“Um,” I say. “Yeah. How did you…” My voice trails off. Right. I forget, sometimes, that my face was once plastered all over the bedroom walls of teenage girls—and some of their brothers.
“Actually, I saw you perform the other night with Frank Robillard and his band,” the guy says cheerfully. “Over at Joe’s Pub?”
My stomach lurches. “Oh. You saw that?”
“Jazz isn’t really my thing,” the guy says. “But I liked that song you did.”
“It was an Ella Fitzgerald cover,” I say. I really want to throw up now. Rodgers and Hart’s “I Wish I Were in Love Again” happens to be one of Cooper’s favorite songs. Which isn’t necessarily why I chose to sing it, but…well, it might have been one of the reasons.
Thank God he’d been called away at the last minute by some kind of PI emergency. I don’t think, in the end, that I could have gotten up there if I’d known he was in the audience.
“Frank and I—” I stammer. “W-we were just fooling around.”
Well, Frank had been fooling around. I’d been deadly serious…at least until no one booed us. Then I began to relax and have a little fun with it. Afterward, people clapped…but of course they were applauding for Frank (even though Patty assures me they were also clapping for me. But only for having the guts to get up there, I’m sure. I’d been rusty…and I hadn’t missed the fact that my dad, in the audience, had been clapping the hardest of anyone. I guess it’s nice to know, whatever else happens, I’ve got one parent watching my back).
“Well, it sounded great to me,” Mr. Gorgeous says. “So, you finally got my messages?”
I blink at him. “Um, I guess so. I got a message from someone named Tad Tocco—”
“That’s me,” Tad says. The smile gets even bigger. So does he, as he stands up and holds out his right hand. He’s taller than me. And possibly even outweighs me. He’s a big, muscular guy. “Your remedial math professor.” His hand swallows mine. “I was going to introduce myself after the show the other night, but you seemed to disappear right after your song.”
I say something. I have no idea what. His hand is callused. From playing so much killer Frisbee, no doubt.
“Anyway, I have to say,” he says, letting go of my hand, finally, and sinking back into his chair, just as my knees give out and I sort of fall back into the one on the other side of his desk, “you have a way better excuse for blowing off my class than most of my students. I mean, I’ve never had anyone miss the first week of school because they were busy catching a murderer.”
My jaw drops. “You’re my…you’re my…” I’ve forgotten how to formulate words.
“I’m your remedial math professor,” Tad says cheerfully. “I wanted to get in touch with you about scheduling some makeup sessions. You know, for the classes you’ve missed? I don’t want you falling behind. So I figured we could meet. At your convenience, of course. How’s after work? There’s a bar near that place you work—Fischer Hall? The Stoned Crow. A bunch of us plays darts down there, so it would be convenient for me if we could meet there, seeing as how we’re both over twenty-one.” Then he winks at me. He winks at me. “I find algebra goes down a lot easier with popcorn and beer. That okay with you?”
I can only stare at him. He’s just so…hot.
Way hotter than Barista Boy.
Suddenly I think I’m going to like college.
A lot.
“That sounds great to me,” I say.
* * *
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MEG CABOT
* * *
I have nothing against the Greek system. Honestly. I even have a couple of friends who were in a sorority. Well, okay, one friend. And she got kicked out. But that is not the point.
Even though I grew up in a college town that boasted one of the largest and oldest Greek systems in the country, I was never tempted to join a sorority, because I could not see the point in living in a house with a lot of girls, when I could live in a dorm filled with guys.
Some people might call this boy crazy. I call this fun.
But that is not the point, either.
The point is, for the entire first two decades of my life (when I lived in a town in which seventeen percent of the college community was in the Greek system), and for the decade after that (when I worked as the assistant director of a large urban university dormitory), I never encountered a fraternity like the one in this book, the Tau Phi Epsilon House—which is entirely fictional.
This is not to say the FAT CHICKS GO HOME thing never happened. It was, in fact, painted on the sidewalk of a fraternity at my college. It was the same fraternity whose members would sit on the front porch and hold up scorecards as girls walked by on their way to class, rating their looks on a scale of one to ten (I learned to take a different route to class).
It’s also the fraternity that, as a prank, stole all my mother’s potted plants from our front porch and placed them on their own front porch, then denied having done so when we spotted them there and called the cops.
But I recognize that there are many exemplary fraternities and sororities in existence, whose charitable and philanthropic acts have made them invaluable to many, and are an asset to the communities in which they exist. I include among these the Delta Nus, the Omega Mus, and, of course, the Tri-Lams.
I hope you enjoyed reading Size 14 Is Not Fat Either. Look for my next mystery featuring Heather Wells, currently titled Big Boned, in January 2008.
About the Author
MEG CABOT was born in Bloomington, Indiana. Armed with a fine arts degree from Indiana University, she moved to New York City to pursue an illustration career, but when that failed to materialize, got a job as the assistant manager of an undergraduate dormitory at New York University instead, writing novels on the weekends (and whenever her boss wasn’t looking). Meg has since gone on to publish over thirty novels for younger readers as well as adults, including The Princess Diaries series, Size 12 Is Not Fat, and Queen of Babble. She now divides her time between New York City and Key West with her husband and their one-eyed cat, Henrietta.
Be sure to check out Meg’s websites:
www.megcabot.com
www.megcabotbookclub.com
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By Meg Cabot
SIZE 14 IS NOT FAT EITHER
QUEEN OF BABBLE
SIZE 12 IS NOT FAT
EVERY BOY’S GOT ONE • BOY MEETS GIRL
THE BOY NEXT DOOR • SHE WENT ALL THE WAY
ALL-AMERICAN GIRL
READY OR NOT: AN ALL-AMERICAN GIRL NOVEL
NICOLA AND THE VISCOUNT • VICTORIA AND THE ROGUE
THE PRINCESS DIARIES
THE PRINCESS DIARIES, VOLUME II: PRINCESS IN THE SPOTLIGHT
THE PRINCESS DIARIES, VOLUME III: PRINCESS IN LOVE
THE PRINCESS DIARIES, VOLUME IV: PRINCESS IN WAITING
THE PRINCESS DIARIES, VOLUME IV AND A HALF: PROJECT PRINCESS
THE PRINCESS DIARIES, VOLUME V: PRINCESS IN PINK
THE PRINCESS DIARIES, VOLUME VI: PRINCESS IN TRAINING
THE PRINCESS DIARIES, VOLUME VIII: PRINCESS ON THE BRINK
THE PRINCESS PRESENT: A PRINCESS DIARIES BOOK
PRINCESS LESSONS: A PRINCESS DIARIES BOOK
PERFECT PRINCESS: A PRINCESS DIARIES BOOK
HOLIDAY PRINCESS: A PRINCESS DIARIES BOOK
THE MEDIATOR 1: SHADOWLAND
THE MEDIATOR 2: NINTH KEY
THE MEDIATOR 3: REUNION
THE MEDIATOR 4: DARKEST HOUR
THE MEDIATOR 5: HAUNTED
THE MEDIATOR 6: TWILIGHT
THE 1-800-WHERE-R-YOU BOOKS
WHEN LIGHTNING STRIKES • CODE NAME CASSANDRA
SAFE HOUSE • SANCTUARY • MISSING YOU
C
redits
Cover design by Mary Schuck
Cover photograph by Jan Cobb.
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Name, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
SIZE 14 IS NOT FAT EITHER. Copyright © 2007 by Meg Cabot, LLC. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Microsoft Reader November 2006 ISBN 978-0-06-124876-4
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cabot, Meg.
Size 14 is not fat either / by Meg Cabot.—1st. ed.
p. cm.
ISBN-13: 978-0-06-052512-5
ISBN-10: 0-06-052512-6
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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