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“Mallory?” A hand settles on my shoulder. I jump and tear out one pod. “Did you need any help?”
“Nope!” I smile at Mrs. Agarwal, sliding the phone into my back pocket. “Just finished the instruction video.”
“Oh, perfect. Make sure you put on gloves before you add the acidic solution.”
“I will.”
The rest of the class is almost done with the experiment. I furrow my brow, hurry to catch up, and a few minutes later, when I can’t find my funnel and spill my baking soda, I stop thinking about Sawyer, or about the way his voice sounded when he said that he never wanted anything as much as chess. And I don’t think of him again for a little over two years. That is, until the day we play for the first time.
And I wipe the floor with him.
PART ONE
Openings
Two years later
Easton is smart, because she lures me out with the promise of free boba. But she’s also dumb, because she doesn’t wait till I’m sipping my chocolate cream cheese foam bubble tea before saying, “I need a favor.”
“Nope.” I grin at her. Pluck two straws from the bin. Offer her one, which she ignores.
“Mal. You haven’t even heard what— ”
“No.”
“It’s about chess.”
“Well, in that case . . .” I smile my thanks to the girl holding out my order. We went out twice, maybe three times last summer, and I have vague, pleasant memories of her. Raspberry ChapStick lips; Bon Iver purring in her Hyundai Elantra; a soft hand, cool under my tank top. Sadly, none of said memories include her name. But she wroteMelanieacross my boba, so that’s okay.
We share a brief, secret smile, and I turn to Easton. “In that case, double no.”
“I’m short a player. For a team tournament.”
“I don’t play anymore.” I check my phone. It’s 12:09— twentyone more minutes before I need to be back at the garage. Bob, my boss, is not exactly a kind, forgiving human being. Sometimes I doubt he’s even human. “Let’s drink this outside, before I spend the afternoon under a Chevy Silverado.”
“Come on, Mal.” She glowers at me. “It’s chess. You still play.”
When my sister Darcy’s sixth- grade teacher announced that she was going to send the class guinea pig to a “farm upstate,” Darcy, unable to ascertain whether the farm really existed, decided to kidnap him. The piggie, not the teacher. I’ve been cohabitating with Goliath the Abducted for the past year— a year spent denying him scraps of our dinners ever since the vet we cannot afford begged us on his knees to put him on a diet. Unfortunately, Goliath has the uncanny ability to stare me into submission every single time.
Just like Easton does. Their expressions exude the same pure, unyielding stubbornness.
“Nuh-uh.” I suck on my tea. Divine. “I’ve forgotten the rules. What does the little horsie do, again?”
“Very funny.”
“No, really, which one is chess? The queen conquers Catan without passing Go— ”
“I’m not asking you to do what you used to do.”
“WhatdidI use to do?”
“You know when you were thirteen and you’d beaten all the other kids at the Paterson Chess Club, then the teenagers, then the adults? And they brought in people from New York for you to humiliate? I don’t needthat.”
I was actually twelve when that happened. I remember itwell, because Dad stood next to me, hand warm on my bony shoulder, proclaiming proudly,I haven’t won a game against Mallory since she turned eleven a year ago. Extraordinary, isn’t she?But I don’t point it out, and instead plop down in a patch of grass, next to a flower bed full of zinnias barely hanging on to life. August in New Jersey is no one’s favorite place.
“Remember halfway through my exhibition matches? When I was about to pass out and you told everyone to step back— ”
“— and I handed you my juice.” She sits next to me. I glance at her perfect eyeliner wing, then at my oil- stained coveralls, and it’s nice, how some things never change. Perfectionist Easton Peña, always with a plan, and her messy sidekick Mallory Greenleaf. We’ve been in the same class since first grade but didn’t really interact until she joined the Paterson Chess Club at ten. She was, in a way, already fully formed. Already the amazing, stubborn person she is today.
