Page 40 of Middlegame

The group turns again, this time to look at Dodger, who has grabbed her bike and is in the process of swinging her leg over the seat, hands already tight on the handlebars. She blanches when she sees them—when she sees him—staring at her.

Then she slaps her smile back into place like it was never gone. “Sorry, just realized I didn’t feed the cat before I left. I’ll see you guys around, right?” The cat came with her apartment, and he’s already been fed, and that doesn’t matter. What’s one more lie in the face of the lies she’s already told, the ones she’s telling every time she smiles like she means it, or doesn’t open her mouth and scream? Lies are nothing. They’re the currency she uses to pay for the rest of her life.

They’re not going to be enough. Roger went pale the second she spoke, and how could he not? He can’t see the color of her hair, her most recognizable feature, with his own eyes, but her voice had been echoing through his head for such long stretches of their childhood. They grew up in one another’s pockets, hand and glove switching positions whenever the need arose, and he knows what she sounds like better than anyone else in the world—better than her, even, because he’d heard what she sounded like to her own ears as well as to his own. There’s no way she can hide from him. She never could. And she shouldn’t have to, because he’s not real, he’s not real, he’s not real.

He’s just a dream that almost killed her, and she can’t fall asleep again. Not when she’s come so far. She doesn’t give him time to speak. Just waves, and kicks off, and she’s away, she’s away, she’s pedaling as fast as she can, and it’s never, never going to be fast enough.

Roger stands frozen in front of the library, entire body numb, staring at Dodger’s swift-receding back. Of course she’s here, he thinks, half-nonsensically. He’s been waiting for her to fall back into his life since the day he woke, drenched and bleeding, on the sidewalk in Harvard Square. He’d seized, over and over, his body fighting to live while Dodger’s fought to die. In the end, he was able to hold on, and they both survived. He knew that, because the “mysterious attack” on a “California math prodigy” by an unidentified teenage boy had made the papers all the way to Massachusetts. The local angle didn’t hurt, since that was all the authorities had to go on: the boy, whoever he was, had a New England accent.

It took a shamefully long time for Roger to realize they were looking for him, that Dodger had convinced them he was the one who’d attacked her. In his defense, he had problems of his own to worry about. Ms. Brown called the office to find out how he was, only to learn he’d never shown up. When they discovered he was no longer on campus, they contacted his parents, and a brief manhunt had ensued before they found him sitting next to the payphone, back to the wall, holding a wadded-up handkerchief—Alison’s, stuffed carelessly into his pocket at some point, forgotten until it proved useful—against his still-bleeding nose.

There was screaming. There were lectures. There were a series of X-rays and MRIs, and the discovery that somehow, he’d been bleeding into his brain; a small bleed, but enough to cause the complications he’d experienced. He didn’t know the applicable words back then. He knows them now: aneurism, hematoma, ecchymosis. At the time, all he was worried about was brain damage, losing the thin, indefinable edge that made him who he was. Then, once it was clear that no such thing had happened, he started worrying about Dodger, calling out to her, waiting for a response.

He’d always known she wasn’t dead. But she never answered, until he began to wonder if that was what had been lost: not natural ability, but preternatural. Their quantum entanglement had been severed by whatever she’d done to herself, and while he’d managed to save her, he hadn’t been able to keep them together.

He’d been in the hospital for a week before Alison came to see him, carrying a box that contained everything he’d left at her house over the duration of their relationship. She didn’t need to break up with him after that; he looked at the box, and he knew exactly what it was. To her credit, she didn’t yell. To his credit, he didn’t try to explain. She just placed the box gently beside his bed, turned, and walked away.

Now it’s five years later and he’s surrounded by shiny new grad students, coming in from schools around the country if not the world, all watching him watch Dodger riding away. He could try to call her back, close his eyes and say her name and hope she hears him, but that would be a great way to cement himself as a stalker or obsessed ex-boyfriend in the eyes of his peers. Plus she’s on her bike. Even if they can still make contact the way they used to, the shock of hearing him in her head might cause her to lose her balance and crash. Not a good way to renew an acquaintance that has been . . . troubled, at best.

Roger takes a long drink of his coffee before turning to the remaining members of his tour group and saying, “I didn’t think we’d lose one of you so soon. If anyone else is going to run out on me, could you do it now, so my ego takes all its blows at once? It would be a big favor. Anyone? No? In that case, let’s try this again: my name is Roger Middleton, and I’m going to be your gateway to the wonders of campus. How many of you have been here before? Show of hands.”

They show their hands. All of them have been here before, touring the place in the company of their fellow applicants while trying to settle on which campus they were going to grace with their brilliance.

Roger has been here for five years, combining undergrad and graduate work in one smooth sweep that doesn’t require winnowing his shit for the move back to Massachusetts a second before he absolutely has to. Even moving from dorm to dorm to off-campus apartment has been enough to make him give serious thought to staying in California. There aren’t real seasons here—California still doesn’t know how to do Februarys right—and people put avocado on everything, but staying would mean not needing to figure out how to part with or pack five years’ worth of carefully curated books. That might be worth it.

“All right, so that’s all of you,” he says. “How many of you want the facilities and library tour, and how many of you want me to take you down to Telegraph and introduce you to the food options that will be keeping body and soul together for however long you’re here?”

As expected, all of them choose burritos over blackboards. Roger keeps smiling as he leads them toward the edge of campus. That’s really all he can do right now. Just keep smiling.

Dodger is sharing an off-campus apartment with two other grad students: Candace, who’s studying child development and leaves wooden blocks scattered around the entryway, and Erin, who’s studying theology, keeps odd hours, and has only been seen twice since the three of them moved in. Both her roommates are out when she gets home. That’s good. That’s very, very good. She needs to think.

Propping her bike against the wall, Dodger walks down the bookshelf-lined hallway to her room: a small white box with a bed and a desk both situated well away from the glistening walls. The first thing she did upon moving in was get permission to paint the room with high-gloss paint, effectively turning the whole thing into one giant whiteboard. Her clothing is stored in the closet, and her books are on the communal shelves outside. This is the room where she lives. She can’t live where she can’t work.

Uncapping a marker, she turns to the nearest wall, and begins.

It’s a horror movie cliché: the unstable genius who spends all their time writing on the walls, chasing an equation that might as well be a dream. Dodger knows that. But the horror movie geniuses never take the time to buy special paint and never erase their work; she does both. The advent of cellphone cameras has made it easier to capture things in a more lasting medium. She works big, photographs small, transcribes into her computer, and continues virtual, moving the numbers and equations in a space where size doesn’t matter, where ink never smears and chalk never wears away. As long as this is just a ritual to calm herself down, she doesn’t see the harm.

She’s still writing when the front door opens and Candace calls, “Hello, the house!”

“Hi, Candy,” Dodger calls back, and keeps writing. She’s removed her sweatshirt. The scars running from her wrists to her elbows are visible, thin white lines that tell their terrible story to anyone who cares to look. What she finds interesting is the way the story is interpreted. Some people see the scars, see her face, and flash directly onto the newspaper articles identifying her as the victim of a vicious attack. Others see the scars and understand them, even if they saw the same articles. Those are usually the people with scars of their own, she’s found; people who have reason to know them for what they are. People who have no reason to judge.

Footsteps pad down the hall—Candace is one of those crunchy granola “shoes are for the outdoors, not the house” people—and Candace herself appears in the doorway, short and softly rounded, the kind of woman made for blue jeans and cable-knit sweaters. Her hair is a sensible brown only a few shades darker than her eyes. She likes to say she’s a survivor of the diet industry still learning how to be fat and happy, but she seems more comfortable in her own skin than Dodger’s ever been.

Candace’s eyes go to the walls. Two of them are already covered in numbers; Dodger is well along the way to filling the third. “Do I even need to ask how the tour went, or should I back away slowly and hope you don’t decide to start covering me with algebra?”

“If this looks like algebra to you, it’s time to add some remedial math classes to your course load,” says Dodger. She puts the cap back on her marker. “This is all bad math. I’m trying to solve something that doesn’t want to be solved, and I fucked up somewhere back there”—she waves a hand vaguely toward the first wall, the snarl of incomprehensible symbols scrawled in black on white—“so now I need to start it over.”

“If you know you screwed up, why are you still going?”

Dodger shrugs. “Even a wrong answer can be interesting. I’ll keep solving as long as solution is possible, and when it stops being possible, I’ll figure out what I did wrong. It’s soothing. It gives me things to play with. Don’t you study child development because you like toys?”

“Yes, toys, not numbers on a wall and risking our security deposit,” says Candace. “You didn’t answer my first question. How was the tour?”

“I didn’t go.” The lie comes light and easy. She’s gotten so good at this. “I was up all night talking to some computational mathematicians in Australia. They’re working on a set of proofs that’s going to blow everyone else out of the water, me included, and they wanted to gloat. By the time I realized I should be getting some sleep, my alarm was going off. It seemed better to meet my new classmates when I wasn’t a sleep-deprived nightmare.”

Candace cocks her head. “You don’t seem like a sleep-deprived nightmare right now.”

“I had a nap. And a two-liter of Mountain Dew. I’m basically good to go. Who schedules a grad-student walking tour at eight-thirty in the morning anyway? Don’t they know most of us are nocturnal at this stage in our careers?”