against a checklist built from observing other people—people who aren’t him, aren’t her quantum-entangled maybe-twin, and hence aren’t the exemplar for whom the list was made. His constant state of low-grade animation is perplexing to her, as someone who lives her life in fits and starts, stops and goes. He could run her to the ground just by continuing to press forward after her sprint has been exhausted.
They balance each other. They always have.
“So no blood tests,” says Roger. “I don’t think we’re alien robots or anything, but I guess it’s not the weirdest of the possible options.”
“The weirdest of the possible options involves the phrase ‘Midwich cuckoos,’” says Dodger.
“I don’t think the book was part of an elaborate cover-up. It seems excessive.”
“No, ‘excessive’ was the remake of the movie. The book is very dry.”
“Still not much of a reader, huh?”
Dodger smiles. “Fiction’s not my thing. You want a nice epigram on spirals, and I’m your girl. Still reading everything you can get your hands on?”
“Books are made of words.” Roger pauses, feeling like he’s just unlocked something important. Dodger’s start-and-stop, his steady forward movement, it’s related to their fields of specialization. He can almost feel it. He just can’t quite get his hands to lock around the idea, and so it slips away, leaving him saying, “I’m glad you’re here. I missed you. Promise we won’t do this again?”
“Do what?” she asks.
“Split up.”
Her smile is quick and bright and almost overwhelming. “I think we’re past that part of the equation, don’t you?”
That night, after Roger is gone, Dodger stands in her room with a dry eraser in her hand, wiping the latest equations off her walls. She’s still chasing the error she made on the day she ran into Roger, trying to figure out how the math diverged from its original track. There’s something important in the twist of numbers and symbols: she knows that, just like she knows that if she tries to sleep in here with wrong answers scrawled on the walls around her, she’ll have nightmares until morning and be useless in the game theory class she’s TAing. The point of being here is to learn. She can learn a lot sleep-deprived, but like everything else in her life, that’s a delicate equation, one unlocked with trial and error and a few fainting spells. Tonight is the night she sleeps.
There’s a rapping behind her. The door is standing open; a house rule, after Candace found her curled in a corner, light-headed and disoriented from cleaning fumes.
“I have proper ventilation, Candy,” she says.
“It’s not Candy,” says Erin.
Dodger turns. Blinks.
This is Erin: five-foot-seven, Midwestern farmer’s daughter tan with a smattering of freckles across the nose (next to her, Dodger looks like the victim of a paintball war), strawberry blonde hair, eyes the color of South American morpho butterflies, down to the black ring around the outside of the irises, which is thick enough to seem unnatural. Blue jeans and a white tank top and the kind of body that seems to have been engineered to satisfy a focus group at one of the girly magazines, the ones where clothing is optional and everyone’s name includes at least one i. She doesn’t look like anyone’s idea of a theology grad student; if anything, she looks like she’ll be leading tent revivals one day, all mascara and thanking the Lord for His good gifts.
Dodger doesn’t dislike her, exactly, but she doesn’t trust her. Something about the woman puts her teeth on edge, some distant feeling of familiarity, like they’ve met before and mutually agreed to forget about it.
“What’s up, Erin?” she asks. She doesn’t realize she’s raised the pitch of her voice and slowed her words, like she’s speaking to a small child or a dangerous animal.
Erin realizes. Erin realizes more than anyone understands, and she likes it that way; likes the fact that, by and large, she’s able to move through the world without attracting attention she’s not prepared to deal with. (Oh, she gets stared at. She’s attractive and living on a college campus, surrounded by people who are combining freedom and the last lingering storms of teenage hormones. She gets noticed. But being noticed is not the same thing as being paid attention to: being noticed is something that can be used, and being paid attention to is something that can get you killed. The difference is subtle. Roger would understand; Roger was designed to understand subtle differences of meaning. Roger doesn’t need it, not like she