Middlegame

by Seanan McGuire

  It would be different if they could spend some time in the same place. He’s sure of that. She’s still his best friend, and if they could sit in the same room, not talking, not doing anything but existing, they could get through this. He knows they could.

  “Good morning,” he replies. “Did we forget to sleep again?”

  “I didn’t forget, exactly,” says Dodger. “I had other things to do.”

  “Other things like…?”

  “There was a Nightmare on Elm Street marathon on TV.”

  Roger sighs. “You say you don’t read because you don’t like being lied to by books. Why are you addicted to lousy horror movies? Are you trying to punish me for my sins?”

  “Always,” says Dodger. “Anyway, it’s not like you can see my nightmares. How would you know if I were trying to punish you? Just be glad I like something.”

  “I have to put up with you when you’re exhausted.”

  “Fair point.” She yawns. “Who’s in charge right now?”

  “You are. I’m already at school.”

  “Lucky dick with your free period.” She opens her eyes, giving Roger an unobstructed view of her ceiling. The cartoonish plastic stars from her childhood are gone, replaced by a solid field of dark blue, spattered liberally with glow-in-the-dark paint. She’s charted the cosmos on her bedroom ceiling. It’s lovely. Sometimes when he has trouble sleeping, he’ll ask her to turn off her lights and let him count the painted stars. He’s never gotten to the end before passing out.

  “You could have had a free period too, if you hadn’t decided to do a half-day at Stanford.”

  “Because you would totally have been able to pass that up if you had the option. Shadowing Professor Vernon while he teaches the geniuses of tomorrow? Heaven.” Dodger’s field of vision shifts as she slides off the bed and begins rooting around in the clothes littering her floor. “Although I guess that wouldn’t tempt you.”

  “No, but the language offerings would. I know why you do what you do. I just wish you’d sleep more while you were doing it.”

  “You’re one to talk, Mom.” Over the years since they started speaking again—swearing never to cut contact for any reason short of coma, death, or intensive cramming—they’ve both gotten very good at dressing without looking at themselves. Neither has a mirror in their bedroom. Roger can see this becoming a problem when they hit college. Presumably the dorms will come with mirrors on the closet doors, or with roommates who want to be allowed to hang their own things on the walls. That’s one more bridge to be crossed when they get to it. Assuming they both survive their last year of high school, which seems absolutely likely and utterly impossible at the same time.

  To the cat that’s lived in the shelter for half of its life, the box is the only reality. Adoption is unthinkable. Roger thinks high school is like that box. It’s learning, yes, and he appreciates that, appreciates the time and effort and concern shown by the adults devoted to hammering knowledge into his thick skull. He knows it hasn’t always been easy on them, especially with the range of required subjects they spread out in front of the student body every day. He’d be valedictorian if it weren’t for physical education, which has damaged his GPA—not to the point of putting him completely underwater, but enough that two people were able to squeak past him in the student rankings. One of them is Alison, and that makes him more okay with it.

  Dodger got off easier than he did. Her California curriculum included options like “aerobics” and “swimming” after freshman year, and she’s been able to avoid the horrors of team sports and endurance running. She didn’t do well on her Presidential Fitness Tests, but then, who does? Jocks and people whose native intelligence is in their bodies, not their minds. He can’t be mad at those folks for blowing the bell curve—it’s not like he doesn’t do the same to half his classes. That doesn’t mean he can’t be a little bitter.

  “Plans for the day?” Roger wants another cigarette. Dodger gets mad when he smokes while he’s inside her head. She says it’s rude to subject other people to his filthy habits, even if she can’t actually smell or taste it. He can wait five minutes, until they’ve finished their morning call. This is normalcy. This is something that predates addiction, that will—he hopes—postdate it as well, remaining a normal part of life long after he’s decided that nicotine has become a crutch and kicked it to the curb.

  “School, more school, homework, and then playing chess at the Y,” says Dodger. She leaves her room, heading down the short, familiar hall to the bathroom. Her parents are accustomed to hearing her mumble as she goes about her daily business; when they’ve asked, she’s smiled blithely and told them she’s trying to work out some snarly formulae. If pressed, she’ll start spewing numbers and mathematical concepts until they back off. It’s happened before. Roger has regretted his lack of popcorn every time. “I have a class of middle school kids who want to learn the game, and it looks good on my application forms.”

  “I thought you were going to go to Stanford.”

  She shrugs, face coming into view in the mirror above the sink as she reaches for her hairbrush. She still wears her hair in the bob she had when he saw her playing chess for the first time, short enough to be easily cared for, long enough to remind people that she’s a girl. Not that she needs the reminder anymore: he’d never invade her privacy by looking on purpose, but she’s an adult woman now, like he’s an adult male. She can wear all the shapeless shirts and ripped-up jeans she likes. The essential facts of puberty won’t change.

  “If I go to Stanford, I’ll always be Professor Cheswich’s daughter,” she says, brushing her hair with sharp, almost violent strokes. Roger winces in distant sympathy, aware of her pain without feeling it. “Not only that, but I’ll always be the kid genius who didn’t want to skip the back half of high school. They don’t have much sympathy for that sort of thing around here, you know? No amount of ‘my social development needs me to be around my peers’ will make up for the fact that I could be more than halfway to my degree by now.”

  “Sorry,” says Roger.

  “Don’t be.” Dodger drops her hairbrush into the basket, picks up her toothbrush, covers it in minty paste. “Your parents wouldn’t let you leave high school early, and I can’t blame them. We both needed more time, and you would have missed Alison way too much if you’d broken up with her before you were finished being in love. Brushing my teeth now. Tell me your day.”

  She sticks the toothbrush in her mouth before he can argue that he’s not done being in love with Alison, and even though it’s his turn to talk, he doesn’t start. Because she’s right. He’s not going to cry when he and Alison break up. A year ago, he would have. A year before that, it would have been the end of the world. Everything changes.

  “Class,” he says. “I shouldn’t have much homework, and what I do have, I can finish by five. I’d better finish by five, since that’s when Dad’s coming to take me to the ballgame.”

  Dodger makes a muffled, inquisitive noise around her toothbrush. Roger smiles.

  “Red Sox versus Giants,” he says. “My hometown against yours. I guess we’ll finally know conclusively which is better, huh, California girl? I’ll be sure to send flowers to apologize when we stomp you into the dirt.”

  She spits, rinses her mouth, and says primly, “You’d have to know where I live to do that. Find something else to threaten me with.”

  Roger pauses. “Well, you could give me your address,” he says finally.

  “Nope,” says Dodger. “Try again.”

  Since the chess tournament, it’s been like their childhood positions have been reversed. Roger has offered his home address, his phone number, even a post office box rented with carefully hoarded lunch money, all to give her a means of contacting him that doesn’t involve her voice whispering through his mind, her eyes seeing through his own. She’s always refused. She’s always refused, and more, she’s declined to offer him any of the same things. He knows every inch of her house, from t
he latch that sticks on the back door to the loose baseboard in the computer room where she hides the things she doesn’t want her parents to see—the razor blades she buys at the local pharmacy, the dirty magazines, the caffeine pills, the carefully rolled bag of what could be, but isn’t, oregano—but he wouldn’t know how to get there if he suddenly found himself in Palo Alto. When she’s coming up the walkway and talking to him at the same time she keeps her eyes on the grass or the sky, anything but the landmarks that could lead him to her, everything but the address.

  She’s still avoiding him. That’s more frightening than he has words for—and that’s frightening, too, because he’s supposed to have words for everything. Dodger is hiding something. What it is, he doesn’t know. Doesn’t think he can.

  “If not Stanford, then where?” he asks.

  “I don’t know. Cambridge is excited to have me come for a visit. So is MIT. And there’s always Yale. I know that shouldn’t be anyone’s fallback school—it’s Yale—but their math department doesn’t excite me. Maybe I’ll tour Brown. Or surprise everybody and go to Oxford. I like British food. Most of it, you don’t even have to chew.” She smooths her hair, looking critically at her reflection. “Okay. That’s as presentable as I’m going to get. Look, I need to run. Catch you tonight after your game?”

  “Sure,” says Roger. “Have a great day, okay?”

  Her smile is barely a quirk of her lips, so faint that only years of familiarity allow him to see it for what it is. “Sure,” she says. “Anything you say.”

  Roger opens his eyes. The sky is turning deeper gray; it’s going to rain soon. That thought hurries him away from the tree and toward the front of the school, thoughts of distant friends and impossible connections quickly chased from his mind.

  Later, he’ll wonder how he missed the intonations she was using, the quiet finality of what should have been an ordinary conversation. Later, he’ll blame himself, knowing this was all his fault. Later, he’ll realize how broken she was. But that’s all later. Time is a funny thing; it doesn’t forgive the things we don’t see. Here and now, he’s running, racing against the rain, and he doesn’t have time to worry about a girl on the other side of the country. He doesn’t have time to consider how much they both have to lose. He’s just running.

  In a way, they both are.

  * * *

  Dodger closes her eyes when Roger’s presence fades, waiting to be sure she’s truly alone. Sometimes he comes back after she thinks he’s gone, returning to remind her of something coming up, some appointment or occasion or sporting event he wants her to know about. It’s adorable, the way he takes such care to keep her informed about his life. Like he thinks she can’t survive without the constant lifeboat of his existence to support her. And why shouldn’t he think that? She as much as told him it was true, when they fell back into contact with one another. She said she’d been lost without him. She said she’d been alone. Of course he worries that she’s fragile. He knows she is.

  What he doesn’t know is how alone she still is. Having one friend who might as well have been imaginary had been fine when they were kids, but she’d learned her lesson when his reply to her proposing they meet was to cut her off completely. Roger says he’s not as good a liar as she is—says he’s telling the truth when he talks about the woman who threatened to take him away from his family, that he was only acting out of fear and desperation—but that’s what a good liar would say, isn’t it? She can’t know. She can’t know.

  But she can see how happy he is, how much he enjoys his friends and the girlfriend he loves without being in love with. She can see how well adjusted he is, to steal the language of the adults who study her mental health, watching for signs that genius, like acid, has eaten away at the flesh of her soul. They think she’s well adjusted too. Lonely, sure, but not broken.

  Dodger is many things. Foremost among them: she is a very good liar.

  She walks down the hall to the computer room, knowing her mother will be downstairs in the kitchen with a cup of coffee and the newspaper, listening to her daughter’s footsteps overhead. Morning visits to the computer room are normal, tightly regulated to keep her from being late to school, but expected. No deviation from the pattern here. She’s maintaining the same equation she’s used for every school day so far this year. That’s important.

  The loose baseboard comes away from the wall easily, not making a sound. She’s been planning this day for a while: she knows that, even as she spent more than a year trying to deny it to herself. Why else would she have taken so much care in sanding the edges of the baseboard, creating a perfect, soundless seal? She must have been planning this.

  Dodger is so very, unbearably tired.

  She wouldn’t describe what she feels quite like that, but deep down, she knows “tired” is the right word: maybe the only word. She’s tired. She’s tired of being too smart to slow down and appreciate things that aren’t performing at her level. She’s tired of adults treating her like a circus sideshow and other kids treating her like a freak. (They’re not the same, not quite: to the adults, she’s the strongman, the fire-eater, the girl who dances on the trapeze without a net. To the kids, she’s the bearded woman, the lobster-girl. The adults gape and whisper because of what she can do. The kids her own age do it because of what she is. They’re both right and they’re both wrong and she’s exhausted from the effort of trying to make them understand.) She’s tired of being lonely, and having Roger back in her life has made things worse when it should have made them better, because she always thought he was the same as she was, but he’s not, he’s not. He has friends. He has people. He has a life. And she has numbers, and figures, and math enough to redefine the sky.

  The numbers would have been enough, if she’d never found the door at the back of her own mind, leading to a boy her own age—to the day—who couldn’t finish his worksheet. They might even have been enough if he’d never slammed and locked the doors between them, shutting her out and giving him time to change the world he lived in. She could have adjusted to how much better he was at people than she was, if she’d watched it happen, if he’d boiled her like a frog. But he didn’t do that. He closed her out, and while she was gone he raised the temperature of the water, and now that she’s back, she can’t take it.

  The flaw, she knows, is hers. The weakness is hers. That’s okay. She’s the math girl. She’s the one who appreciates the necessity of the inevitable equation. She can see where these numbers go.

  One by one, she removes her prizes from the space behind the baseboard: the pack of razors, the bottle of painkillers stolen, one and two at a time, from unguarded medicine cabinets and unwatched purses, the topical numbing gel. She’s worked her plan out so carefully. All the pieces need to be perfect. She’s good at perfect.

  She stuffs her prizes into her backpack, returns the baseboard to its place, and stands. Soon—so very soon—Roger won’t have to worry about her anymore, and she won’t have to worry about her loneliness driving him away. She won’t have to worry about anything.

  She only has to be perfect one more time, and she can be done. Relief outweighing her fear, she shoulders her pack and heads for the door. Time for breakfast. Time to say goodbye.

  Perfection

  TIMELINE: 10:37 EST, SEPTEMBER 5, 2003 (SAME MORNING, SAME DAY, ALMOST TOO LATE).

  Roger is in his AP English class, listening to his favorite teacher—Ms. Brown, who will never have his heart the way Miss Lewis did in the second grade, and that’s okay, because he figures no one ever loves anyone the way they love their second-grade teacher—explain King Lear when the world goes white and everything drops away, leaving him suspended, screaming, in a terrible void. It isn’t pain, exactly: pain would require nerves, skin, a body. It’s an anti-pain, a pain born of absence, and because of that, it hurts more than anything.

  The white turns gold around the edges, burning. The transition forces the edges to exist, transforming them into a frame around a place he’s n
ever seen. A skyline, writhed with flame; a road of rainbows, stretched like a soap bubble across the landscape.

  A girl with red hair (he can see the color of her hair) lying sprawled in the dirt, her eyes half-closed, her own pain receding as blood loss wrings her dry. The blood is gray, gray as blood always is when Dodger isn’t with him, but he knows it all the same, yes, he knows it. She’s going. She’s going. She’s not gone yet.

  The Impossible City is burning, he thinks incoherently, and opens his eyes.

  He’s sprawled on the classroom floor, surrounded by the stunned, staring faces of his classmates. The back of his head hurts. He slammed it against the tile at least once when he fell, and maybe more than once, because his hips and shoulders hurt too, like he’s been thrashing, or seizing. The front of his jeans is wet. Normally, that realization would be followed by shame, or anger, or some combination of the two. Here, now, he can’t muster more than a calm confusion. It feels like someone just ran a few thousand volts through his brain, scrambling everything.

  Miss Lewis is kneeling over him, hair hanging to frame her face the way it always did in his dreams, eyes wide and terrified. “Roger, are you all right?” she asks. “Can you hear me?”

  “I love you, Miss Lewis,” he says dreamily, and she isn’t Miss Lewis anymore: she’s Ms. Brown, and this isn’t second grade, and he’s just had a seizure. It’s the only thing that makes sense. It feels like his brain is struggling to reboot, to start making sense of a fall he doesn’t remember and an impact he didn’t feel. There’s a moment of absolute terror—what if this was a stroke? What if he’s had a stroke, and something essential has been lost, and will never come back? What if he’s less now than he was at the beginning of the day? The fear passes quickly. He’s fine. He knows he’s fine, and he knows, with as much certainty as a heart can hold, that he won’t be fine if he doesn’t start moving. This is not a situation that allows for slowing down.