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By Root 6706 0

yes, but only because the liberals had hated them first. They were simply sick of the kind of unexamined condescension with which his mother treated the Monaghans. Over the past two years, Joey had slowly traded places with Jonathan in their political discussions, particularly on the subject of Iraq. Joey had become convinced that an invasion was needed to safeguard America’s petropolitical interests and take out Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, while Jonathan, who’d landed plum summer internships with The Hill and then with the WaPo and was hoping to be a political journalist, was ever more distrustful of the people like Feith and Wolfowitz and Perle and Chalabi who were pushing for the war. Both of them had enjoyed reversing their expected roles and becoming the political outliers of their respective families, Joey sounding more and more like Jonathan’s father, Jonathan more and more like Joey’s. The longer Joey persisted in siding with Connie and defending her against his mother’s snobbery, the more at home he felt with the party of angry anti-snobbism.

And why had he stuck with Connie? The only answer that made sense was that he loved her. He’d had his chances to free himself of her—had, indeed, deliberately created some of them—but again and again, at the crucial moment, had chosen not to use them. The first great opportunity had been his going away to college. His next chance had come a year later, when Connie followed him east to Morton College, in Morton’s Glen, Virginia. Her move did put her within an easy drive of Charlottesville in Jonathan’s Land Cruiser (which Jonathan, approving of Connie, let Joey borrow), but it also set her on course to be a normal college student and develop an independent life. After his second visit to Morton, which the two of them mostly spent dodging her Korean roommate, Joey proposed that, for her sake (since she didn’t seem to be adapting well to college), they again try to break their dependency and cease communication for a while. His proposal wasn’t entirely disingenuous; he wasn’t entirely ruling out a future for them. But he’d been doing a lot of listening to Jenna and was hoping to spend his winter break with her and Jonathan in McLean. When Connie finally got wind of these plans, a few weeks before Christmas, he asked her if she didn’t want to go home to St. Paul and see her friends and family (i.e., the way a normal college freshman might). “No,” she said, “I want to be with you.” Spurred by the prospect of Jenna, and bolstered by an especially satisfying hookup that had fallen in his lap at a recent semi-formal dance, he took a hard line with Connie, who then cried on the phone so stormily that she got the hiccups. She said she never wanted to go home again, never wanted to spend another night with Carol and the babies. But Joey made her do it anyway. And even though he barely spoke to Jenna over the holidays—first she was skiing, then she was in New York with Nick—he continued to pursue his exit strategy until the night in early February when Carol called him with the news that Connie had dropped out of Morton and was back on Barrier Street, more seriously depressed than ever.

Connie had apparently aced two of her December finals at Morton but simply failed to show up for the other two, and there was virulent antipathy between her and the roommate, who listened to the Backstreet Boys so loudly that the treble leaking from her earphones would have driven anybody crazy, and left her TV tuned to a shopping channel all day, and taunted Connie about her “stuck-up” boyfriend, and invited her to imagine all the stuck-up sluts that he was screwing behind her back, and smelled up their room with terrible pickles. Connie had returned to school in January on academic probation but proceeded to spend so much time in bed that the campus health service finally intervened and sent her home. All this Carol reported to Joey with sober worry and a welcome absence of recrimination.

That he’d passed up this latest fine chance to free himself of Connie (who could no longer pretend that