“Are you sure?” said one of the girls in the room next door, who stopped at Sally and Rochelle’s room with her arms full of Abercrombie sweatshirts and a newish pair of Uggs.
“Completely,” Sally confirmed. “I just want to think a little less about what I want to wear.”
What she wanted to wear, she’d decided, would come from the minimalist stack of folded blue denim and black long-sleeved shirts on her side of the shared closet. It was, maybe, a little strange, but then again, far more alarming transformations were underway elsewhere in Balch Hall. On their corridor alone a freshman from Texas had inked an arachnid on the back of each hand and taken her septum to some shady place in Collegetown to be pierced. Two fragile girls, unluckily assigned to room together, were already embarked upon competitive cutting. A flautist from Denver had deliberately lost her instrument at a Starbucks in town, after which she had shaved her head for no reason she was able to articulate. All this, and Sally still attracted official attention from the RA on her floor? When the senior stopped by she saw that Sally Oppenheimer lacked a standard-issue wooden desk and had not one family photograph or stuffed animal anywhere! On the other hand, Sally herself seemed perfectly healthy and on good terms with her roommate, and there was no telltale herbal residue in the air, nor any alcohol in sight, no new tattoos or fresh scars or radical haircuts or poor hygiene, and both girls talked about their classes with enthusiasm. What should the RA do? Report them for tidiness? She left them to it, and moreover accepted the oversized Cornell ’04 mug Sally offered her, because a person could always use another mug.
It encouraged Sally that her roommate seemed to take some cue from the incredible shrinking trousseau on her own side; as the fall progressed Rochelle, too, began to leave some of her more extraneous items in the lounge down the hall or in the trash bins, notably a set of horrible pink-and-butterfly sheets, a souvenir heart-shaped pillow covered in fading Sharpie autographs, and half of the posters she’d initially stuck up with Blu-Tack. She also kept her desk uncluttered and her bed made and her half of the closet—which never emptied out to the extent Sally’s did—at least orderly. In fact, Rochelle Steiner had been so generally compliant in domestic matters that it took Sally some time to understand that her roommate was no pushover. What she was, instead: plainly brilliant （even quite possibly to the elevated standards of Harrison Oppenheimer）， tenacious, and powerfully focused on the future—her own future, in particular. Rochelle had a love of discourse for its own sake and took obvious pleasure in arguing one side of an issue and then, equally effectively, the other. In fact, she did this so good-naturedly and so clearly as a kind of cerebral exercise that Sally often had to guess which was her actual opinion, and she was not at all surprised to learn that Rochelle had captained her high school team to victory in the Congressional Debate division of the statewide NSDA tournament, an event that had actually been held right here, on the Cornell campus. （“I took one look and decided to apply. I mean: wow.”） Between the two of them, many matters—from the optimal route to Uris Library （distance vs. shelter vs. maintenance of walkways） to George Bush’s decision not to appoint an inaugural poet—would come up for this kind of animated but nonpersonal discussion.
Sally had parried her roommate’s initial, ordinary, getting-to-know-you questions, evading in general, making no specific statement about her family’s sibling configuration, for example. It wasn’t something she had strategized in advance about, and this was partly why she’d been surprised to hear herself volunteer the fact of a brother named Harrison, who attended some weirdo college in New Hampshire where the men were men and there were no women at all.
“Dartmouth?” Rochelle had asked, not unreasonably.
“No. It’s actually a two-year college.”
“Oh. Like a junior college? That’s cool. What’s he like?”
“Kind of a jerk,” Sally said. Then, truthfully enough, she added: “We’re not close.”
And that ended that, at least on her part, though Rochelle would occasionally insert the elusive brother into a question or a discussion of their prior lives. What was the brother studying in junior college? Had he gone to the same school as she had, this fascinating source of oddities like the Ethical Conflict Resolution class and the collective open mic rending-of-garment sessions over the school’s perceived institutional racism? Had the two of them been bar/bat mitzvahed? Did Harrison share her distaste for pizza? It wasn’t difficult to construct or to maintain this alternate Oppenheimer family, nor to uphold the bigger untruth that a second, unnamed brother lived in the dormitory next door, not after that first week when she had come home to find （and hastily erase） his ridiculous “stopped by” note on their whiteboard. Technology, at least, was on her side; that fall Johanna had acquired an AOL account and quickly developed a fondness for deeply unwelcome in-box fodder: joke lists and medical alerts of dubious origin, chain letters you were supposed to send to ten people you loved, with a gobbet of wisdom or a favorite poem. These were not difficult to parry with a Thanks! or Cute, Mom! and they served to open enough of an aperture between herself and Lewyn that there was even less of a reason to make real-world contact. Then Johanna figured out how to email photographs to her children at college. She did this a lot.