Page 45 of Middlegame

“I was mad,” she says. “I woke up in the hospital, and they were saying some boy from New England called my dad at work to brag about how he’d cut me up and left me for dead, and I knew it had to be you. I knew they were wrong about why you’d called—I knew you wouldn’t have called because you were glad I was dying—but I knew you’d called and ruined everything, again. So I was mad. And I was grateful, because once I wasn’t dead, I didn’t want to be. I wanted to have died. I didn’t want to be dead. I told myself you were a dream, a bad dream that wouldn’t go away, and somehow, I . . . I believed it.”

There’s so much she can’t figure out how to say in words. How her mother cried, and how it hurt to know she was the reason for that expression on her mother’s face, that utter and total despair. How her father raged for days, losing his temper at the slightest thing, calling the police over and over to shout at them about how they weren’t doing their jobs if they couldn’t find the boy who’d hurt his daughter. How the police had known from the start that it was a suicide attempt, and just humored her parents. How she found them sitting on the couch, holding each other and sobbing when they thought she wouldn’t hear them. Removing herself from the equation had seemed like the easiest solution when she had decided to do it. She hadn’t realized just how many sub-formulae depended on her until it was almost too late.

“I didn’t want to be grateful to you, you know,” she continues, voice still soft and level. “I was so mad at you, all the time.”

“Because I stopped talking to you when we were kids? I thought we had—I mean, I thought you had accepted my apology.”

“Of course I accepted your apology. What else was I supposed to do?” She shakes her head. “If someone says ‘sorry’ and you don’t say ‘it’s okay, I’m not mad anymore,’ you’re a bad person. Especially if you’re a girl. And I missed you so bad, I thought it would be okay. I thought I could say ‘we’re okay’ and make it be true. But the numbers didn’t add up. I couldn’t understand how you could mean so much to me and I could mean so little to you.”

“You never meant anything less than the world to me, Dodger,” says Roger. “It’s just that my family needed me more than you did. When we were kids, you were always the one running ahead. You never looked to see if you were going to fall. I figured you’d do better without me than I would without you.”

“I only ran like that because I knew you’d always be there to catch me,” she says. “You were my safety net. You meant I couldn’t hurt myself too badly.”

“I caught you and you left me,” he says. “What does that mean?”

“That I’m really stupid for a smart person?” A tear rolls down her cheek. She swipes it away with the back of her hand. “I thought you’d be as messed-up as I was when I saw you again, and you were fine. You had friends, you had a girlfriend, and I had this big notebook filled with apologies that might be good enough to make you love me again. I didn’t know how to deal. So I ran the numbers, and figured you’d be better off without me.”

“I never was, Dodge,” he says.

She sniffles, and that’s it, that’s it: he can handle a lot of things, but he can’t stand seeing Dodger cry. He’s up before he has time to consider the ramifications of his action, moving to kneel next to the chair where she sits, and put his arms around her, and let her bury her face against his shoulder. There’s no way to keep skin from touching skin in this position, and that’s all right; if that means their quantum entanglement gets worse, well, it’s not like she didn’t already almost kill him. Maybe a little more severity would have meant he could feel her picking up the razor, and things would never have gone that far.

“Alison dumped me for running off campus after I had my first seizure. She couldn’t be with someone who’d do something like that to himself, or to her. I didn’t blame her then and I don’t blame her now. It was a pretty amiable breakup.”

“It had to be,” mumbles Dodger, her voice muffled by his shoulder. She’s not lifting her head. She’s not loosening her grip either; she’s holding on like she suspects this all of being a dream that’s about to end and leave her falling. “If you’d stayed together, she would have told the police they were looking for you, eventually. She would have gotten scared.”

Roger doesn’t ask how she knows that: her words are accompanied by a strong sense of déjà vu, or maybe déjà entendu, like she’s describing something he witnessed once, long ago, and never wants to see again. We’ve been here before, he thinks, almost deliriously, and then: We got it wrong.

Dodger slackens her grip and pulls back, eyes wide and shiny with tears. She looks more confused than frightened. That’s a good thing, because Roger is terrified, and one of them needs to not be scared.

“Why do I know that?” she asks. “Because I do know that. It’s not a guess and it’s a suspicion, I know.”

“I don’t know,” he says. “But Dodger, please. Please don’t ever think I’m better off without you. Do you have any idea how many makeup exams I had to take to finish math my senior year? I was nearly the first person in my school’s history with an early admission to Berkeley who couldn’t graduate with his class.”

She giggles, the sound small and thick with snot, before wiping her nose with the back of her hand and saying, “My teachers took pity on me, since I was clearly traumatized, and let me switch my English and History classes to pass/fail. I passed by the skin of my teeth, but I passed, and it wasn’t like Stanford was going to keep me out. Not with Daddy teaching there and my face in all the papers.”

“See, if you’d been speaking to me, you could have passed without needing to look pathetic.”

“I didn’t look pathetic, I . . . Okay, I looked pathetic. It worked, don’t knock it.” Dodger grins, the left side of her mouth twisting sharply upward while the right side remains where it is. Then, with no warning but that, she flings her arms around Roger, hugging him tightly. “I missed you so much.”

“I missed you too,” he says, and stays where he is, just holding her, just being held, until the sound of the front door slamming jerks them both out of the moment. Roger pulls away. Dodger turns to blink at the door, eyes first wide, then narrowing.

“Candace?” she calls. “Is that you?”

There’s no sound from the hallway, no footsteps or hint of breath.

“I think it was your other roommate going out,” says Roger.

Dodger blinks at him. “What, Erin? She’s not here.”

“No, because she just went out,” he says. “She was here when I got here. Out on the balcony, having a cigarette. This is a two-story apartment?”

“Only on a technicality,” says Dodger. “Upstairs is Erin’s bedroom, the master bathroom, and the balcony. She got the upstairs bedroom because it’s the smallest and she’s a smoker. She said giving up a little personal space was worth it if she could go outside to smoke in the middle of the night. Since our security deposit says no smoking inside, this seemed like the best way to arrange things. And I didn’t want to deal with stairs every time I went to bed. But she’s never home.”

“She was home today,” says Roger. “She told me you weren’t interested in making friends, and that if I left without knocking, I’d never need to see you again. Then, when I said I was going to knock anyway, she told me not to say she didn’t warn me. You have interesting taste in roommates, Dodge.”

“Yeah, but she was right, so it’s not like I can be mad,” she says. “I’m not really interested in making friends.”

Roger raises an eyebrow. “What do you call me?” he asks.