“Oh, like … kind of like a Christmas pageant, you know? Acting out the Christmas story, except it’s the Book of Mormon, and hundreds of people are in it. I saw it when I was a kid, with my family. I always wanted to be in it, so I applied and I’m going. You should come out and see it. Bring that girlfriend.”
Jonas had known about Rochelle even before her visit to their room. He had known since Lewyn returned from spring break so radically altered not even a normally myopic male college student could fail to notice something major had taken place. Moreover, Jonas had declared himself not very surprised that the object of his roommate’s affection was Rochelle Steiner, the tiny girl from the Passover Seder.
Don’t be stupid. You couldn’t take your eyes off her. She’s just so cute!
“Oh, well…” Lewyn said now. “I don’t know.”
“I bet she’d find it interesting.”
Lewyn doubted this very much, but he didn’t say so. It was morning, and Jonas was loading his textbooks into his backpack.
“Okay. Maybe.”
Jonas turned. He had also changed over the long months at college. He had come in clipped and neat, but now sported a few leisurely patches of beard and his blond hair drifted south of his chin. Lauren apparently approved of this length. Lauren was their spectral third roommate; consistently invoked, if seldom present in the flesh.
“Maybe what?” he said.
“Maybe we’ll come see you. In the pageant.”
“Oh. Cool,” said Jonas.
They had been good roommates, in the end. They had not fought or held resentments toward each other, and they had tolerated each other’s less than optimal personal habits with equanimity （or, viewed slightly differently, with a mutual lack of consciousness）。 Still, they were not moving on together. Jonas had a room picked out on the third floor of AGR for the following year. Lewyn, with a good housing lottery number, had selected a single in 112 Edgmoor Lane, a small dorm in an old house near Collegetown. He had compelling reasons to want a single now.
After the exams were done and the final papers turned in, after Jonas had stored his boxes at the fraternity house and left town, and—crucially—after Rochelle reported that her roommate had already moved out—Lewyn accepted Rochelle’s invitation to come see the room where she and his sister had lived since the previous September. For the first time since Freshman Week, he opened the door to Balch Hall and stepped onto its black-and-white-tiled lobby. He climbed the gray speckled stairs up to the second floor and turned right past a paneled living room with a baronial （if clearly nonworking） fireplace, and into a carpeted corridor, where the door to Sally’s home away from home stood open.
Inside, Rochelle was seated cross-legged on a twin bed, her flip phone to her ear. She was nodding rapidly, and didn’t immediately look up, but Lewyn knew this posture and this tone; she was talking with her mother, or more accurately, listening to her mother talk. He took in the room: dingy walls and grimy floor and the same institutional off-white roller shade. The view was of a far-off corner of his own dormitory, though not the corner he’d actually lived in.
“Hi!” Rochelle said, snapping shut her phone. She got up, stepped to the doorway, and embraced him. He closed his eyes. His chin rested on the top of her head.
“So this is where you’ve been living,” he said.
“With my roommate, Sally. Also named Oppenheimer,” she agreed.
He cringed at the strangeness: his sister’s name in Rochelle’s voice.
“So. Do you want to go get dinner?” He glanced at the door. It occurred to him that they could close that door and stay inside. When had they ever been this alone together?
“Okay. If you’re hungry,” she said.
“Oh, I’m not,” he told her. So they didn’t go out after all. And very late that night, still mainly clothed but sprawled across the now pushed-together beds, with her head on her pillow and his head on—incredibly—the left-behind pillow of his sister Sally, Rochelle said something that seemed unattached to anything that had happened in the previous hours, or been said in the previous hours, which had themselves been crowded with a wild array of incredible things and profound sensations. She said: