Meg Cabot - Size 14 Is Not Fat Either

It takes him three rings to answer. I guess Lindsay’s tribute must be especially moving.

“Somebody’s been stabbed by the squash courts,” I say into the phone. It’s important to stay calm in an emergency. I learned that during my assistant hall director training. “Call for an ambulance and the cops. The guys who did it are wearing basketball masks. Don’t let anyone in basketball masks leave. And get a first-aid kit. And get down here!”

“Heather?” Cooper asks. “Heather—what?Where are you?”

I repeat everything I’ve just said. As I do, I look down at the stabbed man, and realize, with sudden horror, that I know him.

It’s Manuel, Julio’s nephew.

“Hurry!” I shriek into the phone. Then I hang up. Because the blood from Manuel’s body is starting to pool around my knees.

Whipping off my sweater, I stuff it into the gaping hole in Manuel’s stomach. I don’t know what else to do. The emergency first-aid course we took didn’t cover multiple stab wounds to the gut.

“You’re going to be all right,” I tell Manuel. He’s looking up at me with half-lidded eyes. The blood around him is gelatinous and almost black as it seeps into my jeans. I stuff my sweater more deeply into the biggest hole I can find, keeping my fingers pressed over it. “Manuel, you’re going to be fine. Just hang on, okay? Help will be here in a minute.”

“H-Heather,” Manuel rasps. Blood bubbles up out of his mouth. I know this is not a good sign.

“You’re going to be fine,” I say, trying to sound like I believe it. “You hear me, Manuel? You’re going to be just fine.”

“Heather,” Manuel says. His voice is nothing more than a wheeze. “It was me. I gave it to her.”

Pressing hard against the wound—blood has soaked through my sweater and is gathering under my fingernails—I say, “Don’t talk, Manuel. Help is on its way.”

“She asked me for it,” Manuel says. He’s obviously delirious with blood loss and pain. “She asked me for it, and I gave it to her. I knew I shouldn’t’ve, but she was crying. I couldn’t say no. She was… she was so… ”

“Would you shut up, Manuel?” I say, alarmed by the amount of blood coming out from between his lips. “Please? Please don’t talk.”

“She was crying,” Manuel keeps saying, over and over again.Where is Cooper? “How could I say no to her when she was crying? I didn’t know, though. I didn’t know what they were going to do to her.”

“Manuel,” I say, hoping he can’t hear that my voice is shaking. “You have to stop talking. You’re losing too much blood… .”

“But they knew,” he goes on, clearly off in his own world. A world of pain. “They knew where she got it—”

At that moment, Cooper turns the corner, Pete and Tom right behind him. Pete, seeing me, pulls out his security walkie-talkie, and begins squawking into it about how they’ve found me, and to get a stretcher down to the squash courts ASAP.

Cooper falls to his knees beside me and, miraculously, reveals a first-aid kit he’s snagged from somewhere.

“Ambulance is on the way,” he says, while Manuel, beneath my blood-soaked fingers, rambles feebly on.

“I gave it to her, don’t you see, Heather? It was me. And they knew it was me.”

“Who did this to him?” Cooper demands, pulling a huge roll of Ace bandages from the first-aid kit. “Did you get a look at him?

“They all had basketballs on their heads,” I say.

“What?”

“They had basketballs on their heads.” I grab the roll of bandages from him, pull away my sweater, and ram the roll of bandages into the biggest wound. “Half a basketball, over their faces, with little eye holes cut out—”

“My God.” Tom, looking pale, blinks down at us. “Is that… is that Manuel?”

“Yes,” I say, as Cooper leans forward and pulls down one of Manuel’s eyelids.

“He’s going into shock,” Cooper says, pretty calmly, in my opinion. “You know him?”

“He works at Fischer Hall. His name is Manuel.” Julio, I know, is going to flip out when he sees this. I pray that he doesn’t come looking for his nephew.

“They did this as a warning,” Manuel says. “A warning to me not to tell that I gave it to her.”

“Gave what to who, Manuel?” Cooper asks him, even as I’m shushing him, telling him to save his breath.

“The key,” Manuel says. “I know I shouldn’t have, but I gave her my key.”

“Who?” Cooper wants to know.

“Cooper,” I say. I can’t believe this. I can’t believe he’s interrogating a dying man.

But he ignores me.

“Manuel, who’d you give your key to?”

“Lindsay,” Manuel says. Manuel shakes his head. “I gave Lindsay my key. She was crying… she said she’d left something in the cafeteria, something she needed to get. At night, after it was closed—”

His eyelids drift shut.

Cooper says, “Damn.”

But then the EMTs are there, shoving us both out of the way. And I’m actually relieved, thinking everything is going to be okay.

Which just goes to show how much I know.

Which is nothing.

You know what happens when someone nearly gets murdered during a Division III college basketball game that is being televised live on New York One?

Everyone keeps right on playing.

That’s right.

Oh, they posted cops at all the exits, and after the game—which the Pansies lost, twenty-four to forty. They just never came back after the second half. And not even because they heard about what happened to Manuel. Because no one told them. No, basically, the Pansies just suck—the cops made everybody stop on their way out and show them their hands and feet and the insides of their bags, so they could check for blood and weapons.

Not that they told anyone that’s what they were checking for, of course.

But they didn’t find anything incriminating. They couldn’t even hold the people with half-basketball masks for questioning, because roughly every male in the audience had a half-basketball mask.

And it was pretty obvious—to me, anyway—that the guys who’d stabbed Manuel were long gone. I mean, I highly doubt they stuck around to watch the rest of the game. They probably got out before the cops even arrived.

So they didn’t even witness the Pansies’ humiliating defeat.

Neither did I, actually. Because no sooner was Manuel loaded into an ambulance with his heartsick uncle at his side and carted away—the paramedics said he had lost a lot of blood and had some internal injuries, but that nothing vital had been punctured, so he’d probably be okay—than I was whisked off to the Sixth Precinct to look at mug shots with Detective Canavan, even though I EXPLAINED to him I hadn’t seen their faces, due to the masks.

“What about their clothes?” he wants to know.

“I told you,” I say, for the thirtieth time at least. “They were wearing regular, everyday clothes. Jeans. Flannel shirts. Nothing special.”

“And you didn’t hear them say anything to the victim?”

It’s kind of irritating to me that Detective Canavan keeps referring to Manuel as “the victim” when he knows perfectly well that he has a name, and what that name is.

But maybe, like Sarah’s gallows humor, saying “the victim” is a way of distancing himself from the horror of acts of such violence.

I wouldn’t mind distancing myself from it, either. Every time I close my eyes, I see the blood. It wasn’t red like blood on TV. It was dark brown. The same color the knees of my jeans are now.