Page 52 of Middlegame

“And I’ve learned how to read a clock,” he says. “I won’t wake you up. Although I may scold you if you’re still awake when I’m going to bed. You have to sleep sometime, Dodge. Not sleeping is not good for you.”

“Says the man who stayed awake for three days reading and analyzing a bunch of books in ancient Sumerian. For fun.”

“It was fun,” he says, turning on the bed to face her. “I had a question for you, if you’ve got a second.”

“Is this ‘got a second’ in the ‘you can keep working’ sense, or in the ‘please cap your pen and give me your full attention, this is important’ sense?” Dodger keeps writing. She’s running out of room at eye level; soon, she’ll have to kneel, and eventually lie flat on her belly, numbers and figures unspooling from her pen, Scheherazade of the mathematical world. Roger rarely knows what she’s working on. The few times she’s tried to explain, he hasn’t been able to follow beyond the superficial level. He’s stopped asking. It’s worth it to see how happy it makes her.

“The latter, if you don’t mind.”

Dodger pauses. “Let me get this down,” she says, and writes double-speed until she reaches the end of the line. Then she caps her pen and turns, sinking to the floor as she does. It’s like watching a crane fold itself into its nest, an impossible amount of material compacting into something equally impossibly small. She cocks her head to the side, and asks “Are you about to ask me to move in with you? Because I think it’s a bad idea. I’ve been doing some research—not into the physics, just into the math—and I have concerns—”

“Many of which keep me awake at night, believe me,” says Roger. “I don’t want to get a place together for a lot of reasons. That’s one of them. Trying to explain you to any girls I happen to bring home is another.”

“Most people on campus believe I’m your sister. Not that it matters. Any girl worth dating would listen when we both told her nothing like that was going on between us.”

“I agree with you. But twenty years of romantic comedies do not agree with you, and they sort of make things complicated when, say, I bring a girl home and you’re just getting out of the shower, so the first thing she’s confronted with in my swinging bachelor pad is my wet, half-naked, redheaded sister.”

“Everyone knows redheads are insatiable sex machines,” says Dodger blandly. “With our freckles and our math and our eschewing dating because it takes up so much time that could be spent on doing other things.”

“Not everyone skips out on the dating part of their college experience.”

“Not everyone enjoys having free time.”

Roger shrugs. “We all prioritize what we enjoy. Can we get back on the topic?”

“I wasn’t aware we’d left the topic. I don’t know what the topic is.”

“You interrupted me before I could get there,” he protests. “It’s about my parents.”

Dodger goes still. Roger settles in to wait. He’s seen her do this a few times before: he understands what’s happening. Words aren’t her forte, exactly. She can carry on a conversation easily enough, and she isn’t stupid, but sometimes the subtler meanings of language escape her. When that happens, and she knows it’s important, she shuts herself down, blocking out all extraneous input, and digs straight into the issue. What is he really asking? Why is he really asking it? What will happen when she replies?

(He does something similar when he has to do math more complex than making change. Kelly used to joke about “tipping fugue,” when he’d stop responding for up to five minutes as he tried to calculate the appropriate amount to leave on a check. What he finds truly interesting about this phenomenon—what he wasn’t able to consider when it was just him, and Dodger was a phantom from his past who might never show her face again—is the fact that when she shuts down, he feels a faint tingling at the back of his mind, like he’s struggling to recall something he’s forgotten. It’s not quite déjà vu—call it jamais vu, the feeling of knowing something he knows he’s never seen before. Dodger worries more about the quantum entanglement than he does, in a quiet reversal of their childhood positions on the subject. He doesn’t want to scare her by bringing this up. Eventually, he’s going to have to.)

Finally, she cocks her head and asks, “What are you hoping to achieve?”

“I want to tell them about you. Maybe something in my adoption paperwork mentions a sister.” It would be easier than a blood test. It wouldn’t involve anyone new.

Dodger’s frown is slow but deep. “I really thought you were going to ask about, I don’t know, asking Erin on a date or something.”

“Uh, no. Dating Erin would be sort of like dating a blender. Sure, it makes great smoothies, but one day you’re going to be minding your own business and it’s going to switch on and remove your hand.”

Dodger raises an eyebrow. “Okay, one, your metaphors have gotten weirder, and two, you are not allowed to borrow horror movies from my collection anymore. Your girlfriends may be a vague, amorphous mass to me, but that doesn’t make them kitchen appliances.”

“You know what I mean, though,” says Roger. “It seemed sort of cliché to compare her to a wild animal, which would have been the easier choice.”

“Heaven forbid you do anything cliché, Mr. English-Professor-in-Training,” says Dodger. “You might find a single cliché is a gateway drug to tweed jackets and khaki slacks, and the next thing you know, you’re teaching Kerouac and making eyes at that cute undergrad in the front row who makes you think about fucking all of Middle America in one triumphant go.”

Roger blinks.

“How long have you been saving that one up?” he asks.

“About a week,” Dodger admits.

“Feel better?”

“Little bit.” She still grins like she did when she was nine years old, on the rare occasions when she’s relaxed enough to grin at all. Even when she smiles with her whole face, one side of her mouth is a little higher, making it obvious that her real smile is buried in the mix. Then the smile fades. “I don’t mind if you want to tell your parents about me. Just . . . be careful.”

“I will be,” he says. “I always am.”