Dodger Cheswich is famous in mathematical circles: Dodger Cheswich is the girl who solved the Monroe Equation. (The memory of her shyly showing him her work, written in gel pen on wide-lined paper, hurts less than it used to, because he’s going to see her again, he’s going to see her and tell her he was wrong to run away but so was she, and she’s the mathematician—can’t she see that this makes them equal? Can’t she see that the time for running is over?) Getting her to come to Berkeley for grad school was an accomplishment. Not a big accomplishment, like netting a real celebrity or someone whose parents could afford to endow a new library, but an accomplishment all the same. Someone has to have bragged about getting her for their specific specialty.
Someone has. He finds a reference buried in one of the chess club newsletters to “incoming student D. Cheswich, joining our esteemed Mathematics department as she pursues her degree in game theory.” Armed with a name, description, birth date, and area of study, it was a small thing to find her advisor, and an even smaller thing to present himself as her brother hoping to surprise her. It’s a lie, but a believable one: they look alike enough to pass as siblings. They have the same eyes. They were born on the same day and adopted by families on opposite sides of the continent. And once upon a time, impossible as it is to believe when nothing like it has ever happened again, they were able to talk to each other by closing their eyes.
People usually give him what he asks, when he takes the time to do his research and understand his own requests. It’s been three days since the campus tour that went off-campus after she ran out on it, and now here he is, standing on her doorstep with a chessboard tucked under his arm, trying to find the courage to knock.
“Hey.”
He looks up. There’s a woman on the balcony above him. Short, curvy, pretty in an all-American way: she’d look perfectly at home at a baseball game, or wearing cut-off shorts and sitting in the bed of a pickup truck. His romantic life has been a succession of Norman Rockwell paintings, and this girl would slot into place without disrupting the line. Her hair is ashen and her eyes are pale and she’s looking at him like he’s an interesting new species of insect, something meant to be placed in a jar and studied for as long as possible.
“Hello,” he says.
Her gaze sharpens. “You’re not here for me, because I don’t know you. You’re not here for Candy, because she has a boyfriend, and he’s built like a Sherman tank. There’s no way you could be here for Dodger. She doesn’t date. I’m not sure she understands why humans have anything other than a waste exhaust port in their pants.”
He lifts his eyebrows. “How long have you been living here?”
“A week, but I pay attention. I know stuff.” The woman leans further out over the rail, taking a drag off her cigarette and blowing the smoke in his direction. When she taps the ash over the rail it falls perfectly into the bushes below her, practice making perfect. “That a chessboard?”
“Yes,” he says, trying not to sniff the air like a starving dog. His last cigarette was eight days ago. A personal best, which is something to be proud of, but doesn’t currently feel like it. It feels like he’s torturing himself for no good reason.
“So you’re here for Dodger, then.”
“Yes.”
“Why?” The woman’s gaze is sharp enough to nail his feet to the porch. “She’s not interested in making friends. She says she is, but she’s lying. She’s a good liar.”
“So how do you know she’s not just nervous?”
“Because I pay attention.” The woman takes another drag on her cigarette, still watching him closely. “What’s your name?”
“Roger.”
“Your names rhyme. That’s cute. If you were related, you’d have grounds to sue your parents.” She blows smoke out through her nose. “Last chance, Roger. If you don’t knock, you could walk away clean. I’m pretty sure she doesn’t want to see you. She’s been acting spooked for days. You could get out of here and probably never see her again.”
“Thanks for the advice . . . ?” He leaves the question dangling, waiting.
Her lips twist in what might charitably be called a smile. “Erin,” she says. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.” She drops