Between the lines

easily.”

I sit up. “Can I ask you a question? How come Oliver looks just like your son?”

“Because he is my son.” Jessamyn looks up at me. “After Edgar’s father died, he was so afraid of everything. I wanted to create a role model for him-someone who maybe wasn’t the bravest or strongest boy in the kingdom but who managed to always triumph by using his brain. Edgar was younger then-I had to imagine the boy I thought he’d grow up to look like-and that was how I painted Oliver.”

“Well, they’re identical.”

“Not really,” Jessamyn says. “Edgar never became the Oliver I hoped he would.” She smiles, a little sadly. “I wasn’t very good at helping Edgar with his grief. I didn’t know how to do that, but I knew how to write books. So I figured I’d try to help him, through what I do best. But when that wasn’t enough, I stopped writing. Instead, I concentrated on learning how to be a better mother.” She shakes her head, as if she’s clearing it, and then pats my shoulder. “Why don’t we get you settled upstairs?”

* * *

The guest room is painted the color of a sunset. There is a small wooden bureau and a double bed. Jessamyn leaves me with a stack of fresh towels and a promise to check in on me after I’ve rested for a while.

It’s weird, having no luggage to unpack. I sit on the edge of the bed and look around the room. There are framed photos on the walls of a baby who keeps getting progressively older. This, I realize, is Edgar-but I find myself drawn to the walls, touching the glass on the photos, thinking that this is what Oliver would have looked like when he was two, when he was four, when he rode his first horse, when he learned how to swim.

Suddenly, I really miss Oliver. I unzip my backpack and pull out the book. It falls open to page 43.

“It’s her, it’s really her! Delilah, you amazing girl, you did it!” He is so happy that it hurts me to look at him.

“Oliver,” I whisper. “She won’t change the ending.”

His face falls. “Maybe there’s a way for me to talk to her.”

“Even if she could hear you, she wouldn’t do it. She wrote this book for her son. She’s not going to make any changes. It means too much to her personally.”

“She has a son?” Oliver says. “Have you met him? Maybe he can convince her.”

“Yeah, I’ve met him.”

“Well, what’s he like?”

“He could be your twin,” I say.

For a moment, Oliver gets very quiet. “So you’re in a house,” he sums up, “with a guy who looks just like me, but who’s real?”

I think of what Jessamyn said about Edgar. “He’s not you,” I state simply.

Whatever Oliver says in reply is drowned out by the strangest sounds coming from the room next door to mine. There are high-pitched screams and whistles and weird sirens.

“Well?” Oliver says. “What do you think?”

“I didn’t hear what you said…” Now, in addition to all the crazy noises, I hear a voice: “I’m going to get you, you bloodsucking, boneheaded monster!”

“What the-?” I look down at the book, careful this time not to slam it shut. “Wait here,” I tell Oliver. I get up and walk into the hall, then knock on the door beside mine.

There’s no answer. This isn’t a surprise, because who could hear with that racket going on? So I turn the doorknob and peek inside.

Edgar is sitting in a strange reclining chair at floor level, holding a game controller in his hand. On a computer screen in front of him, there’s an asteroid explosion in a galaxy. “Take that, Zorg!” Edgar hollers, and he punches a fist in the air. Letters roll over the screen:

HIGH SCORES

EDGAR… 349,880

EDGAR… 310,900

EDGAR… 298,700

EDGAR… 233,100

I wonder if Edgar’s ever even played his video game against another person.

I remember what Jessamyn said about him being a loner. “Hey,” I say. “You want company?”

He whirls in his seat. “Who told you I was in here?”

“I could pretty much hear everything through the wall…”

Edgar narrows his eyes. “Have you ever played Battle Zorg 2000 before?”

“I can’t say that I have.”

He digs around in his desk for a second controller. “Then I suppose I’ll have to teach you.”

He fumbles through the opening screens of the game to set it up for two players instead of one. “I usually play solo,” he says casually. “I’m actually sort of legendary, in terms of scoring.”

I let Edgar explain to me about the Galactoids from Planet Zugon who are coming to take over Earth. “Our job,” he says, “is to kill them before they plant a mind-control ozone bomb in the San Andreas Fault, or create a force field of incineration that burns everyone to ash the minute they come in contact with it.”

It makes me think of the Pandemonium.

“If you can get past the foot soldier Galactoids,” Edgar continues, “you can be admitted into the Astrochamber, where you have to complete fourteen tasks in order to face Zorg.”

“Who’s Zorg?” I ask.

He snorts. “Only the biggest, baddest robot-android hybrid in the Aphelion galaxy!”

I gingerly take the controller and press a button. “No!” he shouts. “Not until we’ve set up your avatar!”

With a few clicks, I become Aurora Axis, a geophysicist from Washington, DC. I follow Edgar’s avatar through the levels of the game, getting knocked out almost immediately by a low-flying asteroid. “Shoot!” I say, angry at myself. “I should have been able to see that.”

Edgar grins. “It takes a little bit of practice.”

For three-quarters of an hour, we battle aliens with an array of weapons. I get killed more times than I can count. Finally, just when I think it’s virtually impossible, Edgar and I double-team an Amazon made of starlight who is shooting electromagnetic radiation from her fingers, and we manage to drown her in a micrometeorite lake. Just like that, we are admitted into the Astrochamber.

“Yes!” we both scream as the door to Edgar’s bedroom opens.

“Edgar!” Jessamyn cries, “have you seen-Oh!” She looks at me, and then at Edgar, and then back at me. “You’re here.”

Edgar pivots in his chair. “She wanted to learn how to play.”

I grin. “Turns out I’m a natural with a neutrino ray.”

Jessamyn seems surprised-by my comment, and maybe by the fact that her son has made a friend. “Good!” she says. “Can I get you two anything? Cookies? Milk?”

“Privacy?” Edgar suggests.

Jessamyn backs out of the room, and Edgar lifts his controller again. “Awkward,” he says. “Now, where were we…”

“About to kick some Zorgian butt,” I reply.

Edgar lifts his controller and points to the screen, but the computer blinks a steady neon green. “Shoot,” he mutters. “Not again.”

“What’s the matter?”

“Stupid old computer. It freezes up all the time. I just hope our game saved…” He starts pushing buttons and rebooting the system. “My mom won’t let me load my games on her new computer because she says they take up too much of the memory, so I have to work on this total dinosaur.”

“It doesn’t look that old to me-”

“That’s because it was state-of-the-art when my mom was still using it to type her books. But believe me, I