Check & Mate by Ali Hazelwood

The bright, happy expression darkens a little. “Why?”

I like her. I really like her, and for a moment I almost consider explaining things to her. Stuff. Life. My sisters, and Mom, and roller derby fees. Bob, and changing windshield wipers, and the fact that I don’t need a one- year fellowship but a job that will be there next year, and the year after, and the one after that. Dad, and the memories, and the night I swore to myself that I was done with chess. Forever.

It seems like too much for a first meeting, so I condense the truth. “I’m just not interested.”

She’s instantly subdued. Her brow furrows in a slight frown and she studies me for a long while, as though realizing that there might be something she doesn’t know about me. Ha. “Tell you what,” she says eventually. “I’m going to get going— Sunday’s peak day at Zugzwang. Lots of prep. But I’ll give you a few days to think about it— ”

“I’m not going to change my mind— ”

“— and in the meantime, I’ll email you the contract.” She pats my shoulder, and I’m enveloped by her lemony scent once again. One of her tattoos, I notice, is a chessboard, with pieces developed on it. A famous game, perhaps, but I don’t recognize it.

“I— You don’t have my email,” I tell her. She’s already at her car— 2019 Volkswagen Beetle.

“Oh, I do. From the tournament database.”

“Which tournament?”

“Yesterday’s.” She waves goodbye as she gets into the driver’s seat. “I organized it.”

I don’t wait for her to drive off. I turn around, walk back inside the house, and pretend not to notice Mom looking at me from the window.





I am surrounded. Under siege. Relentlessly attacked from all sides.

Honda Civic leaking coolant? On top of me.

Mortgage letter from the credit union? In my backpack. Sabrina’s text reminding me that her derby fees are due on Friday and if I don’t pay them, her life will be in shambles? On my phone.

Bob’s supervillain presence, raging because I refused to push an early brake job on a high school junior? Hovering all over the garage.

Easton, whining at me nonstop like I’m her local congressman? Somewhere next to the Civic.

I successfully avoided her for three days. Now it’s Wednesday, she’s shown up to the garage, and I have nowhere to retreat. Except under a steady stream of coolant.

“You’re acting like a total weirdo,” she says for the twentieth time. “Winning against Sawyer and then running away? Refusing money to play chess?”

“Listen,” I say, and then stop. Partly because the leaking has intensified. Partly because I exhausted my explanations ten minutes ago. “I need a stable, long-term job that allows me to pick up extra shifts when money gets tight. I need it to be here in Paterson in case something happens to Mom and my sisters need me. I have no interest in getting sucked back into chess.” There’s a limited number of ways I can paraphrase these three simple concepts. “You’re leaving next Wednesday, right?”

She ignores me. “People are talking about your game. They’re analyzing it on ChessWorld.com. They’re using words like masterpiece, Mal. Zach keeps sending me links!”

I patch the radiator and roll from under the Civic, take in Easton’s University of Colorado crop top, and scrunch my nose. Seems a bit premature. “Did Zach ever end up playing against Lal?”

“Now you’re interested in the tournament?” She rolls her eyes. “No. But that’s probably for the best, since he lost every single game.” I smile my schadenfreude, but she wags her finger at me. “Hey— at least Zach didn’t leave me without a player because he freaked out when Nolan Sawyer winked at him.”

I huff. “First of all, I seriously doubt Nolan Sawyer has ever winked, will ever wink, or even knows the meaning of the word wink.” I stand, wiping my hands on the butt of my coveralls. Sawyer’s serious, intense expression is not something I’ve been letting myself think about. Okay, maybe I dreamed of him staring at me from across a chessboard that spontaneously burst into flames. Of him pushing the chess clock at me, smiling faintly, and saying with his deep voice, “Did you know that I’m a Gen Z sex symbol?” Of him tipping me over like people do with their kings when they resign, and then stubbornly holding out a hand for me, eager to help me up. Okay, maybe in the past week I’ve had three separate Nolan Sawyer dreams. So what? Sue me. Send the sleep police. “Secondly, I had an emergency.”

“Forgot to turn on the Crock-Pot, did you?”

“Something like that. Hey, I want to come to the airport when you— ” Bob’s voice rises in the main garage, and I frown. “Wait here a sec,” I say, running to check on the too-familiar noise.

My uncle used to co-own the garage with Bob, and I was working here during summers since well before he should have agreed to have me underfoot. I’ve always been intuitive about fixing stuff— figuring out how the different pieces are connected in a larger system, visualizing how they work together as building blocks of a whole, calculating how changing one could affect the others. So much like chess, Dad used to say, and I don’t know if he was right, but Uncle Jack was happy to have me around. Until he wasn’t around anymore: the week after I graduated and began working for him full- time, he made the unfortunate decision to sell his share to Bob and move to the Pacific Northwest “for the Dungeness crab.” As a consequence, I now have the pleasure of answering only to Bob.