Middlegame

by Seanan McGuire

  “Yeah,” he says, feeling a strange relief wash over him. If she knows he’s color-blind, it’s because she remembers looking through his eyes, seeing the ways the world differed from her expectations. She’s remembering that it wasn’t all some weird childhood hallucination. “I mean, I know it’s red, it’s just not … it doesn’t look red to me, you know?”

  “I know.” She lowers her hand. “I’ve thought about it. Especially after … after. I didn’t like how easy it was for people to spot me. But I could never go through with it. I don’t know why. It just seemed … wrong.”

  “You wouldn’t be able to draw fire like you’re supposed to,” says Roger without thinking, and stops dead, staring at her as she stares at him. His words are true: he knows that, without knowing how he knows it. (And hasn’t that always been the way? A lifetime studded with facts he knows beyond the shadow of the doubt, never with any proof to back them up. It’s not scientific. It’s not scholarly. It’s just the way things are.)

  Dodger shakes her head, visibly unnerved. “I think you’re right,” she says, in a small voice. She sounds scared, and Roger hates himself a little for making her sound like that. Dodger isn’t supposed to be scared. She’s supposed to be the brave one. It’s the compensation for her also being the breakable one.

  Silence spools out between them. If they let it go on for too long, they’re never going to break free. Roger does the first thing he can think of: he drops his chessboard onto the clear spot Dodger has formed on the table, and asks, “You want to go get some pieces?”

  She laughs, and everything is going to be okay. At least for now, everything is going to be okay.

  “No, but I’ll go get a chess set,” she says. “The whole thing. This is amateur hour. I mean, really, Roger.” She breezes past him, twisting her body at the last moment to keep their shoulders from touching. He wonders how long it will be before they feel comfortable with physical contact. He wonders whether they’ll be able to be in one another’s presence for that long. The last thing he wants to do is drive her away again, or drive her to do something she can’t take back. She’s wearing a short-sleeved shirt. He saw the scars on her arms.

  It’s difficult not to think he had something to do with putting them there. He knows he didn’t. That doesn’t change anything. The mind is an imperfect engine, and it does what it will with the information it receives. He failed to see how lonely she was; she felt he didn’t need her; events followed their natural course. It wasn’t his fault. It could never have been his fault. But he didn’t see it coming, and he should have. Somehow, he should have.

  When Dodger returns she finds him outside the sliding glass door, crouching on the concrete step that serves as their “porch,” scratching old Bill behind the ears. The ragged battle-axe of a tomcat is purring so loud she can hear it from three feet away, almost tumbling over himself in his effort to get closer to Roger’s practiced fingers.

  “You have a cat?” she asks, putting the chess set she carries down on the table.

  “Not right now,” he says. “Student housing wasn’t so good for pet ownership, and I just moved off-campus. My most recent ex-girlfriend had one, though. She got a note from her psychiatrist calling it a necessary therapy animal, and we mostly spent time in her room.”

  “Oh,” says Dodger. “What was her name?”

  “Zucchini.”

  Dodger blinks.

  Roger looks over his shoulder, sees her expression, and bursts out laughing. “Oh, man, your face—not the girlfriend, Dodge, the cat. The cat was named Zucchini. The fact that I gave you the cat’s name first explains why we broke up. We were both exhausted all the time, and I’d go to her place to pet the cat and try to ease my nerves. Eventually, Kelly decided she wanted to find a boyfriend who’d pet the Kelly instead of the kitty, and we parted ways. Amiably.”

  He’s good at that: parting amiably. Every relationship he’s ever been in has ended amiably. Even his relationship with Alison, which had had the most potential to go horribly wrong, ended with the two of them being perfectly civil to each other when they passed in the halls or met in class. Parting amiably is one of his great skills.

  Except with Dodger. Every time they’ve parted has been incredibly traumatic, for both of them. He gives the cat one last scratch and stands, stepping back into the apartment and closing the glass door before old Bill can follow. The big tom tries anyway, stepping right up to the glass and meowing. His eyes are locked on Roger.

  “You’re doomed,” says Dodger, laying out the chess set. Her movements are quick, practiced, precise; she barely looks at the pieces before putting them on the board. If it were possible for someone to feel the difference in color between two otherwise identical pawns, she’d be doing it. “That cat knows a sucker when he sees one, and now you’re doomed. It’s been nice knowing you.”

  “Now, you and I both know that hasn’t always been true,” he says.

  Dodger pauses for an instant before she resumes setting out the pieces, hands moving too fast to be acting on anything but autopilot. “Maybe not, but it’s polite to pretend,” she says. She sets out the last piece, puts the shoebox she was taking them out of aside, and sits, taking the chair farthest from where he’s standing. This puts her on the black side of the board. Normally, they’d agree to the sides they were playing, he knows that. He isn’t going to object. If she’s choosing her color based on whether it keeps her away from him, he’s not going to pursue.

  He sits. Then he frowns, squinting at the set, and leans forward to pick up a bishop, rolling it over in his hand. “Isn’t this the set you used to keep down in the gully?” he asks. “I remember when you thought you’d lost your bishop. You were inconsolable for days. And then it rained, and washed the mud away so you could find the missing piece, and you started keeping everything in your room, because an incomplete chess set wasn’t any good.”

  “You kept saying that even if the piece was lost forever, I could find a new one. You said you’d look in every Goodwill in Massachusetts if you had to.”

  “I was really hoping I wouldn’t have to,” he says. “I hate seeing you cry, but I had no idea how I was going to explain to my parents that I needed to buy just one chess piece and mail it to a girl in California.”

  “At least then you would have let me give you my address.”

  “I don’t think I could have found a way to avoid it.”

  “Maybe it would have been better for both of us if the bishop had stayed lost.” She finally looks up. They really do have the same eyes. He wears glasses and she doesn’t, but their irises are the same. It’s like finding someone who shares his fingerprints. “I would have had a return address. I could’ve written you letters. Made you talk to me.”

  “Dodger, we were nine.”

  “Nine-year-olds are still people and can still feel pain. That’s a scientific fact.” She drops her eyes back to the chessboard. “Your move, Roger.”

  So he moves, and she moves, and for a few minutes, all is silence: their focus is on the game. He takes his time with his choices, shifting the pieces in a defensive pattern he’s hoping will keep him on the board for at least a while.

  Dodger doesn’t play defensively. Dodger plays so offensively that it’s almost profane, and it’s almost poetry, and there’s no contradiction in those things—no contradiction at all. She was good when she was a teenager, playing masters and grandmasters all over the country in her black and white schoolgirl outfits, but she also played like a teenager; she understood the game innately enough to be a workman. She hadn’t been possessed of the kind of experience that would make her an artist. She has that experience now. Her every move is ruthless, designed to end the game as quickly as possible. They’re not just playing different sides: they’re playing different games, him to last, her to end.

  “You’re good,” he says.

  “I always was,” she says.

  Roger pauses in the act of reaching for a pawn, hesitates, and pulls his hand ba
ck, letting it rest in his lap. He waits.

  As he’d expected, Dodger is still not built for patience: stillness is anathema to her. She can stop when she has to, can transmute physical motion into mental; anyone who’s ever seen her doing math knows she can go without moving for hours if she has the right kind of problem to occupy her mind. But this is not a problem she can solve. This is an interaction, one person answering the other, and he is refusing to give her the satisfaction of progress.

  Seconds tick by, forming minutes, until she can’t take it anymore. Her head comes up, her eyes narrowing. Blood is rising in her cheeks, and for the first time since their game began, she is present: she is engaged. “I know you’re not this bad,” she says. “Move your piece.”

  “What if I don’t want to?”

  “Then forfeit, and call the game in my favor.”

  “What if I don’t want to do that either?” Roger shows her his empty hands before letting them rest on the table. “I want to talk to you. I came here because I wanted to talk to you.”

  “So talk.”

  “I tried that. You didn’t answer me. I’m not leaving until you talk to me, Dodger. I saved your life. You owe me at least a conversation.”

  Dodger blinks, the blood draining out of her face a drop at a time, until she’s as pale as ever, a wax figure of a mathematician. Then, with a shake of her head, she laughs. “Really?” she asks, syllables distorted by her amusement but comprehensible for all of that. “That’s what you’re going to go with? ‘I saved your life’? I didn’t ask you to, Roger. I went out of my way to make sure I’d be able to go down to the gully and do what needed to be done while you weren’t looking. You were never supposed to know.”

  “If you hadn’t been so damn determined to shut me out, you’d be asking yourself how I knew.” Roger glares. He’s been trying to keep himself from getting angry, but there’s only so much he can take before enough is enough. “Quantum entanglement, remember? That whole ‘I say it and you hear it on the other side of the country’ gig? Turns out it’s good for more than just giving you the answers on a pop quiz.”

  Dodger frowns at him. Unlike her smiles, her frowns engage her whole mouth, making her look utterly perplexed. “What do you mean? You felt me cut myself? You never felt anything I did to myself before.”

  (Thank God for that. Both of them had been terrified, after they restored contact, that the other would somehow pick up on certain things. Certain personal things. Roger liked girls, but the idea of a girl—any girl, but especially this girl—coming along for the ride when he was alone under the covers was enough to darken even the teenage libido. Experiments and trials had followed, until they were both satisfied that only their thoughts could cross the void between them. Feelings, emotional or otherwise, were not capable of making the jump. Except that her feelings had, when she was almost at the end. Trauma could work miracles.)

  “I mean that when your heart started getting fucked up because it didn’t have enough blood to beat, so did mine,” he says grimly. “I had a seizure in class. I blacked out and hit my head on the floor, and when I woke up, I knew you’d done something to yourself. I knew you’d hurt yourself, and I was thousands of miles away, and I couldn’t do a damn thing to help. I called for you. I screamed. You didn’t answer.”

  Dodger turns away, refusing to look at him. Too bad. The floodgates are open: the story is coming out now, whether he wants it to or not. He’s spent too many years unable to be mad at her, because she was too far away, because she wasn’t speaking to him, because he honestly wasn’t sure she was still alive. Well, she’s alive now; she’s here now, sitting on the other side of a table, shying away from the touch of his hand like he had been the one to hold the razor blade.

  Maybe he has some culpability here. Maybe he missed the signs; maybe he helped to create an essential weakness in her foundations when he cut off contact at nine years old. Maybe no one is an island. But in the end, he’s not the one who fed her a bottle of painkillers and opened her wrists. He missed the signs. He was seventeen years old. There’s a point where blaming himself has to end, and he’s finally reached it.

  “I had three seizures while your brain tried like hell to take me down with it. Three. The third one hit right after I called your dad. I passed out in the middle of Harvard Square, in the rain, by myself. It’s a miracle I didn’t wake up in jail on a public drunkenness charge.” It’s a miracle he woke up at all. He’s thought, more than once, about how easy it would have been for him to have rolled over during one of his seizures, leaving him to drown in the heavy September rain. As ironic ways to go went, that one was pretty high on the list.

  Dodger is staring at him in undisguised horror. “I didn’t know,” she whispers, and he doesn’t doubt her, and it doesn’t matter.

  “Didn’t know all that happened, or didn’t know all that would happen?” he asks.

  “Either. Both. I swear, Roger, I didn’t know I could hurt you by hurting myself. I would never—”

  “Yeah, you would,” he says gently. She goes still. “Dodge, you’re my best friend. Always. Even when we’re not talking—and I sort of feel like we’ve spent more time not talking than we have talking, at this point—you’re my best friend. Hell, I would have flunked second grade if not for you. Did you really think it wouldn’t hurt me to lose you? Like, honestly and truly? Fuck, just almost losing you hurt like hell. And then you shut me out so hard that I started thinking you were dead after all, or that you’d gone without oxygen for so long that you’d managed to damage yourself and couldn’t hear me anymore.”

  “I heard you,” she whispers, chin dipping toward the table again. “I always hear you.”

  “So why the hell didn’t you answer?”

  “I was mad,” she says. “I woke up in the hospital, and they were saying some boy from New England called my dad at work to brag about how he’d cut me up and left me for dead, and I knew it had to be you. I knew they were wrong about why you’d called—I knew you wouldn’t have called because you were glad I was dying—but I knew you’d called and ruined everything, again. So I was mad. And I was grateful, because once I wasn’t dead, I didn’t want to be. I wanted to have died. I didn’t want to be dead. I told myself you were a dream, a bad dream that wouldn’t go away, and somehow, I … I believed it.”

  There’s so much she can’t figure out how to say in words. How her mother cried, and how it hurt to know she was the reason for that expression on her mother’s face, that utter and total despair. How her father raged for days, losing his temper at the slightest thing, calling the police over and over to shout at them about how they weren’t doing their jobs if they couldn’t find the boy who’d hurt his daughter. How the police had known from the start that it was a suicide attempt, and just humored her parents. How she found them sitting on the couch, holding each other and sobbing when they thought she wouldn’t hear them. Removing herself from the equation had seemed like the easiest solution when she had decided to do it. She hadn’t realized just how many sub-formulae depended on her until it was almost too late.

  “I didn’t want to be grateful to you, you know,” she continues, voice still soft and level. “I was so mad at you, all the time.”

  “Because I stopped talking to you when we were kids? I thought we had—I mean, I thought you had accepted my apology.”

  “Of course I accepted your apology. What else was I supposed to do?” She shakes her head. “If someone says ‘sorry’ and you don’t say ‘it’s okay, I’m not mad anymore,’ you’re a bad person. Especially if you’re a girl. And I missed you so bad, I thought it would be okay. I thought I could say ‘we’re okay’ and make it be true. But the numbers didn’t add up. I couldn’t understand how you could mean so much to me and I could mean so little to you.”

  “You never meant anything less than the world to me, Dodger,” says Roger. “It’s just that my family needed me more than you did. When we were kids, you were always the one running ahead. You never loo
ked to see if you were going to fall. I figured you’d do better without me than I would without you.”

  “I only ran like that because I knew you’d always be there to catch me,” she says. “You were my safety net. You meant I couldn’t hurt myself too badly.”

  “I caught you and you left me,” he says. “What does that mean?”

  “That I’m really stupid for a smart person?” A tear rolls down her cheek. She swipes it away with the back of her hand. “I thought you’d be as messed-up as I was when I saw you again, and you were fine. You had friends, you had a girlfriend, and I had this big notebook filled with apologies that might be good enough to make you love me again. I didn’t know how to deal. So I ran the numbers, and figured you’d be better off without me.”

  “I never was, Dodge,” he says.

  She sniffles, and that’s it, that’s it: he can handle a lot of things, but he can’t stand seeing Dodger cry. He’s up before he has time to consider the ramifications of his action, moving to kneel next to the chair where she sits, and put his arms around her, and let her bury her face against his shoulder. There’s no way to keep skin from touching skin in this position, and that’s all right; if that means their quantum entanglement gets worse, well, it’s not like she didn’t already almost kill him. Maybe a little more severity would have meant he could feel her picking up the razor, and things would never have gone that far.

  “Alison dumped me for running off campus after I had my first seizure. She couldn’t be with someone who’d do something like that to himself, or to her. I didn’t blame her then and I don’t blame her now. It was a pretty amiable breakup.”

  “It had to be,” mumbles Dodger, her voice muffled by his shoulder. She’s not lifting her head. She’s not loosening her grip either; she’s holding on like she suspects this all of being a dream that’s about to end and leave her falling. “If you’d stayed together, she would have told the police they were looking for you, eventually. She would have gotten scared.”