at nine.” And she’s walking again, moving faster now, like she’s trying to get away from something that may or may not pursue.
Roger doesn’t want to be the thing that chases her. He pulls back, opens his own eyes, and watches, from his familiar point of view, as she disappears through the door at the back of the arena. Alison is tugging on his arm. He turns, and the way she’s looking at him makes him realize things have changed; introducing another girl into the mix made her start looking at him the way he’s been looking at her for ages. Part of him wants to be overjoyed. The rest of him is muddled and confused, not sure how to cope with the speed at which everything is shifting around him.
“You want to get a soda?” he asks, and is rewarded by her smile blossoming like a flower, and maybe everything isn’t so complicated after all.
Dodger plays three more games that day, and she wins them all, although two of them are closer than she likes: after the third, when they’re packing their things, the event organizer comes over to thank her for making things more interesting for the audience. Dodger, who can see the mathematical possibilities of the game spreading out in front of her with every move, who might as well have a map in hand every time she picks up a pawn, says nothing. She can’t toy with her opponents the way they want her to, and she can’t be distracted every time she sits down to play; neither would be fair, either to her or to the people she plays against. When she’s at the table, she needs to know the people she’s challenging will fight her with everything they have. Anything less would be cruel.
(This is her first chess tour. She signed up for the college credit, and because her father promised she could audit one of Professor Vernon’s courses if she did something extracurricular this semester. She loves Professor Vernon. He’s been a mentor to her, and she thinks losing Roger would have broken her even worse than it did if she hadn’t been able to run to Professor Vernon for support. This is also her last chess tour. She could be a darling of the sort of people who enjoy these things, the little girl who never smiles as she annihilates her opponents, but there would be no joy in it for her, and without the joy, she doesn’t understand the point. Chess is meant to be something sacred, not a party trick to be trotted out and used to entertain people who’d be just as happy to watch a seal balance a ball on the tip of its nose.)
That night, she returns to the hotel. As the youngest, she has a room of her own, with a connecting door to the room where the tour chaperone sleeps. For the first couple of stops, she’d been required to leave that door propped open, so the chaperone could see she was in her bed and not off getting into trouble. Pleading difficulty falling asleep and showing no inclination to leave her room after curfew has earned her a few privileges, chief among them a door that can actually be closed, giving her the privacy she needs.
Carefully, she removes her performance clothes and trades them for flannel pajama pants and a faded Jurassic Park T-shirt. Dinosaurs are okay, but in the grand scheme of things, she wears the shirt in honor of Dr. Ian Malcolm, fictional mathematician slash rock star and focus of more than a few confusing teenage dreams. She’s worn this shirt so much that the seams are fraying. It’s not attractive, not the sort of thing she should be wearing to invite a boy into her room, much less into her head. But it’s comfortable. It’s comforting. Right here, right now, that’s what matters.
She wants to be angry. Wants to pull back and let him have it with both barrels, as her dad always says; wants him to understand how badly he hurt her, that she’s not the sort of girl who forgives on a moment’s notice. She can’t do any of those things. As badly as he hurt her, as badly as she’s still hurting, she missed him twice as much. She doesn’t have the words for what she’s feeling—and there was a time when, if she needed a word, she would have reached for Roger, trusting him to supply the