Page 14 of Middlegame

“You’re sorry you laughed at me?” Now Dodger sounds puzzled. “Everyone laughs at me, all the time. No one ever says sorry.”

“How many of them can talk in your head like this?” Roger grins. His mom always says people can hear it in your voice when you smile. He wants Dodger to hear him smiling. “If they could, I bet they’d say sorry.”

“Maybe,” she says. Her puzzlement is fading, replaced by caution. “You’re really sorry? You won’t laugh anymore?”

“I’m really sorry. I might laugh, I guess. Friends laugh at each other, right?”

“I don’t know.” She changes the subject: “Thanks for helping with my spelling words. I hate spelling. It’s stupid and it doesn’t make sense. But I have to do it.”

“I like spelling,” says Roger. “Sometimes whether a word is one thing or something else is all about what order one or two letters are in. I’ll help as much as you want, if you’ll help with my math.”

“It’s a deal,” says Dodger.

“It was a good idea to get a few of the answers wrong. I didn’t think to do that.”

Dodger shrugs. “People don’t believe things that are too perfect.”

There’s something important in that statement. Roger will find himself thinking about it later, turning it over and over again in his mind as he tries to find the flaws. For the moment, and knowing time is growing short for both of them, he pushes on, asking, “How did you know you could come talk to me?”

“My dad.”

The answer makes no sense. Roger hesitates for a moment before he says, “I don’t understand.”

“He was having a fight with my mom about why don’t I have more friends, is there something wrong with me, should they send me away so I can meet other ‘gifted’ kids—that’s what they say when they don’t want to say ‘freak’—and she said I needed time, and he said ‘that imaginary friend of hers was the only one who ever came for a sleepover.’ So later, I asked him what he meant, and he sort of stuttered and stammered and finally said when I was little, I used to talk to this made-up boy called ‘Roger’ all the time, until one day I stopped. That’s how I knew your name. I knew if Roger was real, and I could talk to him, and I could talk to you, that you had to be Roger.”

She doesn’t need to tell him the rest, because Roger is smart too, as smart as she is, and he can see the gaps in the story. They’re . . . familiar. She’s lonely. Her brashness is meant to cover that, like his shyness does, but she’s lonely. He doesn’t remember talking to her when he was littler—but he’s accepted the idea of her fast, hasn’t he? He was surprised, not frightened, when she started doing his homework. Like he’d talked to her before, long enough ago that it seemed like something he’d made up, not so long ago that part of him wouldn’t always know her as a friend.

She’s lonely, and she’s one of those kids for whom loneliness has become a sort of fearless propulsion, forcing her forward at an ever-accelerating pace, searching for a way to make the loneliness stop. When her father said she’d had an imaginary friend, one with a name, one she liked well enough to have talked to for a long time, she’d gone looking, just like he had when he’d needed to apologize. And she’d found him. Just like he’d found her.

“Dodger?”

Dodger lifts her head. Through her eyes Roger sees the librarian approaching. The woman is old, maybe even older than his mom, but she looks nice; she has worry-lines around her eyes, and her mouth is painted a soft shade of pink, keeping it from looking too cruel, even when she has to shush people for being loud in the library.

“Are you all right?”

Dodger nods mutely.

“Are you supposed to be in the bathroom?” The question is gentle. Dodger has done this before, then, running away and hiding for a few minutes in a place where no one will expect her to be brash, to be bold, to be anything other than small and frightened and seven years old.

Dodger nods again.

“They’re going to think you’re sick if you don’t go back now, and when your teacher checks the bathroom, she won’t find you. I don’t want you to get in trouble.” Still so gentle, still so careful. Roger guesses people all over the world must use the same tone when they talk to the smart kids, like they were bombs on the edge of going off, instead of children with brains too big for the people they’re supposed to be.

“Okay.” Dodger gets up, unfolding easily from what had seemed like such a crumpled position. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry, just be all right. You’d tell me if you weren’t all right, wouldn’t you?”

Of course not. Roger has only known Dodger for a day—maybe longer, if her father is right, if they were friends before, only to lose hold of one another—but he already knows she doesn’t tell people things when she doesn’t feel she needs to. She keeps her secrets close to her chest. That’s how she survives in a world where she’s so much smarter than she should be, and so much more delicate than she seems.

“Yes, Ms. McNeil,” says Dodger obediently.

“Good. Now get back to class, and if anyone asks, I never saw you.” The librarian smiles. Dodger smiles back, and then she’s in motion, heading for her classroom at a brisk walk. Roger is pretty sure she never takes her time getting anywhere.

She pauses at the classroom door and says, in a loud whisper, “It’s ten. I get out of school at three. You can call in six hours.” Then she opens the door and walks, head high, into a classroom filled with bright, judging eyes.

This is her prison, not his. Roger lets go of his place in her head and falls back into his own, opening his eyes on the dim janitor’s closet. He picks himself up, pins and needles shooting through his legs, brushes his jeans off so no one will be able to see where he has been, and lets himself out.

Six hours has never seemed like such a long time. Roger watches the clock, counting the minutes. Ten for her was one for him, and dinner is served at seven thirty; that means he has half an hour in his room before he’ll have to go downstairs and tell his parents about his day. He’s finished all his homework except the new math worksheet, which is even more complicated than the last one. Worse, because he did so well on one sheet, they’re going to expect him to do well on the next one. Maybe not as well, but . . .