Page 38 of Middlegame

Dodger moans in her sleep, and is still.

In the morning, she will have a blister where he kissed her. It will burst in a week, remaining red and weeping for the better part of a year before it finally, resentfully heals. But no matter.

The morning finds her sleeping, alive and alone. Everything continues from there.

ENROLLMENT

Timeline: 08:35 PST, August 15, 2008 (five years later).

Dodger hits the edge of campus like she has a grudge, hunched over the handlebars of her bike and pedaling hard. She knows she’s late, three hundred and seven seconds, ticking over into three hundred and eight as she swerves to avoid a squirrel. Three hundred and nine when she rides over the curb, tires somehow finding purchase. She almost wishes they wouldn’t. She won’t hurt herself on purpose—the razor blades and nightmares and group therapy sessions for victims of violent crime are in the past, not the future—but showing up bruised and bloody might garner her a little sympathy, whereas “sorry, I was up until four in the morning arguing with mathematicians on the other side of the world” just makes her look like a flake.

(Sometimes she thinks the razor blades aren’t that far behind her. She’s transmuted her self-destructive impulses into “healthier” forms, like riding her bike into traffic and shorting herself on sleep until she starts seeing things, but that doesn’t mean the impulses are gone. They’re just harder for anyone else to see. She’s learnt how to be a better liar than she ever thought she could be, even when she was convincing her parents she was fine. Healthy California lifestyle as metaphor for suicidal depression. Roger would have yelled at her for that, saying he didn’t teach her about metaphors—meet-a-fors—so she could abuse them. But Roger doesn’t matter. She’s never going to see him again.)

Three hundred and seventeen seconds when she skids to a stop at the base of the library stairs, tires audibly shedding rubber on the poorly maintained slate walkway. The rest of her walkthrough group is already there of course, of course, waiting for her, the girl who has now been late one hundred percent of the time. She’ll cut it to fifty percent when she’s on time for their next outing, followed by thirty-three percent, twenty-five, dwindling down and down into meaninglessness, but that won’t matter. Her first impression will always be of lateness. She’s sorry for that, even as she plasters a smile across her face and hops off her bike, leaving it leaning against the base of the steps.

“Sorry,” she says. “Lost track of time.”

“Time, space, where you left your keys . . .” says one of the other incoming grad students, and laughs, a sound unnervingly like a kookaburra’s mating cry. She’s pretty, with dark skin, long black hair, and a sweatshirt patterned in geometric squares of orange, pink, and canary yellow. Maybe she’s the other mathematician Dodger was promised when she signed up for this tour group. That would be nice. Female mathematicians exist, they’re just rarer than she’d like, and most of them have no sense of humor.

There are six of them in total, counting the girl in the remarkable sweatshirt. A tall boy with a shaved head and eleven visible tattoos; a Chinese girl whose eyes haven’t left her phone once, not even to mark the screeching of Dodger’s tires; a plump, tan girl with pink and blonde hair and an expression of wonderment, like this campus is the most amazing thing she’s ever seen; and a broad, brown-skinned man with a bushy beard and a T-shirt instructing people to ask him how to get to Sesame Street. They all look more awake than Dodger feels, but more importantly, they look like her peers. They have the air of amiable stress that she’s come to associate with graduate students, and the calm resignation to the inevitable that she’s come to associate with people she’s unlikely to drive insane. Maybe they can be friends.

“We’re waiting on one more,” says the tattooed boy. His voice is surprisingly soft, with traces of a Nova Scotian accent. His leather jacket is a wonderland of badges, safety pins, and patches advertising punk bands she’s never heard of. It’s like looking at a time traveler from several decades and a few continents away. “So hey, you’re not the last one here. I’m Snake.”

“His parents didn’t name him that,” says the girl with her eyes on her phone.

“Your parents didn’t name you ‘Jessica,’” says Snake. There’s no rancor in his tone: this is a conversation they’ve had before.

“No, they gave me a name white people can’t pronounce. I’m tired of hearing it butchered, so everyone gets to call me Jessica, and we all feel good about how progressive we are.” Jessica finally glances up. “You know what white people can pronounce? ‘Tom.’”

“But I don’t look like a Tom,” protests Snake.

“You have limbs. You don’t look like a Snake either.”

Dodger snorts to keep herself from laughing and raises one hand to shoulder height, pulling their attention toward her. “My parents named me ‘Dodger,’ if that helps,” she says.

“See, that’s cool,” says Snake. “That’s a name I can get behind.”

“Try going through middle school with me and see if you agree,” she says mildly.

“Smita,” says the girl in the remarkable sweatshirt, gesturing to herself with one hand.

“Dave,” says the man with the beard.

“I’m, um, Lauren?” The girl with the pink and blonde hair has a Midwestern accent that peaks at the end of her sentence, turning her name into a question. “I’m in biochem.”

“Cool,” says Dodger. “We all STEM?”

“Chemistry,” says Dave.

“Genetics,” says Smita. “You need a biologically accurate velociraptor, I’m not your girl. You want a terrifying hybrid of science gone wrong, give me a few years, I may be able to deliver.”

“Cool,” says Dodger again. She has the feeling she’s going to be saying that a lot. She’s okay with the idea. This is grad school. If it wasn’t cool, she’d have to question her life choices. It’s not like she needs the degree. She doesn’t want to teach—can’t imagine shutting herself in a classroom for her entire life like her father has—and with the prizes she’s already won, the things she’s already accomplished, she could have a comfortable career without further schooling. But she wants to learn. Knowledge is more addictive than anything she could put into her body, and she should know—she’s tried everything there is and a few things there aren’t, thanks to innovative chemistry majors. None of it has held a candle to learning.

(That’s not true. She’s never smoked. The smell makes her think of Cambridge, and thoughts of Cambridge are thoughts of something that was never real, something that almost got her killed when she was too young to know how to keep herself on an even keel. So she avoids cigarettes and things that might remind her of them. Besides, it’s not like nicotine is an effective neural stimulant. It’s the ritual that stimulates, and rituals she has in plenty.)

Jessica has looked up from her phone again and is studying Dodger with narrow-eyed suspicion. “Dodger,” she says.

“Yes,” says Dodger.