And yet: this proved and was continuing to prove to be precisely the case.
In the mornings they ate breakfast in Willard Straight Hall, in Central Campus, drinking coffee and eating fruit salad and sharing the New York Times before parting （with a hug!） on East Avenue for their classes （the eternal art history survey for him, the Bill of Rights seminar for her）。 In the evenings she came to meet him at the Green Dragon after her meetings （she had so many meetings）， and they finished the night with more coffee and more talk, unless her mother called. The first time she took his hand was on the bridge one night in May, as the wind blew through the gorge, and this was thrilling, not least because it felt so natural and so innocent. Spring had taken forever to warm up, and people were walking around as if there was still snow on the ground, in parkas and layers of sweatshirts and those ubiquitous Uggs. Lewyn himself had not much altered his wardrobe of Tshirts and sweatshirts, but one morning after the weather finally started to change, he was shrugging on the same Big Red shirt he’d been handed six months earlier at registration and found that it was large, in fact huge on his frame. With an almost clinical curiosity, he gathered and lifted the length of it and looked into the mirror mounted to his closet door.
Ribs. And below them, nothing, by which he understood that the padding of fat—not rolls of fat but padding of fat—was no longer there. The shirt was so far gone that it had lost a good portion of its lettering, and the hem was shredded. He threw it away. After his morning class, he went to the Cornell store and bought four more shirts, all of which hung in proximity to the actual new dimensions of his actual new body. It was neither good nor bad, and he attached no sense of accomplishment to it, mainly because he hadn’t been attempting to accomplish anything at all and hadn’t even been aware that it was being accomplished. This was just how things were, because of her.
That first time, on the bridge, when she took his hand, Lewyn was assailed by the strangest memory of being forced to hold hands with his sister and brother while posing for the obligatory birthday photograph on the back porch in Chilmark, and what followed this memory was an unmistakable wave of unease. He held tight to resist that, and then it passed and he breathed deeply and was calm again. He was more than calm. He squeezed the hand of Rochelle Steiner in his own hand, even as she called hello to someone walking across in the other direction and waved with her other hand.
One day, a little before the end of term, she asked him what he was planning for the summer, because she herself was intending to take a job resident-advising the high school students who came to Cornell for the experience of “college” life （and something to write about on their own applications for admission）。 It was decent money, and wouldn’t it be nice, after exams, to relax on the campus and take a bit of a break? The spring had cheated them out of that brief （but legendary!） time in Ithaca when winter could barely be remembered, and people took to the quads and the gorges and showed their sun-starved bodies to the sun. Perhaps, if Lewyn wasn’t rushing off to some job in the city or a holiday with his parents, he might like to take a summer class or get a local job and stay on with her. And Lewyn, who of course had no summer plans at all, who could barely think past the next time he would see Rochelle Steiner, eagerly agreed.
I’m going to stay in Ithaca this summer, he emailed his mother.
“I’m going to stay in Ithaca this summer,” he told Jonas, who surprised him by saying that he would also be remaining in upstate New York after the semester ended.
“Really?” said Lewyn. “In Ithaca?”
“No, I’m going to Palmyra, for the pageant.”
Lewyn had a brief and hilarious vision of Jonas Bingham walking across a stage in a bathing suit and high heels, a sash inscribed Miss Ogden, Utah knotted at his hip.
“I’m sorry,” he said, “but what?”
“It’s an LDS thing. At the Hill Cumorah. You know, where Joseph Smith found the golden plates?”
Lewyn nodded. Now, the vision was of Jonas Bingham, in his bathing suit and heels, walking across the summit of a hill. “But what kind of pageant?”