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By Root 1356 0

as she unpacked. They seemed different now, heavier, each piece less important. She needed little: clothes, notes for the articles she wanted to research. Good walking shoes (but Rose hadn’t, of course, any other kind). Strange how little it all mattered to her now. Rose had always been the worst of us in terms of possessions, though we thanked her for it when we wanted to look at the scrapbooks she had made of our family trips, our shoe boxes full of old papers and notes and art projects. Now she was like Cordy, wanting nothing more to weigh her down than a backpack. When she had sent her letter of resignation, artfully written to convey in the most genteel manner possible that Columbus University could take its job and shove it, a sudden weight had lifted off her shoulders. She would never have to go back to her dingy office and the gray classrooms and the exhausted students. That the lethargy plaguing her since she had set foot on the campus would never wrap its tentacles around her again, that she might even, dare she say it, be happier without that place.

Cordy herself was lying on Rose’s bed, covered slightly with the discarded clothes Rose had tossed over her when she refused to move. She was always like this, our Cordy, wanting to be near the action, watching us dress to go out, or following behind us when we did. As teenagers, we had found it grating, but now it was comforting, though Rose did complain about Cordy’s inertia, and that she was wrinkling the clothes spread around and over her.

“The clothes going into storage, you mean?” Cordy asked, deliberately rolling back onto a shirt that had fallen off her hip and crushing it under her ever-expanding bottom. Oh, the joys of our metabolism and of pregnancy.

Rose snatched the shirt out from under Cordy and shook it out. “Yes, those. Unless you’re offering to iron them all for me when I get back.”

“You’re never coming back,” Cordy said, and then blinked, as if she had not intended to speak.

“Don’t be ridiculous. I’ll be back at Christmas, and then in August, and anytime Mom needs me.” With a practiced snap of her wrist, she flicked a pair of pants into submission and then rolled them into a tight cylinder, pressing it among the clothes inside her suitcase. She picked up a winter coat, contemplated its length, and then discarded it in favor of another.

“Not here, though. Not Barney.”

Rose stopped and stared at Cordy, who spoke with such cool certainty it made her shiver a little. “How do you know?”

“I just do,” Cordy said, and then giggled. “Beware the Ides of March!”

“That’s a possibility,” Rose said, sitting on the edge of the bed to push in a pair of shoes. “But I imagine I’ll get pretty homesick after a while.”

“Maybe,” Cordy said. She reached out to Rose’s bedside table and picked up a bottle of lotion, squeezed some into her palm and rubbed it in. “I never was, not really.”

“You’re not like me,” Rose said.

Cordy looked at her like a curious squirrel. “Don’t be ridiculous. I’m exactly like you. We’re all exactly alike, you know.”

“Sure. In the way that we’re completely different. Move,” Rose said, nudging Cordy’s leg. Cordy, ever obliging, moved off a neatly rolled row of underwear. Rose picked up the bundles and edged the gaps at the sides of her suitcase with them.

“No, in the way that we’re all the same. We all want what Mom and Dad have. We all want to be the favorite, the best-loved, the star of our own movie. And we all want to become something better than Barney, but we won’t.” She paused for a moment and then stared at the ceiling, thinking. “Not that it’s a bad thing, you know. Barney’s not so bad.”

“I’ve been telling you that for years,” Rose said.

“You’ve been telling us that for years because you were scared to leave because you thought we’d forget about you, or that we’d survive without you, and then where would you be? You’d lose the only role you ever had.” Cordy put the bottle of lotion back on the table and turned her head to look at Rose.

Rose stared at our youngest sister. “My oracle, my prophet,” she said finally. When in