muffled by the worn brown carpet, and seats her at the folding card table that serves as his dining room and study nook. (It’s also where he plays poker with some other members of the English department. None of them are any good, and sometimes he thinks about bringing Dodger along, just to see the looks on their faces when she takes them for everything they have.)
Dodger won’t stop shaking. He wants to hug her and tell her everything is going to be all right, and he doesn’t want to lie to her. He knows she’d believe him; that’s why he can’t do it. Instead, he fills two mugs with coffee, reheating them in the microwave. His is taken black, with two sugars. Hers, with milk and six sugars. Hummingbird girl, running on caffeine and borrowed energy. He’s seen what happens when that energy runs out. He never wants to see it again.
“Here you go,” he says, setting the mug in front of her.
She picks it up; wraps her hands around it; doesn’t drink. She seems content to hold it, letting the warmth seep through the ceramic and into her skin. Eyes on the liquid, she says, “The phone rang. I have tutoring sessions in the Life Sciences Annex. Had. I had tutoring sessions in the Life Sciences Annex. I don’t anymore; they’re canceled. The building burned down last night, sometime after the rain stopped. It was . . . They think it was some sort of wiring fault that managed to catch fire. Once it reached the chemistry labs, it found all the accelerants it needed to beat the weather. Those labs aren’t even supposed to be there. They were going back to their own building as soon as their plumbing was repaired. A freak accident. People are going to call it a freak accident. Maybe it was. I don’t know. Maybe it was. But. But.”
“But what?” he asks gently. He already knows—she was clear when she showed up on his doorstep, even if she didn’t give many details—but he doesn’t want to accept it. Not yet. Maybe if he asks the question the right way, he’ll get a different answer.
“But Smita was in her lab,” whispers Dodger, bringing his hopes crashing down around him. “They found . . . they found her body when they went looking for survivors.”
Something occurs to him. “How do you know all this?”
“The Dean’s office called to say my tutoring sessions were canceled. I guess they’re contacting everyone who’s supposed to have been in there today, to try to keep us from showing up at a smoking ruin.” She looks up. There are tears in her eyes. Still or again, it doesn’t really matter. “Erin was already up. She said she’d been out when the police arrived last night, and heard them talking. She didn’t wake me when she got home, because she knew I was going to find out eventually. She didn’t want to be the one who told me.”
Privately, Roger thinks Erin made the right call. He wouldn’t have wanted to be the one to put this expression on Dodger’s face, and he knows from past experience that he’s the one person who will always be forgiven. He could destroy the world, and she’d love him on the other side of the rubble. That’s what it means to be entangled like they are. That’s what it means to be family.
“Smita probably collapsed from smoke inhalation before she could get to the stairwell,” continues Dodger. “She was fighting all the way to the end. She died before the fire reached her. I guess that’s a good thing. Burning alive isn’t a good way to go.” She says it with such conviction that for a moment, Roger could almost believe she knows from experience.
(The thought is followed by another: he could almost believe he knows from experience. He remembers—although of course it’s not a memory; better to say he imagines—flames closing in on them in an underground corridor ringed with broken windows like blinded eyes. They never looked out on anything real. He imagines remembering putting his arms around her as the flames drew closer, all avenues of escape long since closed; imagines remembering her laughter, thin and brittle and bitter, as she said, “Well, at least this time’s not bullets.” Then, the fire, and his final plea for another chance, before the inferno took them both.)
Roger shudders. Sometimes a vivid imagination is closer to a curse than a blessing. “God, Dodge, that’s