Viola in Reel Life Read Free Page A

stuff like nobody’s business. Hopefully that will all change here because there won’t be the great city of New York to distract me. No Promenade, no BrooklynBridge, no Greenwich Village, and no friends = no fun. Let’s face it: South Bend, Indiana, will not be loaded with diversions. My mother, terminally upbeat and gratingly optimistic at all times, said something about enjoying the South Bend Symphony (please) and ice-skating on the Saint Joe River (the good old days) when she went to school here and perhaps I should check them out. Yeah. Right. I might just stay in my room and study so much I will rocket to the top of our class (doubt it).
    Marisol set up her laptop on her desk with a brand-new desk lamp and she’s writing on her blog. Evidently, she likes me a lot already, which is a good thing because the feeling is mutual.
    The door to our quad pushes open, and with it comes a gust of chatter so loud it sounds like we’re on the 42nd Street subway ramp at rush hour. Marisol and I look up from our computers.
    “I’m Romy,” the new girl announces. Romy Dixon, a peppy girl from upstate New York, has red hair cropped into a bob with two streaks of sky blue, which she tucks behind her ears when she’s talking. The light blue streaks match her eyes. That’s the only cool element to her look: From the neck down she is pure prepster—the straight-leg jeans lined in red flannel, a yellow Shetland wool sweater with her initials at the collar, and pennyloafers (!) with no socks. It’s like she walked out of Talbot’s having spent the max on her holiday gift card on wool and plaid and shirts you have to iron with flat collars. It’s September, and even though it’s warm out, Romy wears the new fall line as though it’s in a rule book somewhere.
    Our newest and third roommate introduces us to her family. It will take an hour because Romy has, like, six parents. I’m not kidding. Her mother and father divorced and remarried, and evidently, her dad twice, so she has, like, three mothers. Only the current parents are here but it’s strange, they all look alike. They wear L.L. Bean and have the ruddy faces of people who run for miles in cold weather. They also smell like muscle ointment, and they do not stop talking.
    They carry all kinds of duffels loaded with what can only be sports equipment. From first glance, I see a tennis racket, golf clubs, and what look like field hockey sticks with socks on the shanks. Great. An athlete.
    In the midst of their banter as they load the duffels into the closet, Marisol and I show Romy the bunks, and she snags the upper one. True athletes need air, apparently, and the top bunk gives her that breeze from the window transoms.
    Romy’s two mothers, with matching short haircuts,make her bed, and they chat and laugh as though they are moving in. So much for divorced couples having issues and blended families unable to blend. These people seem happy. Marisol watches them, sort of amazed. She only has her original parents, as do I. Our families seem downright puny compared to this clan.
    Romy’s bunk is soon made up with a comforter that has a loud print of giant daisies in yellow and white on a field of black. The dads hang a poster of a tin crock of daisies over the upper bunk. (No matter where you sleep in this quad, you’re gonna be looking at daisies. Great.) There is a throw pillow shaped like, guess what, a daisy (!) leaning against the headboard. Matchy matchy. Clearly, Romy planned this boarding school move for weeks. I pretended it wasn’t happening until we got in the car yesterday and drove out here.
    Romy is very take charge in a way that I find exhausting. Already. She has a round face, and what my mother would call “a determined chin.” She sort of leads her parents around our room like it’s a ring, like they are show ponies and she’s the trainer. Romy tells them what goes where and how to hang it, fold it, or store it.
    There’s a knock at the door, even