“Who’s that?” Rochelle said one late afternoon in October. She had come back unexpectedly while Sally was in the bathroom and was pointing to a sour infant dressed as a pumpkin for Halloween.
“Who’s what?” said Sally, knowing full well. “Oh. Cousin’s baby. Chubster.” She clicked it away as Rochelle stepped closer.
“All babies are cute, though.”
“Are they, though?” She closed her Clamshell iBook. “Are you going for dinner soon?”
“I don’t know,” said Rochelle, as expected. “Are you?”
Only a handful of times had she even set eyes on Lewyn: once in the first meeting of Cognitive Science 101 （after seeing him she’d dropped the class）， and once far across the dining room, where he was seated with a tall, skinny boy. She’d been on her own at the time, and it might have been an acceptable moment to go over and say hello, but she didn’t want to, and anyway Lewyn looked okay, perfectly functional. And obviously, he had made at least one friend.
Sally, too, had made a friend. There wasn’t anything particularly shocking about that. She’d always had friends, and she’d certainly expected to make new ones at Cornell. What she hadn’t expected, though, was that her will to find people to befriend would pretty much terminate at the door of 213 Balch. Given the fact that she’d never shared a bedroom, neutral cohabitation was going to be a pretty big ask, but Rochelle Steiner went beyond what she’d dared to hope for in a randomly assigned roommate. Well beyond. In fact, beyond in a way that, as the term progressed, began ever so slightly to unsettle her.
They were both Arts & Sciences, but Rochelle was going to be a lawyer and Sally, with no professional direction at all, had yet to truly care what her classes were, let alone how well she did in them. As midterms approached, Rochelle—never precisely laid-back—seemed to rev up in intensity, burrowing into some private carrel at Uris in the evenings, which left Sally in the distressing position of having to wait up, or having to decide not to wait up, or ricocheting between these two unpleasant options. That was in addition to Rochelle’s impressive array of commitments, each categorized by a different color of pen in her Filofax. Early in the term, she had joined the Center for Jewish Life and then taken on some administrative role, requiring many meetings. Shortly after that she joined a social justice group, and though she ultimately decided against pledging any of the Jewish sororities on campus she still managed to acquire whole groups of new girlfriends in each of them while exploring the possibilities, and these women often came to call, looking at Sally with frank disappointment when they found her home alone. Sally, on the other hand, had yet to discover a campus activity, group, or interest compelling enough to get her out of 213 Balch in the evenings, or even on the weekends, and usually she found herself alone there, doing her class reading and trying not to think too much about when Rochelle was going to get back, or why that seemed to matter so much, or the ways in which her lifelong dream of singularity, now clearly achieved, was turning out to be not nearly as pleasant as she’d imagined.
She and Lewyn both went home for Thanksgiving, then again for the winter break, both times traveling separately by the college’s chartered buses but arriving at the house on the Esplanade within hours of each other. Once back in Brooklyn, brother and sister awkwardly （but at least without discussing it, which would have been even more awkward） regressed to high school–era modes of communication, answering Johanna’s and Salo’s questions about their Cornell lives in a way that definitely implied they were hanging out, at least occasionally. Johanna seemed to radiate anxiety, clasping them both in viselike hugs that went on for far too long. Never a cook, she had ordered in so much food that both of the Sub-Zeros were fully loaded, and her constant fretting about what would be consumed, and when, on which plates, and in which quantities, said everything those painful embraces had not.
The baby seemed distinctly longer than she had the previous summer. Also, thankfully, quieter.
The baby was nothing to her.
Lewyn, confirming the change she had noticed on campus, was definitely thinner, but the transformation of Harrison was truly impressive. Harrison had added a highly unnecessary layer of smugness to his already noxious personality, as if his great superiority had only been confirmed by recent experiences, but he had also become physically hardened from actual bodily labor. This was obvious not only to her but to everyone, and in particular it seemed to fascinate Johanna, who peppered her most highbrow child with endless questions about chickens and cows. To Sally he seemed to have undergone some form of cultish indoctrination, which apparently featured reading by candlelight while watching over baby animals in a barn, or discussing Aristotle while digging up carrots, or some such ridiculousness. He did not have a roommate, as such, since “the men”—Christ—all roomed together in what sounded like a bunkhouse. He was maddeningly evasive about his actual classes, except to say that Roarke referred to these as “seminars,” not “classes,” and that it was a great pleasure to be in a community of fellow intellectuals at last. One of these “Roarke men,” for example, had written an actual book: serious scholarship, properly published, widely admired, etc., etc.