Page 33 of Middlegame

Dodger is many things. Foremost among them: she is a very good liar.

She walks down the hall to the computer room, knowing her mother will be downstairs in the kitchen with a cup of coffee and the newspaper, listening to her daughter’s footsteps overhead. Morning visits to the computer room are normal, tightly regulated to keep her from being late to school, but expected. No deviation from the pattern here. She’s maintaining the same equation she’s used for every school day so far this year. That’s important.

The loose baseboard comes away from the wall easily, not making a sound. She’s been planning this day for a while: she knows that, even as she spent more than a year trying to deny it to herself. Why else would she have taken so much care in sanding the edges of the baseboard, creating a perfect, soundless seal? She must have been planning this.

Dodger is so very, unbearably tired.

She wouldn’t describe what she feels quite like that, but deep down, she knows “tired” is the right word: maybe the only word. She’s tired. She’s tired of being too smart to slow down and appreciate things that aren’t performing at her level. She’s tired of adults treating her like a circus sideshow and other kids treating her like a freak. (They’re not the same, not quite: to the adults, she’s the strongman, the fire-eater, the girl who dances on the trapeze without a net. To the kids, she’s the bearded woman, the lobster-girl. The adults gape and whisper because of what she can do. The kids her own age do it because of what she is. They’re both right and they’re both wrong and she’s exhausted from the effort of trying to make them understand.) She’s tired of being lonely, and having Roger back in her life has made things worse when it should have made them better, because she always thought he was the same as she was, but he’s not, he’s not. He has friends. He has people. He has a life. And she has numbers, and figures, and math enough to redefine the sky.

The numbers would have been enough, if she’d never found the door at the back of her own mind, leading to a boy her own age—to the day—who couldn’t finish his worksheet. They might even have been enough if he’d never slammed and locked the doors between them, shutting her out and giving him time to change the world he lived in. She could have adjusted to how much better he was at people than she was, if she’d watched it happen, if he’d boiled her like a frog. But he didn’t do that. He closed her out, and while she was gone he raised the temperature of the water, and now that she’s back, she can’t take it.

The flaw, she knows, is hers. The weakness is hers. That’s okay. She’s the math girl. She’s the one who appreciates the necessity of the inevitable equation. She can see where these numbers go.

One by one, she removes her prizes from the space behind the baseboard: the pack of razors, the bottle of painkillers stolen, one and two at a time, from unguarded medicine cabinets and unwatched purses, the topical numbing gel. She’s worked her plan out so carefully. All the pieces need to be perfect. She’s good at perfect.

She stuffs her prizes into her backpack, returns the baseboard to its place, and stands. Soon—so very soon—Roger won’t have to worry about her anymore, and she won’t have to worry about her loneliness driving him away. She won’t have to worry about anything.

She only has to be perfect one more time, and she can be done. Relief outweighing her fear, she shoulders her pack and heads for the door. Time for breakfast. Time to say goodbye.

PERFECTION

Timeline: 10:37 EST, September 5th, 2003 (same morning, same day, almost too late).

Roger is in his AP English class, listening to his favorite teacher—Ms. Brown, who will never have his heart the way Miss Lewis did in the second grade, and that’s okay, because he figures no one ever loves anyone the way they love their second-grade teacher—explain King Lear when the world goes white and everything drops away, leaving him suspended, screaming, in a terrible void. It isn’t pain, exactly: pain would require nerves, skin, a body. It’s an anti-pain, a pain born of absence, and because of that, it hurts more than anything.

The white turns gold around the edges, burning. The transition forces the edges to exist, transforming them into a frame around a place he’s never seen. A skyline, writhed with flame; a road of rainbows, stretched like a soap bubble across the landscape.

A girl with red hair (he can see the color of her hair) lying sprawled in the dirt, her eyes half-closed, her own pain receding as blood loss wrings her dry. The blood is gray, gray as blood always is when Dodger isn’t with him, but he knows it all the same, yes, he knows it. She’s going. She’s going. She’s not gone yet.

The Impossible City is burning, he thinks incoherently, and opens his eyes.

He’s sprawled on the classroom floor, surrounded by the stunned, staring faces of his classmates. The back of his head hurts. He slammed it against the tile at least once when he fell, and maybe more than once, because his hips and shoulders hurt too, like he’s been thrashing, or seizing. The front of his jeans is wet. Normally, that realization would be followed by shame, or anger, or some combination of the two. Here, now, he can’t muster more than a calm confusion. It feels like someone just ran a few thousand volts through his brain, scrambling everything.

Miss Lewis is kneeling over him, hair hanging to frame her face the way it always did in his dreams, eyes wide and terrified. “Roger, are you all right?” she asks. “Can you hear me?”

“I love you, Miss Lewis,” he says dreamily, and she isn’t Miss Lewis anymore: she’s Ms. Brown, and this isn’t second grade, and he’s just had a seizure. It’s the only thing that makes sense. It feels like his brain is struggling to reboot, to start making sense of a fall he doesn’t remember and an impact he didn’t feel. There’s a moment of absolute terror—what if this was a stroke? What if he’s had a stroke, and something essential has been lost, and will never come back? What if he’s less now than he was at the beginning of the day? The fear passes quickly. He’s fine. He knows he’s fine, and he knows, with as much certainty as a heart can hold, that he won’t be fine if he doesn’t start moving. This is not a situation that allows for slowing down.

Ms. Brown doesn’t have the reassurance of being in his body, of feeling what he feels. She looks petrified. “Roger, do you know where you are?”

“Classroom.” His tongue is slow and clumsy. He tries to sit up, and is delighted to find that he can. Everything is reacting normally. If not for the wet patch on his jeans and the sore places where he slammed into the floor, he’d say he was in tip-top condition, no problems here, all systems go. He’s fine.

“Roger, you need to lie still.” Ms. Brown flutters her hands helplessly, motioning for him to lie back down. The rest of the students are watching in mute fear. The seizure must have been pretty impressive: normally he would have expected at least a few of them to be suppressing snickers over the fact that he wet his pants. “Please. I’ve called the office, they’re going to get you an ambulance—”

Math is not his strong suit, but he does the math anyway, adding up travel times, test times, the amount of time hospital admissions will take, the possibility of sedation . . . all the things that stand between him and a phone call if he does as he’s told. The figure he comes up with is brutal in its simplicity, and it says “too long.” He can’t listen to his teacher. If he does, Dodger is going to die.

The Impossible City is burning, he thinks again, and while he doesn’t know what the words mean, he knows what they’re trying to say. If Dodger dies, so does he.

“You’re supposed to walk off a seizure if you can,” he says glibly, and it may be the most convincing lie he’s ever told. He climbs to his feet, proud of the fact that his knees barely shake, and bolts for the door before Ms. Brown can order him to stop. The last thing he sees as it swings shut is her face, white as whey, crowned with eyes gone huge and childlike in her fear. He feels bad about that, he really does, but as Dodger is so fond of saying, there isn’t time.

There’s a “no leaving campus without permission” rule in effect for all grade levels, but this is an emergency, and he’s already going to be in trouble when Ms. Brown gets over her shock and tries to follow him, because he’s not heading for the office. He’s running, full-tilt, toward the street. The rain has stopped, for the moment, but it wouldn’t matter if it were pouring. He’s got to get to a phone. The seconds are ticking by, too fast to trace or catch, and the entire world seems to be oversaturated, too bright, too sharp, until the air irritates his skin.

This is how Dodger sees time, he thinks, feeling almost fevered. She’s bleeding into him the same way she’s bleeding into the dirt. Everything is fluid. Everything needs someplace to go. Time is running out. He knows that like he knows the shape of his own skin, like he knows the shadow lurking at the back of his mind, threatening another, worse seizure. There’s no way he should be doing this in this condition. He shouldn’t be doing anything but going to the hospital. But there’s no time, time is running out, there’s no time keeps running through his mind, a jumbled string of words that barely holds together as it tumbles end over end, and he knows the hospital won’t save him. He couldn’t say how he knows: just that he does.

Right now, he’s accepting the fact that given a choice between running off by himself immediately after a seizure or going to the hospital, the right choice puts him on the street. If he goes to the hospital, they’ll both die.

He hits the sidewalk at what feels like a hundred miles an hour, trying to relax into the motion, to level out his breathing, to find comfort in the act of running. He can’t. Even the shape of his own skin is starting to feel wrong. It’s too long, too lanky, stretched too tight across the bones. He doesn’t want to think about what that might mean, and so he runs, as hard and as fast as he can.

The sky is a bruise, pulsing with clouds, heavy with the promise of more rain. The air is electric. This is a Frankenstein day, ready to strike out at any moment. He darts across the street without looking, hearing the horns blare behind him and not looking back. He can’t look back. He’s not one of the rich kids, whose parents will trust them with a phone, and he doesn’t know any of them well enough to ask to borrow their phones, not when he’s seizing for no apparent reason, not when he’s running out of time. There’s a payphone half a mile up the road, at Harvard Square. He has a handful of quarters in his pocket, intended for feeding into parking meters when he takes Alison out on Friday nights. She’ll understand if he has to borrow a few dollars. She’ll see that he was helping a friend.