He knows so many words, to describe so many things. His vocabulary has grown immeasurably, aided in a sideways manner by the girl whose head he currently occupies. Once his math scores started rising, his teachers became more understanding of his boredom. They knew how to handle a well-rounded genius in a way they’d never been able to handle a focused one. He’s spent the last two years reading whatever he wants, providing he keeps the rest of his grades up. He’s taking German, French, and Mandarin. He’s learnt so many new concepts, and the words to pin them to the surface of his soul, perpetual and immutable. Without words, some things would slip away, impossible to describe and hence impossible to hold.
He doesn’t know how to tell Dodger to take care of herself. She’s his best friend, and she knows that, but he doesn’t know how to make her understand that when she hurts herself, she’s hurting him, too. He doesn’t have the phrases to describe the shape of his fear, and so sometimes he doesn’t say anything at all. Silence is not a natural state for either of them. It’s especially unusual and unsustainable for him, who lives and dies by the word.
Dodger has reached the bottom of the gully. She shoves herself through a gap in the blackberry brambles that was easier to navigate a year ago, even six months ago, before her hips began spreading—not enough to be noticeable until she’s trying to wiggle through a hole—and her shirt began taking on a different shape, enough so that Roger no longer watches when she’s getting ready for bed, but turns his distant face away. He’s always known she was a girl, and that if she lived in Massachusetts, there’d be questions about crushes and childhood puppy love. He doesn’t feel that way about her, and she doesn’t feel that way about him; he knows that as surely as he knows the color of her hair and the slope of his hands. Not feeling that way about someone doesn’t make it right to look.
“You still with me?” she asks, even though she knows the answer. They’ve each become adept at sensing the presence of the other, and more, at sensing its absence. He stays awake until her bedtime almost every night, so they can fall asleep together, and she wakes when he does, both of them walking through their lives with the constant, immutable sense of presence at the back of their minds. Sometimes they have to work to turn it off, to split themselves apart. Still, sometimes she needs reassurance.
“I’m here,” says Roger. His alarm is set: he’s supposed to go downstairs in half an hour for game night with the family. They’re playing Monopoly tonight. He’d crush them all if he let Dodger play, and so he doesn’t, because that wouldn’t be fair; having a tutor living in his head is one thing, but using her to beat his mother at a board game is something else entirely.
(Melinda Middleton takes her board games very seriously. She plays Candyland the way some people play poker, all close-held cards and thin-lipped frowns. Roger thinks it would be funny, if it wasn’t sort of scary.)
“Cool,” Dodger says, and sits cross-legged on the ground, backpack in her lap. She unzips it and pulls out her notebook, opening it and looking at the page like she’s trying to read it. She’s not: she’s giving him a chance to see.
The paper is covered in squiggles, mathematical symbols, and a dismaying number of letters. There aren’t many numbers. That’s the thing with Dodger: she seems to think numbers are irrelevant to the process of doing math. What’s scarier is she seems to be right. She still helps with his math, but hers has progressed to college level and beyond. Half her local library’s reference section is stored under her bed in photocopies that swallow the bulk of her allowance every week. What feels like half his local library’s reference section is there with it, copied by hand in California as he read it, uncomprehending, in Massachusetts.
“I don’t know what that is,” he says.
“That’s okay. I didn’t expect you to.” Dodger taps the top of the page, where she’s transcribed an equation. She’s discovered gel pens recently. Her math papers are a rainbow explosion of figures, symbols, and confusing results. “This is a really famous problem by a man named Monroe. There’s a reward for solving