to anyone else about anything that feels like friendship, and when he’s asked, she’s never been willing to answer. It doesn’t feel like she has any friends but him. That’s a little scary.
“Roger?” she whispers.
“Are you sure?” He shakes his head. She can’t hear it, but he needs to move. If he opens his eyes, he’ll lose her. He’s had a lot of practice at doing things with his eyes closed. “What if . . . Remember when we were talking about wormholes and stuff? What if that was true?”
“I don’t think sending a letter could violate quantum entanglement,” she says. “If you send it and it doesn’t get here, we’ll know we’re not in the same dimension, and we don’t have to try doing this again. But don’t you want to meet me for real?”
He does not. What they have is strange and fragile and it’s the best thing in his world, but it’s also terrifying and weird. It’s not normal. Dodger doesn’t seem to care whether people think she’s normal. Roger does. He likes it when people treat him like everybody else, like he’s just a smart kid and not some sort of circus freak. What if meeting her makes their connection go away and suddenly he’s a lopsided genius again, taking remedial math classes while he argues with college professors about verb tenses? Or what if it’s like on Star Trek, where touching somebody who reads minds makes it worse, and they can never turn off the connection between their thoughts again?
He’s been quiet too long. Dodger’s hand flashes into her frame of vision as she reaches up and wipes her eyes; she’s crying. He didn’t answer when she asked if he wanted to meet her, and now she’s crying. “Dodge—”
“Forget it.” She slams the notebook, wrinkling the pages. There are glittering stars drawn on the cover, fidget-constellations marching from margin to margin in silver and purple ink. Somehow that little reminder that she is a person when he’s not around, that she’s not an imaginary friend he can take or leave at will, makes it worse. “It was a stupid idea, okay? I’ll use the money to go to Disney World or something. Roller coasters are like math you can ride.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You should go now, Roger. It’s family game night, isn’t it?” She wipes her eyes again as she stands. “Maybe I can get Dad to play chess with me. You don’t like watching that, anyway.”
Roger doesn’t say anything. He’s learned to recognize Dodger’s moods: there’s no getting through to her when she’s this upset, and maybe that’s good, because it means he has time to figure out what to say to make her stop crying. It’s not that he doesn’t care about her—he loves her, the way he assumes he’d love a sister—but sometimes changing things isn’t the right thing to do. Sometimes changing things means throwing the whole world out of alignment.
“Well?” she demands.
“I’ll come back at bedtime,” he says, and opens his eyes on his own bedroom ceiling. The California afternoon is gone, replaced by the snow outside his window and the gray-and-brown wallpaper he picked out for himself the last time his mother decided to redecorate.
Carefully, he sits up, checking his body for tingles and numbness. He’s not out of his body when he’s visiting Dodger, but he’s less connected to it than a person is supposed to be. He can forget about it, if he’s gone long enough. Sometimes he snaps back into his own skin and discovers he’s been lying wrong on his arm for an hour, and then everything buzzes and stings while it’s waking up. He’s had to bite his lip more than once to keep from whimpering and attracting the attention of his parents. His mom has already expressed concerns that he might be narcoleptic. He’s had to plead with her not to have him tested, claiming he just gets headaches sometimes.
(That’s not entirely false: he does get headaches sometimes, and the school nurse has seen enough of them that she was happy to explain to his parents that no, there’s nothing wrong with him, it’s just that kids work their brains too hard and make them hurt sometimes. As long as it’s nothing worse than the occasional nap in a dark room in the middle of the day, there’s nothing for them to worry about. Roger doesn’t like the way she looks at him—with pity, like he’s halfway to becoming an invalid, like she’s trying to