Then, as she made her way back to East Seneca, she looked through the window of the Starbucks on College Avenue and saw something that upended her afternoon and changed the direction of her life.
Well now, thought Sally.
Her stomach felt as if it were falling to the pavement. She didn’t stop. She never even broke her stride, but her brain began to pound out each step as she walked on. Oh, with each expelled breath. Oh, with each slap of foot on cement. The street tilted up the hill. She hadn’t seen this coming. Not this. Not this. It defied all logic and all fairness, and by the time she got home—to her new home—she felt terminally lost.
Flat on her back on the four-poster, looking up through where the canopy had once been but wasn’t anymore, she tried to make sense of the sight of Rochelle, her roommate, her friend, hunched over a textbook with a fat highlighting pen in her left hand and the hand of Lewyn Oppenheimer in her right. That hand, which Sally had been made to hold so often, instantly recognizable, even had it not been attached to the oddly altered body of her brother. A leaner body, longer limbed, longer haired, somehow more at ease with itself than Sally had ever known it to be, but still … Lewyn.
Could they just be friends, acquaintances from somewhere, studying conveniently together, holding companionable hands at Starbucks? No they could not. Because Rochelle had kept it a secret. Because Lewyn hadn’t given her the courtesy of a heads-up, which even he must have understood was bedrock decency befitting a stranger, let alone a sister.
She passed a terrible night and then another, then she got out of bed and drove Harriet’s car to Watertown, following Drew’s shiny truck through Adirondack forests, and back through Pulaski, Oswego, and Syracuse （where they relieved a thrift store of a three-piece painted cottage bedroom set）， and the following morning she decided she didn’t know enough to be as angry as she was or as sad as she feared she was becoming. She walked across Ithaca, across the campus, across the Thurston Avenue Bridge, and past the scene of her own crime, Balch Hall, to Jameson, where she knew Rochelle was resident advising for the high school students in the summer session, and found a discreet seat on a bench with a good view of the entrance.
At half past eight they emerged together, each wearing a sweater against the morning chill, her brother’s arm distressingly across Rochelle’s shoulders. （She came up only to his shoulder, which made this a logical posture, but still.） They headed into town and Sally, after a moment, followed, trailing them to Café Jennie where she was forced to watch her brother bring two smoothies and a copy of the Times to their table, dividing the paper between them like any couple at ease on a leisurely morning. After this, they parted for separate classes and reconvened, again at Café Jennie, this time for sandwiches and coffees. The afternoon they spent at adjacent tables in the law library: Rochelle engrossed in her work, Lewyn restless, checking on her frequently, always with some accompanying touch. Then they ate dinner and returned to Jameson—in for the night. Together.
Sally walked back to East Seneca through the campus and town. Even after this, and the easy intimacy she’d seen between them all day, she still could not fully process the transformation of these two singular persons into coupledom. She kept running an imagined conversation through her head, over and over, as she ascended the hill to East Seneca, churning her humiliation and anger into a froth and then changing something and doing it again, making it worse.
Oppenheimer! That’s my roommate’s name.
Well then, you must be my sister’s roommate. Sally Oppenheimer?
What do you mean, your sister?
My sister. Sally Oppenheimer.
Wait, are you the twin brother? You go to some … college somewhere. In New Hampshire? （Rochelle would be too polite to say “junior college.” She was a far nicer person than Sally herself.）
Not a twin. A triplet. She never told you she had a brother at Cornell? I’ve been just across the courtyard since the day we moved in.
She never told me. She never told me.