Size 12 Is Not Fat Read Free

tell by her expression. She isn’t merely upset because the fire department won’t let her back in the building. She’s upset because she KNOWS.
    “Heather!” Magda, seeing me in the crowd, flings a heavily manicured hand toward me. “Oh, Heather! Is terrible!”
    Magda is standing there in her pink cafeteria smock and leopard-print leggings, shaking her frosted curls and taking long, nervous drags on the Virginia Slim she’s got tucked between her two-inch-long nails. Each nail bears a mini replica of the American flag. Because even though Magda goes back to her native Dominican Republic every chance she gets, she is still very patriotic about her adopted country, and expresses her affection for it through nail art.
    That’s how I met her, actually. Almost four months ago, at the manicurist. That’s also how I heard about the job in the dorm (I mean, residence hall) in the first place. The last assistant director before me—Justine—had just gotten fired for embezzling seven thousand dollars from the building’s petty cash, a fact which had enraged Magda, the dorm—I mean, residence hall—cafeteria’s cashier.
    “Can you believe it?” Magda had been complaining to anyone who would listen, as I was having my toes done in Hot Tamale Red—because, you know, even if the rest of your life is going down the toilet, like mine was back then, at least your toes can still look pretty.
    Magda, a few tables away, had been having mini Statues of Liberty air-brushed onto her thumbnails, in honor of Memorial Day, and was waxing eloquent about Justine, my predecessor.
    “She order twenty-seven ceramic heaters from Office Supply and give them to her friends as wedding presents!”
    I still have no idea what a ceramic heater is, or why anyone would want one as a wedding gift. But when I’d heard someone had been fired from Magda’s place of work, where one of the job benefits—besides twenty vacation days a year and full health and dental—is free tuition, I’d jumped on the information.
    I owe Magda a lot, actually. And not just because she helped me with the job thing, either (or because she lets me eat free in the caf anytime I want—which might be part of the reason why I’m no longer a size 8, except in vanity sizing), but because Magda’s become one of my best friends.
    “Mag,” I say, sidling up to her. “Who is it? Who died?”
    Because I can’t help worrying it’s someone I know, like one of the maintenance workers who are always so sweet about cleaning up spilled bodily fluids, even though it’s not in their job description. Or one of the student workers I’msupposed to supervise— supposed to being the operative words, since in the three months I’ve worked at Fischer Hall, only a handful of my student employees have ever actually done what I’ve told them to (a lot of them remain loyal to the sticky-fingered Justine).
    And when any of them actually do what I ask, it’s only because it involves something like checking every single room after the previous residents have moved out and cleaning out whatever they’ve left behind, generally half-full bottles of Jägermeister.
    So then when I get to work the next day, I can’t get a single one of them to come downstairs and sort the mail, because they’re all too hung over.
    But there are a couple kids I’ve genuinely come to love, scholarship students who didn’t come to school equipped with a Visa that Mom and Dad are only too happy to pay off every month, and who actually need to work in order to pay for books and fees, and so will take the 4 P . M .–midnight shift at the reception desk on a Saturday night with a minimum of begging on my part.
    “Oh, Heather,” Magda whispers. Only she pronounces it Haythar. She is whispering because she doesn’t want the kids to know what’s really going on. Whatever it is. “One of my little movie stars!”
    “A student?” I can see people in the crowd eyeing Magda curiously. Not because she’s