Size 14 Is Not Fat Either Read Free

them. If you can just hang on until next Monday, when we know who’s checked in and who hasn’t shown up—”
    I am interrupted by general moaning. “By next Monday I’ll be dead,” one resident assures another.

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    “Or my roommate will,” his friend says. “Because I’ll have killed him by then.”
    “No killing your roommate,” I say, having gotten the office door open and flicked on the lights. “Or yourself. Come on, guys. It’s just another week.”
    Most of them go away, grumbling. Only Cheryl continues to hang around, looking excited as she follows me into my office. I see that she has a mousy-looking girl in tow.
    “Heather,” she says again. “Hi. Listen, remember when you said if I found someone who would swap spaces with me, I could move? Well, I found someone. This is my friend Lindsay’s roommate, Ann, and she said she’d swap with me.”
    I’ve peeled off my coat and hung it on a nearby hook. Now I sink into my desk chair and look at Ann, who appears to have a cold, from the way she’s sniffling into a wadded-up Kleenex. I hand her the box I keep handy in case of Diet Coke spills.
    “You want to trade spaces with Cheryl, Ann?” I ask her, just to make sure. I can’t imagine why anyone would want to live with a person who painted the walls of her side of the room black.
    Then again, it was probably annoying to Cheryl’s roommate that Cheryl’s side of the room was decorated with so many pansies, the New York College mascot.
    “I guess,” Ann says, looking wan.
    “She does,” Cheryl assures me brightly. “Don’t you, Ann?”
    Ann shrugs. “I guess,” she says again.
    I begin to sense Ann might have been coerced into agreeing to this room change.
    “Ann,” I say. “Have youmet Cheryl’s roommate, Karly? You know she, er…likes the color black?”
    “Oh,” Ann says. “Yeah. The Goth thing. I know. It’s okay.”
    “And…” I hesitate to bring it up, because, ew. “The snake?”
    “Whatever. I mean”—she looks at Cheryl—“no offense, or anything. But I’d rather live with a snake than a cheerleader.”
    Cheryl, far from being offended, beams at me.
    “See?” she says. “So can we do the paperwork for our swap now? Because my dad is here to help me move, and he wants to get back to New Jersey before this big blizzard hits.”
    I pull out the forms, finding myself shrugging, just like Ann—it’s sort of catching.
    “Okay,” I say, and hand them the papers they have to fill out to make the switch. When the girls—Cheryl giddy with excitement, Ann decidedly more calm—finish filling out their forms and leave, I look over last night’s briefing forms. Fischer Hall is staffed round-the-clock by a security guard, student front desk receptionists, and resident assistants, students who, in exchange for free room and board, act Page 9

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    as sort of house mothers on each of the hall’s twenty floors. They all have to fill out reports at the end of their shifts, and my job is to read and follow up on these briefings. This always makes for an interesting morning.
    The reports range from the ludicrous to the banal. Last night, for instance, six forty-ounce bottles of beer were hurled from an upper-story window onto the roof of a cab passing on the street below. Ten cops from the Sixth Precinct arrived and ran up and down the stairs a few times, unsuccessfully trying to figure out who the pitcher had been.
    On the other end of the spectrum, the front desk apparently lost someone’s Columbia House CD of the Month, causing much consternation. One of the RAs somberly reports that a resident slammed her door several times, crying, “I hate it here.” The RA wishes to refer the student to Counseling Services.
    Another report states that a small riot occurred when a cafeteria worker chastised a student for