Middlegame Read online

  She doesn’t need to tell him the rest, because Roger is smart too, as smart as she is, and he can see the gaps in the story. They’re … familiar. She’s lonely. Her brashness is meant to cover that, like his shyness does, but she’s lonely. He doesn’t remember talking to her when he was littler—but he’s accepted the idea of her fast, hasn’t he? He was surprised, not frightened, when she started doing his homework. Like he’d talked to her before, long enough ago that it seemed like something he’d made up, not so long ago that part of him wouldn’t always know her as a friend.

  She’s lonely, and she’s one of those kids for whom loneliness has become a sort of fearless propulsion, forcing her forward at an ever-accelerating pace, searching for a way to make the loneliness stop. When her father said she’d had an imaginary friend, one with a name, one she liked well enough to have talked to for a long time, she’d gone looking, just like he had when he’d needed to apologize. And she’d found him. Just like he’d found her.

  “Dodger?”

  Dodger lifts her head. Through her eyes Roger sees the librarian approaching. The woman is old, maybe even older than his mom, but she looks nice; she has worry-lines around her eyes, and her mouth is painted a soft shade of pink, keeping it from looking too cruel, even when she has to shush people for being loud in the library.

  “Are you all right?”

  Dodger nods mutely.

  “Are you supposed to be in the bathroom?” The question is gentle. Dodger has done this before, then, running away and hiding for a few minutes in a place where no one will expect her to be brash, to be bold, to be anything other than small and frightened and seven years old.

  Dodger nods again.

  “They’re going to think you’re sick if you don’t go back now, and when your teacher checks the bathroom, she won’t find you. I don’t want you to get in trouble.” Still so gentle, still so careful. Roger guesses people all over the world must use the same tone when they talk to the smart kids, like they were bombs on the edge of going off, instead of children with brains too big for the people they’re supposed to be.

  “Okay.” Dodger gets up, unfolding easily from what had seemed like such a crumpled position. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry, just be all right. You’d tell me if you weren’t all right, wouldn’t you?”

  Of course not. Roger has only known Dodger for a day—maybe longer, if her father is right, if they were friends before, only to lose hold of one another—but he already knows she doesn’t tell people things when she doesn’t feel she needs to. She keeps her secrets close to her chest. That’s how she survives in a world where she’s so much smarter than she should be, and so much more delicate than she seems.

  “Yes, Ms. McNeil,” says Dodger obediently.

  “Good. Now get back to class, and if anyone asks, I never saw you.” The librarian smiles. Dodger smiles back, and then she’s in motion, heading for her classroom at a brisk walk. Roger is pretty sure she never takes her time getting anywhere.

  She pauses at the classroom door and says, in a loud whisper, “It’s ten. I get out of school at three. You can call in six hours.” Then she opens the door and walks, head high, into a classroom filled with bright, judging eyes.

  This is her prison, not his. Roger lets go of his place in her head and falls back into his own, opening his eyes on the dim janitor’s closet. He picks himself up, pins and needles shooting through his legs, brushes his jeans off so no one will be able to see where he has been, and lets himself out.

  * * *

  Six hours has never seemed like such a long time. Roger watches the clock, counting the minutes. Ten for her was one for him, and dinner is served at seven thirty; that means he has half an hour in his room before he’ll have to go downstairs and tell his parents about his day. He’s finished all his homework except the new math worksheet, which is even more complicated than the last one. Worse, because he did so well on one sheet, they’re going to expect him to do well on the next one. Maybe not as well, but …

  He knows the words. Cheating, plagiarism, lying, lying, liar. He’s not sure plagiarism applies when it’s math problems and not words, but he doesn’t want to find out; doesn’t want Miss Lewis looking at him with disappointment or—worse—revulsion. He needs to do better in math. He needs to keep that look at bay. That means he needs the far-away girl whose name rhymes with his, and he thinks she needs him too, to guide her through the strangeness of spelling and English. They can help each other. They can make each other better.

  The clock ticks over to seven. Roger Middleton closes his eyes. “Dodger?” he says.

  For a moment, there’s no response. Somehow, that isn’t a surprise: part of him has been waiting for this to end since the moment it started, and end badly, proving once and for all that there is something wrong with him, that his mother has been right to be concerned.

  Then someone else’s eyes open on someone else’s room, and he’s looking at a mirror, at a freckle-faced girl with eyes the same unassuming gray as his own. She’s wearing a shirt with butterflies on the front, and she’s grinning ear to ear, looking relieved and pleased and surprised, all at the same time.

  Her hair is red. Her shirt is yellow. Both these things are surprising, and he stares, unable to believe how bright her world is.

  “Ta-da!” says Dodger, and Roger is startled out of surprise into laughter, because she learned this trick from him. They’re already teaching each other so much. “I thought you’d want to see me.”

  “Do you ever brush your hair?”

  Dodger wrinkles her nose. “Not when I can help it. It’s long because my dad says girls should have long hair until they stop looking like boys without it, but I don’t like it. I’d cut it all off if they’d let me. It gets caught on things.”

  “Things?”

  “Trees. Blackberry bushes. Other people’s fingers.” Her expression darkens like a cloud rolling in. Roger has learnt to go unnoticed to avoid the persecution of others. Roger isn’t a girl with bright red hair—how is anything so red? He’s never seen a red like that before—and a passion for math. Going unnoticed was never an option for her: he knows that down to his bones. She had to go in the opposite direction, becoming mercurial and never stopping long enough to be caught.

  Still … “People pull your hair?” The thought is vaguely horrifying. Girls aren’t supposed to have their hair pulled. There’s nothing wrong with shoving them if they shove you first, but pulling hair is petty and mean, and it’s not supposed to happen.

  “If you were a girl, they’d pull your hair too,” she says matter-of-factly. “Girl nerds are in even more trouble than boy nerds, because everybody says we don’t exist, or if we do exist, it’s because we’re trying to get the boy nerds to like us. I don’t like any of the boy nerds in my school. I’m smarter than all of them, so they’re mean to me just like everybody else.”

  Roger nods solemnly, not thinking about the fact that his body is in Massachusetts while hers is in California; she won’t see his agreement. But he’s experienced what she’s talking about. Smart kids get put on a pedestal by parents and teachers alike, and the rest of the class gathers around the base of it throwing rocks, trying to knock them down. People who say “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me” don’t understand how words can be stones, hard and sharp-edged and dangerous and capable of doing so much more harm than anything physical. If someone chucks a real stone at you on the playground, it leaves a bruise. Bruises heal. Bruises get people in trouble, too; bruises end with detentions for the rock-throwers, with disapproving parents ushered into private offices for serious conversations about bullying and bad behavior.

  Words almost never end that way. Words can be whispered bullet-quick when no one’s looking, and words don’t leave blood or bruises behind. Words disappear without a trace. That’s what makes them so powerful. That’s what makes them so important.

  That’s what makes them hurt so much.
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  Dodger turns away from the mirror, which hangs, he realizes, on the inside of her closet door; the first of the concrete differences between her room and his. The walls are painted a cheerful yellow, almost matching her shirt. His walls are white. They both have rugs on hardwood floors, but where his is plain gray, hers is a riot of butterflies and flowers in bright primary colors, until it almost hurts to look at. He’s never seen most of these colors before. He’d be awake all night if he had a rug like that. He wouldn’t be able to look away.

  (It will be hours before he realizes how many of the colors in her room were new to him, or starts to wonder what that means.)

  Where his walls are lined with bookshelves crammed with every scrap of paper he’s been able to get hold of, hers are lined with taller, deeper shelves packed with plush toys, dolls, and other symbols of a carefree childhood. He wonders whether the adults in her life—she must have adults in her life, has mentioned parents, and parents usually come with a range of aunts and uncles and grandparents—have noticed how dusty her toys are, especially compared to the much more carefully stored bins of blocks and tinker toys and geometric wooden shapes. A tower stands in one corner of the room, bright blue blocks piled higher than he thought gravity would allow.

  Dodger looks at the tower and smiles, smug. “I figured out how to position the bases for maximum stability,” she says. “I think I can get another six or seven layers on before it falls down. I’m going to do it this weekend. I’ll call when I’m done, so you can see.”

  “Okay,” says Roger, awed. If he could do that … “Um. I got a perfect on my math paper.”

  “You told me.”

  “I don’t want my teacher to think I cheated.”

  “You didn’t cheat,” says Dodger matter-of-factly. She walks to her bed and sits, one foot tucked under her body, the other dangling. Roger is a passenger, not a driver, but he’s painfully aware of every move she makes, like someone is writing down every single gesture and reading them off to him, only slightly delayed. “There’s nothing in the rules about a voice in your head telling you what the answers are supposed to be. I checked.”

  “I think the rules think any voices in your head will belong to you,” says Roger.

  Dodger shrugs. “It’s not my fault the rules don’t think of everything.”

  “I guess not.” Roger pauses before he says, “If it’s not cheating, can you keep helping with my math? Not just doing it. I mean. I like you doing it. But can you make me understand it? I need to be able to do it for myself, too.”

  “I already said I would, if you can help me with my reading. And my spelling.” Dodger wrinkles her nose. “I hate spelling. It doesn’t make sense.”

  “It does, once you know the rules,” says Roger. He’s almost giddy with relief. This will make everything so much easier, and if she’s right—if this isn’t cheating—then there’s nothing wrong with doing things this way. They can help each other. They can shore up the broken places. He knows the words for this: cooperation, symbiosis, reciprocity. So many words, and he’ll teach her all of them, if she’ll just keep being his friend.

  “Okay,” says Dodger, sounding suddenly shy. “Let’s do it.”

  “Okay,” says Roger. Then: “I have to go. It’s dinnertime. Talk to you later?”

  “Okay,” says Dodger, for the second time.

  In his room in Massachusetts, Roger opens his eyes. His mother is calling him down to dinner. Grasping his math worksheet in one hand, he runs to tell her about his day.

  * * *

  Dodger feels the moment Roger’s presence leaves her mind the way she’d feel a cotton ball being pulled out of her ear: a sudden absence, creating a space for the world to rush into. She flops backward and closes her eyes, fighting the urge to call his name and push herself into his life the way he’d been riding along on hers. It’s hard. In the end, she perseveres. If there’s one thing Dodger has a lot of experience with, it’s being alone.

  Her parents would never call her lonely, if anyone thought to ask them. Sure, she’s alone a lot of the time, but she has friends. They’re sure of it. Absolutely sure. They’d be horrified if Dodger ever bothered to tell them how wrong they were.

  Maybe if she’d been Roger, smart about books and words and spelling and stuff, she could have made friends. Book-smart is okay for girls, as much as any sort of smart is okay for girls. But math-smart isn’t the same. Math-smart belongs to skinny boys with glasses and pocket protectors and heads full of science. That’s what the books say. That’s what the TV says. And that’s what her classmates say in a thousand tiny ways, every time she finishes her math book ahead of the rest of them. Even the math-smart boys don’t like her, because she’s smarter than them, and some things are too much to be borne.

  She’s learnt to make it look like she doesn’t care. She’s not class clown—one-liners and comebacks aren’t her forte—but she’s brassy and loud and she talks like nothing matters. She’s been to see the principal for squirming and shouting more than half the boys she knows, which has earned her a certain grudging respect, even though she still sits alone at lunch every day. Her teacher doesn’t like her because she’s a disruption. The school librarian loves her, though, and lets her hide in the cool dark when she needs to. She’ll survive. She knows that. She’ll survive, and she’ll do it with a smile on her face, because Roger’s back. Roger’s real, and he’s back, and she’s not alone anymore.

  Her bedroom door opens. She sits up, turning, and there’s her mother, a sheet of paper clutched in her hand. She brandishes it. “You know what this is?”

  Dodger stiffens. “That’s mine,” she says. “It was in my bag.”

  “You left it on the stairs again,” says her mother. “I picked it up and this fell out. A ninety? Really?”

  “I studied.” The lie comes quick and easy. The necessary lies always do. (She’ll try for years to explain her dislike of metaphor to Roger, even as they both learn how to pronounce the word correctly: to make him see why lies should be reserved for life-or-death situations, because anything else would make them weaker, and weak things can’t save you. She’ll always be a better liar than he is. He’ll always have a better grasp of metaphor. Some things run too close to the bone to change, no matter how much you want to.)

  “You studied? Are you sure?” Her mother’s eyes scan her face. Dodger looks guilelessly back, confident her deceptions will go unseen. Sometimes she thinks being adopted is the best thing in the world, because it’s made her a better liar where her parents are concerned. All the kids she knows think it’s hard to lie to their parents, because their parents can say things like “you have your mother’s eyes, and she always squints when she’s lying,” or “see, that blush means you’re not telling me the truth.” Dodger doesn’t have anyone’s eyes but her own, and maybe Roger’s …

  That’s just wishful thinking. She doesn’t have anyone’s eyes but her own, and those eyes are wide and innocent, devoid of anything but childish delight at her own accomplishment.

  Finally, her mother yields. Heather Cheswich’s retail job is only part-time, starting after she puts Dodger on the school bus and ending early enough to let her beat her daughter home by almost half an hour, but it’s still exhausting, and she doesn’t have the energy to pursue this any further. “I told you that you could do it if you applied yourself. Didn’t I tell you?”

  “You told me,” agrees Dodger solemnly. “You told me until I listened.” She’s not being sarcastic. Sarcasm will come later, after the world has kicked her more.

  “Your father will be pleased.”

  Dodger perks up at that. “Is he coming home for dinner?”

  Her mother looks at the hopeful expression on her little girl’s face and feels herself wither a bit more inside, way down deep, where the light never reaches.

  “I don’t think he’ll be home for dinner tonight, sweetheart; he has a class,” Heather says, and Dodger’s face falls. Heather forces a smile. “Now why don’t
you show me that spelling worksheet?”

  Dodger does, and time marches on.

  Purple Stars

  TIMELINE: 17:02 PST, FEBRUARY 9, 1995 (TWO YEARS LATER).

  “Are you sure California has February?” asks Roger. Dodger is sliding down the embankment on the sides of her feet, plunging into the bushes behind her house. She’s shredding her shoes; she goes through them five times as fast as he goes through his, even though their parents buy the same brands. Up until a few months ago, they even wore the same size. She’s hitting her growth spurts early and hard, and her mother is beginning to look thoughtfully at the shoes in the athletic section, which might stand half a chance of lasting for more than a month.

  “The calendar says it does, and calendars don’t lie,” says Dodger. She grabs at branches as she descends, scraping the skin off her palms. Roger winces in sympathy, feeling the idea of her pain without feeling the pain itself. The brief moments of physical synchronicity they used to have, where he could feel her tap his shoulder, where she would know if he had a headache, have been fading. He’s sort of grateful for that. Some things shouldn’t be shared.

  Dodger is paler than he is—neither of them goes out in the sun much, but she’s turned avoiding it into a game, while he just sighs whenever it comes out from behind the clouds—and her bruises stand out brighter than his ever do. Sometimes she looks like a flower of a girl, drawn in white and purple and healing yellow, all the more striking because those colors only seem to exist in California. She laughs when he tells her to take better care of herself. No one else cares if she takes her skin off, so why should she?

  He knows so many words, to describe so many things. His vocabulary has grown immeasurably, aided in a sideways manner by the girl whose head he currently occupies. Once his math scores started rising, his teachers became more understanding of his boredom. They knew how to handle a well-rounded genius in a way they’d never been able to handle a focused one. He’s spent the last two years reading whatever he wants, providing he keeps the rest of his grades up. He’s taking German, French, and Mandarin. He’s learnt so many new concepts, and the words to pin them to the surface of his soul, perpetual and immutable. Without words, some things would slip away, impossible to describe and hence impossible to hold.