Page 84 of Middlegame

“I don’t see the connection between those two statements,” says Dodger, setting the bags on the counter. She keeps her purse. It’s a big brown leather bag, bought with the advance from her first book. It cost more than she liked to consider at the time, but she’d run the numbers, and knew this was the sort of purse she’d only need to purchase once: it would last her entire life, classic enough never to go out of style, sturdy enough to tolerate the abuse she heaped on her possessions. She’s had it for five years, and so far, it’s managed to keep its side of the unspoken bargain just fine.

“You don’t like making messes,” says Dr. Peters. He stands. The gun is still pointed at her. “I’m afraid we’re going to make a mess. That can’t be helped. At least this way you’ll know that your corpse was the only thing leaking on the floor.”

“Ah,” says Dodger. Inwardly, she’s raging and frozen at the same time, fear warring with fury for control. How dare he come into her home, her space, and threaten her this way? He’s her therapist, for God’s sake. He’s supposed to be one of the people she can trust. There are few enough of those in this world. How dare he? “If you don’t mind me asking, why are you planning to kill me? I don’t keep all my money in a lockbox under the mattress. There’s nothing here to steal. You’d make a lot more if you just kept being my therapist.”

“I’m afraid that’s none of your concern,” says Dr. Peters, and takes a step forward.

Dodger tilts her head.

The room is fifteen feet long and eleven feet wide, with eight-foot ceilings. Dr. Peters is six foot three inches tall, giving him a base stride of thirty-one inches. Momentum plus velocity plus kinetic absorption rate equals—

Dr. Peters steadies his gun. His hand tenses. Dodger moves. This is her space, her place, and all she needs to know is in the numbers. She grabs a can of chicken noodle soup from the top of the bag, flinging it as hard as she can for the wall to his right. It misses his ear by inches, and he’s starting to laugh when it hits the wall just so, finding the perfect angle for recoil, and bounces back to hit him in the head. Dr. Peters stops laughing. Dr. Peters pulls the trigger.

But Dodger isn’t there. This is her space; it has no secrets from her. The house is a mathematical model, and she is the only one who knows it both inside and out, knows every angle to the slightest degree. The house is not a living thing, but it is an equation, and she moves through it with a speed that can’t be matched by someone who needs eyes to see where the furniture is placed, needs to pay attention to their surroundings. In this moment, Dodger Cheswich is her surroundings, and she’s gathering speed.

The next thing to strike Dr. Peters is a coffee mug, flying apparently from nowhere to hit him in the throat. He roars anger and confused pain. This isn’t how the situation was supposed to play out. The little mathematician was supposed to cry, to beg, to apologize for the self-absorbed way she’d always interacted with him. She was supposed to say she was wrong, that she’d do anything to save herself, anything. This job, this whole situation, has been a trial. This is where he was meant to reap his reward. Instead, the girl is a ghost, moving from place to place like she’s somehow found a way to fold the fabric of space itself.

More things fly at him. A glass paperweight, a potted succulent, a rock. Why does she have a rock in the damn house? It doesn’t matter, because the more she throws, the more he’ll know about where she is.

“Stop this while I have some patience left,” he says. “I only have to shoot you once.”

“True enough,” she says, from behind him. He turns. Dodger is right there, less than a foot away. She looks . . . awake, for lack of a better word, like she’s been sleepwalking through life the whole time he’s been dealing with her, and has only just decided to open her eyes.

The toaster impacts with the side of his face so hard that he feels bone give way, and then he’s falling into the dark, and it doesn’t matter anymore.

Dodger stands over the body of her therapist, panting, the toaster clutched in her hands. It’s a good toaster. Why did she never notice before what a good toaster it is? There’s a dent in one shiny metal side the exact size and shape of Dr. Peters’s skull. It probably won’t make toast anymore. That’s a pity. It was a good toaster.

Her purse begins ringing.

Dodger looks down at it, uncomprehending at first, then with dawning understanding. The phone. It’s her phone. She sets the toaster on the counter and digs the phone from her purse, checking the display. UNKNOWN NUMBER, it says. A telemarketer, probably, or someone looking for a donation to a political campaign. She should ignore it. She has bigger problems.

But then, bigger problems sometimes get easier to solve when she steps back from them. She slides her thumb to the little green Answer icon, raising the phone to her ear. “Hello?”

“Oh my God it worked.” The voice is breathless, excited, and so damn young.

The voice is her own. Dodger blinks. Frowns. Says the only thing she can, under the circumstances:

“What the fuck is going on here?”

“Oh! Uh. Hello, Dodger in the future. This is Dodger from the past. Specifically, this is Dodger from December tenth, 2008. I would have called yesterday, but the phones were pretty much out of commission after the earthquake. I hitched a ride to Palo Alto. I’m calling from our parents’ place.” A nervous giggle. “This is so weird. I’ve talked to the future before, but I was never the one to make the call. Do you think this counts as long distance?”

Dodger sits down, hard, on the floor. She doesn’t remember making this call—quite—but the feeling of déjà vu gets stronger with every word the other Dodger says. By the time she hangs up, she’s sure she’ll remember the conversation from both sides. The math is changing. “Why are you calling me? How are you calling me?”

“Oh. Um. After Roger called us from the future, I opened our thirty-year planner and circled the first date I saw. I didn’t have a way to show my work, but instinctive mathematics can be as good as practical ones if you’re not being graded.”

“And this number?”

“It’s my number too, just not yet. I dialed the most logical combination I could think of.”

None of this makes sense, and because of that, every bit of this makes perfect sense. Everything the younger Dodger is saying meshes with the older Dodger’s understanding of the world, which is made of math. It’s just that occasionally, the math makes its own rules. Math gets to do that, if it wants to.

“Why are you calling?” she asks.

“Don’t you know?”

“I don’t think I can, until you tell me,” she says. “This hasn’t happened for me yet. I’m the future, but I’m not your future until you finish the call.” It should be terrifying, the thought that she’s changing the equation that comprises her reality. Because this will change things. She knows that, as surely as she knows that every second takes away more of her slim opportunity to escape becoming the future self of a girl she, as yet, never was.

(And it’s a relief, really, to know time can be revised like this. It makes so much about her life start to hang together. A good mathematician is always willing to check their work, to change the pieces that don’t serve the overall equation. That’s what she’s doing now. Just . . . changing pieces, and making something better of herself. She would never have picked up the phone in the past if it wasn’t for the sake of making a better future.)