Page 42 of Middlegame

Roger rings the bell.

Dodger’s class schedule has been designed to give her long blocks of uninterrupted free time, followed by long blocks of time spent teaching classes for professors with better things to do, grading papers, and trying not to be too mean to undergrads. It’s not their fault that they’re at a different point in their studies than she is, and maybe if she reminds herself of that often enough, she’ll stop feeling the need to throw things at them. It’s frustrating enough that when she’s teaching, she’s expected to dress like a grownup, or at least wear something other than pajamas. Dress codes are the bane of her existence.

(Several people have looked at her schedule and told her it doesn’t make sense, it doesn’t work, she can’t possibly have that much time to herself. She doesn’t understand why they’re making such a fuss. All she had to do was rotate the numbers until they slotted together the way she wanted them to. It’s not like it was hard.)

The doorbell rings. She looks up from her computer. Neither of her roommates is home, and she’s pretty sure she’d remember if she’d ordered a pizza, since that would have meant noticing and accepting that she was hungry. Awareness of her own body’s needs is not and has never been her strong suit. Conclusion: it’s not pizza.

There aren’t that many other things it could, or should, be. They live off-campus for a reason. No one has their address, and with as little time as they’ve lived here, every knock on the front door is an adventure. She’s met three neighbors, a door-to-door pot brownie vendor, and a teenage girl with a box of kittens and a harried expression. Who knows what today will bring? Carefully, she saves her work and stands, ready for a new surprise.

Dodger is smiling when she opens the door. That’s the first thing Roger notices. Whoever she’s become in the last five years, it’s still someone who can smile. Her face freezes when she sees him, smile turning into something crystalline and sharp. He could cut himself on that expression.

“Please don’t close the door,” he says.

Her crystal smile vanishes completely. It’s almost a miracle he doesn’t hear it shatter on the floor. “You’re not real.”

Roger blinks. “That’s a new one.”

“You’re not real. You’re my imaginary friend and I dreamed you, and if I dreamed you you’re not real, and if you’re not real, you can’t be here. What are you doing here?”

“Can I come in?” He hopes he doesn’t sound as nervous as he feels. Although maybe it would be better if he did: it would be harder for her to pretend this isn’t hurting him as much as it’s hurting her. He forces a smile of his own, trying to look harmless and hopeful at the same time. Trying to look like he’s not a threat. “I mean, we can do this with me on the porch if you want—this is Berkeley, we have people running around pretending to be vampires every Sunday night, no one’s going to care about a couple of Midwich cuckoos—but it might be easier if I come inside.”

“The Midwich cuckoos were blonde,” says Dodger. Her voice hasn’t changed much. It’s a little deeper, but puberty was basically finished with her long before they’d stopped speaking. “You have brown hair. I’m a redhead. We’re not the children of sexist bucolic aliens. Also you don’t exist.”

“And let’s be grateful for that, because they were trying for breeding pairs—the aliens part, not the ‘I don’t exist’ part,” he says. “How do you know that, anyway?”

“Even math geniuses have to do book reports. We don’t get to skip English because we think it’s silly.” Her voice almost breaks.

His heart feels like it cracks a little. “Please. Dodger. Can I come inside?”

She doesn’t want to let him in: that much is clear in the way she looks past him to the street, scanning for anyone who might give her an excuse to say no. It both hurts and offends him that she’d feel the need to do that. No matter what lies she may have told the police, he’s never laid a hand on her—was on the other side of the continent when she decided to lay a hand on herself. All he’s ever done is try to save her, except when he had to leave her behind to save himself.

Sacrifice. That’s what they’ve each done, at least once: they’ve sacrificed the other for their own protection. Maybe that’s the key. “I brought a chessboard,” he says, holding it up. “I couldn’t find any pieces, but I figured you’d probably have something we could use.”

Now a corner of her mouth quirks, like she’s about to smile again. It seems more genuine this time. He’s already figuring out a few things about Dodger’s smiles, piecing them together from what he remembers of her as a child, what he remembers from the one time they ever met face-to-face: when she’s lying, she smiles with her whole face. When she’s actually happy, she only smiles with the left, like she’s trying to make sure she can control who sees it.

“Did you think I wouldn’t have a chessboard?” she asks, and she doesn’t sound angry, she doesn’t sound frightened, or tired, or any of those other things. She sounds like Dodger. She sounds like his best friend.

He knows the words: relief, alleviation, contentment. None of them encompass the feeling of weightlessness, like all the troubles in the world have been lifted from his shoulders. He guesses this feeling is probably a cliché, but the people who like to put those labels on things don’t always remember that things become clichés because they keep happening, over and over, all around the world.

“Not really,” he says. “So can I exist again, and come inside?”

“Third time’s the charm, I guess,” she says, and holds the door open wider so he can get by. She presses her back against the wall, avoiding even accidental physical contact.

Roger regrets that, a little. He was the one who’d first introduced the idea that their quantum entanglement—or whatever it was—might be enhanced by physical contact, and it appears to have stuck with both of them. He doesn’t want to touch her. He just wishes she didn’t look so scared that he would.

Once the door is closed, he clears his throat and asks, “Berkeley?”

“You have a good math department,” she says, flipping the deadbolt with her thumb. “I wanted to work with Professor Kong. Her research in game theory is revolutionary. And there’s the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, of course. Talk about a kid in a candy store. The kitchen’s this way.” She turns her back on him—a show of trust or a show of dominance, he doesn’t quite know—and heads down the hall, apparently trusting him to follow.

He does, studying his surroundings as they walk, looking for the vocabulary of the woman she’s become. If he can read her, he can start to understand her. The trouble is figuring out which of the things around him belong to her and not to her roommates. That she has roommates is obvious: the place is too big for her to afford on her own, and the Dodger he knew would never have brought a complete set of the Up-and-Under books with her to college. The math texts are probably hers. The books on chess. He’s not sure about the books on social engineering and finding your better self, but something about the way she walks—shoulders back, neck elongated, like she’s practiced this—makes him suspect they might be hers.

The girl on the balcony said Dodger wasn’t interested in making friends, just in having people believe she was, and Roger suspects that she was right. It would fit with who Dodger was when they lost contact.

The kitchen at the end of the hall is small but bright, with windows taking up most of one wall. There’s a concrete patio out back, no more than six feet deep, and every bit of it that can be packed with planter boxes has been. They bristle with dozens of succulents in a dozen varieties, a dozen different shades of gray. There’s a cat sitting on the fence, a scarred orange tom with one green eye. The cat looks at Roger. Roger looks at the cat.

“That’s old Bill,” says Dodger, clearing an armload of newspapers off the folding card table crammed into the breakfast nook. “He comes with the apartment. The landlady asked us to feed him when we remembered, and to call her if he got hit by a car or anything like that. He’s pretty sweet. Only tries to convince us to let him in when it starts raining. So I wasn’t necessarily lying when I said I had to feed the cat, even if he’s not actually mine.”

“What a good kitty,” says Roger dutifully. He likes cats. They have their own agenda, and he respects that. “Is there anything I can do to help?”