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“Fantastic!” Defne tells me while we share a Costco bag of Twizzlers on the campus quad. She’s surreptitiously smoking acigarette, which she lit saying,FYI, I amnotmodeling good behavior.“But itisan elimination tournament. The more you win, the better your opponents, the harder it’ll get.” She notices my frown and bumps her shoulder against mine. “This is chess, Mallory. Painstakingly engineered to make us miserable.”
She’s right. I get a taste on my last match of the day when I find myself dropping a rook, then a bishop against a woman who looks eerily like my middle school’s librarian. Not- Mrs.- Larsen is a fidgety, anxious player who takes ages to make a move and whimpers whenever I advance on her. I alternate between doodling on my score sheet and feeling like I’m at the zoo, staring at the sloth’s cage and waiting for it to move. The game drags until the end of the round, when we’re both out of time.
“It’s a draw,” the tournament director says dispassionately, surveying our board. “Black advances.”
That’s me. I’m moving to the next round because I was at a disadvantage. I know draws are exceedingly common in chess, but I am distressed. Frustrated. No— I’mfurious. With myself.
“I made tons of mistakes.” I tear angrily into the dried apricots Defne handed me. I want to kick the wall. “I should have played rook c6. She could have had me three times— did you see how close she came to my king with her bishop? It was such ashitshow. I cannot believe I am even allowed within ten feet of a chessboard.”
“You won, Mallory.”
“It was adisaster. It qualifies for federal relief— I didn’t deserve to win.”
“Lucky for you, in chess deserving and undeserving wins count the same.”
“You don’t understand. I messed up so many— ”
Defne puts a hand on my shoulder. I quiet. “This. This feeling you have right now? Remember it. Bottle it. Feed it.”
“What?”
“This is why chess players study, Mallory. Why we’re so obsessed with replaying games and memorizing openings.”
“Because we hate to draw?”
“Because we hate feeling like we did anything less than our absolute best.”
The hotel is a five- minute walk from campus. My room is nothing to write home about, except that it is because: privacy. I cannot remember the last time I had access to a bed without the audience of a twelve- year- old goblin and the three- thousandyear- old demon who possesses her guinea pig. I should take advantage of it. I consider watching a movie. Then I consider whipping out my phone, pulling up dating apps, looking for matches in the Philly area. Perfect no-strings- attached opportunity. Plus, orgasms do improve my mood.
Instead I stare out the window, replaying my last game as the sun sets slowly.
It’s like that time I accidentally sexted Mom. Like that day the entire cheering team walked in on me while I pretended to open the automatic sliding doors with the Force. Like in middle school, when I walked into the teachers’ restroom to wash my hands and found Mr. Carter sitting on the toilet doing a sudoku. Whenever I do something really embarrassing, for days after the incident I live in a state of utter mortification. At night I close my eyes and my brain will yank me back to the deep well of my shame, projecting cringeworthy scenes in excruciating detail against my eyelids.
(Overdramatic? Perhaps. But I sexted my mother. I amallowed.)
My neurons cling to every splinter of embarrassment, won’t let go of the mistakes I made during my matches. I won, fine, but in my second game I left my knight open likethat. Gross. Disgusting. Appal—
Someone knocks.
“Defne asked me to take you to the social and introduce you around,” Oz says when I open the door. He’s staring at his phone.
“The social?”
“There’s a reception downstairs, for players who moved to day two. Defne can’t go, since it’s only for players. There’s free food and booze.” He glances up, assessing. “How old are you?”
“Eighteen.”
He mutters something about babysitting toddlers and not being Mary Fucking Poppins. “They probably have Sierra Mist somewhere in a cooler. Come.”
I’m not sure what I expected from a chess party. Easton aside, I never hung out with the PCC people, but they always struck me as quiet and escapism- driven. The players here, though, look more like businessmen, wearing tailored suits and laughing over champagne glasses. There are no sweater vests in sight, and no one is bemoaning the untimely end ofBattlestar Galactica. They all seem boisterous and confident. Young. Wealthy. Sure of their place in the world.
One of them notices Oz and leaves his group to approach us. “Congrats on breaking the top twenty.” He glances at me— first distracted, then appraising, then lingering. An unpleasant shiver travels up my spine. “I didn’t know we could bring a plus-one.”
Oh, yeah—the people in this room? They’re 98 percent male.
“Is this your sister?” He must be around my age, and theoretically he should be handsome in a classic, wholesome way, butthere’s something waxy about him, something unsettling in his blue gaze that lifts my hairs.
“Why the hell would she be my sister?” Oz asks.
