Big Boned (2 page)

That kind of thing.

But still. Who goes around
asking
people that kind of
thing? What they have in common as a couple, I mean? How
rude
is that? I wanted to ask Cooper what he thought
WE
, as in he and I, had in common as a couple…until I remembered we’re not a couple.

The scary thing is that Cooper and I have
tons
of things in common…we both like good food (such as Nathan’s hot dogs, oysters on the half shell, and Peking duck, to name a few), and good music (such as blues, all jazz but fusion, classical, opera, R and B, any kind of rock except for heavy metal, although I have a secret soft spot for Aerosmith), and good wine (well, okay, I can’t really tell the difference between a good wine and a bad one, but I do know the good stuff doesn’t taste like salad dressing or give me a headache).

And, of course, really bad TV. Which I hadn’t known Cooper liked, too, until recently. I’d come across him in a moment when he’d clearly thought he was alone in the house. He’d reached hastily for the remote, attempting to switch to CNN before I got a look. But I saw. Oh, I saw.

“Shame on you, Cooper,” I’d said…though inwardly, of course, I’d been thrilled. “
The Golden Girls
?”

“Shut up,” he’d replied affably.

“Seriously,” I’d said. Because who doesn’t love
The Golden Girls
? Well, except for Tad, who doesn’t own a TV (I know. I
know
, okay?). “Which one are you?”

He’d just looked at me like I was insane. But not for the reason I’d thought. Because it turned out he knew exactly what I was talking about. “Dorothy, of course.”

My heart had nearly stopped. “Me, too,” I’d murmured. And then I’d settled onto the couch beside him, to watch.

Cooper and I have a
lot
in common—even down to the fact
that we both can’t stand to see a social injustice go unpunished (or a crime go unsolved), even when we might have to risk our own lives in order to make things right. Not to mention, we are both somewhat emotionally estranged from our families.

But that doesn’t mean I’m not totally into Tad. I
am
.

I’m just maybe not into running with him.

Which was why, when Tad passed me for like the eighth time, and slowed down to ask, “Heather? Are you doing okay?” I suddenly developed a limp.

“Um,” I said. “I might have pulled something. If it’s okay with you, I was thinking maybe we could call it a day, and go back to your place and take a shower. Then I’ll take you out to breakfast. They’re serving Belgian waffles in the caf today.”

It turns out you should never underestimate the appeal of Belgian waffles to a vegetarian killer Frisbee–playing tenure track assistant professor. Even one who is trying to get his girlfriend to embrace physical fitness.

Then again, it could have been the shower. Tad is convinced it is environmentally unsound for two people to waste water by showering separately when they could shower together.

I have never been a big fan of the shower until now. And the fact that Tad has to take his glasses off before he gets in, so I don’t have to huddle against the wall in an effort to hide my cellulite? Well, that’s just an added plus.

Especially when Tad, as we’re soaping each other’s chests, asks, a little diffidently, “Heather. There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you.”

“Oh?” It’s hard to keep your voice neutral when a guy is
massaging your naughty bits with a washcloth. Even if he can’t really see said naughty bits due to being extremely myopic.

“Yeah. Do you have any, er, plans this summer?”

“You mean, like…for a weekend share, or something?” Is he asking if I want to split a rental on the shore with him? Well, this is awkward. I am so not a beach girl. Because beach means bathing suit, and bathing suit equals sarong, which equals social awkwardness when it comes to everyone asking,
When are you going to take your sarong off so you can join us in the water?

“No,” he says. “I meant…could you maybe take a few weeks off?”

“I don’t know,” I say slowly. A few weeks at the beach? How can I plead disfiguring case of heat rash and therefore cannot remove sarong for a few
weeks
? “I’ll only have accrued about a week of vacation time since I started…” Would he believe me if I say I’m allergic to sand fleas?

“This’ll take longer than a week,” Tad murmurs, as his hand moves even lower. “What about a leave of absence? Do you think you could wrangle one of those?”

“I guess I could ask.” What’s going on here? I mean, I know what’s going on down
there.
But what’s going on up there, in my boyfriend’s head? This is sounding less and less like a weekend beach share and more and more like…I don’t even know. “How long are we talking about? What have you got in mind? Cross-country road trip?”

Tad smiles. “Not exactly. And actually…Forget I said anything. I want to ask you when the timing’s right. And right now, the timing is definitely…not…right.”

The timing was perfectly right, if you asked me. Just not for anything other than…well. Good clean fun.

Still, I couldn’t help feeling a little bit flustered. What on earth could Tad want to ask me—but only when the timing’s right—that would require me taking a significant amount of time off from work this summer?

Hmmm…what…no…

No. Definitely. Not. Not that. It couldn’t be. We’d only been dating for twelve weeks!

On the other hand…I
did
go running with him this morning. If that’s not a sign of commitment, I don’t know what is.

Still, it’s the little things that count most in life. It really is.

Looking back, it’s funny (strange funny. Not ha ha funny) that at the exact moment I was thinking this, my new boss was taking his first sip of morning coffee…

And dying.

I’m feeling pretty good about things as I’m heading back toward my office after breakfast. Yeah, okay, Pete, the security guard, snickered at my elaborately casual good-bye to Tad as he left the building—me: “See ya.” Tad: “Later.” I guess a few New York College employees might be on to us by now. Certainly Magda, when she saw that both my hair and Tad’s was still damp (I have to remember to buy a hair dryer to keep at his place, along with the change of clothes I’ve been stashing in the single bottom drawer he so generously allows me to use), could not seem to be able to repress a smirk.

But whatever. It’s not like they’re going to tell anyone. Although maybe we should be more careful about breakfasting in the residence hall. What if another one of Tad’s students should happen to show up there one morning, and see us sharing a grapefruit half? That would be pretty hard to explain away as a private tutoring session.

The one person I definitely have to be careful around, where Tad is concerned, is my new boss, Dr. Owen Veatch (PhD). Owen was transferred from his position as ombudsman to the president’s office to interim director of Fischer Hall, while a countrywide search is being conducted in order to find a suitable permanent replacement for Tom, my last boss, who got a promotion.

You wouldn’t think it would turn out to be so hard to find someone to run a seven-hundred-bed residence hall in exchange for thirty grand a year and free housing in Greenwich Village, which has some of the highest rents in the country.

But when there’ve been several murders in that residence hall over the course of a mere nine months, garnering that building the nickname Death Dorm, you’d be surprised how few candidates express a willingness to work there.

It’s a shame, because Fischer Hall is actually a kick-ass building. It’s one of the biggest on Washington Square Park, and still maintains a lot of its mid-nineteenth-century grandeur, with its marble floors and fireplaced lounges. I mean, aside from the fact that most of the rooms have been carved up into double-triples (two bedrooms adjoined by a bathroom, with three residents in each room, making for a total of six students sharing one toilet), and the other day I found
human waste (of the scatological variety) in one of the ornately carved mahogany phone booths in the lobby.

I can’t imagine why every higher ed grad in the country isn’t clamoring for the position.

Anyway, in the meantime, we’re saddled with Owen, who’s totally nice and all, but super old school. Like, he wears a
suit
to work every day. In a place where people poop in phone booths. Go figure.

And he’s way strict about following college guidelines for every little thing. Like, he actually said something to me when we ran out of the paper for the photocopier, and I sent our graduate assistant, Sarah, down the hall to borrow some from the dining hall office. Owen was all “Heather, I do hope you don’t make a habit of borrowing supplies from other offices. Part of your job is to make sure our office is at all times fully stocked with the items we need.”

Um. Okay.

Plus, Owen’s way involved in the current campus brouhaha involving the graduate student workers unionizing in order to protest cuts in their pay and medical benefits packages. He’s supposed to be acting liaison between the students and the president’s office—which basically means that half the time he’s in his office in the residence hall, he’s arguing over school policy with angry graduate students who don’t even live here.

So you can see why I’m extra careful to keep my relationship with Tad on the down low, with Owen around.

Which is a shame, because Tad’s really helped me to become a better employee. Not only do I make fewer math mistakes when I’m calculating payroll these days, but I’m
always a few minutes early to work on the mornings after I’ve spent the night at Tad’s, because Tad’s college-subsidized studio apartment is a block closer to Fischer Hall than Cooper’s brownstone. My best friend Patty wants to know how I managed to find and hook up with the one man who lives closer to my place of employment than I do, and just how large a part this played in my decision to pursue him romantically.

My best friend Patty is surprisingly cynical, for a happily married young mother.

The morning of my first training session—and possible prelude to a marriage proposal—with Tad, I actually managed to get to the hall director’s office before Owen, which is quite a feat. I’d been starting to wonder if maybe my new interim boss
lives
in the office, since he never seems to leave it.

I’m not the only one who’s surprised to find the office door still closed and locked that morning. A resident, whom I recognize as spring semester transfer student Jamie Price, blond, broad-shouldered, and blue-eyed, scrambles up from the institutional-style couch that sits outside my office, looking anxious.

“Hi?” Jamie’s one of those girls who ends almost every single statement with a question mark, even when it isn’t a question. “I had an appointment? With Dr. Veatch? For eight-thirty? But he isn’t here? I knocked?”

“He’s probably just running a little late,” I say, taking my keys out from the pocket of my backpack. I always carry a backpack, and not a purse, because backpacks are roomy enough to fit all my makeup, hairstyling equipment, spare changes of underwear, etcetera, which has never come in
handier more than now that I’m splitting my time between my apartment and my remedial math assistant professor’s place. I just need to remember to buy a travel hair dryer. I’ve kind of got the living-on-the-go thing down. Well, I should, considering how many years I spent on the road, living out of a suitcase with my mom, doing the teen-pop-star-singing-sensation mall-tour thing (no stage was too small for Heather Wells!), slowly moving my way up to bigger venues, like state fairs, until I reached that pinnacle of success, opening for the boy band Easy Street, where I met the then love of my life, Jordan Cartwright, whose father signed me to the mega record deal that made Heather Wells a household name…

…for about five minutes, before I decided I wanted to have my own voice and write my own songs, instead of singing the sugary crap the studio handed to me, and Jordan’s dad finally gave me the boot…

…and Mom took off to Argentina with my manager, and all my money.

Although these are not the sort of things upon which I like to dwell before nine in the morning. Or ever, really.

“I’m sure he’ll be here in a minute,” I tell Jamie.

Unlike whoever gets hired to replace him, Owen doesn’t live in the building. The Fischer Hall director’s apartment has sat empty since the old director, Tom, moved out of it last month, having been transferred into a far swankier apartment in the frat building, Waverly Hall, across the park, where he was currently happily nesting with his new live-in boyfriend, the basketball coach. Owen has a college-subsidized apartment just like Tad, but in a much nicer building on the north side of Washington Square Park.

“Okay,” Jamie says, following me—after I’d unlocked the door—into the outer office, which I share with Sarah and fifteen resident assistants, students who, in exchange for free room and board, each supervise a floor of the building, acting as advisor, confidant, and narc to about forty-five residents each. My desk is on the far side, where I can sit with my back to the wall and an eye on the photocopier, which receives so much daily abuse that I think I could probably moonlight as a copier repair person, I spend so much time fixing it.

The door to the hall director’s office—separated from the outer office by a wall made up of plaster for the first five feet, then a metal grate for the next two, until it meets the ceiling—is closed.

Except that, through the grate, I can smell coffee. Also another smell that I can’t quite identify. And I can hear street noises—a honking car, footsteps on the sidewalk—coming from outside the hall director’s office, which—unlike the outer office—has windows that look out onto a side street of Washington Square.

I assume, from these clues, that Owen is in his office, drinking coffee with one of the windows open. But the door closed, probably due to his wanting some privacy. Hopefully so he can look up Internet porn.

But the truth is, Owen’s never really struck me as the Internet porn type, although he is a divorced, middle-aged male, which one has to assume is Internet porn’s target demo—well, aside from fourteen-year-old boys.

“Owen,” I say, giving his door a tap. “Your eight-thirty appointment, Jamie, is here.”

Jamie, standing by my desk in her baby blue sweater set and jeans, calls, through the grate, “Um, hi, Dr. Veatch?”

Dr. Veatch doesn’t respond. Which is totally weird. Because I know he’s in there.

That’s when I start to get the creepy feeling. And the truth is, I’ve worked in Fischer Hall long enough to know that when you get a creepy feeling, it’s probably right on target.

“Jamie,” I say, trying not to let the growing dread I feel show in my voice. “Go out to the front desk and ask Pete, the security guard, to come back here a minute, will you?”

Jamie, looking bemused but still smiling, says, “Okay?” and goes out into the hall.

As soon as she’s gone, I whip out my key to the hall director’s office, insert it into the lock, and open Owen’s door.

And see why it is that he didn’t respond to my knock.

I quickly pull the door shut again, remove my key, sink down into the closest chair—the one by Sarah’s desk.

Then I stick my head between my knees.

I’m studying the tops of my running shoes when Pete and Jamie return, Pete panting a little, because he’s got the same problem saying no to Magda’s offers of free DoveBars that I do.

“What is it?” Pete wants to know. “What’s wrong? Why are you hunched over like that?”

“I have cramps,” I say, to my shoelaces. “Jamie, we’re going to have to reschedule your appointment for another time. Okay?”

I glance up from my shoes and see that Jamie looks confused. “Is everything all right?” she wants to know.

“Uh,” I say. What am I going to say,
Yeah, everything’s fine
?
Because everything’s not fine. And she’s going to find that out—sooner than later. “Not really. We’ll call you later to reschedule, okay?”

“Okay,” Jamie says, now looking more concerned than confused. “I…”

But something in my face—maybe the nausea I’m fighting back?
Why
did I go for that second waffle?—stops her, and she turns and leaves the office.

“Shut the door,” I say to Pete, who does so.

“Heather,” he says. “What’s this all about? What’s wrong with you? Are you sick? You want I should call the nurse on duty?”

“I’m not sick,” I say, and hold out my keys, still keeping my head as close as I can to the floor (I’m hoping this will keep the nausea at bay). “But Owen is. Well, not sick so much as…dead. You better call nine-one-one. I would but…I’m not feeling too good right now.”

“Dead?” I can’t see his face, but I have a good view of his shoes—sturdy black ones, with reinforced steel toes for when recalcitrant residents—or their guests—try to resist being physically dissuaded from whatever half-assed stunt they’re intent on embarking upon. “What do you mean, dead?”

“Dead dead,” I say. “As in dead.”

“Why didn’t you say something before?” Pete swears to himself and grabs my keys. I can hear him fumbling for the right one, but I don’t risk looking up to help. Because things are still swimming around a lot south of my throat.

They’d been chocolate chip waffles, too. That’s just wrong. Why can’t I ever just eat a healthy breakfast? What’s so wrong with whole wheat toast, half a grapefruit, and an
egg white omelet? Why do I always have to reach for the whipped cream?
Why?

“Why didn’t you try to do something for him?” Pete wants to know, still trying to find the right key. “CPR, or something?”

“CPR won’t help,” I say, to my shoes. “Given that he’s dead.”

“Since when do you have a medical degree?” Pete demands. And finally gets the right key, and shoulders the door open with far more force than necessary.

Then freezes.

I know he freezes because I’m still watching his feet.

“Oh,” he says softly.

“Put down the blinds,” I say, to the floor.

“What?” Pete’s voice sounds funny.

“The window blinds,” I say. “Anyone walking by along the sidewalk can look in and see. I’m surprised someone hasn’t yet.” On the other hand, it’s New York City. Busy, busy New York, filled with busy, busy New Yorkers. “Put the blinds down.” I realize I’m starting to feel better. Not well enough to look into the room Pete’s standing in. But well enough to sit up a little and grab the phone. “I’ll call nine-one-one. You put down the blinds.”

“Right.” Pete’s voice still sounds funny. This might be because he’s swearing, steadily and with a great deal of creativity, under this breath. I hear the blinds slide down.

I still don’t look behind me, though. I clutch the phone receiver to my ear and stab the number 9–9–1–1 into the phone. The extra 9 is so that I can get an outside line.

It’s as I’m doing this that a key is inserted into the keyhole
of the door to the outer office—which locks automatically when closed—and a second later, Sarah, our grad student assistant (or, I guess, more correctly,
my
grad student assistant, since there’s no
our
anymore), comes in, looking surprised to see me sitting at her desk.

“Hey,” she says. “What’s going on? Why’s Pete in here? Where’s—”

“Don’t!” both Pete and I yell at the same time, as Sarah takes a step toward the open door to Dr. Veatch’s office.

It’s at that exact moment that the emergency operator says, “Nine-one-one, what’s the emergency?” into my ear.

“What’s wrong?” Sarah wants to know, because Pete has put his hands out and is striding toward her, blocking her efforts to get into Dr. Veatch’s office. “What is it? Let me see. Let me see!”

“Hello?” the emergency operator squawks in my ear.

“Yes, hello,” I say. “I need the police at Fischer Hall, on Washington Square West.” I give them the address, even though it’s hardly necessary. Every emergency operator in Manhattan knows where Death Dorm is by now.