Size 12 Is Not Fat by Meg Cabot Read Free Book Online

wishes he were the one at the bottom of the elevator shaft. I don’t really blame him, either.
    “Phil,” he says to the president. “It happens. In a population this big, there are bound to be some deaths. We had three last year alone, and the year before that, there were two—”
    “Not in my building,” President Allington says. I can’t help thinking that he is trying to sound like Harrison Ford in Air Force One (“Get off my plane”).
    But he sounds more like Pauly Shore in Bio-Dome .
    This seems to me like an appropriate time to go back to my office. I find Sarah there sitting at my desk, talking on the phone. No one else is around, but there’s still a disagreeable amount of tension in the room. It seems to be emanating from Sarah, who slams the phone down and glares at me.
    “Rachel says we have to cancel the hall dance tonight.” She is practically glowering.
    “So?” This sounds like a reasonable request to me. “Cancel it.”
    “You don’t understand. We’ve lined up a real band. We stand to lose about fifteen hundred dollars from this.”
    I stare at Sarah.
    “Sarah,” I say. “A girl is dead. Dead .”
    “And by veering from our normal routine because of her selfish act,” Sarah says, “we will only cause her death to be romanticized by the student population.” Then, coming down off her grad student high horse for a second, she adds, “I guess we can make back the lost revenue in T-shirt sales. Still, I don’t see why we should cancel our dance, just because some nutcase took a dive off the top of an elevator.”
    And people say show biz is rough. They’ve obviously never worked in a dorm.
    Excuse me, I mean, residence hall.

5
    ----
    I don’t see how
    We could have drifted so far apart
    Seems like just yesterday
    You were calling me baby
    Now I’m alone
    And I can’t help crying

    Do Over
    Baby I want a
    Do Over
    ’Cause I’m not ready
    To let you go
    “Do Over”
Performed by Heather Wells
Composed by Dietz/Ryder
From the album Sugar Rush
Cartwright Records
----
    Being this is New York City, where so many unnatural deaths occur every day, it ends up taking the coroner’s office four hours to get to Elizabeth’s body.
    The coroner arrives at three-thirty, and by three thirty-five, Elizabeth Kellogg is declared dead. Cause of death, pending an investigation and autopsy, is recorded as acute trauma, in the form of a broken neck, back, and pelvic bone, in addition to multiple fractures to the face and extremities.
    Call me a dreamer, but I don’t think anybody in the student population will be romanticizing her death when they find this out.
    Worse, the coroner says he thinks Elizabeth has been dead for nearly twelve hours. Which means she’s been lying in the bottom of that elevator shaft since the night before.
    And okay, he says she died on impact with the cement floor, so death was instantaneous. It’s not like she’d lain there, alive, all night.
    But still.
    There’s no hiding the coroner’s van, or the body that is eventually trundled out of the building and into it. By four o’clock, the entire student population of Fischer Hall knows there’s been a death. They also know, once the elevators are turned back on, and they are finally allowed to take them back to their floors, how she died. I mean, they’re college students: They’re not stupid. They can put together two and two and come up with four.
    But I can’t be too concerned with how the seven hundred residents of Fischer Hall are dealing with the news of Elizabeth’s death. Because I am too busy being concerned with how Elizabeth’s parents are dealing with the news of her death.
    That’s because it was decided by Dr. Jessup—a decision backed up by Dr. Flynn—that because of Rachel’s previous contact with Mrs. Kellogg concerning Elizabeth’s guest privileges, she should be the one to make the call to the dead girl’s parents.
    “It will be less of a shock,” Dr. Flynn assures everyone, “for