Middlegame

by Seanan McGuire

  Most of the kids he knows are rushing toward adulthood as fast as they can, hands stretched in front of them, grasping for the unknowable future. Roger wishes he knew how to dig in his heels and stop where he is. Just for a while; just long enough to get a better idea of what’s ahead.

  He finds the bathroom door, eases it open, eases it closed again behind him. He can hear Dodger’s breathing in his head, the fast, excited inhale and exhale of a girl with no idea what’s happening but no qualms about finding out. She won’t slow down, he’s sure; if anything, she’ll run faster, aiming for the golden finish line, the moment where childhood ends and adulthood begins, land of anything-you-want.

  “Cover your eyes,” he says, and squints his own eyes before flicking on the light. It’s bright enough to be biting even through his closed lids. He waits for the pain to recede before cautiously opening them and turning toward the mirror.

  Roger Middleton is a skinny kid, tall for his age, with a shock of too-long brown hair that never seems to settle right, no matter how much his mother tells him to brush it. He’s pale, both because he rarely goes outside and because of the sunscreen he gets doused in every time he inches toward a door. Sometimes he thinks about getting a sunburn, just for the experience. His features are symmetrical, regular, and ordinary. This is a boy who could disappear in any crowd, given the right clothing and the proper attitude.

  His eyes are gray, and as he watches, they widen, although he hasn’t ordered them to do so. Instead, he feels Dodger’s surprise flooding through him, Dodger’s amazement at what seemed—to him—like such a logical step.

  “That’s you?” she asks. He can see everything behind him, and now he knows she isn’t there: he’s alone in the bathroom, wearing his Bumble Bear pajamas with the tear in the right sleeve. His lips aren’t moving.

  At least not until he speaks. “That’s me,” he confirms. “This is me. Where are you?”

  “I’m in bed. My parents are still awake. They’d notice if I got up.” She sounds genuinely regretful, like she can’t wait to pull this trick in reverse. “Your eyes look like mine. Where do you live?”

  “Cambridge.” He’s not supposed to give his address to strangers, but a town isn’t an address, and can a voice inside his head really be considered a stranger? If she’s not real, she doesn’t count, and if she is real (which isn’t possible; there’s no way she can be anything but a very vivid dream), then it’s not like giving her the name of the city tells her how to find the house. “Where are you?”

  “Palo Alto.” Her parents must not be as good about teaching her stranger danger, because she continues blithely, “It’s in California. That’s why it’s so much earlier here. Cambridge is in Massachusetts, isn’t it? You’re way far away. In a whole different time zone.”

  “What’s a time zone?”

  He can hear her perk up. “Did you ever drop an orange in a swimming pool?”

  “Um. What?”

  “It doesn’t all get wet at the same time. No matter how fast you throw it, part of it will always hit the water firster than the rest of it.” She sounds utterly matter-of-fact. All things can apparently be explained using citrus. “Light is like water that way, and the Earth is like an orange. The whole world doesn’t get daytime at the same time. So it’s a different time where you are than it is where I am. Otherwise, some people would have to get up in the middle of the night and pretend it was morning, and that wouldn’t work.”

  In that moment, Roger is sure—absolutely certain—of two things: Dodger is real, and he wants her to be his friend. He grins and his reflection grins back, gap-toothed and excited, despite the lateness of the hour.

  “That was almost a metaphor.”

  “What?” Dodger sounds horrified. He doesn’t know what she looks like, but he can picture her expression all the same, dismayed and furious. “No it wasn’t! You take that back!”

  “It was. The Earth isn’t an orange, and you can’t throw a planet in the pool. You made a metaphor. It’s not all lies.”

  “I—you—that’s—” She stops talking and sputters for a few seconds, utterly indignant. Finally, she says, “You tricked me!”

  Roger can’t help it. He laughs, even knowing the sound could wake his parents. It’s worth the risk. “You made a metaphor! You did it all by yourself!”

  “Oh, why am I even talking to you? Go to sleep.” And just like that, the feeling that he isn’t alone in the bathroom is gone; he’s a laughing boy in his pajamas, alone with his own reflection. He stops laughing. His smile fades.

  “Dodger?”

  There’s no response.

  “Hey, come on. I was only fooling.”

  Still there’s no response. When his mother comes, bleary-eyed and irritated, to usher him back to bed, he goes willingly enough, too confused to fight her.

  Come morning, he’ll get up, get dressed, and go to school. He’ll turn in his homework, including the finished math sheet. He’ll get a perfect score for the first time since moving beyond addition and subtraction. But all that is in the future, on the other side of the ocean of night flowing silently by. Here and now, Roger Middleton sleeps.

  Addition

  TIMELINE: 13:08 EST, APRIL 10, 1993 (THE FOLLOWING DAY).

  “I was a little concerned about some of this material,” says Miss Lewis, and she’s the most beautiful woman in the world, so everyone is listening, even Marty Daniels, who would rather be reading comic books under his desk. Miss Lewis has dark brown skin and darker brown hair and eyes like the sky after the lights go out, so close to black that they could be any color in the world.

  Roger is pretty much in love with her, but he doesn’t think she’d mind if she knew, because someone as beautiful as Miss Lewis has to know that everyone is pretty much in love with her. She walks in a mist of love, smiling benevolently at everyone who passes through it. To do anything else would be cruel, and she’s never cruel. She’s the best second-grade teacher in the universe, and he’s so lucky to have her. All the testing to get into advanced placement was worth it, because it got him Miss Lewis.

  Then he sees what she’s holding, and he cringes. Lunch only ended ten minutes ago. How did she already score their math sheets?

  He’s going to get in trouble. He’s going to get in trouble, and he’s not going to be allowed to read for a week, and—

  And the paper she has put down in front of him has a 100% written in sparkly ink at the very top, with a smiley face drawn beside it. A smiley face. The rarest of Miss Lewis’s many treasures, granted only for exceptional improvement or even more exceptional work. He’s seen smiley faces before, on his spelling papers and short essays, but never on a math paper. Never on his math paper.

  “But you’ve surprised me,” says Miss Lewis, and she’s smiling right at him as she continues, “You’ve all done really, really well on this week’s assignment. I think you may understand it better than I do!”

  Some of the other kids giggle at the idea of understanding the work better than their teacher. Not Roger. He’s not even looking at Miss Lewis anymore. His eyes are fixed on the score at the top of his paper, and it feels like a pit has opened in the bottom of his stomach.

  He got a perfect score.

  He got a perfect score because Dodger helped him.

  He got a perfect score because Dodger helped him, and she’s gone. Or, not gone. She’s where she always was, somewhere in California, so far away that she might as well be on the stupid moon. He doesn’t know her address or her phone number or what school she goes to or anything. He can’t call her and say he’s sorry for laughing. He can’t tell her how much he wants to be her friend, or how much he needs her help with math. All he can do is stare at the perfect score on the top of his paper and feel like a cheater and a bad friend.

  A drop of water hits the paper. He wipes his cheeks, only distantly aware that he’s been crying, and puts his hand up.

  Miss Lewis pauses and looks at him. “Yes, Roger?”

  �
��Miss Lewis, may I, um.” He pauses, cheeks burning. Asking never gets easier, especially not with the rest of the class turning to look at him and giggle, like they never have to use the restroom, like their bodies are above such things. He’s watched the same boys trying to piss a fly out of the air above the urinals during recess, or arguing over who can fart the loudest. He supposes girls probably don’t do that sort of thing. But maybe they do. They giggle the same as the boys. “May I go to the bathroom?”

  “You may,” says Miss Lewis, taking pity. Normally, she’d look at the clock, with its hands standing at fifteen past the hour, and remind him that some things were meant to be done during lunch, when they wouldn’t disrupt class time. But Roger has always been a quiet boy, withdrawn from his peers, and he’s never done well at math. If he needs time to absorb the reality of his score, she’s going to give it to him. There isn’t much she can do for the sensitive ones, and so she’s happy to do what she can.

  Roger slides out of his seat and half-walks, half-staggers to the door, trying to look like he isn’t mortified by the eyes on him. He could wait, he knows; he could let the school day end and try this from the safety of his room, probably with a plate of fresh cookies to celebrate his unexpected mathematical victory. His mom bakes the best cookies, and for a second, the thought of them—sugary, chocolatey, warm from the oven—is enough to make him feel a little better.

  But waiting would be wrong. He knows that too, even if he doesn’t have all the words for it yet. “Procrastination” is one of them. So is “malingering.” (He got that one from his father last summer, when his parents started using the biggest words they could in an effort to keep him from knowing what they were talking about. It didn’t work the way they planned. Roger thinks that’s the trouble with grownups. The more effort they put into deciding what kids are going to do or think or be, the more things go wrong for them.) He got a smiley face because Dodger helped with his math. Not helped—because Dodger did his math. And he laughed at her.

  He needs to say sorry. He needs her to know he didn’t mean to upset her. So he hurries down the hall, past the classrooms (some with open doors, where students turn to watch him pass and smirk at him for being too stupid to go during lunch, when no one would have said anything about it), past the restrooms, until he reaches the janitor’s closet, with its inviting, unlocked door.

  Kids aren’t supposed to be in here. He knows that. But Mr. Paul (“Mis-ter Paul who mops the hall!” as he introduces himself to younger kids, with a quick, jazzy dance step to make them feel better about this hulking, tattooed mountain of a man sharing their space) doesn’t mind, as long as Roger doesn’t touch anything he shouldn’t. Like Miss Lewis, Mr. Paul is aware of the places where Roger is delicate—more aware than Roger himself will be for many years. Mr. Paul knows what can happen to delicate children when adults don’t step in to offer a little protection. Turning a blind eye to unauthorized use of the janitor’s closet as a hidey-hole may not prevent bullying or bloody noses on the playground, but if there’s a chance it’ll make things easier, he’s fine with it, as long as Roger doesn’t start drinking bleach or something.

  Roger slips inside, into the cool, citrus-scented air. It’s time for Mr. Paul to mop the cafeteria; he won’t be back for at least fifteen minutes, which is longer than Roger can stretch a bathroom break, even if he’s willing to go back to the classroom and tell Miss Lewis he had to number-two. (The thought is horror incarnate, and the fact that he’s willing to entertain it for even a moment makes him giddy with disgust. But he has to apologize, he has to.)

  “Dodger?” Roger closes his eyes, dimly aware that this is what people do on his cartoons when they’re trying to talk to someone who isn’t there. That, or they fold their hands and pray, but that would be sacrilegious—one of his favorite words—and he doesn’t want to get in trouble with Jesus while he’s trying to apologize for being a bad friend. “Can you hear me?”

  What happens next is a surprise and a relief. The world goes soft around the edges, and he finds himself looking at a spelling worksheet. There’s a hand in his frame of view, clutching a yellow pencil. The fingers are slender, the nails bitten to the quick. The nails are unpolished, and there’s no jewelry or adornment. Just freckles, scattered across pale skin like beads across the floor.

  “Don’t circle that one, it’s wrong,” he says, as the pencil starts to move. “You want number two. S-U-B-T-L-E.”

  The hand pauses. Moves down. Circles the correct answer. Dodger doesn’t say anything—probably because she’s still in her classroom—but her hand keeps moving as he rattles off the answers, circling and circling. Two of the words she circles are wrong. In both cases, it’s a simple transposition of letters, and Roger realizes she must do even worse in spelling than he does in math: a perfect paper would get her in trouble for cheating. This way, it just looks like she studied extra hard.

  “Gosh, you’re smart,” he says admiringly. “I never thought of that.”

  Dodger’s hand goes up in the air, ramrod straight, even as she lowers her other shoulder to make her hand look even higher. The teacher, who is not as pretty as Miss Lewis, and doesn’t look half so nice, sighs.

  “Yes, Miss Cheswich?”

  “I’m done with my worksheet may I be excused I have to go.” Dodger rattles off the words without hesitation or any sign of embarrassment, even as some of the kids around her put their hands over their mouths to smother their laughter. Roger gapes, his own eyes still closed as he uses hers to watch the classroom. He can’t imagine being so brave.

  Dodger’s teacher looks dubious. She crosses to Dodger’s desk and picks up the worksheet. Her eyes go wide as she skims it. Finally, lowering the sheet, she looks at Dodger. “Very good, Miss Cheswich. I’m surprised.”

  “I studied really hard please can I go to the bathroom?” Dodger squirms to illustrate her point.

  “You may,” says the teacher. “Straight there and straight back. Do not dilly, do not dally, do not stop at the water fountain. I don’t want to go through this again in fifteen minutes.”

  “Thank you Mrs. Butler,” says Dodger, still speaking rapid-fire, like she has a personal vendetta against commas. She’s out of her seat and out of the room before her teacher can change her mind, moving at a fast walk that doesn’t quite break the rules by turning into a run.

  Like Roger, she walks past the bathrooms. Unlike Roger, she doesn’t stop at the janitor’s closet, but keeps going until she comes to the library and lets herself inside. The librarian looks up, sees Dodger, and grimaces sympathetically. She doesn’t say anything as the girl heads for the back of the room, where the air is cool and the smell of old books perfumes everything.

  Dodger drops to the floor, hugs her knees to her chest, and tucks her head against them, creating a small, private space with the frame of her body. “What are you doing?” she demands. “I’m at school.”

  “I know that,” he says, even though he hadn’t been sure when he’d asked to be excused. “What time is it where you are?”

  “Ten,” she says. “I have almost the whole day ahead of me, and now I won’t be able to go to the bathroom even once. Mrs. Butler is really, really strict about potty breaks.” She sounds personally offended by this, like anyone else telling her when she can or can’t pee is a crime against nature.

  Roger is getting the feeling Dodger doesn’t like being told what to do. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I didn’t know what time it was, and I wanted to say sorry.”

  There is a pause before Dodger asks carefully, “Sorry for what?”

  “For laughing. I could tell it upset you, and I didn’t want to upset you. So I’m sorry.”

  “You’re sorry you laughed at me?” Now Dodger sounds puzzled. “Everyone laughs at me, all the time. No one ever says sorry.”

  “How many of them can talk in your head like this?” Roger grins. His mom always says people can hear it in your voice when you smile. He wants Dodger to hear him smiling. “If they cou
ld, I bet they’d say sorry.”

  “Maybe,” she says. Her puzzlement is fading, replaced by caution. “You’re really sorry? You won’t laugh anymore?”

  “I’m really sorry. I might laugh, I guess. Friends laugh at each other, right?”

  “I don’t know.” She changes the subject: “Thanks for helping with my spelling words. I hate spelling. It’s stupid and it doesn’t make sense. But I have to do it.”

  “I like spelling,” says Roger. “Sometimes whether a word is one thing or something else is all about what order one or two letters are in. I’ll help as much as you want, if you’ll help with my math.”

  “It’s a deal,” says Dodger.

  “It was a good idea to get a few of the answers wrong. I didn’t think to do that.”

  Dodger shrugs. “People don’t believe things that are too perfect.”

  There’s something important in that statement. Roger will find himself thinking about it later, turning it over and over again in his mind as he tries to find the flaws. For the moment, and knowing time is growing short for both of them, he pushes on, asking, “How did you know you could come talk to me?”

  “My dad.”

  The answer makes no sense. Roger hesitates for a moment before he says, “I don’t understand.”

  “He was having a fight with my mom about why don’t I have more friends, is there something wrong with me, should they send me away so I can meet other ‘gifted’ kids—that’s what they say when they don’t want to say ‘freak’—and she said I needed time, and he said ‘that imaginary friend of hers was the only one who ever came for a sleepover.’ So later, I asked him what he meant, and he sort of stuttered and stammered and finally said when I was little, I used to talk to this made-up boy called ‘Roger’ all the time, until one day I stopped. That’s how I knew your name. I knew if Roger was real, and I could talk to him, and I could talk to you, that you had to be Roger.”