Except that Sally already knew “one day” wouldn’t reach all that far into the future. Harriet, not the type to indulge discomfort （Sally had seen her bang her thumb with a hammer and respond with a “Crap” and a rinse of her bleeding nailbed under the tap）， was not a healthy woman. She took, with her morning orange juice, a fistful of mysterious medications, and at the end of a list of numbers taped by the kitchen’s wall phone （the friend in Rochester, a cousin in Plattsburgh, Drew, and half a dozen dealers and restorers） was the ominously scribbled entry: Upstate Cancer Care. And she was losing weight. The dense round person Sally had met over a Shaker chair at the Johnson Museum of Art was slowly diminishing, as if someone had punched a tiny hole in her foot and let the life force begin to drain. She did not seem to be in pain, or even in distress, but that didn’t stop Sally from wondering whether Harriet might need some help.
Those are nice rooms up there, she’d said.
What have you decided? said Rochelle.
She’d found, all that spring, that she was back in 213 Balch earlier and earlier at night, sometimes even in the afternoon with no plans to go out again. Whole evenings in the small room with the window cracked open, sitting cross-legged on her bed with her homework at the ready, waiting for the doorknob to turn and Rochelle to enter. Which, she now understood, was happening later and later, sometimes very late indeed. Sally began to understand that this was not simply a case of general attrition, a peeling away of their friendship in a sad but noneventful way. No. Something had happened, something she’d missed, something of significance. Because she had been distracted by her excursions to East Seneca? Because she was selfish and myopic and hadn’t been paying attention? No. Because it was being deliberately hidden from her.
But why hide? They were friends, weren’t they? And until that bad mistake she’d made, foisting herself on Rochelle at her mysterious and sad home, they had been the kind of roommates who might say, for example, I met somebody or I might be in love, for surely that was the something, the deliberately hidden something, that was happening in Rochelle’s life. Night after night, with the relentless party room down the corridor in perpetual jamboree and the stubborn stink of bulimia nervosa （multiple cases） in the shared bathroom across the hall, Sally studied for her English lit final and drafted her passionless women’s studies term paper and tried not to think about the thing that was happening in Rochelle’s life, and why that mattered to her so much.
What have you decided?
She had decided nothing. This had been decided for her.
She began to move well before the end of the term, clearing out the largest of Harriet’s third-floor rooms to leave for herself only an epic four-poster, a highboy, and a Victorian marble-topped table by the bed, and scrubbing the bathroom back to its porcelain basins and tile. （The shower ran brown water for nearly an hour at first but righted itself in time.） Each day, she walked an item or two—a few books or a change of clothing—across the campus from Balch Hall and up the hill to East Seneca, and it was so gradual that even with what little remained in the room after the common room purges and giveaways, Rochelle didn’t seem to notice any transition was underway. Finally, a week before finals ended, she packed up her sheets and her computer and left for good.
What’s up? Rochelle wrote in an email late that night. She must have only just arrived back at the room. Are you ok?
Got a place off campus, Sally wrote back. Lease started on the first so I thought, might as well go now.
I would have helped you move!
Sally was ensconced in her new four-poster. It was massive with a dark carved headboard and twisted pillars, and she felt tiny in the middle of it with her laptop open.
That’s ok. You’ve been busy.
Studying for finals, Rochelle wrote. She wrote it quickly. Too quickly. So worried about my law seminar. I’m sorry, Sally. Can we meet up for coffee?
Sure. Just say when.
When I come up for air, wrote Rochelle, backtracking immediately.