to the much more carefully stored bins of blocks and tinker toys and geometric wooden shapes. A tower stands in one corner of the room, bright blue blocks piled higher than he thought gravity would allow.
Dodger looks at the tower and smiles, smug. “I figured out how to position the bases for maximum stability,” she says. “I think I can get another six or seven layers on before it falls down. I’m going to do it this weekend. I’ll call when I’m done, so you can see.”
“Okay,” says Roger, awed. If he could do that . . . “Um. I got a perfect on my math paper.”
“You told me.”
“I don’t want my teacher to think I cheated.”
“You didn’t cheat,” says Dodger matter-of-factly. She walks to her bed and sits, one foot tucked under her body, the other dangling. Roger is a passenger, not a driver, but he’s painfully aware of every move she makes, like someone is writing down every single gesture and reading them off to him, only slightly delayed. “There’s nothing in the rules about a voice in your head telling you what the answers are supposed to be. I checked.”
“I think the rules think any voices in your head will belong to you,” says Roger.
Dodger shrugs. “It’s not my fault the rules don’t think of everything.”
“I guess not.” Roger pauses before he says, “If it’s not cheating, can you keep helping with my math? Not just doing it. I mean. I like you doing it. But can you make me understand it? I need to be able to do it for myself, too.”
“If you can help me with my reading. And my spelling.” Dodger wrinkles her nose. “I hate spelling. It doesn’t make sense.”
“It does, once you know the rules,” says Roger. He’s almost giddy with relief. This will make everything so much easier, and if she’s right—if this isn’t cheating—then there’s nothing wrong with doing things this way. They can help each other. They can shore up the broken places. He knows the words for this: cooperation, symbiosis, reciprocity. So many words, and he’ll teach her all of them, if she’ll just keep being his friend.
“Okay,” says Dodger, sounding suddenly shy. “Let’s do it.”
“Okay,” says Roger. Then: “I have to go. It’s dinnertime. Talk to you later?”
“Okay,” says Dodger, for the second time.
In his room in Massachusetts, Roger opens his eyes. His mother is calling him down to dinner. Grasping his math worksheet in one hand, he runs to tell her about his day.
Dodger feels the moment Roger’s presence leaves her mind the way she’d feel a cotton ball being pulled out of her ear: a sudden absence, creating a space for the world to rush into. She flops backward and closes her eyes, fighting the urge to call his name and push herself into his life the way he’d been riding along on hers. It’s hard. In the end, she perseveres. If there’s one thing Dodger has a lot of experience with, it’s being alone.
Her parents would never call her lonely, if anyone thought to ask them. Sure, she’s alone a lot of the time, but she has friends. They’re sure of it. Absolutely sure. They’d be horrified if Dodger ever bothered to tell them how wrong they were.
Maybe if she’d been Roger, smart about books and words and spelling and stuff, she could have made friends. Book-smart is okay for girls, as much as any sort of smart is okay for girls. But math-smart isn’t the same. Math-smart belongs to skinny boys with glasses and pocket protectors and heads full of science. That’s what the books say. That’s what the TV says. And that’s what her classmates say in a thousand tiny ways, every time she finishes her math book ahead of the rest of them. Even the math-smart boys don’t like her, because she’s smarter than them, and some things are too much to be borne.
She’s learnt to make it look like she doesn’t care. She’s not class clown—one-liners and comebacks aren’t her forte—but she’s brassy and loud and she talks like nothing matters. She’s been to see the principal for squirming and shouting more than half the boys she knows, which has earned her a certain grudging respect, even though she still sits alone at lunch every day. Her teacher doesn’t like her because she’s a disruption. The school librarian loves her, though, and lets her hide in the cool dark when she needs to. She’ll survive. She knows that. She’ll survive,