"A sad, suffering beauty, whose gestures seem to suggest an utter repulsion toward the tainted world she was made to live in." –Hungarian film critic Bela Balazs on actress Greta Garbo

We were set. Everyone had dished up some penne pasta and peas, poured their milk or water, taken a slice of bread, and we were now all waiting for dad to deliver the verdict on tonight's game.

"Round robin," he said, turning to Moriah. "What year was the Empire State Building completed?"

"1931," Moriah scoffed, rolling her eyes and looking across the table at Peter. "Let's see how you do with a lit question, geek: which Shakespearean play does Virginia Woolf quote in Mrs. Dalloway?"

"Cymbeline," said Peter, making a face at Moriah. He turned to Dennis, who was sitting next to him. "Okay, here's an easy one: who was the fourteenth President of the United States?"

We had to wait a few moments for Dennis to count on his fingers, after which he answered, "Franklin Pierce!" He was still young enough to earn a round of applause from us at having gotten the question right, and he gave us a bashful grin before looking over at me: "Okay, Amy! How many pies are in a baker's dozen?"

When I said thirteen, Peter and Moriah booed the question, saying it had been too easy ("Sorry; I just told him that this morning!" mother laughed). "Best Actress of 1954?" I asked mother.

"Grace Kelly."

There was a small pause here, and not because mother was having trouble thinking of a good question. Grace Kelly had been one of Cody's favorite actresses, and I had asked my question without thinking. It had been six months since Cody's death, but it was only a few weeks ago that my parents had finally decided that it was time to move the chair he'd always taken at meals—the one next to mine—out to the garage. It now occupied the space that had once been taken by his motorcycle. About a month ago, Moriah and I had tried to watch Rear Window, Cody's favorite movie, but we both got too emotional and had to stop. I wished someone would break this silence now.

Mother regained herself: "Okay, honey," she said to dad with an exceptionally wide smile. "On whom did F. Scott Fitzgerald base his story The Last Tycoon, and to whom was that person married at the time of his death?"

"Irving Thalberg, married to Norma Shearer."

And so it went. It was a tradition to do this in our family at least every other night, quizzing each other on the most random topics. Dad was convinced that this would help keep us ahead of the game and set us apart from other kids our age who knew nothing aside from what they learned playing video games or watching TV all day long. He was sure that when it came time for higher education, we'd all be grateful for our endless rounds of trivia—so during Moriah's first year of college, I asked her if the semi-nightly activity had helped prepare her at all.

"Amy," she sighed. "The only time that's ever come in handy for me was a time I was able to tell my roommate that The Addams Family came before The Munsters."

I refused to be discouraged, though. Cody had always loved those dinners, and he had taught me to appreciate everything we learned. It was through his example that I came to love education and studying every random thing under the sun. I've always wondered where Cody would have gone to school had he lived past the age of eighteen. One of the last conversations he and I had wasn't about college, although he had at that point been accepted to Brigham Young University Utah. He was telling me how excited he was to go on a two-year mission for our church when he turned nineteen. We talked eagerly about where he might go: Salt Lake, Guatemala, Hong Kong, London, Sao Paolo, Norway—the possibilities were endless! They were also expensive, which is why mother and dad had started a fund for Cody's mission as soon as he was born (they also did this for Peter and Dennis, as serving missions is customary for boys).

When Cody passed away, mother and dad debated for a while over what to do with the money they had been so carefully saving for Cody's mission and for his schooling. Ultimately they decided to split it among the rest of us kids, putting it into our own education accounts. For a while, that was hard for me: I didn't like the thought of getting money I wouldn't have had if Cody were still alive. But after confiding this fear to Moriah, she merely scoffed that there was nowhere else for the money to go, and that Cody would've wanted us to have it, anyway. I guess she was right.

The year after Cody died was Moriah's last at Our Lady of Sorrows, and the following Autumn she departed for BYU-Hawaii. No one in town could believe she was going all the way to Hawaii for college ("Oh, just from one island to another!" she used to say), and the people from church were just a little surprised, because most kids went to the BYU in Utah. But after having moved away from there so long ago, Moriah had no desire to go back to a state she deemed as being constantly stuck twenty years in the past, and so it was off to Hawaii for her.

To no one's surprise, Peter went to MIT when it was his turn for college. But when I declared where I wanted to go to school, my family was a bit more shocked.

I wanted to go for NYU, which admittedly made absolutely no sense. That was supposed to be a school for kids who are social, who like going out every night to dances and bars and clubs. Furthermore, it was in New York City, a place I had only ever been to once at the age of fourteen, when it had taken a great deal of convincing to get my mother not to hold my hand the entire time. To my parents, particularly my father, the city represented unheard of amounts of vice and sin, where the motto was "anything goes" and baby prostitutes walked the streets while crazy homeless people tried selling you crack. Mother was a bit more lenient on the city, trying to focus on all the culture that Broadway and the wealth of museums offered. But still, she was confused. I'm shy, and I'm not really a people person. I like keeping to myself. What on earth did I want in a place like that?

Well, I'll tell you: I'd never been in a place like New York City in my entire life, and once I visited there, I knew I'd give anything to go back. I could just sit and read or write in Central Park for hours. I could spend an entire day at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The New York Public Library housed endless reading opportunities. The architecture of the Chrysler Building, the Empire State Building, Rockefeller Center, and the Guggenheim Museum all left me feeling breathless. I wanted to take a ferry to Ellis Island, I wanted to touch the bull on Wall Street, I wanted to take a subway and see what kind of characters I would find—because although talking to strangers terrified me, I was fascinated by watching them (that probably sounds weird, doesn't? I think my daughter would call me a "creeper"). But you just get so many types in the city: not only in Chinatown or Little Italy or Korea town, but just all around you. There's Hasidic Jews (never saw one of those at Our Lady of Sorrows!), Latinos, Japanese, actors, businessmen, hippies, the wealthy, the poor, and the best pizza on the face of the earth.

The very idea of going to college terrified me. I was scared witless of leaving my home, my parents, my friends, familiarity. Change has never been something I was okay with. I mean, just look at my move from Utah to Rhode Island—it took about a year for me to make a good friend at school! That is just pathetic! And now after I'd gotten comfortable and had my pals at church and finally a room to myself since Moriah was gone, I had to leave. Go. Gone. College. I found the same childlike fears creeping up on me: college student meant being on your way to becoming an independent adult.

I hated that word, "adult." It meant leaving behind everything that my fears refused to want to let go of. Being an adult meant taking responsibility for things, getting a real job, paying taxes, buying groceries, starting your own family, buying your own plane tickets, picking classes for yourself instead of getting a pre-assigned schedule, being unable to rely on your parents for everything they gave you in your spoiled upbringing. But isn't this what kids my age were supposed to dream of? Leaving the nest, having freedom, being able to do what they wanted to do without their parents' interference? These were not things that excited me. Maybe that's because I didn't find my parents restrictive, or I was just such a mellow kid that I never got into trouble, so I never had to face their wrath at anything I did. I wasn't like my friend Quinn, who hated our small town and wanted to get out. I wasn't like my friend Nicole, who was sick of high school and wanted to move on. I wasn't like my sister Moriah, who wanted out from mom and dad's grasp so much that she left the continental United States. Many a sleepless night were spent crying in bed as my graduation neared, and I was fearful, so, so fearful of what was going to come. I fully realize how ridiculous that must sound—I was only going to college, what hundreds of kids do every year. I wasn't being drafted into the military, I wasn't immigrating to a new country, I wasn't even leaving the east coast! I was just a big wimp.

In a desperate last bid to perhaps get me to consider mid-year enrollment at BYU (where I had been accepted), my father planned a family trip out to Utah the summer before I was to start college. It was a beautiful campus and the programs did seem really great and the tuition was unbelievably cheap, but I just didn't feel like it was the place for me. I don't know why that was, because the school would have catered to my insecurities about encounters with irreligious people and my desire to be around kids who shared my faith. But I was so skeptical of finding someone there who wouldn't be your typical biased, unadjusted Utahn (a very narrow-minded viewpoint of mine, I know).

After touring around BYU for a while, mother and dad agreed to let Moriah and I bike up alone to visit our grandma on her Idaho farm. Moriah had shocked grandma by deciding to go to BYU-Hawaii, where grandma was certain Moriah would marry an Asian (perish the thought). She was surely scandalized at the idea of innocent, naïve little me going off to college in New York City, but she didn't bring it up while we were staying with her. Granted, I didn't give her that much time to talk about it. I spent almost the entire time on my own, riding the only horse left on the farm.

I'd known Banner since he was a foal. His mother Star had been my favorite of grandma and grandpa's horses; she was sleek and fast and big, and I was the only one of us who didn't have trouble keeping a saddle on her ewe-necked body. Her spotted coat had made me think of a Dalmatian, and as my favorite movie as a kid was 101 Dalmatians, she was an instant favorite of mine. Everything about Star was beautiful, from her smiling eyes down to her striped hooves. I'd never had a pet growing up, and that's one of the reasons why I treasured those visits down to grandma and grandpa's farms: Star was the pet I'd always wanted. Grandma used to say I was a good enough rider to try and compete sometime, but I never looked into it. Competing would take away all the things I loved about horseback riding—the wide open spaces, the jumping over whatever came in your way whenever it got there, the slowing down or speeding up whenever you felt like it, the wind whipping your face, and getting back home feeling as though you had just conquered a part of the world. I used to pretend that I was a famous bandit, and Star was my get-away horse, and we'd run from the sheriffs and the townspeople and the other criminals I'd done wrong.

As soon as Banner had become big enough to ride, I saddled him up as well. I didn't have the same connection with him as I did with his mother, but after she passed away, I had to settle. That summer before college was the last time I ever rode him.

But I digress.

If you are the kind of person who finds romance more interesting than horses, I'll throw you a bone (and if you're the kind of person who likes romance with horses, then I suggest you go and catch Equus before it closes on Broadway—which I actually think it already has, so, sorry, I'm afraid you're out of luck).

Anyway, when I was seventeen I started dating Austin Cooper, the poor boy who had tried to ask me out just before Cody's death. He was a really good kid, and I knew he liked me a lot. It pained him deeply when I decided not to go to BYU with him, but he got over it soon enough when he found another girl there to dote on. And I think she was a better match for him anyway, because she doted on him, and I was never able to completely bring down that wall between me and him. I'm happy for Austin. He'll always be someone who was special to me, because I was his first kiss. I lied to him and told him he was mine, too—and he would've been, if not for Claire. But I didn't tell him that; I was afraid it would freak him out.

I'd gone to go watch his State Championship basketball game, and he scored the winning basket. Everyone was cheering like crazy, and his teammates grabbed him in a huge group hug, and the smile on his face was so wide it almost looked like a jack-o-lantern. Upon his release, Austin came running off the court, wiping the sweat off his face as his black curls swished around his head. He ran straight past his family and nearly tackled me to the ground in the force of his embrace. Instead of knocking us both over, he lifted me right up into the air as he hollered, "This is the best day of my life!"

He'd spun me around a bit, making me quite dizzy and causing me to worry that I might vomit up the chili cheese dog his mother had foisted upon me at halftime. To perhaps the luck of both of us, this is when he finally set me back down and said, "There's only one more thing that could make it absolutely perfect." I was about to suggest ice cream, but then he just sort of grabbed me by the shoulders and yanked me towards him, kissing me on the mouth for the first time. To be blatantly and almost rudely honest, he was a bit clumsy. Or really, I guess we both were. It was an incredibly awkward kiss, and not just because his family was standing about four feet away. Was it weird for me to think after it was over that Claire had been a better kisser than him…?

Yeah. That's kind of weird.

Anyway, Austin still wore the expression of a man who'd just won the lottery, so I guess he'd enjoyed that kiss a lot more than I had. Well, good on him for having the guts to do it. I still really liked him, but I think I'd been expecting a bit more from our first kiss. I don't know, a spark or something. That's sort of harsh for me to have had such high expectations, and granted, the first kiss doesn't always lay the groundwork for how a relationship is going to work out—but in this case, it was.

I was a little sad that Austin was going to college on the opposite side of the country from me, but not because I was in love with him and hated the thought of being parted from him. I hated the thought of being parted from just another facet of familiarity, a friendly face, a good friend. Choosing to go to NYU was undoubtedly the gutsiest thing I had ever done, and the night before it was time to leave for school, I still worried that I had made a rash and wrong decision. There was only one thing for it: pray.

"Dear God," I whispered, kneeling at the end of my bed and trying to pay no attention to the crickets and the train passing by my window. "Am I… am I doing the right thing? I know I should have asked you way before now, and it was really stupid of me not to have. But—if you can somehow see it in your heart to do it, could you let me know if this is right? Or should I be going to BYU with Austin? I mean, I know it's too late now to start the fall there, but I could try mid-year enrollment. My parents would be thrilled, I'm sure. Just… know that I respect you and your decisions, and I don't blame you for what happened to Cody." That last bit just slipped out; I hadn't even planned on saying it. "But please, if you see him, tell him I miss him a lot. Make sure he knows that, because it's the truth."

That's where my prayer ended, I think. I went to bed and when I woke up, it was with an inexplicable sense of peace. It's an impossible feeling to explain, really. I just knew that for better or for worse, I was going to have an irreplaceable experience at NYU. That strong feeling of surety was the only thing I had to hold onto the following day, when my mother drove me to New York and I was cringing and crying in sheer terror of my decision. My dad had declined the opportunity to come along, saying that he thought I was old enough to go on my own and that there was no reason for even my mother to come along. I hated that he knew how scared I was and did nothing to comfort me except to say that I needed to grow up.

To be fair, Cody's death still resonated with dad. I mean, it did with all of us, but mostly, dad was still the one who had the hardest time getting over it. That's mostly what I thought about on the drive over to New York, and although it wasn't a particularly happy thing to dwell on, at least it took my mind off of starting college. Cody was the ideal son, especially for someone like my father: he got top grades, he had at least a dozen girls dying to go out with him, he was a serious athlete to be reckoned with in both soccer and ice hockey, he was respectful of his parents, and most importantly, he could always be trusted to do the right thing. Or really, just be trusted. I am positive that Cody never told me a lie, and if he did ever tell a lie to anyone, he almost immediately went back and told them the truth. Mother loved to tell this story about a time Cody had gone to his best friend's birthday party when they were seven, and Cody had taken a cup of Dr. Pepper, even though our parents asked us not to drink that (there was too much caffeine in it). On the car ride home from the party, Cody suddenly burst into tears and confessed to mother that he'd had a Dr. Pepper and could she ever forgive him. Apparently he kept up this begging for forgiveness until he was ten—if there was a lull in the conversation, he would just say, "I'm sorry I drank that Dr. Pepper!"

If Cody hadn't died, he would have been getting home from his mission very soon. Dad was so excited for him to go, hoping he might get sent to London, where our dad went on his mission. We all thought it'd be so funny if Cody came back with an English accent (I doubt he would have; he'd never been any good at putting on voices).

Anyway, we arrived in New York in what felt like no time at all, and the panic came back to me. In this whole huge city, I knew not a single soul. Again, I cannot emphasize enough how uncharacteristic of a choice this was for me, to go to a place like this. I knew there were going to have to be many trips from the parking garage back to my dorm, but the first time mother bracingly said it was time to get out of the car, I was completely immobile, literally frozen with fear.

"Amy," mother said patiently. "Please, Amy. I know you're ready for this."

"No," I said, shuddering and refusing to meet her gaze. I stared straight through the windshield. "I'm not. Why am I doing this? Why NYU? What's wrong with me, I can't do this! I can't! I should be in Utah right now with my friends and Uncle Mike and Auntie Em and—"

Mother reached out and forcibly grabbed my shoulder, saying in a more firm voice, "Amy, Amy, listen to me. Calm down now, take a deep breath, go on." She waited for me to obey her in this, and as I reluctantly breathed in deeply, the first inevitable tears were shed. "All right, there you go. Now come on, honey. I know this is going out of your comfort zone, and it's going to be really scary for a while, but… remember how excited you were when we got your acceptance letter? And remember how thrilling it was when you landed that incredible academic scholarship?"

"Y-yes," I stammered.

"Well honey, just try to focus on those feelings. That's all I can tell you. That, and how proud I am of you. This was a tough decision, but you made it. Amy, you know that quote—'some people are born great, and others have greatness thrust upon them'? You were born great. And the bravery it took for you to choose to come here is going to manifest itself in more greatness being thrust upon you."

She had begun to tear up as well, and for several minutes we just sat in the car hugging each other, crying. I saw this as a terrible omen for the day. Wasn't the crying supposed to come as she was leaving? As it finally, horribly sunk in that I would not see her for months on end, that I was starting a completely new and terrifying chapter of my life? Here we were when the day had barely begun, already red-eyed and afraid of our impending separation.

When I had been completely settled in, I was the only one of my four roommates to have arrived. Katie Harris, Emily Rutherford, and Dana Simmons had yet to move in, a fact made obvious by the semi-depressing lack of ANYthing in our dorm at Goddard Hall. Mother went with me to purchase the books off the list I had finally received, then took me shopping for things we had realized I would need: a desk lamp, a garbage can, another pillow, a bedcover, a shower caddy, and a number of other random things that it occurred to us to buy. After all of this, we ate lunch at a tiny little delicatessen where I had the best sandwich of my life. It calmed me down a bit to be sitting down and trying to relax, watching the constant ebb and flow of all these diverse people, and reminding myself why I had wanted to come to this city in the first place.

Still, it was a bit disconcerting that every time mother and I had gone back to my dorm (after buying books, after shopping for other things, after going to lunch) none of suitemates had arrived. There were of course many other girls we ran into, earnestly unpacking and saying "hello" to everyone else, and I was privately glad that I was not the only one with her mother. Actually, I was surprised how many kids had had both of their parents with them, and I sort of wished my father had been here to see how affectionate the other dads were being. I didn't say any of this to mother; I only freaked out when I noticed the time and saw that she needed to be heading home soon.

That was the most terrible goodbye I ever had to experience, and I think it was just as hard for mother. She knew how nervous I was and how hard it was going to be for me to make new friends, and try to live independently. Neither of us were worried about my classes; Our Lady of Sorrows was renowned for its unapologetically difficult workload and stringent teachers. It was the social thing that was going to be a problem for me. Mother had always been concerned about me, I know, even though she never said so to me. I lacked Cody's and Moriah's indefatigable self-confidence; I had none of Peter's intense enthusiasm for trying new things (even if it was a solitary practice); and I certainly did not seem to display any of the joie de vivre that Dennis so clearly possessed.

The world, to me, was a frightening place.

I walked with mother back to the parking garage, though it probably would have been best if I had just stayed at Goddard Hall. Her subtle perfume nearly overwhelmed me as I buried my face in her neck, trembling and wishing with every fiber of my being that she did not have to go. To me, my mother was not just a mom, someone who made lunch for us and did the laundry and said goodnight to us at the end of a long day: she was the only adult for whom I held complete and total respect. In my times of hardship, particularly after Cody's passing, she was my beacon, the light I looked to in the dark. The only thing that kept me from going back home the first long weekend I had was my father's insistence that I grow up and come home at Thanksgiving, like any other normal kid. In retrospect, that is the only thing I wish my mother had ever done: stood up to dad, at least once. She was subservient to him, always bowing to his will, rarely, if ever, putting up a fight.

But I loved her anyway, and I watched her drive the car away until it was out of sight. Tears were still flooding out of my eyes, and I knew it would be in vain to try and stem the flow or wipe them away. I could only be grateful that in a city as crowded and busy as this one, nobody tried to stop me or talk to me or ask why I was crying—I hated that, it was so embarrassing. So I just stood alone by the back of the parking garage, sitting down on the grimy cement and pulling my knees up to my chest, sobbing into them until I had cried myself out. All of a sudden I was overcome with fatigue, unused to crying so vehemently in such short a time. I forgot how exhausting it was. For a moment after I'd stood up, I didn't know where to go—where was I? Where were my parents, and the car? And then it struck me that I was a college student now. I needed to go back to my Residence Hall.

That is one thing I'll say I have going for me: I've got a great sense of direction. This infinitesimal portion of the city was already mine; I knew it like the back of my hand after having walked back and forth between my dorm and the garage four times. Piece of cake. My walk was unsettlingly mechanical; I was on auto-pilot with my eyes cast downwards. I didn't want to meet any of the other students right now, or any of the other girls moving into my hall. But this was taken out of my hands when I saw that the door to my suite was propped open, and there were voices coming from inside.

My heart leapt and I took a step back. Though I had anxiously been awaiting my roommates' arrival all day long, it now seemed a frightening prospect. What if they didn't like me? What if we didn't get along? What if they were like Moriah, and loved going to parties and doing crazy, out-there things? What if they were like Claire, and tried to kiss me? I didn't know which of these I found the most scary, but all of them kept me standing in my hallway like a deadweight. Or at least they did until a rather impatient girl literally pushed me into the room as she tried to pass me by with a huge suitcase.

And so it was that I stumbled into the person who was to become my best friend to this day.

I probably would have maintained my balance if I had not been pushed right into the girl who was currently moving in. We both fell to the floor with a loud crash, and I say loud because this girl had been holding a bag full of heavy textbooks that hit the ground with a thud. We had landed so that my legs were lying over her hips, and I quickly swung them off of her, but before I could totally freak out, I realized that she was laughing. Really hard. So hard that she seemed to be having trouble breathing.

Her parents (or so I assumed) came running in from one of the bedrooms to see what had happened. My roommate's infectious laughter had kept me from being too startled at the thought meeting three strangers at once as I stood up and offered a hand to help her to her feet.

The girl I had bumped into had one of the kindest faces I had ever seen: it was immediately clear to me that her wide grin was entirely sincere, met by her unusually colored eyes (they looked sort of like two pools of honey, not really a definable shade of brown. Amber, maybe? Anyway, they matched her hair in color). I'd not seen dimples so deep on anyone but a kid, and it was indeed with an almost childlike enthusiasm that she shook my hand and started to introduce herself.

"Hi! I'm Emily Rutherford, how and who're you?"

"Uh—I'm doing great, I guess—" (total lie) "—and um, I'm Amy Duncan."

"Oh, are you Sarah's sister?"

"Sarah's—oh, no, I'm Sarah. I just go by my middle name. Sarah Amy Duncan, nice to meet you."

"Oh my gosh, you're my room-roommate!" Emily laughed, turning to her parents. "Mom, dad, this is Sarah! I mean, Amy."

We exchanged pleasantries (her parents seemed nice enough), and Mrs. Rutherford asked if I had come alone. "Oh, no," I sighed, tugging down on my sleeves and biting my lip. "My mother came down with me, but she only just left a little while ago."

"Oh! Well, we're staying at a friend's house tonight to make sure we've got Emily all moved in and such. We're going to dinner in about an hour; you're welcome to come with us."

It sounded like the kind of invitation that was given for the purpose of sounding polite and expecting to be declined. So naturally, this is what I did, and to my surprise, Mrs. Rutherford looked a bit slighted. Or was I imagining that? I mean, these people didn't even know me; why would they want to take me out to dinner?"

"Please come, Amy!" Emily begged me. "It'd be so much fun! We can get to know each other, and eat real food one more time before dorm life sets in! Please?"

To be completely honest, she initially rubbed me the wrong way. I mean, I'm sure she sounds sort of phony and a little annoying, right? It took me a while, but I eventually learned that Emily was actually as sincere as her smile in everything she said and did. She got me to buckle down and agree to go to dinner with her and her parents that night, and I have to say I'm glad I did. Otherwise, I would have spent the evening miserable and alone. Instead, I got to be with other people and slightly less miserable.

Emily was interested in pursuing accounting (which she would eventually change her mind about, and go into publishing). I also learned that she had actually graduated a year early, and silently I registered that this seemed about right: although she was only about a year and a half younger than me, it showed a lot in her naïveté. She was definitely a talker; she seemed to be the kind of person who was afraid of silence in a conversation, which meant that she took a bit longer to eat than the rest of us. Her older brother was a sophomore at the University of Michigan, and her two younger sisters were still in grade school. I told them about my siblings, but held off on bringing up Cody. That seemed like too depressing a subject to bring up on our first night of meeting each other.

After dinner, Mr. and Mrs. Rutherford could not think of another excuse to stay much longer, but Emily didn't have to worry because her family lived just over a half an hour away. They all invited me to come down in a couple of weeks with Emily, but when Emily saw that I didn't know how to respond to this, she said maybe we could handle it on a case-by-case basis. So then her parents departed, and we were still the only girls in the suite, and I thought things could now go one of two ways: we carry on the evening in complete and total awkward silence, or Emily would keep me up half the night with questions. The latter turned out to be true, but not at all in the negative way I had imagined it.

As Emily brushed her teeth, I lay down on my bed to do a bit of scripture studying. I had really been slacking off lately and needed to catch up. When Emily came back into the bedroom, I tried quickly to finish the chapter so she didn't feel like I was being rude and trying to ignore her (which I wasn't, really… although subconsciously I may have been hoping it'd be a good excuse not to have to talk to her.)

"What's that you're reading?" she asked hesitantly, apparently very curious but not wanting to be a bother.

Hoping she would not react badly (as I had known some people to), I showed her and said, "Uh, Book of Mormon."

She gasped loudly and said, "What! Are you Mormon?!"

"Yeah…"

"You kept that quiet!"

But she sounded excited, so my nervousness ebbed away and I sat up a bit. "Oh, sorry, I didn't mean to be keeping it a secret." Except that I sort of had been. "Um, why? You aren't one, are you?"

"Oh, goodness no," Emily laughed. "Although people used to tell me that I was such a prude, I might as well be! Oh, no offense," she hastily added. I shrugged to let her know that none had been taken. "Wow! Just… wow. That is so funny! Okay so wait, let me see if I have it right: you DO celebrate birthdays, you don't drink or smoke, and you go to church for three hours straight every Sunday!"

A small laugh escaped me. I have to admit I was impressed. "Not bad, Emily, not bad! Most of the time I get people asking me if my dad has eight wives or if I've got horns or something."

Emily wrinkled her nose and said, "Horns? That's so weird. Where do people get these ideas?"

"Beats me. Oh, and we're allowed to date, too, by the way. And kiss. People seem to think we're not allowed to do either. I mean, until we're married."

With another charming laugh, Emily said, "Oh trust me, I know that one! One of my best friends from high school was—oh, wait! Amy, do you have a boyfriend?"

Baffled by her never-ceasing curiosity, I said, "Yes—well, um, no. I mean…" I looked over and saw Emily, in her pajamas, sitting cross-legged on her bed across from me, totally engaged in what I was saying. She had one of those secret, engaging smiles on her face, like we had been best friends for our entire lives and not met only a few hours ago. I'd never been around anyone quite like her, and as I said, her attitude was contagious and I slipped right into girlfriend mode without really even noticing at first.

"Okay, his name was Austin Cooper. And—"

"What'd he look like?"

"He had this beautiful head of black curly hair, and gorgeous green eyes that I could have just stared at for hours. And he was on the basketball team, so he was pretty you know, muscular." For what seemed like the first time in weeks, I felt myself smiling, really smiling—do you know what a gratifying sensation that is? Emily was grinning and laughing with me, encouraging me to go on with this story of a relationship that felt like it had been so long ago. "And, I don't know, he just asked me out and after a while we decided to call ourselves a couple. But now he's at BYU and I'm here, and I just knew our lives would be going in two completely different directions, even if we went to the same school, so… we've basically ended it."

Frowning a bit, Emily said, "I'm sorry. Are you sad about it?"

I shrugged again. "Not really. I mean, it was fun while it lasted, but I'm not totally crushed. Especially since it was sort of my decision—I feel kind of bad, because I think Austin's not totally over it, you know? Or, I dunno. What about you?"

Her smile came back with a vengeance. "A boyfriend? Oh, yes!" She was so girly and I could tell it just made her so happy and excited to be able to share this news with someone she didn't know: "His name's Tyler Wright, and he's totally P. O.'d that I managed to graduate early and he's still got one more year to go! So I'm totally going to have to go back down to Scarsdale a lot to rub it in his face, but he said he'd come up to see me on the weekends, too. So you'll probably get to meet him really soon, and I hope you like him! He is probably the sweetest guy I know. Like, we had just moved into the district, and the Wrights were our neighbors, and Tyler helped me move all my stuff into my new room and all that. And then that night he took me out for pizza! And he was always checking up on me that next day at school, making a big deal out of introducing me to all his friends."

"Wow, he sounds really great." I tried to sound honest, and I swear I did mean what I said, but so often people told me they thought I was being sarcastic when I really wasn't. I guess I'm just not a very emotive person.

Still seeming a little lost in her own little world, Emily dreamily said, "Yeah, yeah, he's amazing. Actually the only guy I can think who might be nicer than him is my Mormon friend I knew in high school. I actually meant to tell you about him a minute ago but I got distracted—anyway, he's the reason why I know a bit about your religion. He's two years ahead of me in school, but we knew his family forever because they lived really close by and Leonard and his sister would baby-sit for me and/or my younger siblings now and then. Then I got to high school and we had gym and art together, and he was just—ah! I don't know. So sweet. Are all Mormon guys like that?"

"A lot of them are, I guess. As much as any other kind of person."

Emily just shook her head, still resolutely grinning. "I don't know. There was just something really special about him. But anyway he went to BYU but now he's on his mission, so…yeah."

"Really? Where's he on his mission, do you know?"

"Oh, yeah, I actually write to him now and then. He's really good about getting back, too. He's in Paris."

"Wow! That's so cool. We…" I had been about to say something about Cody, but stopped myself quickly. I didn't want to have to bring him in front of my new roommate.

"You said you have two brothers, right? Are any of them on missions, or, sorry, were they younger than you?"

I was flustered, still thinking about Cody. "I—yeah, um, they're younger than me, but I've…" Oh, no. Here it came, totally out of nowhere! I had just been seized mid-sentence by tears, feeling my throat choke and it manifested itself in a strange, stifled noise. I shuddered violently and my book fell to the floor.

It seemed that I blinked and when I opened my eyes, Emily was suddenly right on the bed next to me. "Amy, what's the matter?" she asked, her tone one of unbelievable sympathy. From my blurry vision I could make out the sight of her hand raising hesitantly before landing gently on my shoulder. "What's wrong?"

"I—I've got another brother," I said between small sobs. "C-Cody—he passed away on my sixteenth birthday, and…"

A quiet "ohhh" of comprehension came out of Emily, and she drew me into a hug. This didn't feel weird, it didn't feel uncomfortable. She was mothering me, which does sound odd, but it's just really what I needed right then. We stayed up half the night, with Emily being my sounding board and allowing me to tell her all about Cody and the kind of person he had been. I ended up discussing the very thing I had been most determined to avoid, it had just come out of me, like so many things seemed to when I had planned purposely for them not to.

Our other roommates arrived the next day, but I didn't tell them about Cody. He just didn't come up and I saw no reason to dump anything on them. Besides, I didn't feel the connect with them that I had with Emily so soon after our meeting. I'd only known her for a day, but it truly did feel to me like we'd known each other much longer. I had confided in her my fears, my sadness, my guilt about Cody's death, and she listened and did not judge me. There was something inherently special about her, and we quickly bonded, two intimidated girls in a big city.

The first weekend that her boyfriend Tyler was supposed to come up, Emily was at her desk and suddenly looked up from what she was doing. I thought it was homework, but then she said, "Hey! Amy, I'm writing a letter to Leonard—you know, my Mormon friend—do you want to say hi?"

"Um, why…?"

"Because! Oh come on, he'd get a kick out of it!"

"That's okay, Emily."

"All right, but I'm going to tell him you're my roommate and you're Mormon."

"Awesome. Go for it."

I left a few minutes later for class, looking forward to coming back and meeting Tyler, who Emily said would have arrived by the time my class was over. I had imagined that Tyler would preoccupy my thoughts as my boring teacher droned on, but instead I found myself thinking about the number of things Emily had kept telling me about Leonard for the past couple of weeks. We were supposed to start doing a free writing exercise, but I had to ask a classmate to borrow a piece of paper because on the one sheet of my notebook I had left, I had written "Dear Leonard…"