Middlegame Page 10

  He leans in until his lips almost touch the curve of her ear, exposed by the short sweep of her blood-soaked hair. He doesn’t lean close enough to get her blood on his face. One of them should die as close to clean as possible.

  “Dodger,” he whispers. “Don’t die. This is an order. This is a command. This is an adjuration. Do whatever you have to do, break whatever you have to break, but don’t you die. This is an order. This is—”

  This is her eyelids fluttering but not quite finding the strength to open, lashes matted to her cheeks by a gluey mixture of blood and tears.

  This is the sound of gunfire going silent outside. Not tapering off; just stopping, like the world has been muted.

  This is the world going white.

  This is the end.

  We got it wrong we got it wrong we got it wrong we got it wrong we

  The owl looked at Avery and Zib. Avery and Zib looked at the owl. It was difficult not to notice how long the owl’s talons were, or how sharp its beak was, or how wide and orange its eyes were. Looking directly at them was like trying to have a staring contest with the whole of Halloween.

  Privately, Avery guessed that the owl did not give away licorice or candy apples on Halloween night. Dead stoats and stitches were much more likely.

  “You are very loud,” said the owl finally. “If you must spend the whole day fighting, could you do it under someone else’s tree?” The owl had a soft and pleasant voice, like a nanny. Zib and Avery blinked in unison, bemused.

  “I didn’t know owls could talk,” said Zib.

  “Of course owls can talk,” said the owl. “Everything can talk. It’s simply a matter of learning how best to listen.”

  —From Over the Woodward Wall, by A. Deborah Baker

  BOOK II

  Reset

  No physical theory of local hidden variables can ever reproduce all of the predictions of quantum mechanics.

  —Bell’s Theorem

  The call was coming from inside the house.

  —Urban legend (traditional)

  Checkmate

  TIMELINE: 16:52 EST, JUNE 19, 2000 (FIVE YEARS IN ISOLATION).

  Dodger plays chess the way she used to slide down the gully behind her house: hard and fast and like she’s afraid any loss of momentum could prove fatal. Every move is an attack. When she isn’t touching the pieces, she sits frozen, barely seeming to breathe, a predatory halt that bears no resemblance to actual calm. She is a marble statue masquerading as a girl, coming alive only when the rules of the game allow.

  Her opponent moves; she responds, swift and unflinching as a master debater arguing some unprovable point. The fact that they play for a crowd doesn’t matter. (Neither does the fact that her coach has asked her—virtually begged her—to slow down, to draw out her moves and give the rubes something worth watching. “If they wanted to see something flashy, they should have gone to the aquarium” has been her reply every time the subject has come up. She’s as unwavering in her answers as she is in her ruthless, results-based style of play. She’ll never be a rock star, but at least she’ll fade into obsolescence with a trophy in each hand. That’s good enough for her.) Winning is the only thing that matters.

  Winning is something she can do without anyone to help her.

  The last piece is moved; her opponent tips over his king, signaling her victory. She finally lifts her eyes to his, holding out her hand for the ritual, perfunctory handshake. Someone in the crowd—the great, faceless beast of the crowd—shifts positions, and somehow, her attention is caught.

  Training conquers distraction: she shakes her opponent’s hand, fingers cool and nerveless, before she pulls away from him and does the unthinkable. Dodger Cheswich, who once did three games back to back while suffering from food poisoning so bad that she excused herself between moves to vomit, who has another game to prepare for, who has never, during the six long weeks of this tour, which he’s heard her call “geniuses on parade” without a hint of irony in her voice, paid attention to anything but the board … Dodger Cheswich is walking away.

  It’s hardly more of a surprise when she breaks into a run. After all, she’s already broken script; what’s a little more deviation?

  She runs, eyes fixed on a teenage boy with slightly too-long brown hair and a faint tan underscored with years upon years of freckles. His glasses are too large for his face; they make him look like a confused cartoon owl, someone trotted into the episode long enough to dispense wisdom before being carted off again. He’s wearing a T-shirt with a Shakespeare quotation on it, blue jeans, and the possessive hand of the blonde girl next to him. Everything about the blonde screams “back off, he’s mine,” and if Dodger were the one who got the words, she’d find a way to explain that she doesn’t want him, not like that, not ever. But she doesn’t have the words, and she’s never going to have the words. What she has is numbers, probabilities, a whole universe of potential in her head—and those probabilities tell her the odds are a million to one against her being right.

  It’s not him. It’s not him. It’s someone who looks like him, or like she thinks he’d look if she saw him now, five long years after he decided to stop answering when she tried to call. She knows it’s not him, and still she doesn’t slow until she hits the edge of the arena hard enough to knock the wind out of herself, fingers locking around the low bar that’s supposed to keep kids from falling in and landing on the ice skaters, or circus acrobats, or whatever other show is on display this week. When it isn’t chess, which she figures has to be most of the time.

  He stands. He takes a step toward her.

  She opens her mouth. She wants to say his name. She wants to scream it, to pack it with five years of sleepless nights, five years of struggling to be the best at everything, since it was her fault he went quiet. She can’t make a sound. No matter how hard she tries, she can’t even squeak. All she can do is stare, hoping he’ll know her silence for the screaming it is.

  “Dodger.” He sounds half-strangled, like speech hurts him as much as silence is hurting her. He stands, the blonde still grasping his elbow, and when he shrugs her off, she goes without fighting, a slow and petulant frown growing on her face. Dodger doesn’t know her, but she’s met her all the same, the one smart girl in the classroom full of smart boys—and it’s not that girls are less likely to be smart, no, it’s that girls are more likely to be encouraged to hide it—who’s as poorly socialized as the rest of them, and doesn’t know how to handle another girl showing up on her territory. Dodger has met her a hundred times, and only the fact that she’s never cared about who gets the boys has kept her from becoming that iconic girl. There’s never been time. Math takes up too much of the world for that.

  She clings to the railing, staring at the boy who said her name. Of course he knows me, she thinks, scolding herself in silence. They announced me at the start of the match, they announce me at the start of every match, stupid, stupid—

  “Dodger,” he says again, and steps into the aisle. His legs are shaking and his face is going white; he looks, in fact, like he’s on the verge of fainting.

  The rail is too high for Dodger to climb, but she tries, stretching onto the tips of her toes and grabbing for the top like she’s going to haul herself into the bleachers. Her defeated opponent is still behind her, staring, and he’s not alone anymore; several other players have joined him, all gaping at the spectacle of Dodger Cheswich, the Unsmiling Girl, hurting herself trying to get to an unprepossessing teenage boy who looks like he’s seen a ghost.

  She’s started to make a noise, a high, thin keening sound, like a coyote with its leg caught in a trap. It’s enough to set teeth on edge. She doesn’t seem to realize.

  Roger realizes. “Dodger!” he finally shouts, and breaks into a run, his limbs moving in the sort of uncoordinated avalanche of bone that haunts boys between the ages of thirteen and thirty. Dodger is still trying to climb the arena’s edge when he reaches her, leans over the rail, and grabs her hands in a motion so abrupt
that there’s no time for either of them to think better of it. He’s just there, holding her fast, and she’s staring up at him, eyes wide and stunned and filled with the sort of loneliness that should be criminal. Is criminal in the tribunals of the soul, where the innocent are punished alongside the guilty.

  “It’s you,” she sighs, breaking the seal on her voice. Getting louder with each word, she continues, “It’s you, Roger, it’s you what are you doing here did you know it was me did you come to see me play I’m sorry whatever I did I’m sorry I didn’t mean to I won’t do it ever again if you’ll just—”

  “Stop,” he says. His voice is sorrow and apology in equal measure, and she stops immediately, looking up at him with those big, sad eyes. She’ll have bruises on her toes in the morning, from balancing on them for so long in shoes that were never intended for this sort of abuse. In the moment, she doesn’t care. Nothing is going to make her care.

  Roger laughs unsteadily. “Wow,” he says. “You got really tall.”

  Dodger blinks. Then, somehow, somewhere, she finds a smile and offers it to him. “I think you’re taller now,” she says. “You finally caught up.”

  “That happens.”

  The blonde has recovered her shock and come trotting down the steps to appear at Roger’s shoulder. She looks at Dodger, assessing. She’s scoping out the competition. The fact that she has to hurts Dodger’s heart, as does the obliviousness on Roger’s face. He doesn’t see the signs girls pass between themselves, and that makes her wonder whether boys have a secret language of their own, something she’s never seen and maybe never will.

  If it’s a language, he’ll learn it, she thinks fiercely, and she’s never had a truer thought in her life.

  “Hi,” says the blonde, interposing herself into the conversation. “I’m Alison. How do you and Roger know each other?” Her hand returns to his arm, resting lightly just above the wrist. If she’s not his girlfriend already, she will be by tomorrow.

  Dodger wants to be happy for her, and for him; Roger will enjoy having a girlfriend. She remembers him talking about girls in the confused tone of someone who craves something but can’t even start to explain why he’d want it. She remembers how much that aggravated him; he liked having a definition for everything, even back then. At least now he knows he wants a girl, and here’s a girl volunteering for the position. It may have taken another girl showing up—“the competition,” despite the fact that Dodger is anything but—to make her see it, but that doesn’t change the fact that she’ll probably be good for him. Roger is too smart to like a girl who wouldn’t be good for him.

  “We were pen pals when we were kids,” she says, and the lie is so easy that it might as well be the truth, because it’s not like there’s a word for what they were to one another. He was the voice in her head, the reason she learned to read for meaning as well as for superficial content, her best friend and the thing that kept her sane.

  He was the first person who ever broke her heart, and that was an important lesson, too. It had taken Roger to teach her the world was cruel, and that was something she’d very much needed to learn.

  “Yeah,” says Roger, picking up her cue. He was always good at that. This is the first time she’s seen it from the outside: the way his nostrils flare slightly as he decides which way he’s going to jump, the particular set to his shoulders before he tells a lie. He’s an open book, written in a language few people can read. She supposes she should feel privileged to be one of them. All she’s really managing to feel is tired. “We, um, we were pen pals. For years. Until we just … lost touch, I guess.”

  She wants to scream at him, to remind him that he’s the one who went silent, leaving her alone in a world that was too loud and too sharp and too unforgiving. She doesn’t. She drops to the flats of her feet, the motion yanking her fingers away from his. There’s no shock when their connection is broken, any more than there was a shock when it began. They were touching. Now they’re not. Linear time may be many things, but it’s not sympathetic about things like this.

  “Did you come on purpose?” she asks. “To see me play?”

  To her shame and delight (because why would she have thought that? Even for a second, why would she have thought that? But if he didn’t come on purpose, she doesn’t have to let her anger go: the math says she can keep it, if she still wants it), Roger shakes his head. “No. Our class got tickets, and they were good for extra credit, and Alison plays chess.”

  “Oh.” Dodger shifts her attention to the blonde—to Alison—allowing herself, for one brutal, self-indulgent second, to look at the other girl the way the other girl is looking at her. As an opponent; as the competition in a game that society has been priming them for since they were born, no matter how little they want to play.

  Alison will play a defensive game, she decides, loath to sacrifice pieces even when it would serve the greater good. Checkmate in ten moves or less. Not worth the time it would take to humiliate her. The thought is cold, and Dodger is ashamed of it even as it finishes forming.

  She smiles, and she thinks it’s as good a smile as any she’s ever worn. She doesn’t think too deeply about that; about why her false smiles and her real ones look the same. “Wow. I guess we just got lucky. It’s nice to meet you, Alison.”

  “Nice to meet you, too,” says Alison grudgingly, taking advantage of the introduction to slide her arm through Roger’s, making her claim even more apparent. “I don’t think I’ve ever met anybody named ‘Dodger’ before.”

  “My dad teaches American history,” says Dodger, with the shrug she’s perfected for moments like this, when people comment on her name and she has no idea what to say. That isn’t where her name comes from: it was a condition of her adoption, lain down by a birth mother she’s never known and rarely wonders about. The woman who gave her life also gave her up. As far as Dodger’s concerned, that’s something people are only allowed to do once.

  And Roger’s already done it.

  She straightens, still smiling her false, practiced smile. “It was good to see you, Roger. I hope you enjoyed the game, and you both get lots of extra credit for coming. We’re supposed to play again in an hour, so I’d better go get ready.”

  Roger watches helplessly as she turns and walks away, head held high and stiff. He’s losing her again, he knows he is, and he doesn’t know how to make her stop. Not without saying things in front of Alison that would make him sound crazy at best, and like some sort of weirdo ex-boyfriend at worst. He doesn’t want either of those things.

  He also doesn’t want Dodger to go.

  So he closes his eyes and fumbles in the dark behind them until he finds a door he hasn’t looked for in years—a door he stopped looking for when his family was threatened. But he’s fourteen now, not nine; he knows more about how the world works, he’s read more books on adoption law and contracts, because it impacts his life, and he wanted to understand. No matter what contract his parents may have signed, there’s no judge in the world who’d take him away from them for the crime of speaking to someone, especially not when she’s standing right there. She’s real, she’s really and truly real, and that means he’s not crazy to talk to her, and if he’s not crazy, then there’s nothing wrong with acknowledging her existence.

  He “knocks.” She doesn’t open the door. She doesn’t let him in. And so he shoves as hard as he can. He pushes his way through.

  Maybe it’s quantum entanglement and maybe it’s not, but the door opens under the questing fingers of his mental hands, and the world appears in vivid color, showing him the arena from a floor-level view. The angle of Dodger’s eyesight is wrong enough to be jarring. That makes him feel even worse. He’d be accustomed to her perspective if he hadn’t broken contact, like he used to be accustomed to seeing the world from a higher point of view, when they were younger and their heights were reversed.

  (He’s also profoundly, disturbingly color-blind, something he didn’t understand when he was younger and might neve
r have noticed if not for the fact that she isn’t: when he looks through her eyes, the world has a thousand shades that aren’t normally there, and he resents her a little for getting colors when he doesn’t, even as he hungrily matches them to names that were previously academic, ideas that had no anchor on the world.)

  “Please don’t go,” he whispers, as softly as he can, and his voice in her mind is as loud and clear as it ever was.

  Dodger stumbles. She doesn’t fall: her shock is enough to short out her coordination, but not enough to kill it completely. She stops walking, back still to the audience, and asks, “Why not? You did. I think it’s my turn.”

  “Because I’m sorry and I shouldn’t have done it, and please. Don’t go.”

  “I have to. I need to play another game. We’re in the same time zone tonight; call me at nine.” And she’s walking again, moving faster now, like she’s trying to get away from something that may or may not pursue.

  Roger doesn’t want to be the thing that chases her. He pulls back, opens his own eyes, and watches, from his familiar point of view, as she disappears through the door at the back of the arena. Alison is tugging on his arm. He turns, and the way she’s looking at him makes him realize things have changed; introducing another girl into the mix made her start looking at him the way he’s been looking at her for ages. Part of him wants to be overjoyed. The rest of him is muddled and confused, not sure how to cope with the speed at which everything is shifting around him.

  “You want to get a soda?” he asks, and is rewarded by her smile blossoming like a flower, and maybe everything isn’t so complicated after all.

  * * *

  Dodger plays three more games that day, and she wins them all, although two of them are closer than she likes: after the third, when they’re packing their things, the event organizer comes over to thank her for making things more interesting for the audience. Dodger, who can see the mathematical possibilities of the game spreading out in front of her with every move, who might as well have a map in hand every time she picks up a pawn, says nothing. She can’t toy with her opponents the way they want her to, and she can’t be distracted every time she sits down to play; neither would be fair, either to her or to the people she plays against. When she’s at the table, she needs to know the people she’s challenging will fight her with everything they have. Anything less would be cruel.