tried to pick me up—in the metaphorical sense, not the physical sense. Candace kept that from getting ugly.”
“So you’re not, uh, seeing someone right now?”
Dodger’s look of alarm is comical. Roger bursts out laughing, and only laughs harder when her alarm morphs into irritation.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he says, putting his hands out to ward her off, still laughing harder than is strictly good for him. “You looked horrified. I’ve had girls make a lot of faces when they thought I was asking them out, but that’s the first time I’ve managed outright horror. I was not asking you out. I will not be asking you out. I’m in a comfortable lull between girlfriends right now, and I’m enjoying it. Also, I love you, but I don’t love you like that. You’re more like my sister.”
“Statistically speaking, that’s not as unreasonable as it sounds,” she says.
Roger blinks. “Come again?”
“Oh, come on, like you haven’t thought it? We have the same birthday, we have weird closed adoptions where our parents don’t know anything about our biological parents, we have the same eyes, and while quantum entanglement is a fairly extreme manifestation of the phenomenon, the closest thing I’ve found to the way we can talk to each other is in unsubstantiated reports of twins who always knew what the other was thinking, even when they were miles apart.” Dodger shrugs. “We’d need a blood test or something to prove it, but I’d be willing to lay money on us being related.”
“Do you . . . do you want to get a blood test?” Roger moves to the nearest chair and sinks into it, unsurprised when Bill appears and leaps up into his lap. Dodger’s not saying anything he hasn’t thought, but hearing it out loud, from someone else, makes it difficult to ignore.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because what if the results say we’re not related? I don’t have a better way of coping with . . . whatever the hell it is we have going on between us. If I think of us as a really extreme form of twinning, we’re not freaks. We’re just a natural phenomenon turned up to eleven. And what if . . .” She pauses. “It’s silly, because we’ve both been in the hospital at least once. They’d know if there was something wrong with us. But they weren’t checking our blood for alien proteins or weird machines or anything like that when they were trying to keep us breathing. They were just fixing us. So what if there’s something about us that’s not right? We could go in for tests and open a whole world of badness.”
“You’ve thought about this a lot.”
Dodger shrugs. “I had a lot of time on my hands.”
“So you didn’t stay with chess?”
“No.” She shakes her head. “I could have, but it was never . . . There were people I played against who’d spent their whole lives trying to get good enough for those games. They measured their self-worth against how well they could move the pieces. I just know where the pieces need to go. It felt like cheating. Like when I used to help you play Monopoly, and then you’d get mad because it wasn’t fair to your family.”
“You say ‘help,’ I say ‘shouted in my head like a steamroller because it was taking too long.’”
Dodger shrugs again, this time smiling almost sheepishly. “I’m the most impatient patient person that you’ll ever meet.”
“That’s probably true,” says Roger. The conversation has meandered. There’s a reason for that: neither he nor Dodger is comfortable with the idea that whatever it is that lets them speak to each other the way they do has endured into adulthood. It would have been easier, really, if she hadn’t replied; if she’d let him sit in silence in the back garden and allowed this part of their shared past to die.
But quantum entanglement—or whatever this is—has never been that easy to dismiss. They were always going to wind up here, no matter how far they traveled, no matter how fast they ran. He can see that now, just like he can see the temporary animation draining from her face, leaving her watching him again, patient as only a truly impatient person can be. She’s a predator in her own way, capable of absolute stillness when she thinks she needs it, capable of equally absolute momentum.
For her part, Dodger is watching to see whether he’s about to turn and run, measuring every twitch and shift in his balance