Page 10 of Middlegame

(His mother isn’t as bad as she could be. She takes his books when he neglects things like his math homework, but she gives them back, and she’s never told him something was too advanced for him. Instead, she showers him with books, as many as he asks for, and seems to delight endlessly in how fast he learns. She’s even given him some books written in other languages, like Spanish or German or Cantonese, and how she laughs when he reads her those stories! Even if she can’t understand what he’s saying, she still laughs. So he knows she’s proud of him. She has to be.)

He looks at her and smiles hopefully, and she melts. She always does. “All right, mister,” she says, mock-stern. “I’ll be back to check your worksheet in fifteen minutes. You’d better have at least half the problems done, or I’m clearing all the books out of here for two days. Even the ones you have hidden in your drawers.”

Roger gasps, horrified. “Yes, ma’am,” he says, and bends over his paper, pencil scratching out answers as he sets himself to the serious work of keeping his reading privileges.

Ten minutes later, the short burst of productivity has burnt itself out, and he’s once again staring at a sea of numbers and mathematical sigils, wondering whether he can risk pulling his book back from under the desk.

“The answer’s sixteen,” says a girl’s voice. It is not, precisely, coming from the air next to him; it seems to be coming from the space he currently occupies. It is also not, precisely, one of the voices he sometimes hears in his head when he pretends to be a famous author, writing a new book, or a lauded teacher, explaining the definition of a newly discovered word to an eager audience. It’s a new voice, an outside voice, and not his invention at all.

Roger stiffens. Voices from nowhere aren’t a good thing. Being clever and quiet means hearing his mother brag about his cleverness to her friends. It also means hearing his teachers tell her how it worries them that he doesn’t play with the other kids, that he prefers the company of books to the company of people. Maybe there’s something . . . wrong with him. They only ever say that in a whisper, and never when they think he could be listening, but he hears them.

He doesn’t want something to be wrong with him. So he says nothing. Most people go away if he doesn’t talk to them.

The girl sighs, exasperated. “Did you hear me? It’s sixteen, stupid. Write it down.”

Automatically, Roger does. The answer looks correct, nestled under the eight and the two and the little “x” that means to multiply. Still, he doesn’t say anything.

“I can do the rest for you. If you want.”

“You can?” He claps his hand over his mouth, looking anxiously around in case his mother somehow crept into the room and heard him talking to the air. Lowering his voice, he asks, more softly, “You can?”

“Sure. I’m bored. Let me?”

“Um. Okay.”

She rattles off answers as fast as he can write them down, sometimes skipping three or four problems ahead before doubling back. She never pauses to explain. He’s not here to learn: he’s here to do transcription, to let her scratch whatever strange itch would drive someone to do someone else’s math homework. When they’re finished, when the last math problem is complete—along with the four bonus problems at the bottom of the sheet, something he’s never bothered to do before—he drops his pencil and stares at the graphite marks covering his paper.

“Wow.”

“What? It’s really basic stuff. Boring. We should do some calculus.”

Roger can’t take it anymore. “Who are you?” he asks. “Is this a trick?”

“No, silly, this is math. Math is never a trick. Math never plays tricks. Sometimes it makes problems, but they always have solutions. Not like stupid English.” The girl’s voice turns frustrated. “Frogs don’t wear clothes and drive cars, and if you get sucked up by a tornado you wind up dead, not in someone else’s country, and a road can’t be improbable. It’s all a big dumb lie for big dummy liars, but they still make us learn it. It’s not fair.”

Here is something Roger understands. “It’s not a lie,” he says, triumphant. “It’s a metaphor.” He pronounces the word with a long e, like “meet-a-for.” Neither of them notices. (In later years, when mispronunciation has become one of his greatest fears, he’ll look back on this moment and grimace, wondering how they could ever have become friends when he started their relationship with a mangled word.) “It’s using a thing that’s not true to talk about things that are.”

“If something’s not true, it’s a lie.”

“Not always.” He doesn’t have the vocabulary to explain why this is so: he just knows it is, that sometimes things are symbols for ideas bigger than they could ever be without help, that sometimes untruths are the truest thing of all. “I still don’t know who you are.”

“Dodger Cheswich.” Her voice turns prim, and he recognizes that tone, because he’s heard it from his own lips: it’s the voice of the smartest kid in school being asked a senseless question. “We rhyme. Ro-ger and Dod-ger.”

Roger goes very still. How does she know his name? She can’t know his name unless she’s really from inside his head, and if she’s from inside his head, there’s something wrong with him. He doesn’t want there to be something wrong with him.

But she’s still talking, the words quick and unrelenting, and it’s easy to let the worry go. She’s real. She has to be real. He could never imagine anyone like her. “Maybe us rhyming is why I can do your homework. Maybe all rhyming kids are like this. Do you have any more?”

“Names?”

“No, stupid. Homework.”

“Not tonight,” he says, and is dimly delighted to realize he’s telling the truth: he, and the voice in his head, have completed all the problems on the worksheet. What’s more, he did it all by himself, so the handwriting matches up. Then he frowns. “Is this cheating?”

“No.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I argue with my teachers about whether I’m cheating a lot, and they never said ‘a voice in your head that gives the answers is cheating.’ So this can’t be cheating.”