Meg Cabot: Big Boned

“I am not shaken,” I cry. “I’m fine. And no one’s going to interrogate me. I—”

“Oh, shit,” Sebastian says, reaching out to rest a hand on my shoulder. “Sorry about that. You all right? Can I get you anything from the café? Hot tea, or something?”

“Ooooh,” Sarah says. “I’ll take a coffee. And cake, if there’s any.”

“Sarah!” I’m shocked.

“Well, whatever, Heather,” she says, looking annoyed. “If he’s offering. When the GSC strikes—as we will, shortly—our meal plans will probably be taken away, so I’m not wasting my declining dollars if someone else is offering to pay for my—”

“Heather!” Gavin McGoren, lanky film student, junior, and building resident with an unrequited—and unfortunate—crush on me, appears in the storage room doorway, out of breath and panting. “Oh my God, Heather. There you are. Are you all right? I just heard. I came as fast as I could—”

“McGoren, just the man I want to see,” Sebastian says. “I need someone to work the mikes for the rally in the park tomorrow night. You up for it?”

“Sure, whatevs,” Gavin says, letting his backpack slump to the floor, but keeping his gaze on me. “Is it true? Was he really a victim of a random drug shooting? I knew it was dangerous not to have those street-level windows bricked up. You do realize it could easily have been you, don’t you, Heather?”

“Cool it, Gavin,” Sarah says. “She’s skeeved out enough. What are you trying to do, make things worse?”

“Oh my God,” I say. “I am not skeeved out. I mean, I am. But—look, do we have to talk about this?”

“Of course we don’t have to talk about it, Heather,” Sarah says, in her most soothing voice. Then, to Sebastian and Gavin, she says, “Guys, please leave Heather alone. Finding a corpse—particularly one belonging to someone with whom you worked as closely as Heather worked with Dr. Veatch—can be very unsettling. It’s likely Heather will suffer from post-traumatic stress for some time. We’re going to need to watch her for signs of unexplainable aggressiveness, depression, and emotional detachment.”

“Sarah!” I’m appalled. “Would you please zip it?”

She says, in the same soothing voice, “Of course, Heather.” Then, to the boys, she stage whispers, “What did I tell you about unexplainable aggressiveness?”

“Sarah.” I seriously need an aspirin. “I totally heard that.”

“Uh.” Sebastian is looking at his feet. “How long does this post-traumatic stress thing usually last?”

“It’s impossible to say,” Sarah says, at the same time that I say, “I donot have post-traumatic stress.”

“Oh,” Sebastian says, looking at me, now, instead of his feet. “Well, good. Because I’ve been meaning to ask you something.”

I groan. “Not you, too.”

“She doesn’t date students,” Gavin informs him. “I already tried. It’s like a policy, or something.”

I drop my head into my hands. Seriously. How much more can I take in one day? It’s bad enough I actually jogged this morning (only for a few steps, but still. I could have dislodged something. I still don’t know. All my lady parts seemed to have been working fine back at Tad’s, when we took them for a test run. But how can you ever be sure without a visit to the gyno?), but now my boss has been shot, my office taken over by CSI: Greenwich Village, and Gavin McGoren is expounding on the official New York College stand on student-employee relations? I want those two and a half hours of sleep I missed out on back.

“Uh, I wasn’t going to ask her out, dude,” Sebastian says. “I was going to ask her if she could come to our rally tomorrow night.”

I separate my fingers and peer out at him from between them. “What?”

“Come on,” Sebastian pleads, throwing himself onto his knees. “You’re Heather Wells. It would mean a lot if you’d show up, maybe lead us in a little round of ‘Kumbaya’—”

“No,” I say. “Absolutely not.”

“Heather,” Sebastian says. “Do you have any idea how much it would mean to the GSC if we had a celebrity of your stature come out in support of us?”

“Come out in support—” I echo weakly, dropping my hands. “Sebastian, I could lose my job for that!”

“No, you couldn’t,” Sebastian says. “Freedom of speech! They wouldn’t dare!”

“Seriously,” Sarah says with a grunt. “They’re fascists, but not that fascist… ”

“Watch them,” I say. “Come on. I totally support you guys, and everything. Have I said anything about the fact that you, Sebastian, are constantly hanging around this building, even though you are not, in fact, an undergraduate, and do not, in fact, even live here? But sing at your rally? In Washington Square Park? In front of the library, and the president’s office? You have to be kidding me.”

“Really, Sebastian,” Sarah says, in the kind of voice only a woman who adores a guy who is frustratingly oblivious to her feelings for him ever uses. “Sometimes you do go too far.”

He throws her an aggrieved look. “You’re the one who said to ask her!” he cries.

“Well, I didn’t mean now!” Sarah says. “She just found her boss slumped over dead, for crying out loud. And you want her to host some union rally?”

“Not host it!” Sebastian cries. “Just show up and do a number. Something inspiring. It doesn’t have to be 'Kumbaya'. 'Sugar Rush' would be great, too. And it can be unplugged. We aren’t choosy.”

“God,” Sarah says, shaking her head in disgust. “You are too much sometimes, Sebastian.”

“She keeps saying she’s fine!” Sebastian insists, getting up and throwing his hands in the air.

“Don’t do it, Heather,” Gavin says. “Not unless you feel up to it.”

“I’m not doing it,” I say. “Because I happen to like my job and don’t want to get fired this week.”

“They would never fire you,” Sebastian explains, in a matter-of-fact way. “For one thing, not to be tactless, but your boss just got killed. Who would run this place? And for another thing, if they tried to fire you, that would be a violation of your constitutional right to congregate and peacefully protest.”

“Dude,” Gavin says. “She so knows it was you who put that fake arm on the elevator.”

“Heather Wells.” The deep voice booms from the open doorway. I look up and see one of New York’s Finest standing there. “Detective Canavan would like a word.”

“Oh, thank God,” I cry, and fling myself out from behind the desk, and toward the door. You know things are bad at work when you’re actually relieved to be taken away to be interviewed by a homicide detective.

But when you work in Death Dorm, those kinds of things happen with alarming frequency.

Detective Canavan has had his hair cut since I’ve last seen him. It’s been buzzed into a severe crew cut, so tinged with gray it looks almost blue beneath the fluorescent light above my desk (I put in a desk lamp for rosy ambience, but the detective’s apparently chosen not to turn it on. I guess homicide detectives don’t care about rosy ambience). He’s scowling into the phone he’s clutching to one ear, glancing up at me as I walk in as disinterestedly as if I’m a rat that’s wandered out from behind some Dumpster.

“Yeah,” Detective Canavan says into the phone. “I know good and well what the city’s gonna say. They’re happy to shut down a street if someone wants to film an episode of Law & Order on it. But if the real NYPD wants to launch an investigation on an actual murder… ”