Page 49 of Middlegame

“So no blood tests,” says Roger. “I don’t think we’re alien robots or anything, but I guess it’s not the weirdest of the possible options.”

“The weirdest of the possible options involves the phrase ‘Midwich cuckoos,’” says Dodger.

“I don’t think the book was part of an elaborate cover-up. It seems excessive.”

“No, ‘excessive’ was the remake of the movie. The book is very dry.”

“Still not much of a reader, huh?”

Dodger smiles. “Fiction’s not my thing. You want a nice epigram on spirals, and I’m your girl. Still reading everything you can get your hands on?”

“Books are made of words.” Roger pauses, feeling like he’s just unlocked something important. Dodger’s start-and-stop, his steady forward movement, it’s related to their fields of specialization. He can almost feel it. He just can’t quite get his hands to lock around the idea, and so it slips away, leaving him saying, “I’m glad you’re here. I missed you. Promise we won’t do this again?”

“Do what?” she asks.

“Split up.”

Her smile is quick and bright and almost overwhelming. “I think we’re past that part of the equation, don’t you?”

That night, after Roger is gone, Dodger stands in her room with a dry eraser in her hand, wiping the latest equations off her walls. She’s still chasing the error she made on the day she ran into Roger, trying to figure out how the math diverged from its original track. There’s something important in the twist of numbers and symbols: she knows that, just like she knows that if she tries to sleep in here with wrong answers scrawled on the walls around her, she’ll have nightmares until morning and be useless in the game theory class she’s TAing. The point of being here is to learn. She can learn a lot sleep-deprived, but like everything else in her life, that’s a delicate equation, one unlocked with trial and error and a few fainting spells. Tonight is the night she sleeps.

There’s a rapping behind her. The door is standing open; a house rule, after Candace found her curled in a corner, light-headed and disoriented from cleaning fumes.

“I have proper ventilation, Candy,” she says.

“It’s not Candy,” says Erin.

Dodger turns. Blinks.

This is Erin: five-foot-seven, Midwestern farmer’s daughter tan with a smattering of freckles across the nose (next to her, Dodger looks like the victim of a paintball war), strawberry blonde hair, eyes the color of South American morpho butterflies, down to the black ring around the outside of the irises, which is thick enough to seem unnatural. Blue jeans and a white tank top and the kind of body that seems to have been engineered to satisfy a focus group at one of the girly magazines, the ones where clothing is optional and everyone’s name includes at least one i. She doesn’t look like anyone’s idea of a theology grad student; if anything, she looks like she’ll be leading tent revivals one day, all mascara and thanking the Lord for His good gifts.

Dodger doesn’t dislike her, exactly, but she doesn’t trust her. Something about the woman puts her teeth on edge, some distant feeling of familiarity, like they’ve met before and mutually agreed to forget about it.

“What’s up, Erin?” she asks. She doesn’t realize she’s raised the pitch of her voice and slowed her words, like she’s speaking to a small child or a dangerous animal.

Erin realizes. Erin realizes more than anyone understands, and she likes it that way; likes the fact that, by and large, she’s able to move through the world without attracting attention she’s not prepared to deal with. (Oh, she gets stared at. She’s attractive and living on a college campus, surrounded by people who are combining freedom and the last lingering storms of teenage hormones. She gets noticed. But being noticed is not the same thing as being paid attention to: being noticed is something that can be used, and being paid attention to is something that can get you killed. The difference is subtle. Roger would understand; Roger was designed to understand subtle differences of meaning. Roger doesn’t need it, not like she does. Damned cuckoos, too privileged to understand how lucky they are.)

“Who was your friend?” she asks, leaning against the doorframe, effectively trapping Dodger in the room. The redhead would have to touch her to get out, and Erin knows she won’t do that. Dodger isn’t a touchy-feely person. “He stayed for hours. I didn’t know there was anyone whose company you could stand for that long.”

This is it: this is the point where an answer must be given, where things must be put into words and framed for someone else to understand. Dodger hesitates. Erin narrows her eyes, waiting. One cuckoo is dangerous. Two of them together is just shy of the end of the world as everyone knows it. If they’re still in denial . . .

“My brother, Roger,” says Dodger. “We haven’t seen each other in a while, and we needed to catch up.”

Erin lifts an eyebrow. “I didn’t know you had a brother.”

“It’s . . . complicated,” says Dodger. “We didn’t grow up together.” Except for the brief periods where they had. Too brief, broken up by silence and mistrust and misunderstanding. They should have been longer. They should have been always.

“Huh. And you both decided to go to Berkeley? Why? Family reunion? You should’ve gotten an apartment together, spare the rest of us your pre-coffee crankiness.”

“He’s worse than I am in the mornings.”

“Now I know the two of you should have gotten a place together.” Erin continues to watch her closely, measuring her replies. “Who’s older?”

“Roger.” A quick answer: no time taken to think about it. If she’d taken the time to think, she would have agonized over which was the correct response, or whether a response mattered at all. The first answer is almost always the correct one, with Dodger. Instinctive math doesn’t lie to you.

“Huh. He talks funny. Where’s he from?”

“Cambridge.” Dodger realizes with a twinge that anyone who remembers her “assault” might find it strange that she’s spending time with someone from the Boston area. The past is never really past. It’s always lurking, ready to attack the present.