and she stops immediately, looking up at him with those big, sad eyes. She’ll have bruises on her toes in the morning, from balancing on them for so long in shoes that were never intended for this sort of abuse. In the moment, she doesn’t care. Nothing is going to make her care.
Roger laughs unsteadily. “Wow,” he says. “You got really tall.”
Dodger blinks. Then, somehow, somewhere, she finds a smile and offers it to him. “I think you’re taller now,” she says. “You finally caught up.”
“That happens.”
The blonde has recovered her shock and come trotting down the steps to appear at Roger’s shoulder. She looks at Dodger, assessing. She’s scoping out the competition. The fact that she has to hurts Dodger’s heart, as does the obliviousness on Roger’s face. He doesn’t see the signs girls pass between themselves, and that makes her wonder whether boys have a secret language of their own, something she’s never seen and maybe never will.
If it’s a language, he’ll learn it, she thinks fiercely, and she’s never had a truer thought in her life.
“Hi,” says the blonde, interposing herself into the conversation. “I’m Alison. How do you and Roger know each other?” Her hand returns to his arm, resting lightly just above the wrist. If she’s not his girlfriend already, she will be by tomorrow.
Dodger wants to be happy for her, and for him; Roger will enjoy having a girlfriend. She remembers him talking about girls in the confused tone of someone who craves something but can’t even start to explain why he’d want it. She remembers how much that aggravated him; he liked having a definition for everything, even back then. At least now he knows he wants a girl, and here’s a girl volunteering for the position. It may have taken another girl showing up—“the competition,” despite the fact that Dodger is anything but—to make her see it, but that doesn’t change the fact that she’ll probably be good for him. Roger is too smart to like a girl who wouldn’t be good for him.
“We were pen pals when we were kids,” she says, and the lie is so easy that it might as well be the truth, because it’s not like there’s a word for what they were to one another. He was the voice in her head, the reason she learned to read for meaning as well as for superficial content, her best friend and the thing that kept her sane.
He was the first person who ever broke her heart, and that was an important lesson, too. It had taken Roger to teach her the world was cruel, and that was something she’d very much needed to learn.
“Yeah,” says Roger, picking up her cue. He was always good at that. This is the first time she’s seen it from the outside: the way his nostrils flare slightly as he decides which way he’s going to jump, the particular set to his shoulders before he tells a lie. He’s an open book, written in a language few people can read. She supposes she should feel privileged to be one of them. All she’s really managing to feel is tired. “We, um, we were pen pals. For years. Until we just . . . lost touch, I guess.”
She wants to scream at him, to remind him that he’s the one who went silent, leaving her alone in a world that was too loud and too sharp and too unforgiving. She doesn’t. She drops to the flats of her feet, the motion yanking her fingers away from his. There’s no shock when their connection is broken, any more than there was a shock when it began. They were touching. Now they’re not. Linear time may be many things, but it’s not sympathetic about things like this.
“Did you come on purpose?” she asks. “To see me play?”
To her shame and delight (because why would she have thought that? Even for a second, why would she have thought that? But if he didn’t come on purpose, she doesn’t have to let her anger go: the math says she can keep it, if she still wants it), Roger shakes his head. “No. Our class got tickets, and they were good for extra credit, and Alison plays chess.”
“Oh.” Dodger shifts her attention to the blonde—to Alison—allowing herself, for one brutal, self-indulgent second, to look at the other girl the way the other girl is looking at her. As an opponent; as the competition in a game that society