Page 44 of Middlegame

“I don’t think I could have found a way to avoid it.”

“Maybe it would have been better for both of us if the bishop had stayed lost.” She finally looks up. They really do have the same eyes. He wears glasses and she doesn’t, but their irises are the same. It’s like finding someone who shares his fingerprints. “I would have had a return address. I could’ve written you letters. Made you talk to me.”

“Dodger, we were nine.”

“Nine-year-olds are still people and can still feel pain. That’s a scientific fact.” She drops her eyes back to the chessboard. “Your move, Roger.”

So he moves, and she moves, and for a few minutes, all is silence: their focus is on the game. He takes his time with his choices, shifting the pieces in a defensive pattern he’s hoping will keep him on the board for at least a while.

Dodger doesn’t play defensively. Dodger plays so offensively that it’s almost profane, and it’s almost poetry, and there’s no contradiction in those things—no contradiction at all. She was good when she was a teenager, playing masters and grandmasters all over the country in her black and white schoolgirl outfits, but she also played like a teenager; she understood the game innately enough to be a workman. She hadn’t been possessed of the kind of experience that would make her an artist. She has that experience now. Her every move is ruthless, designed to end the game as quickly as possible. They’re not just playing different sides: they’re playing different games, him to last, her to end.

“You’re good,” he says.

“I always was,” she says.

Roger pauses in the act of reaching for a pawn, hesitates, and pulls his hand back, letting it rest in his lap. He waits.

As he’d expected, Dodger is still not built for patience: stillness is anathema to her. She can stop when she has to, can transmute physical motion into mental; anyone who’s ever seen her doing math knows she can go without moving for hours if she has the right kind of problem to occupy her mind. But this is not a problem she can solve. This is an interaction, one person answering the other, and he is refusing to give her the satisfaction of progress.

Seconds tick by, forming minutes, until she can’t take it anymore. Her head comes up, her eyes narrowing. Blood is rising in her cheeks, and for the first time since their game began, she is present: she is engaged. “I know you’re not this bad,” she says. “Move your piece.”

“What if I don’t want to?”

“Then forfeit, and call the game in my favor.”

“What if I don’t want to do that either?” Roger shows her his empty hands before letting them rest on the table. “I want to talk to you. I came here because I wanted to talk to you.”

“So talk.”

“I tried that. You didn’t answer me. I’m not leaving until you talk to me, Dodger. I saved your life. You owe me at least a conversation.”

Dodger blinks, the blood draining out of her face a drop at a time, until she’s as pale as ever, a wax figure of a mathematician. Then, with a shake of her head, she laughs. “Really?” she asks, syllables distorted by her amusement but comprehensible for all of that. “That’s what you’re going to go with? ‘I saved your life’? I didn’t ask you to, Roger. I went out of my way to make sure I’d be able to go down to the gully and do what needed to be done while you weren’t looking. You were never supposed to know.”

“If you hadn’t been so damn determined to shut me out, you’d be asking yourself how I knew.” Roger glares. He’s been trying to keep himself from getting angry, but there’s only so much he can take before enough is enough. “Quantum entanglement, remember? That whole ‘I say it and you hear it on the other side of the country’ gig? Turns out it’s good for more than just giving you the answers on a pop quiz.”

Dodger frowns at him. Unlike her smiles, her frowns engage her whole mouth, making her look utterly perplexed. “What do you mean? You felt me cut myself? You never felt anything I did to myself before.”

(Thank God for that. Both of them had been terrified, after they restored contact, that the other would somehow pick up on certain things. Certain personal things. Roger liked girls, but the idea of a girl—any girl, but especially this girl—coming along for the ride when he was alone under the covers was enough to darken even the teenage libido. Experiments and trials had followed, until they were both satisfied that only their thoughts could cross the void between them. Feelings, emotional or otherwise, were not capable of making the jump. Except that her feelings had, when she was almost at the end. Trauma could work miracles.)

“I mean that when your heart started getting fucked up because it didn’t have enough blood to beat, so did mine,” he says grimly. She hasn’t moved a piece, and so he doesn’t either. “I had a seizure in class. I blacked out and hit my head on the floor, and when I woke up, I knew you’d done something to yourself. I knew you’d hurt yourself, and I was thousands of miles away, and I couldn’t do a damn thing to help. I called for you. I screamed. You didn’t answer.”

Dodger turns away, refusing to look at him. Too bad. The floodgates are open: the story is coming out now, whether he wants it to or not. He’s spent too many years unable to be mad at her, because she was too far away, because she wasn’t speaking to him, because he honestly wasn’t sure she was still alive. Well, she’s alive now; she’s here now, sitting on the other side of a table, shying away from the touch of his hand like he had been the one to hold the razor blade.

Maybe he has some culpability here. Maybe he missed the signs; maybe he helped to create an essential weakness in her foundations when he cut off contact at nine years old. Maybe no one is an island. But in the end, he’s not the one who fed her a bottle of painkillers and opened her wrists. He missed the signs. He was seventeen years old. There’s a point where blaming himself has to end, and he’s finally reached it.

“I had three seizures while your brain tried like hell to take me down with it. Three. The third one hit right after I called your dad. I passed out in the middle of Harvard Square, in the rain, by myself. It’s a miracle I didn’t wake up in jail on a public drunkenness charge.” It’s a miracle he woke up at all. He’s thought, more than once, about how easy it would have been for him to have rolled over during one of his seizures, leaving him to drown in the heavy September rain. As ironic ways to go went, that one was pretty high on the list.

Dodger is staring at him in undisguised horror. “I didn’t know,” she whispers, and he doesn’t doubt her, and it doesn’t matter.

“Didn’t know all that happened, or didn’t know all that would happen?” he asks.

“Either. Both. I swear, Roger, I didn’t know I could hurt you by hurting myself. I would never—”

“Yeah, you would,” he says gently. She goes still. “Dodge, you’re my best friend. Always. Even when we’re not talking—and I sort of feel like we’ve spent more time not talking than we have talking, at this point—you’re my best friend. Hell, I would have flunked second grade if not for you. Did you really think it wouldn’t hurt me to lose you? Like, honestly and truly? Fuck, just almost losing you hurt like hell. And then you shut me out so hard that I started thinking you were dead after all, or that you’d gone without oxygen for so long that you’d managed to damage yourself and couldn’t hear me anymore.”

“I heard you,” she whispers, chin dipping toward the table again. “I always hear you.”

“So why the hell didn’t you answer?”