of muscles weakened from overuse, that I hear Rachel’s triumphant laugh, and her final taunt.

“Heather,” she calls gleefully, her voice sounding far away, though she’s still looming above me. “How many blonds does it take to screw in a light bulb?”

And then her head explodes in front of me.

Seriously. One minute it’s there, laughing in my face, and the next it’s gone, whipped back by the force of an object
that strikes it so hard, blood sprays from the wound and blinds me. The stun gun goes dead in her hands, and her body falls away from me, landing with a sickening thud on the wet flagstones.

I cling to the terrace wall, wiping my face with the backs of my hands—the only uninjured parts of my body—and sobbing. The only sound is the hiss of the rain and someone’s ragged breathing.

It takes me a while to realize that the breathing isn’t my own. When I’m finally able to see, I look up, and see Rachel laying at my feet, blood pouring out of an indentation on the side of her head and tingeing the rain puddles all around her pink.

And standing before me, a bloodied bottle of Absolut in her hand, is Mrs. Allington, her pink jogging suit drenched, her chest heaving, her eyes filled with contempt as she stares down at Rachel’s prone body.

Mrs. Allington shakes her head.

“
I
’m a size twelve,” she says.

I only end up spending one night in the hospital—on account of all my stitches tearing open and the multiple contusions and glass shards embedded in me.

And even that is one night too many, if you ask me. Do you know what their idea of dessert is in the hospital? Yeah, that’d be Jell-O. With fruit in it. Not even mini marshmallows. Everyone knows Jell-O is a
salad
, not dessert.

Plus they don’t even have bathtubs in the hospital. If you want to get clean, it’s a shower or sponge bath only.

Whatever. I try to use my time there wisely. My time in
the hospital, I mean. I sneak off my floor to visit Julio, whom I’m happy to find is recovering nicely from his injuries sustained during the explosion. He’s supposed to be back at work next month, no worse for the wear.

I also stop by Jordan’s room while I’m there. In the hospital, I mean.

He’s plenty embarrassed to see me, and his bride-to-be, Tania? She’s downright hostile. If I didn’t know better, I’d think she was feeling threatened by me or something.

But I don’t know why she would be. Her latest single, “Slut,” hit number ten on
Total Request Live
the other day.

I wish them well, anyway. I tell them I think they make the perfect couple.

I’m not lying, either.

I only have to spend one night in the hospital, but I get two weeks off—with pay—from my position as assistant director at Fischer Hall. I guess that’s how they reward you at New York College if you happen to bust your boss for a double homicide. Even if you haven’t accrued that many sick days, or whatever.

By the time I’m back to my desk, it’s starting to get cold out. The leaves on the trees in Washington Square Park are changing, turning shades of red and gold that pale in comparison with the colors the freshmen in Fischer Hall have dyed their hair in preparation for Parents’ Day.

Seriously. It’s like working in a clown college, or something.

Things at Fischer Hall have changed in other ways as well since I’ve been gone. For one thing, with Rachel in jail awaiting trial, I’m getting a new boss. I don’t know who yet. They’re still interviewing people.

But Dr. Jessup is giving me first pick.

I’m thinking it might be nice to work for a man for a
change. Don’t get me wrong, female bosses are great and all. But I could do with a break from all that estrogen in the office.

Sarah agrees. She and all the student workers are a lot nicer to me now that, you know, I risked my life in order to catch the person who was killing their fellow residents. I hardly ever hear about Justine anymore. Except for the other day, when Tina turned to me and said, “You know, Justine used to never wear jeans to work like you do. She told me it was because she could never find any small enough to fit her. I sort of always hated her for that.”

Even Gavin is finally listening to me, and has completely given up elevator surfing. He’s taken up exploring the city’s sewers instead.

I figure he’ll be giving that up soon enough, too, though. I mean, the smell isn’t exactly making him the most popular guy on his floor.

Oh, and the Allingtons moved. Just to the building next door—the one Donatello or whichever teenage mutant ninja turtle it was jumped onto in the movie. But still, it’s far enough away that Mrs. Allington feels that she and the birds will be more comfortable…especially since they’re now living in a building that they don’t have to share with seven hundred undergraduates and a residence hall staff.

Those undergraduates weren’t sorry to see the Allingtons go, but the same can’t be said about their son. Chris’s turned into something of a celebrity himself, using the notoriety he gained from Rachel’s obsession with him—which made all the headlines—as leverage for his plan to open his own nightclub in SoHo. Law school, apparently, had been his father’s dream for him, and now that offers for his story have come pouring in from the Lifetime Channel and
Playboy
, Chris has broken free from the filial yoke and is pursuing his own devices.

I’m betting those devices will get him arrested fairly soon.

The Fischer Hall residents, student government, and staff came up with what we consider a fitting tribute to Elizabeth Kellogg and Roberta Pace: We planted two trees—twin dogwoods—in a pretty section of the park, with a plaque under them that reads
In Memory Of
and lists their names, the dates of their births and deaths, and the words
They Will Be Missed
. Millions of people will see it—both the plaque and the trees, which the guys from the horticulture department tell me will flower in the spring—just as hundreds of students will benefit from the scholarship, also started by us, in Beth’s and Bobby’s names.

I’m excited to see the trees in full bloom. It’s about the only thing I have to look forward to these days, since I already found out—at last—what Cooper thinks about me.

Not that he knows I know. He probably has no idea I remember. It was when he came bursting out onto the penthouse terrace, just seconds after Mrs. Allington knocked Rachel senseless with her Absolut bottle. He’d gotten the message I’d left on his cell, and had come rushing over to the hall with Detective Canavan, only to learn from Pete—who’d seen Rachel and me going into the penthouse on his monitor—that not only was Rachel alive, but that the two of us had apparently gone upstairs to pay a call on Mrs. Allington (the film quality on the security monitor wasn’t fine enough for Pete to see that Rachel was actually holding a stun gun to my throat at the time, something we’re working on correcting, campus-wide).

While Detective Canavan dealt with the unconscious Rachel and wobbly Mrs. Allington, Cooper knelt beside me in the rain, asking if I was all right.

I remember blinking up at him, wondering if what I was seeing was just some weird hallucination, like the one of
Rachel getting her head bashed in. I’d been pretty sure, at the time, that I was dying, on account of the sting of the pepper spray in my stitches, and the glass shards piercing my back, and my sore shoulder and stuff.

Which might be why I kept saying—the way I remember it—over and over, “Promise you’ll take care of Lucy. When I’m dead, promise you’ll take care of Lucy.”

Cooper had taken his leather jacket off—the one with my bloodstains all over it—and draped it over me. It was still warm from his body. I remember that. And that it smelled like him.

“Of course I will,” Cooper had said to me. “But you’re not going to die. Look, I know you’re hurting. But the paramedics are their way. You’re going to be fine, I promise.”

“No, I’m not,” I’d said. Because I’d been sure I was going to die. Later, the paramedic told me I was in shock, on account of the pain and the cold and the rain and all.

But I’d had no way of knowing that at the time.

“I’m going to be dead at twenty-eight,” I’d informed what I’d taken to be a hallucination of Cooper. “A one-hit wonder. That’s all I am. Make sure that’s what they put on my headstone.
Here lies a one-hit wonder
.”

“Heather,” Cooper had said. He’d been smiling. I’m sure of that. That he’d been smiling. “You’re not going to die. And you’re not a one-hit wonder.”

“Oh, right.” I’d started laughing. Then I’d started to cry. And I hadn’t been able to stop.

It turns out this is a pretty common symptom of shock, too. But again, I hadn’t known that at the time.

“Rachel was right,” I remember saying, bitterly. “She’s right! I had it all, and I blew it. I’m the biggest loser in the world.”

That’s when Cooper forced me to sit up, took me into his
arms, and said, very firmly, “Heather, you’re not a loser. You’re one of the bravest people I’ve ever met. Anyone else, if they’d been through what you have, what with your mother and my brother and your career and all of that, they’d have given up. But you kept going. You started over. I’ve always admired the way, no matter what happens, you just keep going.”

I’m sorry to say that at this point, I responded, “You mean like that little pink rabbit with the drum?”

I like to think that was the shock, too.

Cooper played along. He’d said, “Exactly like that little pink rabbit with the drum. Heather, you’re not a loser. And you’re not going to die. You’re a nice girl, and you’re going to be just fine.”

“But…” To my shock-clouded brain, this assertion sounded troubling, given my earlier conversation with the woman who’d been trying to kill me. “Nice girls finish last.”

“I happen to like nice girls,” Cooper had said.

And then he kissed me.

Just once. And on the forehead. The way, you know, your ex-boyfriend’s big brother would kiss you if, say, you’d been attacked by a homicidal maniac and were suffering from shock and he didn’t think you’d remember it anyway.

But I did. And I do.

He thinks I’m brave. No, wait: He thinks I’m one of the bravest people he’s ever met.

And he likes me. Because he happens to like nice girls.

Look, I know it’s not much. But you know what?

It’s enough. For now.

Oh, and one last thing:

I never did go back to that store and buy those size 8 jeans. There’s nothing wrong with being a size 12, for one thing.
And for another, I’ve been too busy. I passed my six months’ probation. I start my freshman year at New York College in January. My first class?

Intro to criminal justice.

Well, you have to start somewhere, right?