Page 43 of Middlegame

“I’d rather you didn’t.” Dodger continues clearing the table, head down, hair shielding her face. He knows it’s red, even if he can’t see the color right now, red as sunset, red as a warning. It’s as if that, of everything about her, was designed to attract attention, and he knows she doesn’t like people staring at her.

“Did you ever think about dyeing your hair?” he blurts, and instantly regrets it. He’s supposed to be the one who’s good with words, and here he is saying things he should know will upset her. It’s like everything gets scrambled when they’re in the same room, like the fundamental laws of nature have been twisted twenty degrees to the left.

(He knows he can never tell anyone about this feeling, because he knows what they’d say: “you’re in love” and “bang the girl, get it out of your system.” But he’s not in love with Dodger. He loves her, has loved her since the moment he admitted she was a real person and not an imaginary friend, but that’s not being in love. It’s just that when they’re together, it feels like the world is finally complete, and if he can keep it in one piece for long enough, he’ll learn what the rules actually are.)

Dodger turns her head, enough that the hair falls away from her eyes and he can see her looking at him. “Do you think I should?” she asks, with honest curiosity. She’s looking at him like she sees him, now, like he actually exists.

He wishes he weren’t so grateful for that. “No,” he says. “I mean, I remember how pretty it is. I just know you don’t like it when people stare.”

She raises a hand to touch the side of her head, briefly confused. “What do you mean, you remember?” Her eyes widen. “Oh! The color-blindness thing!”

“Yeah,” he says, feeling a strange relief wash over him. If she knows he’s color-blind, it’s because she remembers looking through his eyes, seeing the ways the world differed from her expectations. She’s remembering that it wasn’t all some weird childhood hallucination. “I mean, I know it’s red, it’s just not . . . it doesn’t look red to me, you know?”

“I know.” She lowers her hand. “I’ve thought about it. Especially after . . . after. I didn’t like how easy it was for people to spot me. But I could never go through with it. I don’t know why. It just seemed . . . wrong.”

“You wouldn’t be able to draw fire like you’re supposed to,” says Roger without thinking, and stops dead, staring at her as she stares at him. His words are true: he knows that, without knowing how he knows it. (And hasn’t that always been the way? A lifetime studded with facts he knows beyond the shadow of the doubt, never with any proof to back them up. It’s not scientific. It’s not scholarly. It’s just the way things are.)

Dodger shakes her head, visibly unnerved. “I think you’re right,” she says, in a small voice. She sounds scared, and Roger hates himself a little for making her sound like that. Dodger isn’t supposed to be scared. She’s supposed to be the brave one. It’s the compensation for her also being the breakable one.

Silence spools out between them. If they let it go on for too long, they’re never going to break free. Roger does the first thing he can think of: he drops his chessboard onto the clear spot Dodger has formed on the table, and asks, “You want to go get some pieces?”

She laughs, and everything is going to be okay. At least for now, everything is going to be okay.

“No, but I’ll go get a chess set,” she says. “The whole thing. This is amateur hour. I mean, really, Roger.” She breezes past him, twisting her body at the last moment to keep their shoulders from touching. He wonders how long it will be before they feel comfortable with physical contact. He wonders whether they’ll be able to be in one another’s presence for that long. The last thing he wants to do is drive her away again, or drive her to do something she can’t take back. She’s wearing a short-sleeved shirt. He saw the scars on her arms.

It’s difficult not to think he had something to do with putting them there. He knows he didn’t. That doesn’t change anything. The mind is an imperfect engine, and it does what it will with the information it receives. He failed to see how lonely she was; she felt he didn’t need her; events followed their natural course. It wasn’t his fault. It could never have been his fault. But he didn’t see it coming, and he should have. Somehow, he should have.

When Dodger returns she finds him outside the sliding glass door, crouching on the concrete step that serves as their “porch,” scratching old Bill behind the ears. The ragged battle-axe of a tomcat is purring so loud she can hear it from three feet away, almost tumbling over himself in his effort to get closer to Roger’s practiced fingers.

“You have a cat?” she asks, putting the chess set she carries down on the table.

“Not right now,” he says. “Student housing wasn’t so good for pet ownership, and I just moved off-campus. My most recent ex-girlfriend had one, though. She got a note from her psychiatrist calling it a necessary therapy animal, and we mostly spent time in her room.”

“Oh,” says Dodger. “What was her name?”

“Zucchini.”

Dodger blinks.

Roger looks over his shoulder, sees her expression, and bursts out laughing. “Oh, man, your face—not the girlfriend, Dodge, the cat. The cat was named Zucchini. The fact that I gave you the cat’s name first explains why we broke up. We were both exhausted all the time, and I’d go to her place to pet the cat and try to ease my nerves. Eventually, Kelly decided she wanted to find a boyfriend who’d pet the Kelly instead of the kitty, and we parted ways. Amiably.”

He’s good at that: parting amiably. Every relationship he’s ever been in has ended amiably. Even his relationship with Alison, which had had the most potential to go horribly wrong, ended with the two of them being perfectly civil to each other when they passed in the halls or met in class. Parting amiably is one of his great skills.

Except with Dodger. Every time they’ve parted has been incredibly traumatic, for both of them. He gives the cat one last scratch and stands, stepping back into the apartment and closing the glass door before old Bill can follow. The big tom tries anyway, stepping right up to the glass and meowing. His eyes are locked on Roger.

“You’re doomed,” says Dodger, laying out the chess set. Her movements are quick, practiced, precise; she barely looks at the pieces before putting them on the board. If it were possible for someone to feel the difference in color between two otherwise identical pawns, she’d be doing it. “That cat knows a sucker when he sees one, and now you’re doomed. It’s been nice knowing you.”

“Now, you and I both know that hasn’t always been true,” he says.

Dodger pauses for an instant before she resumes setting out the pieces, hands moving too fast to be acting on anything but autopilot. “Maybe not, but it’s polite to pretend,” she says. She sets out the last piece, puts the shoe box she was taking them out of aside, and sits, taking the chair furthest from where he’s standing. This puts her on the black side of the board. Normally, they’d agree to the sides they were playing, he knows that. He isn’t going to object. If she’s choosing her color based on whether it keeps her away from him, he’s not going to pursue.

He sits. Then he frowns, squinting at the set, and leans forward to pick up a bishop, rolling it over in his hand. “Isn’t this the set you used to keep down in the gully?” he asks. “I remember when you thought you’d lost your bishop. You were inconsolable for days. And then it rained, and washed the mud away so you could find the missing piece, and you started keeping everything in your room, because an incomplete chess set wasn’t any good.”

“You kept saying that even if the piece was lost forever, I could find a new one. You said you’d look in every Goodwill in Massachusetts if you had to.”

“I was really hoping I wouldn’t have to,” he says. “I hate seeing you cry, but I had no idea how I was going to explain to my parents that I needed to buy just one chess piece and mail it to a girl in California.”

“At least then you would have let me give you my address.”