Checkmate

  I called Caren’s house as I ate and her mother said she wasn’t home.

  “She’s at band practice, but I’ll tell her to call you as soon as she gets in,” her mother said.

  I started thinking about Sidney again and the Pullman kid. Lots of kids got pressured when they played ball, but I had never thought of kids getting pressured when they played chess. I felt sorry for Sidney but I felt even sorrier for the Pullman kid. He was good, he worked hard, but he wasn’t being allowed to relax and just play.

  Then I started thinking about LaShonda and Kambui and wondered if they felt any pressure to get good grades. Maybe that’s why they liked the Cruisers, because we were kind of laid-back.

  Finally, I started thinking about the kids that my uncle Guy had told us about. He hadn’t given us any real details, just showed us the places they had died and then showed us how nice they looked when they had been alive. I knew that I couldn’t just look at Sidney and see the pressure he was under to win all the time. I wouldn’t have even thought of it if I hadn’t seen the Pullman kid. I wondered if his father felt bad afterward. Probably not. He probably thought he was doing his son a favor by slapping him around.

  I put on the television, then turned it off, then put it back on again. I was trying to think of a way to convince Sidney to play the fourth board. I went to the Internet and looked up what it meant to play which board. The way it looked was that the fourth board was the weakest on the team and I knew that it could be embarrassing for Sidney not to be first board. Where were all the easy answers?

  I found his number on my cell and called him.

  “Hey, Zander.” Sidney.

  “Hey, Sidney. Look, Bobbi wants to put you on fourth board against Thurgood Marshall. She said —”

  “Whatever,” Sidney interrupted.

  “It’s okay with you?”

  “Yeah.” Real quiet, though.

  “You okay, man?”

  “Yeah.” Real quiet again.

  “Yo, Sidney, is your head straight, man?”

  “Yeah, I’m all good,” he said.

  He didn’t sound all good. I told him I’d tell Bobbi that he was down for the switch.

  I don’t normally doubt the Cruisers. We are definitely chill in our approach to life and all up in the game, but Sidney and his whole world of chess was pushing me into corners I hadn’t been to before, opening my eyes to pressures that you couldn’t just walk away from. And the whole thing with the chessboard and Sidney’s code meant that he was having trouble dealing with the program. It reminded me of the way I dealt or, I guess, didn’t deal with my parents being split up. I didn’t think chess could slip-slide into the world of just about violence. The Zander man tiptoeing down Wrong Street.

  I knew everything wasn’t okay at all, but I didn’t want to push it. Sidney hadn’t been convinced, he just took it. Maybe he felt we were putting him down. I wanted to call him back and say we weren’t, but that might have felt like we were treating him differently, which we were in a way, and that might have made him feel … Where were the easy answers?

  I called Bobbi and told her what happened. She said she would send the board assignments to Thurgood Marshall.

  NO BID, SID!!!

  Sidney Aronofsky, Da Vinci’s lone hope for glory, has chosen to RUN AWAY from a match with Pullman in the upcoming chess match. We see Da Vinci’s true colors as one yellow streak fading rapidly into the sunset!!!!

  This was the flyer two girls from Pullman’s school, Thurgood Marshall Academy, were handing out in front of our school at lunchtime. They had come all the way to our school to mess with us. I hoped that Sidney wouldn’t see the flyer. He didn’t have to. Mr. Culpepper saw it and called Sidney to the office. Then he called the Cruisers.

  “No way!” he said. “Sidney is first board and he will remain first board. He is not a Cruiser and if this is your idea of how to dis-inspire our student body then I will go to Mrs. Maxwell and even beyond to see that your influence ceases once and for all! Do I make myself clear?”

  “You’re clear but you’re wrong, sir,” I said. “If Sidney doesn’t want to play first board …”

  “Sidney, what do you want to do?” Mr. Culpepper spoke softly but it was as if his voice was coming out all in capitals or something.

  “I’d rather play fourth board,” Sidney said, his voice hardly above a whisper.

  I looked at Mr. Culpepper. He was turning red. Then a brighter red. Then he took several deep, slow breaths, held his breath for a minute, exhaled slowly, and said, “You may all leave my office now.”

  I felt real bad for Sidney. Kambui and LaShonda were telling him that he had done the right thing, and Bobbi was just looking kind of lost. I knew she felt bad. Our idea had been a good one, but the way Mr. Culpepper had put it, and the way the kids from Thurgood Marshall had put it, Sidney looked bad either way.

  “You want to hang out after school?” I asked.

  “No,” Sidney replied.

  “We meant to do the right thing,” I said.

  “I know.”

  I didn’t have anything else to say and had to watch him leave with his head down.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Game Day

  Going 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 t
o 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 PALETTE

  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

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  As the World Turns!

  It’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 loo
king 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.