feeling, settling deeper into his stillness, letting go of everything, even the darkness behind his closed eyelids.
“Hey, Dodge,” he says.
There’s a snap. It feels almost like that second seizure back in high school, the one that knocked the world out of true for a single, painless second. It’s like getting struck by lightning and it’s like blacking out and it’s not like either of those things; it’s like his mind is a broken bone that’s been forcefully shoved back into position.
His eyes are still closed, but he can see light, and blurry blotches of color. Dodger blinks several times, and with each blink the world comes more into focus, until he’s seeing Derby Street from above, from a perspective he hasn’t shared in years. The world is recast in sudden, vivid color, and the edges of things are a little softer; Dodger doesn’t quite need glasses, at least not yet, but she doesn’t have the clarity of distance vision that would come with corrective lenses.
She lifts her hand, holding it up so she—and by extension, he—can see it. “Hi, Roger,” she says, and he hears her voice the way she hears it, distorted by bone conduction, and it’s exactly right; it’s like coming home.
He’s winded. He shouldn’t be, but he is. “Hi,” he says. He’s also grinning like a fool. He hadn’t been sure they could still do this. “I can see your hand.”
“I know.” She raises it, flexes the fingers, and then starts moving them, flashing a quick series of signs. “How many fingers?”
“Three, five, two, four, three, one—that’s not very nice, you know. If anyone sees you doing that, they’re going to throw something at you.”
“If people throw things for that in Massachusetts, I’m never going back there.”
“We’re polite on the East Coast.”
“You’re a liar, and I just wanted to check,” she says, and closes her own eyes.
Roger knows what’s coming: he takes a breath, opens his eyes, and says, “See, this is what the cat looks like when you’re color-blind.” Bill obligingly butts his head into Roger’s knee.
“Huh,” says Dodger, and she might as well be leaning over his shoulder, not speaking in the space behind his ears. “Look at that. You going to come up to the roof now? I don’t want one of my roommates deciding there’s something wrong with you and calling the police.”
“Is that really a risk?”
“Search me. I’ve never done this before.”
Roger shakes his head. “I don’t think anyone has.”
Dodger doesn’t say anything. Dodger has, through whatever odd mental mechanism they both understand and can’t explain, shut the door; the conversation is over, at least until he comes up to the roof. Roger smiles a little at that. She always did like to have the last word.
Bill follows him to the ladder, meowing plaintively when Roger begins to climb. Roger pauses to look back at the cat.
“If you honestly expect me to believe you can’t get up to the roof whenever you feel like it, you must think I’m one stupid human,” he says.
The cat meows again.
“Okay, you think all humans are stupid,” says Roger. “Come up if you feel like it.” He resumes his climb.
The folding ladder is stable; the bolted-on portion dangling from the roof is less so. It shifts when he moves his weight to it, just enough to remind him that gravity exists. It would hurt to fall from this height, even if it’s not high enough to kill him. He grits his teeth and keeps them ground together until he pulls himself over the edge of the roof, back onto a reassuringly solid surface. Then he stops, still half-crouched, and blinks at the scene in front of him.
Dodger and her roommates have been busy. She kept her eyes on the street while he was looking through them, presumably so his first look at the rooftop proper would be from his own perspective, allowing her to watch. She’s smirking at him from a folding chair perched on the roof’s edge. It’s the most temporary-looking of the furniture, which includes a full patio set with a vast canvas umbrella, and a dozen potted plants. There’s a chessboard on the table, paused mid-game.
“How . . . ?”
“Candace has friends in the engineering department,” says Dodger. “They spend a lot of time here, so they were happy to figure out how to get some furniture onto the roof. It was a fun challenge. I did a few calculations for them, helped them figure out the angles and everything. One of them