Page 26 of Middlegame

“Yeah,” says Roger, picking up her cue. He was always good at that. This is the first time she’s seen it from the outside: the way his nostrils flare slightly as he decides which way he’s going to jump, the particular set to his shoulders before he tells a lie. He’s an open book, written in a language few people can read. She supposes she should feel privileged to be one of them. All she’s really managing to feel is tired. “We, um, we were pen pals. For years. Until we just . . . lost touch, I guess.”

She wants to scream at him, to remind him that he’s the one who went silent, leaving her alone in a world that was too loud and too sharp and too unforgiving. She doesn’t. She drops to the flats of her feet, the motion yanking her fingers away from his. There’s no shock when their connection is broken, any more than there was a shock when it began. They were touching. Now they’re not. Linear time may be many things, but it’s not sympathetic about things like this.

“Did you come on purpose?” she asks. “To see me play?”

To her shame and delight (because why would she have thought that? Even for a second, why would she have thought that? But if he didn’t come on purpose, she doesn’t have to let her anger go: the math says she can keep it, if she still wants it), Roger shakes his head. “No. Our class got tickets, and they were good for extra credit, and Alison plays chess.”

“Oh.” Dodger shifts her attention to the blonde—to Alison—allowing herself, for one brutal, self-indulgent second, to look at the other girl the way the other girl is looking at her. As an opponent; as the competition in a game that society has been priming them for since they were born, no matter how little they want to play.

Alison will play a defensive game, she decides, loath to sacrifice pieces even when it would serve the greater good. Checkmate in ten moves or less. Not worth the time it would take to humiliate her. The thought is cold, and Dodger is ashamed of it even as it finishes forming.

She smiles, and she thinks it’s as good a smile as any she’s ever worn. She doesn’t think too deeply about that; about why her false smiles and her real ones look the same. “Wow. I guess we just got lucky. It’s nice to meet you, Alison.”

“Nice to meet you, too,” says Alison grudgingly, taking advantage of the introduction to slide her arm through Roger’s, making her claim even more apparent. “I don’t think I’ve ever met anybody named ‘Dodger’ before.”

“My dad teaches American history,” says Dodger, with the shrug she’s perfected for moments like this, when people comment on her name and she has no idea what to say. That isn’t where her name comes from: it was a condition of her adoption, lain down by a birth mother she’s never known and rarely wonders about. The woman who gave her life also gave her up. As far as Dodger’s concerned, that’s something people are only allowed to do once.

And Roger’s already done it.

She straightens, still smiling her false, practiced smile. “It was good to see you, Roger. I hope you enjoyed the game, and you both get lots of extra credit for coming. We’re supposed to play again in an hour, so I’d better go get ready.”

Roger watches helplessly as she turns and walks away, head held high and stiff. He’s losing her again, he knows he is, and he doesn’t know how to make her stop. Not without saying things in front of Alison that would make him sound crazy at best, and like some sort of weirdo ex-boyfriend at worst. He doesn’t want either of those things.

He also doesn’t want Dodger to go.

So he closes his eyes and fumbles in the dark behind them until he finds a door he hasn’t looked for in years—a door he stopped looking for when his family was threatened. But he’s fourteen now, not nine; he knows more about how the world works, he’s read more books on adoption law and contracts, because it impacts his life, and he wanted to understand. No matter what contract his parents may have signed, there’s no judge in the world who’d take him away from them for the crime of speaking to someone, especially not when she’s standing right there. She’s real, she’s really and truly real, and that means he’s not crazy to talk to her, and if he’s not crazy, then there’s nothing wrong with acknowledging her existence.

He “knocks.” She doesn’t open the door. She doesn’t let him in. And so he shoves as hard as he can. He pushes his way through.

Maybe it’s quantum entanglement and maybe it’s not, but the door opens under the questing fingers of his mental hands, and the world appears in vivid color, showing him the arena from a floor-level view. The angle of Dodger’s eyesight is wrong enough to be jarring. That makes him feel even worse. He’d be accustomed to her perspective if he hadn’t broken contact, like he used to be accustomed to seeing the world from a higher point of view, when they were younger and their heights were reversed.

(He’s also profoundly, disturbingly color-blind, something he didn’t understand when he was younger and might never have noticed if not for the fact that she isn’t: when he looks through her eyes, the world has a thousand shades that aren’t normally there, and he resents her a little for getting colors when he doesn’t, even as he hungrily matches them to names that were previously academic, ideas that had no anchor on the world.)

“Please don’t go,” he whispers, as softly as he can, and his voice in her mind is as loud and clear as it ever was.

Dodger stumbles. She doesn’t fall: her shock is enough to short out her coordination, but not enough to kill it completely. She stops walking, back still to the audience, and asks, “Why not? You did. I think it’s my turn.”

“Because I’m sorry and I shouldn’t have done it, and please. Don’t go.”

“I have to. I need to play another game. We’re in the same time zone tonight; call me at nine.” And she’s walking again, moving faster now, like she’s trying to get away from something that may or may not pursue.

Roger doesn’t want to be the thing that chases her. He pulls back, opens his own eyes, and watches, from his familiar point of view, as she disappears through the door at the back of the arena. Alison is tugging on his arm. He turns, and the way she’s looking at him makes him realize things have changed; introducing another girl into the mix made her start looking at him the way he’s been looking at her for ages. Part of him wants to be overjoyed. The rest of him is muddled and confused, not sure how to cope with the speed at which everything is shifting around him.

“You want to get a soda?” he asks, and is rewarded by her smile blossoming like a flower, and maybe everything isn’t so complicated after all.

Dodger plays three more games that day, and she wins them all, although two of them are closer than she likes: after the third, when they’re packing their things, the event organizer comes over to thank her for making things more interesting for the audience. Dodger, who can see the mathematical possibilities of the game spreading out in front of her with every move, who might as well have a map in hand every time she picks up a pawn, says nothing. She can’t toy with her opponents the way they want her to, and she can’t be distracted every time she sits down to play; neither would be fair, either to her or to the people she plays against. When she’s at the table, she needs to know the people she’s challenging will fight her with everything they have. Anything less would be cruel.

(This is her first chess tour. She signed up for the college credit, and because her father promised she could audit one of Professor Vernon’s courses if she did something extracurricular this semester. She loves Professor Vernon. He’s been a mentor to her, and she thinks losing Roger would have broken her even worse than it did if she hadn’t been able to run to Professor Vernon for support. This is also her last chess tour. She could be a darling of the sort of people who enjoy these things, the little girl who never smiles as she annihilates her opponents, but there would be no joy in it for her, and without the joy, she doesn’t understand the point. Chess is meant to be something sacred, not a party trick to be trotted out and used to entertain people who’d be just as happy to watch a seal balance a ball on the tip of its nose.)

That night, she returns to the hotel. As the youngest, she has a room of her own, with a connecting door to the room where the tour chaperone sleeps. For the first couple of stops, she’d been required to leave that door propped open, so the chaperone could see she was in her bed and not off getting into trouble. Pleading difficulty falling asleep and showing no inclination to leave her room after curfew has earned her a few privileges, chief among them a door that can actually be closed, giving her the privacy she needs.

Carefully, she removes her performance clothes and trades them for flannel pajama pants and a faded Jurassic Park T-shirt. Dinosaurs are okay, but in the grand scheme of things, she wears the shirt in honor of Dr. Ian Malcolm, fictional mathematician slash rock star and focus of more than a few confusing teenage dreams. She’s worn this shirt so much that the seams are fraying. It’s not attractive, not the sort of thing she should be wearing to invite a boy into her room, much less into her head. But it’s comfortable. It’s comforting. Right here, right now, that’s what matters.

She wants to be angry. Wants to pull back and let him have it with both barrels, as her dad always says; wants him to understand how badly he hurt her, that she’s not the sort of girl who forgives on a moment’s notice. She can’t do any of those things. As badly as he hurt her, as badly as she’s still hurting, she missed him twice as much. She doesn’t have the words for what she’s feeling—and there was a time when, if she needed a word, she would have reached for Roger, trusting him to supply the missing piece. For the last five years, she’s been muddling through this alone. So has he, but math is easier to avoid than words are. Words are everywhere. Words hurt.

Carefully, she stretches out on her bed, eyes closed, hands folded across her stomach. She feels like she’s measuring herself for her own coffin. That should make her uncomfortable. Right here, right now, it’s a set of simple parameters that makes everything better. Six feet by three feet by two feet; the dimensions of the world. Breathe in, breathe out, fill the world. Let everything else fall away. Let everything else go.

She’s been lying there for a while (seventeen minutes, thirty-one seconds) when the world shifts, a new weight appearing behind her eyes.