Middlegame

by Seanan McGuire

  He doesn’t know how to tell Dodger to take care of herself. She’s his best friend, and she knows that, but he doesn’t know how to make her understand that when she hurts herself, she’s hurting him, too. He doesn’t have the phrases to describe the shape of his fear, and so sometimes he doesn’t say anything at all. Silence is not a natural state for either of them. It’s especially unusual and unsustainable for him, who lives and dies by the word.

  Dodger has reached the bottom of the gully. She shoves herself through a gap in the blackberry brambles that was easier to navigate a year ago, even six months ago, before her hips began spreading—not enough to be noticeable until she’s trying to wiggle through a hole—and her shirt began taking on a different shape, enough so that Roger no longer watches when she’s getting ready for bed, but turns his distant face away. He’s always known she was a girl, and that if she lived in Massachusetts, there’d be questions about crushes and childhood puppy love. He doesn’t feel that way about her, and she doesn’t feel that way about him; he knows that as surely as he knows the color of her hair and the slope of his hands. Not feeling that way about someone doesn’t make it right to look.

  “You still with me?” she asks, even though she knows the answer. They’ve each become adept at sensing the presence of the other, and more, at sensing its absence. He stays awake until her bedtime almost every night, so they can fall asleep together, and she wakes when he does, both of them walking through their lives with the constant, immutable sense of presence at the back of their minds. Sometimes they have to work to turn it off, to split themselves apart. Still, sometimes she needs reassurance.

  “I’m here,” says Roger. His alarm is set: he’s supposed to go downstairs in half an hour for game night with the family. They’re playing Monopoly tonight. He’d crush them all if he let Dodger play, and so he doesn’t, because that wouldn’t be fair; having a tutor living in his head is one thing, but using her to beat his mother at a board game is something else entirely.

  (Melinda Middleton takes her board games very seriously. She plays Candyland the way some people play poker, all close-held cards and thin-lipped frowns. Roger thinks it would be funny, if it wasn’t sort of scary.)

  “Cool,” Dodger says, and sits cross-legged on the ground, backpack in her lap. She unzips it and pulls out her notebook, opening it and looking at the page like she’s trying to read it. She’s not: she’s giving him a chance to see.

  The paper is covered in squiggles, mathematical symbols, and a dismaying number of letters. There aren’t many numbers. That’s the thing with Dodger: she seems to think numbers are irrelevant to the process of doing math. What’s scarier is she seems to be right. She still helps with his math, but hers has progressed to college level and beyond. Half her local library’s reference section is stored under her bed in photocopies that swallow the bulk of her allowance every week. What feels like half his local library’s reference section is there with it, copied by hand in California as he read it, uncomprehending, in Massachusetts.

  “I don’t know what that is,” he says.

  “That’s okay. I didn’t expect you to.” Dodger taps the top of the page, where she’s transcribed an equation. She’s discovered gel pens recently. Her math papers are a rainbow explosion of figures, symbols, and confusing results. “This is a really famous problem by a man named Monroe. There’s a reward for solving it. Like, a lot of money. People have been trying for sixty years, and no one’s been able to figure it out.”

  “And you have?”

  “I have.” Dodger smiles. For the moment, she is still; for the moment, she’s at peace. Roger sometimes feels like he’s the only one who gets to see her that way, and he knows how lucky he is to have that, even as he wishes there was someone else she trusted this much. He’s very far away. They may never meet. They may not even be in the same world—because once you say “I have a friend who talks in my head, and I’m pretty sure she’s real, she knows things I don’t know, and I guess that’s what real looks like,” it’s not such a leap to say “I think she’s in another dimension”—and if she ever gets really hurt, he’s not going to be able to do anything to help her. He can imagine calling the police and trying to make them understand that his imaginary friend who isn’t imaginary has fallen and broken her leg. He’d go to the nuthouse so fast that they’d probably leave his shoes behind like in a cartoon.

  “Can you tell me the answer?”

  “No.” There’s no rancor in her reply: she knows he wouldn’t understand, like he knows she wouldn’t understand if he started trying to explain the etymology of the words they’re both using. They shore up one another’s limits. That means knowing where those limits are. “But if I send this in, if I show my work and send this in…” Her fingers skitter across the page like water bugs across the surface of the pond, hesitant and proprietary all at once.

  “They’d give you the money?”

  Dodger’s smile turns serene. He can feel it. “They’d have to. I did the work, and the rules say anyone can enter, anyone can do the work and enter. It’s a lot of money, Roger.”

  “How much?”

  “Ten thousand dollars.”

  For a moment, Roger is silent, staggered by the size of the figure. Ten thousand dollars is a lot of books, a lot of photocopies; it’s the sort of money even adults only dream about. For Dodger, it could mean her own home computer, one of those fancy ones that does math faster than a calculator, even faster than her; it could mean the tools she’s shown him in her scientific catalogs, the ones that would let her figure out the way the universe is made.

  “I was thinking, if I send it in, and they give me the money … I could say you were my pen pal. That we met last year at chess camp. If you sent me a couple letters, it would be a way for me to have your address that wouldn’t look weird, you know?” She sounds suddenly shy, like she can’t believe she’s saying this out loud. “Ten thousand dollars is a lot of money. I bet my parents would be okay with spending part of the prize on plane tickets, if it was so I could visit a friend. We could come to Cambridge. Me and my parents. Daddy says the East Coast has a lot of history he’d love to see, and Mom likes anything he likes, and I could meet you. You could meet me. For really real, not just like this.”

  Roger is silent. Roger is reeling. This is moving so fast, and what if he sends her a letter and it never gets there? They’ve talked about this before, about the possibility that they’re in different dimensions, talking through some sort of wormhole or cosmic hiccup. About the chance that trying to make contact—because it would be easy to pass a phone number or an address along their mental link, it would be so easy—would sever that bond and leave them both on their own.

  Roger has gotten better at making friends in the past two years. He knows the words they want to hear from him, and he’s no longer so scared of rejection, because he knows Dodger will always be there; if the kids in his class say he’s not worth their time, that won’t render him eternally alone. He’s not sure he could hold on to that confidence if he lost her. And Dodger …

  He’s not in her head all the time. She has class and baths and stuff, and so does he; sometimes they have to walk solo. But he’s never dropped in to find her talking to anyone else about anything that feels like friendship, and when he’s asked, she’s never been willing to answer. It doesn’t feel like she has any friends but him. That’s a little scary.

  “Roger?” she whispers.

  “Are you sure?” He shakes his head. She can’t hear it, but he needs to move. If he opens his eyes, he’ll lose her. He’s had a lot of practice at doing things with his eyes closed. “What if … Remember when we were talking about wormholes and stuff? What if that was true?”

  “I don’t think sending a letter could violate quantum entanglement,” she says. “If you send it and it doesn’t get here, we’ll know we’re not in the same dimension, and we don’t have to try doing this again. But don’t you want to meet me for real?”

  H
e does not. What they have is strange and fragile and it’s the best thing in his world, but it’s also terrifying and weird. It’s not normal. Dodger doesn’t seem to care whether people think she’s normal. Roger does. He likes it when people treat him like everybody else, like he’s just a smart kid and not some sort of circus freak. What if meeting her makes their connection go away and suddenly he’s a lopsided genius again, taking remedial math classes while he argues with college professors about verb tenses? Or what if it’s like on Star Trek, where touching somebody who reads minds makes it worse, and they can never turn off the connection between their thoughts again?

  He’s been quiet too long. Dodger’s hand flashes into her frame of vision as she reaches up and wipes her eyes; she’s crying. He didn’t answer when she asked if he wanted to meet her, and now she’s crying. “Dodge—”

  “Forget it.” She slams the notebook, wrinkling the pages. There are glittering stars drawn on the cover, fidget-constellations marching from margin to margin in silver and purple ink. Somehow that little reminder that she is a person when he’s not around, that she’s not an imaginary friend he can take or leave at will, makes it worse. “It was a stupid idea, okay? I’ll use the money to go to Disney World or something. Roller coasters are like math you can ride.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You should go now, Roger. It’s family game night, isn’t it?” She wipes her eyes again as she stands. “Maybe I can get Dad to play chess with me. You don’t like watching that, anyway.”

  Roger doesn’t say anything. He’s learned to recognize Dodger’s moods: there’s no getting through to her when she’s this upset, and maybe that’s good, because it means he has time to figure out what to say to make her stop crying. It’s not that he doesn’t care about her—he loves her, the way he assumes he’d love a sister—but sometimes changing things isn’t the right thing to do. Sometimes changing things means throwing the whole world out of alignment.

  “Well?” she demands.

  “I’ll come back at bedtime,” he says, and opens his eyes on his own bedroom ceiling. The California afternoon is gone, replaced by the snow outside his window and the gray-and-brown wallpaper he picked out for himself the last time his mother decided to redecorate.

  Carefully, he sits up, checking his body for tingles and numbness. He’s not out of his body when he’s visiting Dodger, but he’s less connected to it than a person is supposed to be. He can forget about it, if he’s gone long enough. Sometimes he snaps back into his own skin and discovers he’s been lying wrong on his arm for an hour, and then everything buzzes and stings while it’s waking up. He’s had to bite his lip more than once to keep from whimpering and attracting the attention of his parents. His mom has already expressed concerns that he might be narcoleptic. He’s had to plead with her not to have him tested, claiming he just gets headaches sometimes.

  (That’s not entirely false: he does get headaches sometimes, and the school nurse has seen enough of them that she was happy to explain to his parents that no, there’s nothing wrong with him, it’s just that kids work their brains too hard and make them hurt sometimes. As long as it’s nothing worse than the occasional nap in a dark room in the middle of the day, there’s nothing for them to worry about. Roger doesn’t like the way she looks at him—with pity, like he’s halfway to becoming an invalid, like she’s trying to protect what remains of his childhood by refusing to refer him to a doctor—but it’s kept his parents from probing any deeper, so he supposes he’s grateful.)

  He’s still sitting on the bed, rubbing his elbow with one hand, when the door swings open and his father is there, dressed in khaki slacks and a button-down white shirt, like he came home from the office five minutes ago. “Roger?” he says. “You feeling up to a little game, sport?”

  “Yeah, Dad,” he says, grinning ear to ear. He slides off the bed, his fight with Dodger already virtually forgotten. He’ll remember it later, but sometimes it’s best to let his brain work like this, puzzling over the problem in the background while he gets on with the business of living. It’ll be okay. It always is. He and Dodger have fought before, and it’s always been okay. So why should this time be any different?

  * * *

  Dodger sits at the kitchen table with her notebook in front of her, trying to make her parents understand. Her frustration is obvious in the red tips of her ears and the high, bright color in her cheeks; no matter how much she explains, there will always be concepts she doesn’t have the words for, ideas she doesn’t know how to express. She wishes Roger were here to feed her what she needs, and she hates herself for being weak enough to need him, and she hates him for being gone.

  Her father picks up the notebook, frowning. He hasn’t looked at any of her “independent study” in years; while he’s happy to stick her schoolwork to the fridge like any proud parent, this isn’t math anymore. This is poetry written in a language he doesn’t know, and something about it makes him feel unnecessary and small, like she’s gone on to decode the universe without him.

  “You’re sure you didn’t copy this out of a book at the library?” he asks, for the third time. “We’re not going to be angry. It’s not like there’s anything wrong with copying things for your own use. It’s only wrong if you pretend you created them.”

  Dodger, thinking of the reams of copier paper beneath her bed, sits up straighter and shakes her head. “No, Daddy,” she says. “I didn’t copy it. Only the equation at the top, in the purple ink. That’s the puzzle Mr. Monroe’s institute has been trying to solve, and I solved it. It’s my work, for real. I can come to the school and do it again while one of the math professors watches, if you want.” She doesn’t really understand the difference between teachers and professors, except that professors know so much more than teachers. Professors are like wizards: they create the universe. Having her work checked by one of them isn’t insulting, like it is when Mr. Blackmore does it. He doesn’t think girls are good at math. When he checks her work, it’s because he knows, all the way to his toes, that she cheated. A professor wouldn’t know that, wouldn’t even think that. A professor would be neutral.

  (And to be honest, somewhere deep, deep down, she harbors the fantasy that if a real professor saw her work, they’d gasp and cry, “This girl is a genius!” and pull her out of elementary school to put her in college, where she could do all the math she wanted, and no one would whisper about her behind their hands or throw things at her “accidentally” during lunch and recess, or make fun of her name, or tell her girls weren’t supposed to be more interested in decimals than dolls. All she has to do is find a way into one of those classrooms, and her future can finally begin.)

  “You say there’s a monetary prize?” The idea of paid academic challenges is nothing new to Peter Cheswich, who has never left academia; he’s seen manna from heaven a time or two, usually as a result of a translation project or the successful unraveling of an ancient riddle. He’s never looked at the math side of things, but math isn’t his forte. The scribbles in his daughter’s notebook (in purple ink, no less!) might as well be cuneiform.

  And yet.

  And yet he knows enough to know she’s smarter than he’ll ever be, especially where things like this are concerned. They’re comfortable—between his classes and Heather’s work at the store, they don’t want for money—but “comfortable” isn’t the same as “wealthy,” and this prize of hers could make a world of difference.

  Dodger nods so vigorously that it looks like her head is in danger of popping clean off. “Ten thousand dollars,” she says. Suddenly shy, she continues, “I was thinking maybe we could take a family trip to Cambridge.”

  “Why Cambridge?” asks Heather.

  “My pen pal lives there,” says Dodger. She’s still the best liar in her household: she sounds utterly sincere. “It could be fun to go and meet him.”

  Heather and Peter exchange a look. Their nine-year-old daughter is talking about flying across the country to meet a boy, and som
ehow the only thing either of them can feel is relief. There’s someone in the world Dodger wants to meet. Someone who isn’t a famous mathematician or a children’s science host. Although …

  “How old is your pen pal?” asks Peter. They try to keep a tight leash on her activities, but she’s slippery when she wants to be. She could easily have started writing to some retired mathematician outside of Harvard and be trying to trick her parents into taking her to meet him. Dodger is young enough that he doesn’t worry about people trying to take advantage of her in the ways young girls are taken advantage of—although he’s aware that she’s a beautiful child, and the day will come when he has to add another layer of paranoia to his daily fears—but that doesn’t mean he’s all right with her corresponding with adults who haven’t been approved.

  “Nine,” she says. “Same as me.” She and Roger have the same birthday, even, like they have the same eyes. Mathematically, they were always meant to be friends, two halves of the same equation, designed to complement one another. She doesn’t say that part. There’s getting your own way and there’s getting in your own way. She’s better at the second than she is at the first, but she’s learning, oh, yes. She’s learning.

  “If I can get one of my colleagues to look over your work, and if it qualifies for this prize, we can discuss it,” says Peter finally. “Assuming you won this prize, most of it would need to go toward your college fund.” Being his daughter, her tuition will be covered if she goes to Stanford. There are still other expenses to consider, books and papers and the like, and that assumes she’s going to live at home, skipping housing costs. Raising a smart child is expensive in ways he could never have considered when he was a young man hoping for a family of his own.