isn’t, oregano—but he wouldn’t know how to get there if he suddenly found himself in Palo Alto. When she’s coming up the walkway and talking to him at the same time she keeps her eyes on the grass or the sky, anything but the landmarks that could lead him to her, everything but the address.
She’s still avoiding him. That’s more frightening than he has words for—and that’s frightening, too, because he’s supposed to have words for everything. Dodger is hiding something. What it is, he doesn’t know. Doesn’t think he can.
“If not Stanford, then where?” he asks.
“I don’t know. Cambridge is excited to have me come for a visit. So is MIT. And there’s always Yale. I know that shouldn’t be anyone’s fallback school—it’s Yale—but their math department doesn’t excite me. Maybe I’ll tour Brown. Or surprise everybody and go to Oxford. I like British food. Most of it, you don’t even have to chew.” She smooths her hair, looking critically at her reflection. “Okay. That’s as presentable as I’m going to get. Look, I need to run. Catch you tonight after your game?”
“Sure,” says Roger. “Have a great day, okay?”
Her smile is barely a quirk of her lips, so faint that only years of familiarity allow him to see it for what it is. “Sure,” she says. “Anything you say.”
Roger opens his eyes. The sky is turning deeper gray; it’s going to rain soon. That thought hurries him away from the tree and toward the front of the school, thoughts of distant friends and impossible connections quickly chased from his mind.
Later, he’ll wonder how he missed the intonations she was using, the quiet finality of what should have been an ordinary conversation. Later, he’ll blame himself, knowing this was all his fault. Later, he’ll realize how broken she was. But that’s all later. Time is a funny thing; it doesn’t forgive the things we don’t see. Here and now, he’s running, racing against the rain, and he doesn’t have time to worry about a girl on the other side of the country. He doesn’t have time to consider how much they both have to lose. He’s just running.
In a way, they both are.
Dodger closes her eyes when Roger’s presence fades, waiting to be sure she’s truly alone. Sometimes he comes back after she thinks he’s gone, returning to remind her of something coming up, some appointment or occasion or sporting event he wants her to know about. It’s adorable, the way he takes such care to keep her informed about his life. Like he thinks she can’t survive without the constant lifeboat of his existence to support her. And why shouldn’t he think that? She as much as told him it was true, when they fell back into contact with one another. She said she’d been lost without him. She said she’d been alone. Of course he worries that she’s fragile. He knows she is.
What he doesn’t know is how alone she still is. Having one friend who might as well have been imaginary had been fine when they were kids, but she’d learned her lesson when his reply to her proposing they meet was to cut her off completely. Roger says he’s not as good a liar as she is—says he’s telling the truth when he talks about the woman who threatened to take him away from his family, that he was only acting out of fear and desperation—but that’s what a good liar would say, isn’t it? She can’t know. She can’t know.
But she can see how happy he is, how much he enjoys his friends and the girlfriend he loves without being in love with. She can see how well adjusted he is, to steal the language of the adults who study her mental health, watching for signs that genius, like acid, has eaten away at the flesh of her soul. They think she’s well adjusted too. Lonely, sure, but not broken.
Dodger is many things. Foremost among them: she is a very good liar.
She walks down the hall to the computer room, knowing her mother will be downstairs in the kitchen with a cup of coffee and the newspaper, listening to her daughter’s footsteps overhead. Morning visits to the computer room are normal, tightly regulated to keep her from being late to school, but expected. No deviation from the pattern here. She’s maintaining the same equation she’s used for every school day so far this year. That’s important.
The loose baseboard comes away from the wall easily,