“Why do I know that?” she asks. “Because I do know that. It’s not a guess and it’s a suspicion, I know.”
“I don’t know,” he says. “But Dodger, please. Please don’t ever think I’m better off without you. Do you have any idea how many makeup exams I had to take to finish math my senior year? I was nearly the first person in my school’s history with an early admission to Berkeley who couldn’t graduate with his class.”
She giggles, the sound small and thick with snot, before wiping her nose with the back of her hand and saying, “My teachers took pity on me, since I was clearly traumatized, and let me switch my English and History classes to pass/fail. I passed by the skin of my teeth, but I passed, and it wasn’t like Stanford was going to keep me out. Not with Daddy teaching there and my face in all the papers.”
“See, if you’d been speaking to me, you could have passed without needing to look pathetic.”
“I didn’t look pathetic, I . . . Okay, I looked pathetic. It worked, don’t knock it.” Dodger grins, the left side of her mouth twisting sharply upward while the right side remains where it is. Then, with no warning but that, she flings her arms around Roger, hugging him tightly. “I missed you so much.”
“I missed you too,” he says, and stays where he is, just holding her, just being held, until the sound of the front door slamming jerks them both out of the moment. Roger pulls away. Dodger turns to blink at the door, eyes first wide, then narrowing.
“Candace?” she calls. “Is that you?”
There’s no sound from the hallway, no footsteps or hint of breath.
“I think it was your other roommate going out,” says Roger.
Dodger blinks at him. “What, Erin? She’s not here.”
“No, because she just went out,” he says. “She was here when I got here. Out on the balcony, having a cigarette. This is a two-story apartment?”
“Only on a technicality,” says Dodger. “Upstairs is Erin’s bedroom, the master bathroom, and the balcony. She got the upstairs bedroom because it’s the smallest and she’s a smoker. She said giving up a little personal space was worth it if she could go outside to smoke in the middle of the night. Since our security deposit says no smoking inside, this seemed like the best way to arrange things. And I didn’t want to deal with stairs every time I went to bed. But she’s never home.”
“She was home today,” says Roger. “She told me you weren’t interested in making friends, and that if I left without knocking, I’d never need to see you again. Then, when I said I was going to knock anyway, she told me not to say she didn’t warn me. You have interesting taste in roommates, Dodge.”
“Yeah, but she was right, so it’s not like I can be mad,” she says. “I’m not really interested in making friends.”
Roger raises an eyebrow. “What do you call me?” he asks.
“Roger,” she says. Her smile is radiant. “I call you Roger. Now come on. Let’s finish that chess game. I think you’ve gone too long without me whooping your ass.”
He laughs, and she laughs, and he moves back to his side of the table, and while things are not entirely okay between them—won’t be for a while yet—things are getting better. The world is getting back to true.
EXPERIMENTATION
Timeline: 17:09 PST, September 3, 2008 (sixteen days later).
Rebuilding old friendships is never easy. Doing it during the first month of grad school, when there are new things to learn and new duties lurking around every corner, is virtually impossible. Roger’s advisor keeps him occupied for two solid weeks with campus tours, reminding him over and over again that his volunteering unlocks certain privileges within the library system. A little wasted time is worth it, for the ability to take his reference materials home without worrying about whether they’re restricted. As for Dodger, she’s finding her way around campus, learning where she can safely chain her bike, and discovering the local food options—although she seems content with pizza, which is fast, cheap, and nutritionally complete, as long as they add extra artichokes.
Still, they steal the time they can, meeting up at the Starbucks just off campus, or in front of the library, or on the quad. They avoid touching as much as they can. They get less anxious, less poised for something terrible to