not making a sound. She’s been planning this day for a while: she knows that, even as she spent more than a year trying to deny it to herself. Why else would she have taken so much care in sanding the edges of the baseboard, creating a perfect, soundless seal? She must have been planning this.
Dodger is so very, unbearably tired.
She wouldn’t describe what she feels quite like that, but deep down, she knows “tired” is the right word: maybe the only word. She’s tired. She’s tired of being too smart to slow down and appreciate things that aren’t performing at her level. She’s tired of adults treating her like a circus sideshow and other kids treating her like a freak. (They’re not the same, not quite: to the adults, she’s the strongman, the fire-eater, the girl who dances on the trapeze without a net. To the kids, she’s the bearded woman, the lobster-girl. The adults gape and whisper because of what she can do. The kids her own age do it because of what she is. They’re both right and they’re both wrong and she’s exhausted from the effort of trying to make them understand.) She’s tired of being lonely, and having Roger back in her life has made things worse when it should have made them better, because she always thought he was the same as she was, but he’s not, he’s not. He has friends. He has people. He has a life. And she has numbers, and figures, and math enough to redefine the sky.
The numbers would have been enough, if she’d never found the door at the back of her own mind, leading to a boy her own age—to the day—who couldn’t finish his worksheet. They might even have been enough if he’d never slammed and locked the doors between them, shutting her out and giving him time to change the world he lived in. She could have adjusted to how much better he was at people than she was, if she’d watched it happen, if he’d boiled her like a frog. But he didn’t do that. He closed her out, and while she was gone he raised the temperature of the water, and now that she’s back, she can’t take it.
The flaw, she knows, is hers. The weakness is hers. That’s okay. She’s the math girl. She’s the one who appreciates the necessity of the inevitable equation. She can see where these numbers go.
One by one, she removes her prizes from the space behind the baseboard: the pack of razors, the bottle of painkillers stolen, one and two at a time, from unguarded medicine cabinets and unwatched purses, the topical numbing gel. She’s worked her plan out so carefully. All the pieces need to be perfect. She’s good at perfect.
She stuffs her prizes into her backpack, returns the baseboard to its place, and stands. Soon—so very soon—Roger won’t have to worry about her anymore, and she won’t have to worry about her loneliness driving him away. She won’t have to worry about anything.
She only has to be perfect one more time, and she can be done. Relief outweighing her fear, she shoulders her pack and heads for the door. Time for breakfast. Time to say goodbye.
PERFECTION
Timeline: 10:37 EST, September 5th, 2003 (same morning, same day, almost too late).
Roger is in his AP English class, listening to his favorite teacher—Ms. Brown, who will never have his heart the way Miss Lewis did in the second grade, and that’s okay, because he figures no one ever loves anyone the way they love their second-grade teacher—explain King Lear when the world goes white and everything drops away, leaving him suspended, screaming, in a terrible void. It isn’t pain, exactly: pain would require nerves, skin, a body. It’s an anti-pain, a pain born of absence, and because of that, it hurts more than anything.
The white turns gold around the edges, burning. The transition forces the edges to exist, transforming them into a frame around a place he’s never seen. A skyline, writhed with flame; a road of rainbows, stretched like a soap bubble across the landscape.
A girl with red hair (he can see the color of her hair) lying sprawled in the dirt, her eyes half-closed, her own pain receding as blood loss wrings her dry. The blood is gray, gray as blood always is when Dodger isn’t with him, but he knows it all the same, yes, he knows it. She’s going. She’s going. She’s not gone yet.