Page 16 of Middlegame

“Okay,” says Dodger, for the second time.

In his room in Massachusetts, Roger opens his eyes. His mother is calling him down to dinner. Grasping his math worksheet in one hand, he runs to tell her about his day.

Dodger feels the moment Roger’s presence leaves her mind the way she’d feel a cotton ball being pulled out of her ear: a sudden absence, creating a space for the world to rush into. She flops backward and closes her eyes, fighting the urge to call his name and push herself into his life the way he’d been riding along on hers. It’s hard. In the end, she perseveres. If there’s one thing Dodger has a lot of experience with, it’s being alone.

Her parents would never call her lonely, if anyone thought to ask them. Sure, she’s alone a lot of the time, but she has friends. They’re sure of it. Absolutely sure. They’d be horrified if Dodger ever bothered to tell them how wrong they were.

Maybe if she’d been Roger, smart about books and words and spelling and stuff, she could have made friends. Book-smart is okay for girls, as much as any sort of smart is okay for girls. But math-smart isn’t the same. Math-smart belongs to skinny boys with glasses and pocket protectors and heads full of science. That’s what the books say. That’s what the TV says. And that’s what her classmates say in a thousand tiny ways, every time she finishes her math book ahead of the rest of them. Even the math-smart boys don’t like her, because she’s smarter than them, and some things are too much to be borne.

She’s learnt to make it look like she doesn’t care. She’s not class clown—one-liners and comebacks aren’t her forte—but she’s brassy and loud and she talks like nothing matters. She’s been to see the principal for squirming and shouting more than half the boys she knows, which has earned her a certain grudging respect, even though she still sits alone at lunch every day. Her teacher doesn’t like her because she’s a disruption. The school librarian loves her, though, and lets her hide in the cool dark when she needs to. She’ll survive. She knows that. She’ll survive, and she’ll do it with a smile on her face, because Roger’s back. Roger’s real, and he’s back, and she’s not alone anymore.

Her bedroom door opens. She sits up, turning, and there’s her mother, a sheet of paper clutched in her hand. She brandishes it. “You know what this is?”

Dodger stiffens. “That’s mine,” she says. “It was in my bag.”

“You left it on the stairs again,” says her mother. “I picked it up and this fell out. A ninety? Really?”

“I studied.” The lie comes quick and easy. The necessary lies always do. (She’ll try for years to explain her dislike of metaphor to Roger, even as they both learn how to pronounce the word correctly: to make him see why lies should be reserved for life-or-death situations, because anything else would make them weaker, and weak things can’t save you. She’ll always be a better liar than he is. He’ll always have a better grasp of metaphor. Some things run too close to the bone to change, no matter how much you want to.)

“You studied? Are you sure?” Her mother’s eyes scan her face. Dodger looks guilelessly back, confident her deceptions will go unseen. Sometimes she thinks being adopted is the best thing in the world, because it’s made her a better liar where her parents are concerned. All the kids she knows think it’s hard to lie to their parents, because their parents can say things like “you have your mother’s eyes, and she always squints when she’s lying,” or “see, that blush means you’re not telling me the truth.” Dodger doesn’t have anyone’s eyes but her own, and maybe Roger’s . . .

That’s just wishful thinking. She doesn’t have anyone’s eyes but her own, and those eyes are wide and innocent, devoid of anything but childish delight at her own accomplishment.

Finally, her mother yields. Heather Cheswich’s retail job is only part-time, starting after she puts Dodger on the school bus and ending early enough to let her beat her daughter home by almost half an hour, but it’s still exhausting, and she doesn’t have the energy to pursue this any further. “I told you that you could do it if you applied yourself. Didn’t I tell you?”

“You told me,” agrees Dodger solemnly. “You told me until I listened.” She’s not being sarcastic. Sarcasm will come later, after the world has kicked her more.

“Your father will be pleased.”

Dodger perks up at that. “Is he coming home for dinner?”

Her mother looks at the hopeful expression on her little girl’s face and feels herself wither a bit more inside, way down deep, where the light never reaches.

“I don’t think he’ll be home for dinner tonight, sweetheart; he has a class,” Heather says, and Dodger’s face falls. Heather forces a smile. “Now why don’t you show me that spelling worksheet?”

Dodger does, and time marches on.

PURPLE STARS

Timeline: 17:02 PST, February 9, 1995 (two years later).

“Are you sure California has February?” asks Roger. Dodger is sliding down the embankment on the sides of her feet, plunging into the bushes behind her house. She’s shredding her shoes; she goes through them five times as fast as he goes through his, even though their parents buy the same brands. Up until a few months ago, they even wore the same size. She’s hitting her growth spurts early and hard, and her mother is beginning to look thoughtfully at the shoes in the athletic section, which might stand half a chance of lasting for more than a month.

“The calendar says it does, and calendars don’t lie,” says Dodger. She grabs at branches as she descends, scraping the skin off her palms. Roger winces in sympathy, feeling the idea of her pain without feeling the pain itself. The brief moments of physical synchronicity they used to have, where he could feel her tap his shoulder, where she would know if he had a headache, have been fading. He’s sort of grateful for that. Some things shouldn’t be shared.

Dodger is paler than he is—neither of them goes out in the sun much, but she’s turned avoiding it into a game, while he just sighs whenever it comes out from behind the clouds—and her bruises stand out brighter than his ever do. Sometimes she looks like a flower of a girl, drawn in white and purple and healing yellow, all the more striking because those colors only seem to exist in California. She laughs when he tells her to take better care of herself. No one else cares if she takes her skin off, so why should she?

He knows so many words, to describe so many things. His vocabulary has grown immeasurably, aided in a sideways manner by the girl whose head he currently occupies. Once his math scores started rising, his teachers became more understanding of his boredom. They knew how to handle a well-rounded genius in a way they’d never been able to handle a focused one. He’s spent the last two years reading whatever he wants, providing he keeps the rest of his grades up. He’s taking German, French, and Mandarin. He’s learnt so many new concepts, and the words to pin them to the surface of his soul, perpetual and immutable. Without words, some things would slip away, impossible to describe and hence impossible to hold.

He doesn’t know how to tell Dodger to take care of herself. She’s his best friend, and she knows that, but he doesn’t know how to make her understand that when she hurts herself, she’s hurting him, too. He doesn’t have the phrases to describe the shape of his fear, and so sometimes he doesn’t say anything at all. Silence is not a natural state for either of them. It’s especially unusual and unsustainable for him, who lives and dies by the word.

Dodger has reached the bottom of the gully. She shoves herself through a gap in the blackberry brambles that was easier to navigate a year ago, even six months ago, before her hips began spreading—not enough to be noticeable until she’s trying to wiggle through a hole—and her shirt began taking on a different shape, enough so that Roger no longer watches when she’s getting ready for bed, but turns his distant face away. He’s always known she was a girl, and that if she lived in Massachusetts, there’d be questions about crushes and childhood puppy love. He doesn’t feel that way about her, and she doesn’t feel that way about him; he knows that as surely as he knows the color of her hair and the slope of his hands. Not feeling that way about someone doesn’t make it right to look.

“You still with me?” she asks, even though she knows the answer. They’ve each become adept at sensing the presence of the other, and more, at sensing its absence. He stays awake until her bedtime almost every night, so they can fall asleep together, and she wakes when he does, both of them walking through their lives with the constant, immutable sense of presence at the back of their minds. Sometimes they have to work to turn it off, to split themselves apart. Still, sometimes she needs reassurance.

“I’m here,” says Roger. His alarm is set: he’s supposed to go downstairs in half an hour for game night with the family. They’re playing Monopoly tonight. He’d crush them all if he let Dodger play, and so he doesn’t, because that wouldn’t be fair; having a tutor living in his head is one thing, but using her to beat his mother at a board game is something else entirely.

(Melinda Middleton takes her board games very seriously. She plays Candyland the way some people play poker, all close-held cards and thin-lipped frowns. Roger thinks it would be funny, if it wasn’t sort of scary.)