Middlegame Read online

  “If you know you screwed up, why are you still going?”

  Dodger shrugs. “Even a wrong answer can be interesting. I’ll keep solving as long as solution is possible, and when it stops being possible, I’ll figure out what I did wrong. It’s soothing. It gives me things to play with. Don’t you study child development because you like toys?”

  “Yes, toys, not numbers on a wall and risking our security deposit,” says Candace. “You didn’t answer my first question. How was the tour?”

  “I didn’t go.” The lie comes light and easy. She’s gotten so good at this. “I was up all night talking to some computational mathematicians in Australia. They’re working on a set of proofs that’s going to blow everyone else out of the water, me included, and they wanted to gloat. By the time I realized I should be getting some sleep, my alarm was going off. It seemed better to meet my new classmates when I wasn’t a sleep-deprived nightmare.”

  Candace cocks her head. “You don’t seem like a sleep-deprived nightmare right now.”

  “I had a nap. And a two-liter of Mountain Dew. I’m basically good to go. Who schedules a grad-student walking tour at eight-thirty in the morning anyway? Don’t they know most of us are nocturnal at this stage in our careers?”

  “People who are no longer nocturnal, and resent the fact that they need sleep,” says Candace. Her tone is light but her eyes are sharp, narrowing as she looks at Dodger.

  Not for the first time, Dodger thinks she may have made a tactical error in agreeing to room with someone whose discipline includes developmental psychology. She smiles as brightly as she can, trying to force the memory of Roger’s startled face even further toward the back of her mind. He’s the reason she messed up her math, because she can’t focus.

  She was never supposed to see him again. She’s never really seen him before. He’s not real. He’s not real, because if he were real, she would have hurt him, by slamming the door between them. He can’t be real, because if he’s real, she’s a monster for what she did to him.

  He can’t be real.

  “I guess I just wasn’t up for it,” she says finally.

  Candace’s eyes dart to the scar on Dodger’s left arm, and Dodger has to swallow the urge to put her hand over it. Candace is one of the people who knew what it was the first time she saw it, and knew the newspaper articles for a childish—if eagerly accepted—attempt at a cover-up.

  “You want some tea?” Candace asks. “It might make you feel better. I know it always helps me when I’m not feeling good.”

  “That would be great,” says Dodger, and smiles, and Candace smiles back before she turns and disappears, leaving Dodger alone in her room of flawed equations, numbers that don’t add up, marching ever onward into the future, never finding their solution, never really being solved.

  Reunion

  TIMELINE: 14:12 PST, AUGUST 18, 2008 (THREE DAYS LATER).

  Roger never knew there were so many ways to be a math major. The field is enormously divided and subdivided, a fractal web of specializations chasing its own tail into the depths of the course catalog. It’s like peering through the gates of hell. Infinite math classes packed with infinite mathematicians, all of whom would be delighted to explain in great and painful detail exactly why the fact that he gave up as soon as he fulfilled his general math credit requirements was a mistake.

  But Dodger Cheswich is famous in mathematical circles: Dodger Cheswich is the girl who solved the Monroe Equation. (The memory of her shyly showing him her work, written in gel pen on wide-lined paper, hurts less than it used to, because he’s going to see her again, he’s going to see her and tell her he was wrong to run away but so was she, and she’s the mathematician—can’t she see that this makes them equal? Can’t she see that the time for running is over?) Getting her to come to Berkeley for grad school was an accomplishment. Not a big accomplishment, like netting a real celebrity or someone whose parents could afford to endow a new library, but an accomplishment all the same. Someone has to have bragged about getting her for their specific specialty.

  Someone has. He finds a reference buried in one of the chess club newsletters to “incoming student D. Cheswich, joining our esteemed Mathematics department as she pursues her degree in game theory.” Armed with a name, description, birth date, and area of study, it was a small thing to find her advisor, and an even smaller thing to present himself as her brother hoping to surprise her. It’s a lie, but a believable one: they look alike enough to pass as siblings. They have the same eyes. They were born on the same day and adopted by families on opposite sides of the continent. And once upon a time, impossible as it is to believe when nothing like it has ever happened again, they were able to talk to each other by closing their eyes.

  People usually give him what he asks, when he takes the time to do his research and understand his own requests. It’s been three days since the campus tour that went off-campus after she ran out on it, and now here he is, standing on her doorstep with a chessboard tucked under his arm, trying to find the courage to knock.

  “Hey.”

  He looks up. There’s a woman on the balcony above him. Short, curvy, pretty in an all-American way: she’d look perfectly at home at a baseball game, or wearing cut-off shorts and sitting in the bed of a pickup truck. His romantic life has been a succession of Norman Rockwell paintings, and this girl would slot into place without disrupting the line. Her hair is ashen and her eyes are pale and she’s looking at him like he’s an interesting new species of insect, something meant to be placed in a jar and studied for as long as possible.

  “Hello,” he says.

  Her gaze sharpens. “You’re not here for me, because I don’t know you. You’re not here for Candy, because she has a boyfriend, and he’s built like a Sherman tank. There’s no way you could be here for Dodger. She doesn’t date. I’m not sure she understands why humans have anything other than a waste exhaust port in their pants.”

  He lifts his eyebrows. “How long have you been living here?”

  “A week, but I pay attention. I know stuff.” The woman leans further out over the rail, taking a drag off her cigarette and blowing the smoke in his direction. When she taps the ash over the rail it falls perfectly into the bushes below her, practice making perfect. “That a chessboard?”

  “Yes,” he says, trying not to sniff the air like a starving dog. His last cigarette was eight days ago. A personal best, which is something to be proud of, but doesn’t currently feel like it. It feels like he’s torturing himself for no good reason.

  “So you’re here for Dodger, then.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?” The woman’s gaze is sharp enough to nail his feet to the porch. “She’s not interested in making friends. She says she is, but she’s lying. She’s a good liar.”

  “So how do you know she’s not just nervous?”

  “Because I pay attention.” The woman takes another drag on her cigarette, still watching him closely. “What’s your name?”

  “Roger.”

  “Your names rhyme. That’s cute. If you were related, you’d have grounds to sue your parents.” She blows smoke out through her nose. “Last chance, Roger. If you don’t knock, you could walk away clean. I’m pretty sure she doesn’t want to see you. She’s been acting spooked for days. You could get out of here and probably never see her again.”

  “Thanks for the advice…?” He leaves the question dangling, waiting.

  Her lips twist in what might charitably be called a smile. “Erin,” she says. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.” She drops her cigarette, grinds it under her heel, and goes inside.

  Roger rings the bell.

  * * *

  Dodger’s class schedule has been designed to give her long blocks of uninterrupted free time, followed by long blocks of time spent teaching classes for professors with better things to do, grading papers, and trying not to be too mean to undergrads. It’s not their fault that they’re at a different point in their studies than
she is, and maybe if she reminds herself of that often enough, she’ll stop feeling the need to throw things at them. It’s frustrating enough that when she’s teaching, she’s expected to dress like a grownup, or at least wear something other than pajamas. Dress codes are the bane of her existence.

  (Several people have looked at her schedule and told her it doesn’t make sense, it doesn’t work, she can’t possibly have that much time to herself. She doesn’t understand why they’re making such a fuss. All she had to do was rotate the numbers until they slotted together the way she wanted them to. It’s not like it was hard.)

  The doorbell rings. She looks up from her computer. Neither of her roommates is home, and she’s pretty sure she’d remember if she’d ordered a pizza, since that would have meant noticing and accepting that she was hungry. Awareness of her own body’s needs is not and has never been her strong suit. Conclusion: it’s not pizza.

  There aren’t that many other things it could, or should, be. They live off-campus for a reason. No one has their address, and with as little time as they’ve lived here, every knock on the front door is an adventure. She’s met three neighbors, a door-to-door pot brownie vendor, and a teenage girl with a box of kittens and a harried expression. Who knows what today will bring? Carefully, she saves her work and stands, ready for a new surprise.

  Dodger is smiling when she opens the door. That’s the first thing Roger notices. Whoever she’s become in the last five years, it’s still someone who can smile. Her face freezes when she sees him, smile turning into something crystalline and sharp. He could cut himself on that expression.

  “Please don’t close the door,” he says.

  Her crystal smile vanishes completely. It’s almost a miracle he doesn’t hear it shatter on the floor. “You’re not real.”

  Roger blinks. “That’s a new one.”

  “You’re not real. You’re my imaginary friend and I dreamed you, and if I dreamed you you’re not real, and if you’re not real, you can’t be here. What are you doing here?”

  “Can I come in?” He hopes he doesn’t sound as nervous as he feels. Although maybe it would be better if he did: it would be harder for her to pretend this isn’t hurting him as much as it’s hurting her. He forces a smile of his own, trying to look harmless and hopeful at the same time. Trying to look like he’s not a threat. “I mean, we can do this with me on the porch if you want—this is Berkeley, we have people running around pretending to be vampires every Sunday night, no one’s going to care about a couple of Midwich cuckoos—but it might be easier if I come inside.”

  “The Midwich cuckoos were blonde,” says Dodger. Her voice hasn’t changed much. It’s a little deeper, but puberty was basically finished with her long before they’d stopped speaking. “You have brown hair. I’m a redhead. We’re not the children of sexist bucolic aliens. Also you don’t exist.”

  “And let’s be grateful for that, because they were trying for breeding pairs—the aliens part, not the ‘I don’t exist’ part,” he says. “How do you know that, anyway?”

  “Even math geniuses have to do book reports. We don’t get to skip English because we think it’s silly.” Her voice almost breaks.

  His heart feels like it cracks a little. “Please. Dodger. Can I come inside?”

  She doesn’t want to let him in: that much is clear in the way she looks past him to the street, scanning for anyone who might give her an excuse to say no. It both hurts and offends him that she’d feel the need to do that. No matter what lies she may have told the police, he’s never laid a hand on her—was on the other side of the continent when she decided to lay a hand on herself. All he’s ever done is try to save her, except when he had to leave her behind to save himself.

  Sacrifice. That’s what they’ve each done, at least once: they’ve sacrificed the other for their own protection. Maybe that’s the key. “I brought a chessboard,” he says, holding it up. “I couldn’t find any pieces, but I figured you’d probably have something we could use.”

  Now a corner of her mouth quirks, like she’s about to smile again. It seems more genuine this time. He’s already figuring out a few things about Dodger’s smiles, piecing them together from what he remembers of her as a child, what he remembers from the one time they ever met face-to-face: when she’s lying, she smiles with her whole face. When she’s actually happy, she only smiles with the left, like she’s trying to make sure she can control who sees it.

  “Did you think I wouldn’t have a chessboard?” she asks, and she doesn’t sound angry, she doesn’t sound frightened, or tired, or any of those other things. She sounds like Dodger. She sounds like his best friend.

  He knows the words: relief, alleviation, contentment. None of them encompass the feeling of weightlessness, like all the troubles in the world have been lifted from his shoulders. He guesses this feeling is probably a cliché, but the people who like to put those labels on things don’t always remember that things become clichés because they keep happening, over and over, all around the world.

  “Not really,” he says. “So can I exist again, and come inside?”

  “Third time’s the charm, I guess,” she says, and holds the door open wider so he can get by. She presses her back against the wall, avoiding even accidental physical contact.

  Roger regrets that, a little. He was the one who’d first introduced the idea that their quantum entanglement—or whatever it was—might be enhanced by physical contact, and it appears to have stuck with both of them. He doesn’t want to touch her. He just wishes she didn’t look so scared that he would.

  Once the door is closed, he clears his throat and asks, “Berkeley?”

  “You have a good math department,” she says, flipping the deadbolt with her thumb. “I wanted to work with Professor Kong. Her research in game theory is revolutionary. And there’s the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, of course. Talk about a kid in a candy store. The kitchen’s this way.” She turns her back on him—a show of trust or a show of dominance, he doesn’t quite know—and heads down the hall, apparently trusting him to follow.

  He does, studying his surroundings as they walk, looking for the vocabulary of the woman she’s become. If he can read her, he can start to understand her. The trouble is figuring out which of the things around him belong to her and not to her roommates. That she has roommates is obvious: the place is too big for her to afford on her own, and the Dodger he knew would never have brought a complete set of the Up-and-Under books with her to college. The math texts are probably hers. The books on chess. He’s not sure about the books on social engineering and finding your better self, but something about the way she walks—shoulders back, neck elongated, like she’s practiced this—makes him suspect they might be hers.

  The girl on the balcony said Dodger wasn’t interested in making friends, just in having people believe she was, and Roger suspects that she was right. It would fit with who Dodger was when they lost contact.

  The kitchen at the end of the hall is small but bright, with windows taking up most of one wall. There’s a concrete patio out back, no more than six feet deep, and every bit of it that can be packed with planter boxes has been. They bristle with dozens of succulents in a dozen varieties, a dozen different shades of gray. There’s a cat sitting on the fence, a scarred orange tom with one green eye. The cat looks at Roger. Roger looks at the cat.

  “That’s old Bill,” says Dodger, clearing an armload of newspapers off the folding card table crammed into the breakfast nook. “He comes with the apartment. The landlady asked us to feed him when we remembered, and to call her if he got hit by a car or anything like that. He’s pretty sweet. Only tries to convince us to let him in when it starts raining. So I wasn’t necessarily lying when I said I had to feed the cat, even if he’s not actually mine.”

  “What a good kitty,” says Roger dutifully. He likes cats. They have their own agenda, and he respects that. “Is there anything I can do to help?”

  “I’d rather you
didn’t.” Dodger continues clearing the table, head down, hair shielding her face. He knows it’s red, even if he can’t see the color right now, red as sunset, red as a warning. It’s as if that, of everything about her, was designed to attract attention, and he knows she doesn’t like people staring at her.

  “Did you ever think about dyeing your hair?” he blurts, and instantly regrets it. He’s supposed to be the one who’s good with words, and here he is saying things he should know will upset her. It’s like everything gets scrambled when they’re in the same room, like the fundamental laws of nature have been twisted twenty degrees to the left.

  (He knows he can never tell anyone about this feeling, because he knows what they’d say: “you’re in love” and “bang the girl, get it out of your system.” But he’s not in love with Dodger. He loves her, has loved her since the moment he admitted she was a real person and not an imaginary friend, but that’s not being in love. It’s just that when they’re together, it feels like the world is finally complete, and if he can keep it in one piece for long enough, he’ll learn what the rules actually are.)

  Dodger turns her head, enough that the hair falls away from her eyes and he can see her looking at him. “Do you think I should?” she asks, with honest curiosity. She’s looking at him like she sees him, now, like he actually exists.

  He wishes he weren’t so grateful for that. “No,” he says. “I mean, I remember how pretty it is. I just know you don’t like it when people stare.”

  She raises a hand to touch the side of her head, briefly confused. “What do you mean, you remember?” Her eyes widen. “Oh! The color-blindness thing!”