Page 11 of Middlegame

The answer just raises more questions. Roger is beginning to feel like he’s trying to run up the side of an avalanche. This Dodger girl—who isn’t real, can’t be real; voices in your head aren’t real—is too exhausting to be a good imaginary friend. “I don’t think we should do this.”

“Come on. I’m bored.” She sounds frustrated. “Stupid Jessica Nelson hit me in the face with a red bounce ball during recess, and now I have to be in the nurse’s office until my mom comes to take me home. I’m missing math and dance and I didn’t get to eat my pudding cup.”

None of this matches Roger’s understanding of imaginary friends. It doesn’t match what he knows about people who hear voices, either. He just knows she sounds so . . . so sad, and that she helped him with his homework. So he reaches for his pencil, and a clean sheet of paper, and says, “Let me teach you about metaphors.”

When his mother looks in, sometime later, Roger is bent over the paper, mumbling to himself as he writes. She can see the finished worksheet off to one side, and she smiles.

Maybe he can be taught to follow instructions after all.

Midnight creeps into the room one second at a time. Roger is deep in a comforting dream—one about trains and teddy bears and that weird noise the pantry door makes—when a hand touches his shoulder. He sits bolt upright in bed, eyes already open, searching for the intruder.

There’s no one there.

“Oh, good,” says the voice from before. “You’re awake. I was bored.”

“Who’s there?” He looks wildly around.

She sighs. “It’s Dodger, hello? Why’d I have to have an imaginary friend who’s a dumb boy who doesn’t like math? I wanted something cool. Like an elephant.”

Roger sinks back into the pillows, scowling at the ceiling. He’s been in bed for more than three hours: the glow-in-the-dark stars have mostly lost their shine. A few still glimmer dimly, like he’s looking at them through deep water. “I’m not an elephant.”

“I know. Why were you asleep?”

“Because it’s midnight.”

“No it’s not. It’s nine. My dad says I have to be in bed so I’m not a butt in the morning.” Dodger’s tone shows how little she thinks of this advice. “It’s not my fault I wake up before he’s had his coffee. What are you doing?”

“Sleeping,” hisses Roger. “I’m not your imaginary friend. I have school tomorrow.”

“Me, too. And you have to be my imaginary friend.”

“Why?”

“Because if you’re not, I’m talking to myself.” There’s something familiar in her voice: fear. She’s afraid of what it would mean if she started talking to herself. Roger lets himself thaw a little. None of this makes any sense at all, but maybe it’s not such a bad thing. Maybe it would be good to have someone to talk to.

“How can you be talking to me?”

“I dunno.” He feels her shrug. “I close my eyes and you’re there. It’s like picking up a phone. I can see the stuff you see, too, when I try. Like with the math. Do you have any more?”

“No. Hang on.” He gets out of bed, limbs protesting all the way. His mind is awake, thanks to Dodger’s cheerful refusal to be quiet, but his body knows it’s supposed to be asleep. When he’s sure he can walk without falling he shuffles out of his room and down the hall. The house is as close to silent as it ever gets. The clock downstairs in the kitchen ticks to itself; a branch scrapes against the hallway window; the wind whistles through the eaves. There’s a dreamlike quality to everything, divorced from the waking world by the strangeness of it all.

(It has to happen now, he realizes, dimly aware that the things he’s experiencing should seem impossible. Two years ago, he would have accepted voices in his head helping him with his homework as so natural that he’d have told everyone about it, cheerfully unaware that some things are best kept secret. Two years from now, he would think hearing voices meant he was going crazy and would claw himself to ribbons trying to make it stop. This is the perfect time. This is the one point on his timeline where contact can be made without trauma or damage. He doesn’t know how he knows that, or why he’s so sure that two years in either direction would change everything, but he’s seven years old; he accepts his conclusion without questioning it.)

The door to his parents’ room is closed. He’s the only one awake. Well, him, and Dodger—but she doesn’t count, does she? She’s in a different house, a different place entirely. If she exists at all.

He trails a hand along the wall as he walks, feeling the worn places in the wallpaper. His fingers have sketched them, night after night. When he was small, he used to reach up to find the wall, letting his hand land at a level even with his ears. As he got taller, his hand dropped to shoulder height. Now it trails slightly above his waist, following the same track it always has. Sometimes in the morning he looks at that worn strip of wallpaper and thinks about what it means: how soon he’ll need to reach down to keep running his fingers along the same patch of wall. How he’s growing, a little more every day, and nothing stays the same forever.

Most of the kids he knows are rushing toward adulthood as fast as they can, hands stretched in front of them, grasping for the unknowable future. Roger wishes he knew how to dig in his heels and stop where he is. Just for a while; just long enough to get a better idea of what’s ahead.

He finds the bathroom door, eases it open, eases it closed again behind him. He can hear Dodger’s breathing in his head, the fast, excited inhale and exhale of a girl with no idea what’s happening but no qualms about finding out. She won’t slow down, he’s sure; if anything, she’ll run faster, aiming for the golden finish line, the moment where childhood ends and adulthood begins, land of anything-you-want.

“Cover your eyes,” he says, and squints his own eyes before flicking on the light. It’s bright enough to be biting even through his closed lids. He waits for the pain to recede before cautiously opening them and turning toward the mirror.

Roger Middleton is a skinny kid, tall for his age, with a shock of too-long brown hair that never seems to settle right, no matter how much his mother him tells to brush it. He’s pale, both because he rarely goes outside and because of the sunscreen he gets doused in every time he inches toward a door. Sometimes he thinks about getting a sunburn, just for the experience. His features are symmetrical, regular, and ordinary. This is a boy who could disappear in any crowd, given the right clothing and the proper attitude.

His eyes are gray, and as he watches, they widen, although he hasn’t ordered them to do so. Instead, he feels Dodger’s surprise flooding through him, Dodger’s amazement at what seemed—to him—like such a logical step.

“That’s you?” she asks. He can see everything behind him, and now he knows she isn’t there: he’s alone in the bathroom, wearing his Bumble Bear pajamas with the tear in the right sleeve. His lips aren’t moving.