Cambridge—nothing is quite Cambridge—it sometimes manages to come close, at least in the middle of the night.
(His being the one who needs to walk home also means Dodger isn’t riding her bike at midnight. She’s good with that thing, handles it like she’s been on it all her life, but accidents happen, and until they know exactly how their entanglement works, he’d rather she didn’t get hit. He’d rather she didn’t get hit after they know how their entanglement works, either—he’d rather she stay healthy and present for their entire lives—it’s just that right now, he doesn’t know what would happen. He might not admit it out loud, but that scares him. That scares him a lot.)
Now that he’s alone, he can admit to himself how excited he is by the idea of beginning the testing process. It starts with blood: he and Dodger came to that conclusion independently, and it feels right. It feels accurate, even, which doesn’t mean the same thing, and has just as much importance here. Dodger’s math doesn’t work if she doesn’t take the steps in the right sequence, following the correct path through the equation. The question of their quantum entanglement feels similar. They need to find the right sequence to make their way through this, take the steps in the right order, or it could all fall down. And he doesn’t want it to fall down.
Dodger’s issues may be more visible—and that makes sense; she’s always worn her heart on her sleeve, a bright banner to attract the world’s snipers, like a bird feigning a broken wing to draw predators away from the nest—but that doesn’t mean she’s the only one who has them. Roger has spent his life trying to balance being the smartest person in the room with a genuine desire to be liked. He wants to talk about phonemes and the number of sounds the human body can produce and baseball and how hard it is to get a decent cup of chowder in this town, and he wants to do them all at the same time, and he can’t. Half the smart people he meets are so hung up on the idea of being smart—the idea that all they can be is smart, defined by the discipline that calls them—that as soon as he mentions baseball, they jump in to tell him how boring they find it. How plebian. How beneath them.
He knows the words: balance, equilibrium, parity. He’s always thought they were a pretty dream, something to be pursued but never caught. Now, for the first time in years, he’s starting to feel as if they might describe something possible. All they need to do is figure out what they are, what they mean, and they can begin moving forward.
He’s sunk deeply enough into his own thoughts that he doesn’t notice the person falling into step beside him. Their footsteps are soft, and they’re dressed entirely in gray, blending with the moonlight city streets. It’s not until he catches a glimpse of pale hair out of the corner of his eye that he realizes anyone is there at all, and not until he turns that he realizes it’s Erin.
“Uh,” he says. “Hi?”
“You have an odd sense of direction,” she says. “We should have turned two blocks ago if you were trying to get home in a timely manner.”
“I’m enjoying the walk,” he says, flustered. Dodger’s roommates are both strange in their own ways. He finds Candace’s brusque, often paint-covered strangeness endearing; he finds Erin’s strangeness, which is feline and fluid and cold, off-putting. There’s something about her that doesn’t quite synchronize with the rest of the world, like she’s been spliced in from a different story. She pays the rent on time and is almost never home, so Dodger doesn’t mind her, but since that first encounter on the balcony, he’s been doing his best to keep her at a safe remove. Something about her is wrong.
“You were,” she says, and she’s right, so he doesn’t argue, no matter how polite it would have been to try.
They walk in silence for a short while, Erin pacing soundlessly beside him, Roger choosing the more economical turns, the ones that will get him home and end this game—whatever it is—that much sooner.
Finally, Erin asks, “If I gave you advice, would you take it? Or would you just go ‘oh, that’s Dodger’s weirdo roommate, that’s the one who never shows her face, I can ignore her without worrying about the consequences’?”