Of course, she had wanted to know things. Of course, there had had to be some evasions. Before their first bus ride had ended Rochelle asked him more questions than he’d been cumulatively asked in years. Where did he come from? Who were his people? What were his plans and who were his friends, apart from that strange group he’d brought to the Seder? （Not his friends! he’d insisted. His roommate’s friends, though nice guys. Not his friends!） And while Lewyn did take refuge in some circumventions, he only lied about one thing outright: when Rochelle asked if he had any siblings he said, ferociously and without hesitation, no.
Obviously, there was plenty to worry about. In fact, Lewyn would spend the following months in a near-constant state of worry. What if she asked him to pick her up at her room? What if she pressed him about his parents? Or even asked to meet them? Should he compound his earlier evasions with new and even more labyrinthine evasions? What if he forgot his prior statements and contradicted them—Rochelle was exactly the kind of person who would remember and investigate. Or the most terrible scenario of all, and the one that tormented him: What if he and Rochelle actually ran into Sally on campus, or Sally and Rochelle actually ran into him? The fact that neither of these things had happened already, not once since the previous September, gave him absolutely no comfort, and he lived with a thrum of terror at all times. He knew his luck could not possibly hold forever, and he understood that he truly would have to do something, say something, to head it off or at least mitigate it. More than once he even attempted to compose a letter to her on his computer, explaining that he had made an awful mistake in not telling her, that he’d been afraid of what she might think of him, or of Sally, or of their sibling bond （or lack thereof）， which was so normal to the two of them that it seemed benign, but to the rest of the world he imagined must appear anything but. These letters did not progress past their torturous first paragraphs, and were all abandoned, but he continued to compose them in his head. They were a dark cloud, perpetually overshadowing his happiness. And the weeks passed, and he got deeper in, and then too deep to ever fully apologize or explain.
Rochelle, in contrast to all this self-inflicted torment, seemed to take real joy in telling him things. Her father was dead, but not until years after leaving her and her mother in that town he’d never heard of before meeting her. She had no siblings, but had run in a pack of girls, all scattered now at colleges around the country （except for one, who was apparently nearly six feet tall and a fashion model in Tokyo）。 She had deliberately chosen not to replicate that dynamic in college, declining no fewer than three invitations to join the Jewish sororities and addressing herself to individual connections she made in the course of her life at Cornell: in class, at meetings for Tzedek （the Jewish social justice group）， or in the dormitory. Her only hesitation seemed to surround the topic of her mother, with whom she was obviously deeply connected, and he had the sense that she was in some form her mother’s supporter, possibly even caregiver, necessitating long and intense phone calls, often several times a day. When they came through on Rochelle’s flip phone, she moved automatically away from Lewyn to speak, hunched over, whispering. The calls left her uncharacteristically dull, and sometimes plainly sad. He didn’t ask her about them. He was pretty sure she didn’t want him to.
He also didn’t ask about her dorm room, or the person she shared it with, so afraid to find out anything that would render his psychic affliction even more acute. Once, on the walkway between their dormitories, when she said she needed to run back upstairs for a book, he invented some forgotten thing in his own room so as not to accompany her. Thus far, Rochelle had only come to his own room once, and in anticipation of this occasion he cleaned （or “cleaned”） to the best of his abilities. There was nothing personal on display, and most of her attention, in any case, had been directed at Jonas, who happened to be home, studying for an infectious disease midterm.
Always, he reveled in her. Rochelle Steiner! Who could not cross any bridge, quad, or street on or near the Cornell campus without running into someone who was happy to see her, and who might have a question about the exam for the Bill of Rights class or the individual presentations for the postwar international relations seminar. Lewyn, a half step behind, would watch her reach back into her ponderous red backpack and retrieve her much-inscribed Filofax to insert or scratch away some upcoming item in the appropriate color: red for academic, blue for extracurricular, yellow for gym appointments （and other leisure and social pursuits）， and black for notes to herself. He, who did not possess an agenda, paper or otherwise, who was still carrying around the official sheet of his class times and locations he’d received at the beginning of the term, and who had yet to visit the Cornell gym or join a club or arrange to meet friends for dinner on campus or in town, could only marvel at the expansive brain in Rochelle Steiner’s small head, and that it had somehow selected for companionship his own far less impressive brain in its own much larger head.