Page 25 of Middlegame

—Urban legend (traditional)

CHECKMATE

Timeline: 16:52 EST, June 19, 2000 (five years in isolation).

Dodger plays chess the way she used to slide down the gully behind her house: hard and fast and like she’s afraid any loss of momentum could prove fatal. Every move is an attack. When she isn’t touching the pieces, she sits frozen, barely seeming to breathe, a predatory halt that bears no resemblance to actual calm. She is a marble statue masquerading as a girl, coming alive only when the rules of the game allow.

Her opponent moves; she responds, swift and unflinching as a master debater arguing some unprovable point. The fact that they play for a crowd doesn’t matter. (Neither does the fact that her coach has asked her—virtually begged her—to slow down, to draw out her moves and give the rubes something worth watching. “If they wanted to see something flashy, they should have gone to the aquarium” was her reply every time the subject came up. She’s as unwavering in her answers as she is in her ruthless, results-based style of play. She’ll never be a rock star, but at least she’ll fade into obsolescence with a trophy in each hand. That’s good enough for her.) Winning is the only thing that matters.

Winning is something she can do without anyone to help her.

The last piece is moved; her opponent tips over his king, signaling her victory. She finally lifts her eyes to his, holding out her hand for the ritual, perfunctory handshake. Someone in the crowd—the great, faceless beast of the crowd—shifts positions, and somehow, her attention is caught.

Training conquers distraction: she shakes her opponent’s hand, fingers cool and nerveless, before she pulls away from him and does the unthinkable. Dodger Cheswich, who once did three games back to back while suffering from food poisoning so bad that she excused herself between moves to vomit, who has another game to prepare for, who has never, during the six long weeks of this tour, which he’s heard her call “geniuses on parade” without a hint of irony in her voice, paid attention to anything but the board . . . Dodger Cheswich is walking away.

It’s hardly more of a surprise when she breaks into a run. After all, she’s already broken script; what’s a little more deviation?

She runs, eyes fixed on a teenage boy with slightly too-long brown hair and a faint tan underscored with years upon years of freckles. His glasses are too large for his face; they make him look like a confused cartoon owl, someone trotted into the episode long enough to dispense wisdom before being carted off again. He’s wearing a T-shirt with a Shakespeare quotation on it, blue jeans, and the possessive hand of the blonde girl next to him. Everything about the blonde screams “back off, he’s mine,” and if Dodger were the one who got the words, she’d find a way to explain that she doesn’t want him, not like that, not ever. But she doesn’t have the words, and she’s never going to have the words. What she has is numbers, probabilities, a whole universe of potential in her head—and those probabilities tell her the odds are a million to one against her being right.

It’s not him. It’s not him. It’s someone who looks like him, or like she thinks he’d look if she saw him now, five long years after he decided to stop answering when she tried to call. She knows it’s not him, and still she doesn’t slow until she hits the edge of the arena hard enough to knock the wind out of herself, fingers locking around the low bar that’s supposed to keep kids from falling in and landing on the ice skaters, or circus acrobats, or whatever other show is on display this week. When it isn’t chess, which she figures has to be most of the time.

He stands. He takes a step toward her.

She opens her mouth. She wants to say his name. She wants to scream it, to pack it with five years of sleepless nights, five years of struggling to be the best at everything, since it was her fault he went quiet. She can’t make a sound. No matter how hard she tries, she can’t even squeak. All she can do is stare, hoping he’ll know her silence for the screaming it is.

“Dodger.” He sounds half-strangled, like speech hurts him as much as silence is hurting her. He stands, the blonde still grasping his elbow, and when he shrugs her off, she goes without fighting, a slow and petulant frown growing on her face. Dodger doesn’t know her, but she’s met her all the same, the one smart girl in the classroom full of smart boys—and it’s not that girls are less likely to be smart, no, it’s that girls are more likely to be encouraged to hide it—who’s as poorly socialized as the rest of them, and doesn’t know how to handle another girl showing up on her territory. Dodger has met her a hundred times, and only the fact that she’s never cared about who gets the boys has kept her from becoming that iconic girl. There’s never been time. Math takes up too much of the world for that.

She clings to the railing, staring at the boy who said her name. Of course he knows me, she thinks, scolding herself in silence. They announced me at the start of the match, they announce me at the start of every match, stupid, stupid—

“Dodger,” he says again, and steps into the aisle. His legs are shaking and his face is going white; he looks, in fact, like he’s on the verge of fainting.

The rail is too high for Dodger to climb, but she tries, stretching onto the tips of her toes and grabbing for the top like she’s going to haul herself into the bleachers. Her defeated opponent is still behind her, staring, and he’s not alone anymore; several other players have joined him, all gaping at the spectacle of Dodger Cheswich, the Unsmiling Girl, hurting herself trying to get to an unprepossessing teenage boy who looks like he’s seen a ghost.

She’s started to make a noise, a high, thin keening sound, like a coyote with its leg caught in a trap. It’s enough to set teeth on edge. She doesn’t seem to realize.

Roger realizes. “Dodger!” he finally shouts, and breaks into a run, his limbs moving in the sort of uncoordinated avalanche of bone that haunts boys between the ages of thirteen and thirty. Dodger is still trying to climb the arena’s edge when he reaches her, leans over the rail, and grabs her hands in a motion so abrupt that there’s no time for either of them to think better of it. He’s just there, holding her fast, and she’s staring up at him, eyes wide and stunned and filled with the sort of loneliness that should be criminal. Is criminal in the tribunals of the soul, where the innocent are punished alongside the guilty.

“It’s you,” she sighs, breaking the seal on her voice. Getting louder with each word, she continues, “It’s you, Roger, it’s you what are you doing here did you know it was me did you come to see me play I’m sorry whatever I did I’m sorry I didn’t mean to I won’t do it ever again if you’ll just—”

“Stop,” he says. His voice is sorrow and apology in equal measure, and she stops immediately, looking up at him with those big, sad eyes. She’ll have bruises on her toes in the morning, from balancing on them for so long in shoes that were never intended for this sort of abuse. In the moment, she doesn’t care. Nothing is going to make her care.

Roger laughs unsteadily. “Wow,” he says. “You got really tall.”

Dodger blinks. Then, somehow, somewhere, she finds a smile and offers it to him. “I think you’re taller now,” she says. “You finally caught up.”

“That happens.”

The blonde has recovered her shock and come trotting down the steps to appear at Roger’s shoulder. She looks at Dodger, assessing. She’s scoping out the competition. The fact that she has to hurts Dodger’s heart, as does the obliviousness on Roger’s face. He doesn’t see the signs girls pass between themselves, and that makes her wonder whether boys have a secret language of their own, something she’s never seen and maybe never will.

If it’s a language, he’ll learn it, she thinks fiercely, and she’s never had a truer thought in her life.

“Hi,” says the blonde, interposing herself into the conversation. “I’m Alison. How do you and Roger know each other?” Her hand returns to his arm, resting lightly just above the wrist. If she’s not his girlfriend already, she will be by tomorrow.

Dodger wants to be happy for her, and for him; Roger will enjoy having a girlfriend. She remembers him talking about girls in the confused tone of someone who craves something but can’t even start to explain why he’d want it. She remembers how much that aggravated him; he liked having a definition for everything, even back then. At least now he knows he wants a girl, and here’s a girl volunteering for the position. It may have taken another girl showing up—“the competition,” despite the fact that Dodger is anything but—to make her see it, but that doesn’t change the fact that she’ll probably be good for him. Roger is too smart to like a girl who wouldn’t be good for him.

“We were pen pals when we were kids,” she says, and the lie is so easy that it might as well be the truth, because it’s not like there’s a word for what they were to one another. He was the voice in her head, the reason she learned to read for meaning as well as for superficial content, her best friend and the thing that kept her sane.

He was the first person who ever broke her heart, and that was an important lesson, too. It had taken Roger to teach her the world was cruel, and that was something she’d very much needed to learn.