libido. Experiments and trials had followed, until they were both satisfied that only their thoughts could cross the void between them. Feelings, emotional or otherwise, were not capable of making the jump. Except that her feelings had, when she was almost at the end. Trauma could work miracles.)
“I mean that when your heart started getting fucked up because it didn’t have enough blood to beat, so did mine,” he says grimly. She hasn’t moved a piece, and so he doesn’t either. “I had a seizure in class. I blacked out and hit my head on the floor, and when I woke up, I knew you’d done something to yourself. I knew you’d hurt yourself, and I was thousands of miles away, and I couldn’t do a damn thing to help. I called for you. I screamed. You didn’t answer.”
Dodger turns away, refusing to look at him. Too bad. The floodgates are open: the story is coming out now, whether he wants it to or not. He’s spent too many years unable to be mad at her, because she was too far away, because she wasn’t speaking to him, because he honestly wasn’t sure she was still alive. Well, she’s alive now; she’s here now, sitting on the other side of a table, shying away from the touch of his hand like he had been the one to hold the razor blade.
Maybe he has some culpability here. Maybe he missed the signs; maybe he helped to create an essential weakness in her foundations when he cut off contact at nine years old. Maybe no one is an island. But in the end, he’s not the one who fed her a bottle of painkillers and opened her wrists. He missed the signs. He was seventeen years old. There’s a point where blaming himself has to end, and he’s finally reached it.
“I had three seizures while your brain tried like hell to take me down with it. Three. The third one hit right after I called your dad. I passed out in the middle of Harvard Square, in the rain, by myself. It’s a miracle I didn’t wake up in jail on a public drunkenness charge.” It’s a miracle he woke up at all. He’s thought, more than once, about how easy it would have been for him to have rolled over during one of his seizures, leaving him to drown in the heavy September rain. As ironic ways to go went, that one was pretty high on the list.
Dodger is staring at him in undisguised horror. “I didn’t know,” she whispers, and he doesn’t doubt her, and it doesn’t matter.
“Didn’t know all that happened, or didn’t know all that would happen?” he asks.
“Either. Both. I swear, Roger, I didn’t know I could hurt you by hurting myself. I would never—”
“Yeah, you would,” he says gently. She goes still. “Dodge, you’re my best friend. Always. Even when we’re not talking—and I sort of feel like we’ve spent more time not talking than we have talking, at this point—you’re my best friend. Hell, I would have flunked second grade if not for you. Did you really think it wouldn’t hurt me to lose you? Like, honestly and truly? Fuck, just almost losing you hurt like hell. And then you shut me out so hard that I started thinking you were dead after all, or that you’d gone without oxygen for so long that you’d managed to damage yourself and couldn’t hear me anymore.”
“I heard you,” she whispers, chin dipping toward the table again. “I always hear you.”
“So why the hell didn’t you answer?”
“I was mad,” she says. “I woke up in the hospital, and they were saying some boy from New England called my dad at work to brag about how he’d cut me up and left me for dead, and I knew it had to be you. I knew they were wrong about why you’d called—I knew you wouldn’t have called because you were glad I was dying—but I knew you’d called and ruined everything, again. So I was mad. And I was grateful, because once I wasn’t dead, I didn’t want to be. I wanted to have died. I didn’t want to be dead. I told myself you were a dream, a bad dream that wouldn’t go away, and somehow, I . . . I believed it.”
There’s so much she can’t figure out how to say in words. How her mother cried, and how it hurt to know she was the reason