Her hair is a sensible brown only a few shades darker than her eyes. She likes to say she’s a survivor of the diet industry still learning how to be fat and happy, but she seems more comfortable in her own skin than Dodger’s ever been.
Candace’s eyes go to the walls. Two of them are already covered in numbers; Dodger is well along the way to filling the third. “Do I even need to ask how the tour went, or should I back away slowly and hope you don’t decide to start covering me with algebra?”
“If this looks like algebra to you, it’s time to add some remedial math classes to your course load,” says Dodger. She puts the cap back on her marker. “This is all bad math. I’m trying to solve something that doesn’t want to be solved, and I fucked up somewhere back there”—she waves a hand vaguely toward the first wall, the snarl of incomprehensible symbols scrawled in black on white—“so now I need to start it over.”
“If you know you screwed up, why are you still going?”
Dodger shrugs. “Even a wrong answer can be interesting. I’ll keep solving as long as solution is possible, and when it stops being possible, I’ll figure out what I did wrong. It’s soothing. It gives me things to play with. Don’t you study child development because you like toys?”
“Yes, toys, not numbers on a wall and risking our security deposit,” says Candace. “You didn’t answer my first question. How was the tour?”
“I didn’t go.” The lie comes light and easy. She’s gotten so good at this. “I was up all night talking to some computational mathematicians in Australia. They’re working on a set of proofs that’s going to blow everyone else out of the water, me included, and they wanted to gloat. By the time I realized I should be getting some sleep, my alarm was going off. It seemed better to meet my new classmates when I wasn’t a sleep-deprived nightmare.”
Candace cocks her head. “You don’t seem like a sleep-deprived nightmare right now.”
“I had a nap. And a two-liter of Mountain Dew. I’m basically good to go. Who schedules a grad-student walking tour at eight-thirty in the morning anyway? Don’t they know most of us are nocturnal at this stage in our careers?”
“People who are no longer nocturnal, and resent the fact that they need sleep,” says Candace. Her tone is light but her eyes are sharp, narrowing as she looks at Dodger.
Not for the first time, Dodger thinks she may have made a tactical error in agreeing to room with someone whose discipline includes developmental psychology. She smiles as brightly as she can, trying to force the memory of Roger’s startled face even further toward the back of her mind. He’s the reason she messed up her math, because she can’t focus.
She was never supposed to see him again. She’s never really seen him before. He’s not real. He’s not real, because if he were real, she would have hurt him, by slamming the door between them. He can’t be real, because if he’s real, she’s a monster for what she did to him.
He can’t be real.
“I guess I just wasn’t up for it,” she says finally.
Candace’s eyes dart to the scar on Dodger’s left arm, and Dodger has to swallow the urge to put her hand over it. Candace is one of the people who knew what it was the first time she saw it, and knew the newspaper articles for a childish—if eagerly accepted—attempt at a cover-up.
“You want some tea?” Candace asks. “It might make you feel better. I know it always helps me when I’m not feeling good.”
“That would be great,” says Dodger, and smiles, and Candace smiles back before she turns and disappears, leaving Dodger alone in her room of flawed equations, numbers that don’t add up, marching ever onward into the future, never finding their solution, never really being solved.
REUNION
Timeline: 14:12 PST, August 18, 2008 (three days later).
Roger never knew there were so many ways to be a math major. The field is enormously divided and subdivided, a fractal web of specializations chasing its own tail into the depths of the course catalog. It’s like peering through the gates of hell. Infinite math classes packed with infinite mathematicians, all of whom would be delighted to explain in great and painful detail exactly why the fact that he gave up as soon as he fulfilled his general math credit requirements was a mistake.