it. Like, a lot of money. People have been trying for sixty years, and no one’s been able to figure it out.”
“And you have?”
“I have.” Dodger smiles. For the moment, she is still; for the moment, she’s at peace. Roger sometimes feels like he’s the only one who gets to see her that way, and he knows how lucky he is to have that, even as he wishes there was someone else she trusted this much. He’s very far away. They may never meet. They may not even be in the same world—because once you say “I have a friend who talks in my head, and I’m pretty sure she’s real, she knows things I don’t know, and I guess that’s what real looks like,” it’s not such a leap to say “I think she’s in another dimension”—and if she ever gets really hurt, he’s not going to be able to do anything to help her. He can imagine calling the police and trying to make them understand that his imaginary friend who isn’t imaginary has fallen and broken her leg. He’d go to the nuthouse so fast that they’d probably leave his shoes behind like in a cartoon.
“Can you tell me the answer?”
“No.” There’s no rancor in her reply: she knows he wouldn’t understand, like he knows she wouldn’t understand if he started trying to explain the etymology of the words they’re both using. They shore up one another’s limits. That means knowing where those limits are. “But if I send this in, if I show my work and send this in . . .” Her fingers skitter across the page like water bugs across the surface of the pond, hesitant and proprietary all at once.
“They’d give you the money?”
Dodger smiles serenely. He can feel it. “They’d have to. I did the work, and the rules say anyone can enter, anyone can do the work and enter. It’s a lot of money, Roger.”
“How much?”
“Ten thousand dollars.”
For a moment, Roger is silent, staggered by the size of the figure. Ten thousand dollars is a lot of books, a lot of photocopies; it’s the sort of money even adults only dream about. For Dodger, it could mean her own home computer, one of those fancy ones that does math faster than a calculator, even faster than her; it could mean the tools she’s shown him in her scientific catalogs, the ones that would let her figure out the way the universe is made.
“I was thinking, if I send it in, and they give me the money . . . I could say you were my pen pal. That we met last year at chess camp. If you sent me a couple letters, it would be a way for me to have your address that wouldn’t look weird, you know?” She sounds suddenly shy, like she can’t believe she’s saying this out loud. “Ten thousand dollars is a lot of money. I bet my parents would be okay with spending part of the prize on plane tickets, if it was so I could visit a friend. We could come to Cambridge. Me and my parents. Daddy says the East Coast has a lot of history he’d love to see, and Mom likes anything he likes, and I could meet you. You could meet me. For really real, not just like this.”
Roger is silent. Roger is reeling. This is moving so fast, and what if he sends her a letter and it never gets there? They’ve talked about this before, about the possibility that they’re in different dimensions, talking through some sort of wormhole or cosmic hiccup. About the chance that trying to make contact—because it would be easy to pass a phone number or an address along their mental link, it would be so easy—would sever that bond and leave them both on their own.
Roger has gotten better at making friends in the past two years. He knows the words they want to hear from him, and he’s no longer so scared of rejection, because he knows Dodger will always be there; if the kids in his class say he’s not worth their time, that won’t render him eternally alone. He’s not sure he could hold on to that confidence if he lost her. And Dodger . . .
He’s not in her head all the time. She has class and baths and stuff, and so does he; sometimes they have to walk solo. But he’s never dropped in to find her talking