“Yow,” said Sally, momentarily distracted from her own drama. She missed talking like this. She had loved talking like this. When would she ever talk like this again, if not with Rochelle Steiner?
“Oh,” said Rochelle, “and I kind of have a boyfriend.”
Sally, punctured, said nothing. She tried to prepare herself for the next thing.
“I know. Hilarious, right? I mean, who has time? But it sort of just happened. I should have mentioned it back in the spring, but … you know, I wasn’t sure where it was going, and I just … I guess I didn’t want to share my inevitable humiliation. But now I’m sorry I didn’t. I’d have liked you to meet him. I mean, of course you can still meet him anytime!”
Sally stared. She could still? Meet him?
“He’s a bit shy. To be honest, he hasn’t made a ton of friends here, but that’s okay. He kind of hung out with his roommate, and his roommate’s friends. They’re all, like, born-again Christians. Well, the roommate’s a Mormon.”
Sally didn’t trust herself to speak. Luckily, she didn’t have to.
“Oh my God,” Rochelle said, “a couple of weeks ago we went to see his roommate in this Mormon thing, this religious pageant thing, way out in the middle of nowhere.”
“Palmyra?” said Sally.
She and Harriet had passed Palmyra on the way back from the Chautauqua trip. Where the Mormons came from, Harriet had said as they drove by.
Rochelle looked at her in surprise. “Yes. The most bizarre thing I’ve ever seen in my life. Hundreds of corn-fed Americans in a field, dressed up like extras in Ben-Hur, reenacting the Book of Mormon. I mean, I understand why we went. For his roommate. And you need to be respectful. But it was so bizarre. Oh!” she said, “this is the weirdest thing, but he has the same last name as you. My boyfriend, not the Mormon roommate. I had no idea it’s such a common name. That’s what he said, when I told him about you.”
When I told him about you.
Sally, working her way through this, said nothing.
“And what about you? Are you seeing…” Rochelle seemed to falter. “Anyone?”
Nine months on the other side of their little room, and it was the first time this question had been asked. It was so banal, so pedestrian. Sally wanted to hurl it back.
“What do you mean, ‘seeing’？” she said unkindly.
“Oh, you know.”
A long and uncomfortable moment passed.
“Sally,” said Rochelle, “I’m so happy we were roommates. I felt really lucky. And sometimes I thought, how would I have ever met Sally if I hadn’t been matched up with her by some computer or something?”
“But you didn’t want to keep rooming together,” she said. She was a little surprised to hear herself say it out loud.
Rochelle looked around uncomfortably. “I didn’t handle that very well. I think I just wanted some privacy…”
“For the boyfriend.”
“Well, yes. Partly. And I wondered if … if we were becoming too dependent on each other.”
If I was becoming too dependent on you, Sally thought. That’s what you mean.
“We could have talked about it,” she said.
“Yes. We should have. I take responsibility for that. But it’s why I was so glad you got in touch with me. Because I’d be incredibly sad if I thought we weren’t going to be friends anymore.”
She felt something inside herself soften, but even as it did the volume of her outrage was rising. Rochelle had been victimized no less than herself. More than herself! And by Lewyn, that snake, more snakely still by virtue of the fact that his snakeliness had lain dormant all these years. Cruelty from Harrison: that was a given, a no-brainer. Harrison could smell weakness in his siblings, track it to its source, then lay the perfect trap to reap the most exquisite harvest of sibling distress, all without dropping an Oxford comma. But Lewyn? Lewyn, indolent in his loser role, his weirdo role, too passive to even contemplate a vicious act against anyone, let alone the triplet who was not the triplet who’d been such an asshole to him since birth—who would have guessed what depths of vicious calculation he’d harbored, all these years!