He’s not supposed to give his address to strangers, but a town isn’t an address, and can a voice inside his head really be considered a stranger? If she’s not real, she doesn’t count, and if she is real (which isn’t possible; there’s no way she can be anything but a very vivid dream), then it’s not like giving her the name of the city tells her how to find the house. “Where are you?”
“Palo Alto.” Her parents must not be as good about teaching her stranger danger, because she continues blithely, “It’s in California. That’s why it’s so much earlier here. Cambridge is in Massachusetts, isn’t it? You’re way far away. In a whole different time zone.”
“What’s a time zone?”
He can hear her perk up. “Did you ever drop an orange in a swimming pool?”
“Um. What?”
“It doesn’t all get wet at the same time. No matter how fast you throw it, part of it will always hit the water firster than the rest of it.” She sounds utterly matter-of-fact. All things can apparently be explained using citrus. “Light is like water that way, and the Earth is like an orange. The whole world doesn’t get daytime at the same time. So it’s a different time where you are than it is where I am. Otherwise, some people would have to get up in the middle of the night and pretend it was morning, and that wouldn’t work.”
In that moment, Roger is sure—absolutely certain—of two things: Dodger is real, and he wants her to be his friend. He grins and his reflection grins back, gap-toothed and excited, despite the lateness of the hour.
“That was almost a metaphor.”
“What?” Dodger sounds horrified. He doesn’t know what she looks like, but he can picture her expression all the same, dismayed and furious. “No it wasn’t! You take that back!”
“It was. The Earth isn’t an orange, and you can’t throw a planet in the pool. You made a metaphor. It’s not all lies.”
“I—you—that’s—” She stops talking and sputters for a few seconds, utterly indignant. Finally, she says, “You tricked me!”
Roger can’t help it. He laughs, even knowing the sound could wake his parents. It’s worth the risk. “You made a metaphor! You did it all by yourself!”
“Oh, why am I even talking to you? Go to sleep.” And just like that, the feeling that he isn’t alone in the bathroom is gone; he’s a laughing boy in his pajamas, alone with his own reflection. He stops laughing. His smile fades.
“Dodger?”
There’s no response.
“Hey, come on. I was only fooling.”
Still there’s no response. When his mother comes, bleary-eyed and irritated, to usher him back to bed, he goes willingly enough, too confused to fight her.
Come morning, he’ll get up, get dressed, and go to school. He’ll turn in his homework, including the finished math sheet. He’ll get a perfect score for the first time since moving beyond addition and subtraction. But all that is in the future, on the other side of the ocean of night flowing silently by. Here and now, Roger Middleton sleeps.
ADDITION
Timeline: 13:08 EST, April 10, 1993 (the following day).
“I was a little concerned about some of this material,” says Miss Lewis, and she’s the most beautiful woman in the world, so everyone is listening, even Marty Daniels, who would rather be reading comic books under his desk. Miss Lewis has dark brown skin and darker brown hair and eyes like the sky after the lights go out, so close to black that they could be any color in the world.
Roger is pretty much in love with her, but he doesn’t think she’d mind if she knew, because someone as beautiful as Miss Lewis has to know that everyone is pretty much in love with her. She walks in a mist of love, smiling benevolently at everyone who passes through it. To do anything else would be cruel, and she’s never cruel. She’s the best second-grade teacher in the universe, and he’s so lucky to have her. All the testing to get into advanced placement was worth it, because it got him Miss Lewis.
Then he sees what she’s holding, and he cringes. Lunch only ended ten minutes ago. How did she already score their math sheets?
He’s going to get in trouble. He’s going to get in trouble, and he’s not going to be allowed to read for a week, and—
And the paper she has put down in front of him has a 100% written in sparkly ink at the very top, with a