it becomes pretty conclusive. We know we have the same blood type. Red and brown hair are frequently found in the same family.”
“This is important to you, isn’t it?” asks Roger.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because if we’re related, they can’t ever tell you to give me up again.” Dodger is calm, precise: she’s done the math. “You don’t get to run away from family.”
She’s talking about herself as much as she’s talking about him; more, even. He left her for a little while. She tried to leave him forever. Still. “And if we’re not related?”
“You’re still my brother. Quantum entanglement is thicker than blood.”
“You know, the original quote—”
“Is irrelevant, and I have access to things I can throw, so don’t get pedantic,” she says pleasantly. “If we’re not biologically related, that removes one data point from the list of causes for our entanglement. If we are, then maybe we can start looking for other cases and find out what the possible consequences might be. I’m not going to hurt myself again, but what happens if one of us is in an accident? We already know that a near-death experience for one of us is a near-death experience for both of us, but is it possible for you to survive my death, or vice versa? We need to know how much we’re risking each other every time we do something dangerous.”
“Then what? Wrap ourselves in cotton wool? I can’t ask you to stop living your life just because it might endanger mine.” Or vice versa, but he knows she’d never ask him to do that: her response every time the pressure has gotten unbearable has proven that. Finding proof that all injury could potentially transfer won’t make her careful. It will make her paranoid, locking her door and never letting anyone inside.
“I don’t know.” She makes no effort to conceal her frustration. “This is uncharted ground, and it’s not like we have a physicist to help us figure it out. Maybe if we know the base situation, we can go and find one. Convince them we need help without turning us into a science project. It all starts with a blood test. So can we get a blood test?”
“Sure,” says Roger.
Dodger allows her shoulders to slump, showing her relief. “When?” she asks.
“Maybe after Thanksgiving . . .”
The rest of the evening passes like that, topic flowing into topic, all of them light, many of them easy. It’s nice to sit and talk; both of them think, more than once, that this is how things should have been all along. That this is what the world was supposed to contain. There’s tension, yes, but it’s the tension of minds meeting, the conflict of differing core interests, not the tension of a world about to become terribly complicated.
It won’t last, of course. But neither of them knows that consciously, and even if they did, it wouldn’t change the moment, the comfort it contains, or the fixed point it represents on the tangled structure of their lives. This is one of the moments around which all else will rotate, even when the world starts falling down.
This is one of the moments that will shine.
Roger leaves at eleven on school nights. They mostly meet at Dodger’s place, due to her propensity for writing on the walls; he can keep her in butcher paper, but there’s always the chance she’ll relax so much that she’ll forget he doesn’t have whiteboard paint on everything. He likes his security deposit. He especially likes the way he’s going to get it back when he moves, allowing him to use it again on a new apartment. The competition for grad student housing gets vicious in the fall, when the incoming scholars fight the established ones for the places nearest to campus, or better yet, nearest to the Derby food court. He likes his current apartment, but he has his eye on a place above Amoeba Records which is supposed to come open over the summer. So protecting his security deposit is of the utmost importance, at least for now.
He also likes the walk from her place to his, especially late at night, when the city is quiet and cool and the air smells of that curious wooded-concrete blend the campus pumps off. It reminds him of home. Most of California has its own weird scent profile, a combination of eucalyptus and oleander and desert heat masquerading as human paradise. Berkeley, though. Berkeley smells like the college town it is, and while it isn’t quite