Checkmate (9 page)

G
oing to a chess tournament is like going to an opera that’s sung in a foreign language. You see everybody moving around but you don’t really know what’s going on. The game was at Da Vinci, and the Thurgood Marshall team arrived in a stretch limousine. No lie. The game was in the media center and there had to be a hundred kids from Marshall there to sit around and watch. The boards were set up in a semicircle near the windows. The blinds had been drawn and the windows shut to keep out the noise. The Marshall players took their seats first, and there was a murmur from the crowd. I looked up, but I didn’t see anything going on.

“Pullman’s on board four!” Cody Weinstein said.

They were putting their best player on the board that
Sidney was going to play. There was a brief discussion, and then Bobbi came over to me.

“Zander, they’re switching to get at Sidney,” she said. “They asked permission to make a change. If we say no it’s going to be even worse than it looked.”

“Where’s Sidney?”

Bobbi looked around. “I thought I saw him down the hall,” she said. “He was headed toward the bathroom.”

I didn’t know what to say.

At exactly four o’clock the signal was given, and the players started the clocks. Sidney was nowhere to be seen.

Pullman put his hands behind his head and leaned back in his chair. He was so pleased with himself that it was just dripping from him. There were webcams facing each board, and we could follow the games on laptops set up on the encyclopedia shelves.

Our players were concentrating on their boards. I looked over to where Mr. Culpepper sat, next to the computers. He was looking around the room, I guess wondering where Sidney was.

I imagined my friend outside looking for someplace
to buy drugs, and I felt so sorry for him. The games started moving along slowly, but still no Sidney. I knew his clock was running, and he would be having time pressure later on.

Bobbi looked over at me and then pointed toward the door. I turned and looked. I didn’t see Sidney, but then I thought she must have meant for me to go look for him.

The hallway was empty except for a security guard reading a newspaper. The bathroom was near the end of the corridor. I went in and looked around. I was about to leave when I thought I heard a noise.

“Sidney?” I called.

“I can’t come out.”

“You stuck?”

“I just can’t.”

The door to the stall wasn’t locked, but I didn’t want to open it. I opened it anyway. Sidney was sitting on the john with his pants up.

“Hey, Sidney, I’m sorry,” I said. “But I think you should come out. Go on in there and play the match.”

“Zander, there’s too much pressure.”

“Yeah, I know, but the pressure is going to be there if you play or not, Sidney,” I said. “It’s going to be there for the next match and the next match. And if you don’t play it’s going to be there to make you play, because you’ve got the stuff and everybody knows that. So maybe you need to play and learn how to take the pressure off of yourself by not caring as much. Or maybe even caring as much but just giving yourself a break.”

“You practice saying that, Zander?” Sidney asked. “You make it sound easy, but it doesn’t work that way. Not for me, it doesn’t.”

“It worked for you once, man,” I said. “Remember when you first met me, and some guys were all up in my face and trying to push me through a wall? You stood up for me even though you didn’t know how to fight. You stood up for me even after they knocked your butt down. Go out there and stand up for yourself. Let yourself be knocked down again, but get back up. That’s the Sidney I know.”

“You think I should just say it doesn’t matter?”

“No, try something like … it matters and I might get hurt but I’m doing what I think is … or might be … okay.”

“Everybody is going to look at me when I come into the room,” he said.

“Your clock is running,” I said. “Pullman is sitting at their board four with a big grin on his face.”

“Pullman?”

Sidney Aronofsky looked away for a moment, then stood up.

“Okay,” he said, “let’s get knocked down again.”

I followed Sidney into the media center. He walked up to the board that Pullman was sitting at, glanced down at the pieces, and pushed his king’s pawn two squares up.

Pullman instantly moved, and the next five moves went by so quickly I couldn’t follow them. It was move! Hit the clock! Move! Hit the clock! Move! Sidney hadn’t even sat down yet.

I saw Bobbi look over toward where Sidney and Pullman were playing. She nodded, then looked down at her own game.

Sidney sat and leaned forward. His hands were low between his knees, and he only moved them when he made a move. Pullman was leaning back in his chair
and made me think of the old-time gunslingers in the Western movies.

Each player had his or her own style. Sidney had a slight head bob, and I imagined him working out the moves in his head. Todd was a seventh-grader with a narrow, muscular build, and he sat almost motionless. Bobbi rocked back and forth.

I followed Sidney’s game until the fifth move as he and Pullman jockeyed for position. Then the game was over my head. I couldn’t tell who was winning or if anybody was. The games went along quietly. No one made a sound. All of a sudden I could hear every noise that came from the street below. I tried to guess which of the vehicles were buses and which were trucks.

Then Sidney made a move, pushing a pawn with one stubby finger. Pullman smiled and reached for his piece. When his hand stopped in midair over the board and just
stayed
there I looked over at him. The smile was gone, and he was squinting slightly.

I glanced at Sidney. He looked the same, except that now his hands were above the board, and he was rubbing them together lightly. Pullman made his move,
retreating his bishop, and Sidney instantly made another move.

Now it was Pullman rocking, then tapping his heels under his seat.

I didn’t know how, or exactly what move did it, but I could see by their body language that the game had suddenly gone wrong for Pullman. He was twisting in his seat, hesitating as he reached for his pieces.

When he laid his king to one side, showing that he had conceded the game, his hand was actually trembling.

I felt sorry for Pullman, really sorry. As much as I wanted Sidney to win, I didn’t want Pullman to lose and have to face his father.

Bobbi and Brendel won, too, and Todd got a draw. Da Vinci had won the match three and a half points to one half. Sweet.

“He was playing the Dragon Variation but he really doesn’t know it!” Sidney was saying after Thurgood Marshall had left. “What was he
thinking
?”

“You back now?” LaShonda asked.

“On first board?” Sidney looked up at Bobbi. “Depends on what Bobbi wants.”

“You’re still first board,” Bobbi said.

“I mean from checking out drugs?” LaShonda said.

“I think … I think I’ve got it together again.” Sidney looked at LaShonda and his forehead wrinkled up. “It could go wrong, but I know I got some people on my side. That helps some.”

“Just
some
?” LaShonda asked.

“Some,” Sidney said.

The editors of
The Palette
want to offer our heartfelt congratulations to our own Sidney Aronofsky for his cool and heroic win over James Pullman in the recent chess match with Thurgood Marshall Academy. There had been some rather shoddy comments about Sidney prior to the match, but Sidney met the comments and the challenge of the contest with his usual coolness and dignity. Pullman once again went to the King’s Gambit, which Sidney had declined in their previous meetings. This time Sidney accepted the offered pawn and went on to play a masterful and aggressive game. Overall, Da Vinci won the match with three wins and a draw. Way to go, team!

— Ashley Schmidt

I
t’s great going out with people you don’t particularly like,” Mom was saying as she inspected me from the bathroom door. “That way if the date goes wrong you won’t feel bad.”

“You ever go out with somebody you didn’t like?” I asked.

“Your father.”

“You didn’t like him?”

“Not when I first went out with him,” Mom said. “I thought he was a nerd.”

“He is.”

“But then I fell in love with him, and we got married.”

“Just like that?”

“No, there was a lot of kissing and hugging in between the first date and the marriage,” Mom said. “You want me to tell you about that?”

“No!”

I had just about decided to call Caren Culpepper and tell her I couldn’t make the date, but Mom had convinced me not to. She said it wasn’t any big deal for me, but it might really hurt Caren to break the date at the last minute.

Caren had said she wanted to talk to me when we were in school, and I didn’t mind talking to her except I couldn’t think of anything she would say that I could find interesting. She had also asked me not to hate her for falling in love with me, and I didn’t want to hear anything about no love. What I needed to do was to take Caren out, be reasonably nice to her, and let her down easy.

Mr. Culpepper lived in a great pad on Waverly Place down in the Village, a block from where they sell the best and cheapest hot dogs in the city. The plan was to snatch Caren up, take her uptown to a movie on 23rd Street, buy one bag of popcorn, dig the flick, walk her home, and say “The End.”

Knock on the door. Mrs. Culpepper opened it. She’s pretty in a schoolteacher sort of way, with everything in place and a nice smile. She invited me in, even though I would rather have waited in the hallway. Mr. Culpepper
came into the kitchen. He was wearing a long-sleeved shirt with rolled-up sleeves and a sweater vest. That must be his idea of casual, which made me smile.

“Is there something humorous happening, Mr. Scott?”

“I never saw you with your sleeves rolled up before,” I said.

“It’s not exactly appropriate for school,” he said. The rolled-up sleeves were Waverly Place, but the voice was still Da Vinci.

Caren came out wearing a shimmering pink dress, black leggings, low black heels, and a beret. She looked okay.

“I trust I will see you two before the clock strikes and we’re all turned into mice and pumpkins,” Mr. Culpepper said.

“You’ll see us,” I said.

“So, how are you doing?” Caren asked as we went down in the elevator.

“Okay,” I said. “How are you doing?”

“I’m all good,” she answered.

Caren is not that tough-looking but she dressed up nice. She was looking pretty good, and I couldn’t think of anything to say. We copped the F train at West 4th and four minutes later we were on 23rd.

“Look, Caren, you know we can’t be, like …”

“Like what?” She took my arm.

I hadn’t expected her to take my arm or anything like that. I looked at her, and she had this big smile on her face, which kind of threw me off. I had wanted to tell her that we couldn’t be serious or anything like that, but she had the kind of smile that put you off.

Got to the movie, bought the tickets, and found seats. I forgot the popcorn and asked if she wanted some. She said no. I wanted some, but I didn’t go get a bag just for me. We were waiting for the movie to start and she put her hand under my wrist and held my hand from the inside. Right away I knew she had moves. I didn’t know where she got them from, but mama had some moves.

The movie started, and she looked straight ahead. I was wishing I had some popcorn so I could get my hand free, because she was definitely holding on.

The movie was about some woman who had dreams about what was going to happen to people and all the dreams came true. It was pretty nice. There could have been more violence in it, though. If the girl had a dream about someone dying, they would just get sick and die, nothing outstanding.

But through the whole movie Caren was holding my hand, and when things got tense on the screen she held it even tighter. Finally, the movie was over. I thought that she was liking this too much, and I needed to put some reality back into the scene.

“Let’s walk to my house,” she said.

“Yeah, okay,” I said.

“You think I look all right tonight?”

“You usually look pretty dumpy,” I said.

“What looks dumpy?”

“You wear those jeans with the sequins and stuff.”

“I didn’t know you were noticing me that much,” she said.

“I wasn’t.” I stopped and looked at her. Caren was about five foot five, so she was looking up at me and she was smiling, and I was wondering if she was actually falling in love with me or something. I didn’t think people fell in love that easy, but she was only in the seventh grade so I thought maybe she had.

So we walked down Sixth Avenue and she had my hand again, and I didn’t want to tell her to just let it go because I didn’t want to be mean or anything like that, but then I wondered if she thought I was going to kiss her good night.

“What are you thinking?” she asked. “You’re so quiet.”

“I was wondering what you were thinking,” I said.

“I’m just liking being with you,” she said.

We got to Waverly Place and I asked her if she needed me to go upstairs with her. She said yes.

We got into the elevator, and she leaned against me and put an arm around my waist.

The elevator stopped at her floor. We walked toward her door. She stopped and lifted her face toward me.

I didn’t want to kiss Caren Culpepper, and I didn’t want to look stupid like I’m afraid to kiss a girl, so I kind of leaned down a little and she came up a little and we kissed. Just as the door opened.

Monday morning. Math finally ended and I was on my way to World History when Kambui and LaShonda grabbed me in the hallway.

“Emergency meeting!” Kambui said in this dramatic whisper. He pulled me into Mr. Goldstein’s empty Typing class. We saw Bobbi, and LaShonda frantically waved her over.

Bobbi was out of breath when she got to us. “What’s up?” she asked.