Big Boned by Meg Cabot Read Free Book Online Page A

you to get upset. But he did. I’m glad he’s dead.”
    “Shhhh.” I look around. Over at a nearby table, some of Detective Canavan’s colleagues are enjoying taco salads with sides of sour cream and guacamole. “Magda, don’t go around saying that too loudly, okay? I think we’re pretty much all guilty until proven innocent with this one.”
    “So what else is new?” Magda asks, rolling her elaborately made-up eyes. Then those eyes start to twinkle as she asks, “So things are getting cozy with Mr. Math, eh? I saw you two this morning in here, feeding each other bites of whipped cream…”
    I can’t help scowling. “Things were cozy. Cozy enough that…” I let my voice trail off. So much had happened since that extremely odd interlude in the shower this morning that I’m not even exactly sure whether or not it really took place.
    But it had. Hadn’t it?
    Magda raises her drawn-on eyebrows. “Yes?”
    “He wanted to know if I could take a chunk of time off from work this summer,” I say. “Then he said he has something he wants to ask me. When the timing is right.”
    Magda’s mouth drops open. Then she squeals. Then she hops off her stool and runs around the cashier’s desk in her four-inch heels and throws her arms around me. Since she’s about a foot short than I am, this means she is basically hugging my waist with her enormously high hair tickling my nose.
    “Heather!” she cries. “I’m so happy for you! You’re going to be such a beautiful bride!”
    “I don’t know,” I say, uncomfortably conscious of the curious stares turning in our direction. “I mean, I can’t imagine that’s the question he really wants to ask me. Can you? We’ve only been going out a few months—”
    “But when it’s right, it’s right,” Magda says, letting go of my waist to grab my arms instead, and give me a little shake. “Mr. Math is no dummy. Not like Cooper.”
    That name again. I feel my cheeks heating up, as they seem to always do these days, whenever my landlord’s name is mentioned.
    “So what are you going to say?” Magda wants to know. “You are going to say yes, right? Heather, you cannot wait for the rest of your life for Cooper to come around. Some men never do. Like Pete. You know, I once had my eye on him—”
    I am poleaxed.
    “ You like Pete ?” I stare at her, as dumbstruck as if she’d just admitted she’s a Scientologist with an invitation to join Tom and Katie on the spaceship when it shows up. “Our Pete? Sitting out there at the guard’s desk Pete? Widowed father of four Pete? Insatiable appetite for panadas Pete?”
    “Very funny,” Magda says, giving me a sour look. “Yes, our Pete. But that was a long time ago, back when his wife first died, and I felt sorry for him, and all of that. Not that it made any difference. He still has no idea I’m alive. Though how any man could not notice this ”—she waves the robin’s egg blue nails up and down her compact frame, which, though currently covered in her pink uniformsmock, is obviously smoking hot, from the matching blue toenails peeping out from the hot pink plastic stilettos, to the bleached blond bob that frames her face—“I don’t know.”
    “He’s still transfixed with grief?” I suggest. Although it’s more likely that Pete, like me, doesn’t have the slightest inkling that Magda has ever looked upon him as anything other than an amusing dining companion.
    “Probably,” Magda says, with a shrug of her curvy shoulders. Then, because a resident with an advanced state of bed head has come stumbling into the cafeteria, his meal card extended, she hurries back to her stool, takes the card, swipes it, and with a “Look at my little movie star! Have a nice brunch, honey,” hands it back to the student, then says to me, “Now. Where were we?”
    “Wait a minute.” I still cannot believe what I’ve just heard. “You liked Pete. Like…like liked liked him. And he never caught on?”
    Magda shrugs.