Dodger nods so vigorously that it looks like her head is in danger of popping clean off. “Ten thousand dollars,” she says. Suddenly shy, she continues, “I was thinking maybe we could take a family trip to Cambridge.”
“Why Cambridge?” asks Heather.
“My pen pal lives there,” says Dodger. She’s still the best liar in her household: she sounds utterly sincere. “It could be fun to go and meet him.”
Heather and Peter exchange a look. Their nine-year-old daughter is talking about flying across the country to meet a boy, and somehow the only thing either of them can feel is relief. There’s someone in the world Dodger wants to meet. Someone who isn’t a famous mathematician or a children’s science host. Although . . .
“How old is your pen pal?” asks Peter. They try to keep a tight leash on her activities, but she’s slippery when she wants to be. She could easily have started writing to some retired mathematician outside of Harvard and be trying to trick her parents into taking her to meet him. Dodger is young enough that he doesn’t worry about people trying to take advantage of her in the ways young girls are taken advantage of—although he’s aware that she’s a beautiful child, and the day will come when he has to add another layer of paranoia to his daily fears—but that doesn’t mean he’s all right with her corresponding with adults who haven’t been approved.
“Nine,” she says. “Same as me.” She and Roger have the same birthday, even, like they have the same eyes. Mathematically, they were always meant to be friends, two halves of the same equation, designed to complement one another. She doesn’t say that part. There’s getting your own way and there’s getting in your own way. She’s better at the second than she is at the first, but she’s learning, oh, yes. She’s learning.
“If I can get one of my colleagues to look over your work, and if it qualifies for this prize, we can discuss it,” says Peter finally. “Assuming you won this prize, most of it would need to go toward your college fund.” Being his daughter, her tuition will be covered if she goes to Stanford. There are still other expenses to consider, books and papers and the like, and that assumes she’s going to live at home, skipping housing costs. Raising a smart child is expensive in ways he could never have considered when he was a young man hoping for a family of his own.
But it comes with its own rewards. Dodger lights up, smiling like a sunrise. “I can meet with one of the professors to talk about math? I can really?”
“If I can set it up,” says Peter. His mind is already racing, considering and rejecting names. He needs someone he can trust to take Dodger seriously, despite her age; someone who’ll look at her work for what it is and not let their preconceptions of what a nine-year-old girl is capable of color their reactions. He closes her notebook. “May I take this?”
Dodger wants to tell him no; wants to explain that she needs it to sleep at night. All she does is bite her lip and nod.
Peter smiles. “I’m impressed, baby girl, even if you don’t win this prize. Do you want to play a game of chess?”
“I’ll set up the board,” she says, and she’s out of her chair and already running for the pieces, running for a future filled with professors and prizes, where she’ll be able to finally meet Roger, and he’ll understand that they were always meant to be best friends, forever.
That night she goes to bed and falls asleep almost immediately. She never hears Roger trying to make contact. She’s already too far away.
ISOLATION
Timeline: 9:35 PST, February 11, 1995 (two days later).
It’s nine-thirty in the morning. Dodger is supposed to be in school, but her father got her out with a note and an apology, and here she is walking alongside him, falling into another world. She feels awkward and small in her starched cotton dress and pale pink sweater. This isn’t her: this isn’t how she dresses, or how she stands, or anything. She’s a creature of jeans and blouses with capped sleeves, sneakers and T-shirts and shredded knees. This is the sort of thing she wears when her grandparents come on Easter to take her to church, even down to the pinching patent leather shoes. It feels like a costume. It feels like she’s being