for that expression on her mother’s face, that utter and total despair. How her father raged for days, losing his temper at the slightest thing, calling the police over and over to shout at them about how they weren’t doing their jobs if they couldn’t find the boy who’d hurt his daughter. How the police had known from the start that it was a suicide attempt, and just humored her parents. How she found them sitting on the couch, holding each other and sobbing when they thought she wouldn’t hear them. Removing herself from the equation had seemed like the easiest solution when she had decided to do it. She hadn’t realized just how many sub-formulae depended on her until it was almost too late.
“I didn’t want to be grateful to you, you know,” she continues, voice still soft and level. “I was so mad at you, all the time.”
“Because I stopped talking to you when we were kids? I thought we had—I mean, I thought you had accepted my apology.”
“Of course I accepted your apology. What else was I supposed to do?” She shakes her head. “If someone says ‘sorry’ and you don’t say ‘it’s okay, I’m not mad anymore,’ you’re a bad person. Especially if you’re a girl. And I missed you so bad, I thought it would be okay. I thought I could say ‘we’re okay’ and make it be true. But the numbers didn’t add up. I couldn’t understand how you could mean so much to me and I could mean so little to you.”
“You never meant anything less than the world to me, Dodger,” says Roger. “It’s just that my family needed me more than you did. When we were kids, you were always the one running ahead. You never looked to see if you were going to fall. I figured you’d do better without me than I would without you.”
“I only ran like that because I knew you’d always be there to catch me,” she says. “You were my safety net. You meant I couldn’t hurt myself too badly.”
“I caught you and you left me,” he says. “What does that mean?”
“That I’m really stupid for a smart person?” A tear rolls down her cheek. She swipes it away with the back of her hand. “I thought you’d be as messed-up as I was when I saw you again, and you were fine. You had friends, you had a girlfriend, and I had this big notebook filled with apologies that might be good enough to make you love me again. I didn’t know how to deal. So I ran the numbers, and figured you’d be better off without me.”
“I never was, Dodge,” he says.
She sniffles, and that’s it, that’s it: he can handle a lot of things, but he can’t stand seeing Dodger cry. He’s up before he has time to consider the ramifications of his action, moving to kneel next to the chair where she sits, and put his arms around her, and let her bury her face against his shoulder. There’s no way to keep skin from touching skin in this position, and that’s all right; if that means their quantum entanglement gets worse, well, it’s not like she didn’t already almost kill him. Maybe a little more severity would have meant he could feel her picking up the razor, and things would never have gone that far.
“Alison dumped me for running off campus after I had my first seizure. She couldn’t be with someone who’d do something like that to himself, or to her. I didn’t blame her then and I don’t blame her now. It was a pretty amiable breakup.”
“It had to be,” mumbles Dodger, her voice muffled by his shoulder. She’s not lifting her head. She’s not loosening her grip either; she’s holding on like she suspects this all of being a dream that’s about to end and leave her falling. “If you’d stayed together, she would have told the police they were looking for you, eventually. She would have gotten scared.”
Roger doesn’t ask how she knows that: her words are accompanied by a strong sense of déjà vu, or maybe déjà entendu, like she’s describing something he witnessed once, long ago, and never wants to see again. We’ve been here before, he thinks, almost deliriously, and then: We got it wrong.
Dodger slackens her grip and pulls back, eyes wide and shiny with tears. She looks more confused than frightened. That’s a good thing, because Roger is terrified, and one