Free Size 12 Is Not Fat by Meg Cabot

a man of few words, but the words he does use are always the exactly right ones. When he heard about my walking in on Jordan and Tania, he called my cell and told me that if I was looking for a new place to live, the top-floor apartment of his brownstone—where his grandfather’s houseboy had lived—was available. When I explained how broke I was—thanks to Mom—Cooper said I could earn my keep by doing his client billing and entering the piles of receipts he had lying around into Quicken, so he didn’t have to pay his accountant $175 an hour to do it.
    Simple as that, I left the Park Avenue penthouse Jordan and I had been sharing, and moved into Cooper’s place. After only a single night there, it was as if Lucy and I had never lived anywhere else.
    Of course, the work isn’t exactly easy. Coop had said he thought it would total maybe ten hours a week, but it’s more like twenty. I usually spend all day Sunday and several nights a week trying to make sense out of the piles of scrap paper, notes scribbled on matchbooks, and crumpled receipts in his office.
    Still, as rent goes, twenty hours a week of data entry is nothing. We’re talking a West Village floor-through that would easily go for three thousand a month on the open market.
    And yeah, I know why he did it. And it’s not because deep down inside he has a secret penchant for size 12 ex–pop stars. In fact—like Jordan’s pounding on the door just now—it’s got nothing to do with me at all. Cooper’s motivation inletting me move in with him is that, in doing so, he’s really bugging the hell out of his family—primarily his little brother. Coop revels in annoying Jordan, and Jordan, in return, hates Cooper. He says it’s because Coop is irresponsible and immature.
    But I think it’s really because Jordan’s jealous of the fact that Cooper, when his parents tried to pressure him into joining Easy Street by cutting him off financially, hadn’t seemed to mind being poor in the least, and had in fact found his own way in the world without the help of Cartwright Records. I’ve always suspected that Jordan—much as he loves performing—wishes he’d told his parents where to go, the way Cooper—and eventually me, too—had.
    Cooper obviously suspects the same thing.
    “Well,” he says, as in the background, we hear Jordan shout, “ Come on, I know you guys are in there .” “Much as I’m enjoying sitting here listening to Jordan have a meltdown on my stoop, I have to get to work.”
    I can’t help staring at him as he puts down his beer bottle and stands up. Cooper really is a choice specimen. In the fading sunlight, he looks particularly tanned. But it isn’t, I know, a tan from a can, like his brother’s. Coop’s tan is from sitting for hours behind some bushes with a telephoto lens pointed at a motel room doorway…
    Not that Cooper has ever told me what, exactly, he does all day.
    “You’re working?” I ask, squinting up at him. “On a Saturday night? Doing what?”
    He chuckles. It’s like a little game between us. I try to trick him into letting slip what kind of case he’s working on, and he refuses to take the bait. Cooper takes his clients’ rights to privacy seriously.
    Also, he thinks his cases are way too kinky for his kidbrother’s ex-girlfriend to hear about. To Cooper, I think I’ll always be a fifteen-year-old in a halter top and ponytail, proclaiming from a mall stage that I’m suffering from a sugar rush.
    “Nice try,” Cooper says. “What are you going to do?”
    I think about it. Magda is pulling a double at the cash register in the caf, and would want to go straight home afterward to wash the smell of Tater Tots out of her hair. I could call my friend Patty—one of my former backup dancers from the Sugar Rush tour, and one of the few friends I have left from back when I’d been in the music business.
    But she’s married now, with a baby, and doesn’t have much time for her single friends anymore.
    I