“Is that the only reason I’d want to sit with you?”
He stared at her. Her pointed chin, those thick braids, the dark eyes a mite too close together for perfect symmetry. She was beautiful. Heart-stoppingly beautiful. Already Lewyn was terrified of what might happen if he stopped looking at her.
“Please, sit.” He had no idea how he was even making words.
She folded her short legs into the seat, kicking the backpack forward under the seat in front, then sighed. “I love the smell of industrial-strength bathroom air freshener in the morning.”
“Sorry,” he said, as if he had entrapped her in this awful position.
“Remind me how your name is spelled? I remember writing it down when you called CJL about your friends. Something unusual.”
He spelled it out for her. Never had his name seemed so ridiculous. “After a relative named ‘Lou.’”
“Naturally,” she said with extravagant sarcasm. “So many Aidans named after Avrahams, and Tiffanys named after Tzipporahs. I’m sorry.”
For his name? Lewyn wondered. Or for teasing him? Was she teasing him?
“No, it’s okay. We don’t choose our names, after all.”
“Very true,” she said. “I certainly would not have chosen Rochelle.”
Rochelle. Rochelle, Rochelle, he thought, ramming it into his brain.
“It’s a nice name,” he said at last, because it was. Whatever her name turned out to be would be a nice name.
“Sure, for 1925. So. Lewyn what?”
“What?”
“Your last name. Lewyn what?”
“Oh,” he said. “It’s Oppenheimer.”
The girl—Rochelle—turned to him. “You’re kidding! That’s my roommate’s name! That’s crazy!”
Into the awful void of this moment a number of insights came rushing, each dragging behind it a careening wave of numbness and horror. Not possible. But clearly possible. Not likely. But somehow the case. And horrible, horrible, horrible, Lewyn’s thoughts were screaming, but on the other hand how could it be that this girl was his sister’s roommate, that she had slept as close to Sally as Jonas slept to him, and still had not just offered him the slightest recognition: “That must make you the mystery brother!” or “I’ve heard a lot about you!” Or something, something that implied she already knew her roommate had a brother—also named Oppenheimer, if not, in fact, Lewyn!—who lived a stone’s throw away in the dormitory next door. He had long understood that Sally had written him out of the life she wanted to live at Cornell—Lewyn wasn’t even hurt by that anymore—but now he saw that she had written him out of her life in its entirety, because it was clear as day that Sally had lied to this marvelous person from the very beginning. She must hate me, he suddenly thought, and then he realized that he barely cared, because he didn’t care about his sister. Not now. Maybe not ever, after this.
It was all too shocking to get his head around. It was cruelly dealt. It was a disaster.
And yet, he also felt a dizzying jolt of freedom, because what this also meant was that Rochelle, this lovely, small person looking across at him with a kind of open, amused, but thoroughly genuine interest, didn’t know who he was. And that meant that Lewyn was allowed to be somebody else, and not whatever pre-set character Sally might have conjured for him and viciously communicated to her. （He could well imagine the deficiencies of that character.） It was an astonishing opportunity, and he would be a fool not to take it. And he wasn’t a fool, despite what his sister thought, and his brother.
“Not crazy,” Lewyn said, lying to her for the very first time. “Oppenheimer is kind of a common name.”