Size 14 Is Not Fat Either by Meg Cabot Read Free Book Online Page A

loaded with Tetris (oh, who am I kidding? Between studying and Tetris, it’s a solid bet I’ll be spending my morning trying to beat my high score). Still, maybe I can convince Lucy to come outside and get her business done, so I don’t have to worry about finding any surprises later.
    The clouds above are still dark and heavy with unshed moisture, but that isn’t, I know, why Reggie and Page 25

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    his friends are nowhere to be seen. They’ve scattered thanks to the heavy police presence around the corner, at Fischer Hall. They’re probably in the Washington Square Diner, taking a coffee break.
    Murder’s as tough on the drug business as it is on everything else.
    Lucy is so puzzled to see me home this early that she forgets to protest about being let outside into Cooper’s grandfather’s cold back garden. By the time I’ve retrieved my textbook and Game Boy and come back downstairs, she’s sitting by the back door, her business steaming a few yards away. I let her back in and hastily clean up her mess, and am about to tear from the house when I notice the message light blinking on the machine in the hall—our house phone, as opposed to Cooper’s business line. I press PLAY , and Cooper’s brother’s voice fills the foyer.
    “Um, hi,” my ex-fiancé says. “This message is for Heather. Heather, I’ve been trying to reach you on your cell as well as your work phone. I guess I keep missing you. Could you call me back as soon as you get this message? I have something really important I need to talk to you about.”
    Wow. It really must be important, if he’s calling me on Cooper’s house line. Cooper’s family haven’t spoken to him for years—since they learned the family patriarch, Cartwright Records founder Arthur Cartwright, had left his black sheep grandson his West Village brownstone, a prime piece of New York City real estate (valued at eight million dollars). Relations hadn’t exactly been warm before that, though, thanks to Cooper’s refusal to enter the family business (specifically, Cooper refused to sing bass in Easy Street, the boy band his father was putting together).
    In fact, if it wasn’t for me—and my best friend Patty and her husband Frank—Cooper would have spent Christmas and New Year’s by himself (not that the prospect of this seemed to have bothered him very much), instead of basking in the warm glow of family…well, Patty’s family, anyway, my own family being either incarcerated (Dad) or on the lam with my money (Mom. It’s actually probably good I’m an only child).
    Still, I’d found during the years I’d dated Cooper’s brother that what was important to Jordan was rarely important to me. So I don’t exactly scoop up the phone and call him right back. Instead, I listen to the rest of the messages—a series of hang-ups: telemarketers, no doubt—and then head back out into the cold toward St. Vincent’s.
    Now that I want one, of course I can’t find a cab, so I have to hoof it the five or six blocks (avenue blocks, not short street blocks) to the hospital. But that’s okay. We’re supposed to get a half hour of exercise a day, according to the government. Or is it an hour? Well, whatever it is, five blocks in bitter cold seem more than enough. By the time I get to the hospital, my nose and cheeks feel numb.
    But it is warm in the waiting room—if chaotic…though not as much as it normally is: the weather forecast has apparently frightened most of the hypochondriacs into staying home—and I’m able to find a seat with ease. Some kindly nurse has turned the channel on the waiting room television set from Spanish soaps to New York One, so everyone can keep abreast of the coming storm. All I need to get comfy is a little hot cocoa—and I come by that easily enough, by slipping some coins into the coffee vending machine—and some breakfast.
    Food, however, is less easy to come by