refusal to be quiet, but his body knows it’s supposed to be asleep. When he’s sure he can walk without falling he shuffles out of his room and down the hall. The house is as close to silent as it ever gets. The clock downstairs in the kitchen ticks to itself; a branch scrapes against the hallway window; the wind whistles through the eaves. There’s a dreamlike quality to everything, divorced from the waking world by the strangeness of it all.
(It has to happen now, he realizes, dimly aware that the things he’s experiencing should seem impossible. Two years ago, he would have accepted voices in his head helping him with his homework as so natural that he’d have told everyone about it, cheerfully unaware that some things are best kept secret. Two years from now, he would think hearing voices meant he was going crazy and would claw himself to ribbons trying to make it stop. This is the perfect time. This is the one point on his timeline where contact can be made without trauma or damage. He doesn’t know how he knows that, or why he’s so sure that two years in either direction would change everything, but he’s seven years old; he accepts his conclusion without questioning it.)
The door to his parents’ room is closed. He’s the only one awake. Well, him, and Dodger—but she doesn’t count, does she? She’s in a different house, a different place entirely. If she exists at all.
He trails a hand along the wall as he walks, feeling the worn places in the wallpaper. His fingers have sketched them, night after night. When he was small, he used to reach up to find the wall, letting his hand land at a level even with his ears. As he got taller, his hand dropped to shoulder height. Now it trails slightly above his waist, following the same track it always has. Sometimes in the morning he looks at that worn strip of wallpaper and thinks about what it means: how soon he’ll need to reach down to keep running his fingers along the same patch of wall. How he’s growing, a little more every day, and nothing stays the same forever.
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 him tells 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?”