Check & Mate by Ali Hazelwood

“She asked me to teach her to play chess.”

“Darcy?” I perk up. “For real?”

“She said it’s . . . hot shit girl?”

I laugh. “Hot girl shit. You should really try to be online a little.” Most of the other top- ten players have Twitch and You-Tube channels. Nolan: Twitter and Instagram— both with NOT DIRECTLY MANAGED BY NOLAN SAWYER written in all caps in the bio. I bet his social media guy got sick of people DMing him nudes. “Why are you not online, anyway?”

“I’m online way too much.”

“What do you mean?”

“There are pictures of seven- year- old me mining his nose for boogers while playing Nakamura. Throwing a tantrum like a whiny brat after a loss at fourteen.”

“Oh.”

“We all have embarrassing phases growing up, but mine were immortalized. Whoever’s online looking for me already has plenty to find.”

I remember Emil’s words: It’s not easy, growing up as a prodigy in front of the cameras. “Do you mind it? Your . . . troublemaker reputation.”

“You mean, total piece of shit?” He laughs softly. “It’s deserved. I was one. I can only try to be different in the future.”

He’s succeeding, too. I try to recall recent incidents and come up empty. “You still get mad at the people who beat you.”

“Is that what you think?” He shakes his head. “I get furious at myself. For making mistakes. For not being the best I can be. And every time you blunder, you feel the same.”

“Not true. I— ”

He gives me a side look, and I fall quiet. Whatever.

“I showed Darcy how the pieces move,” he says quietly.

“How?”

“She had a set under her bed. Pink and purple.”

I close my eyes. A knot tightens in my belly. “I thought I’d gotten rid of that.”

“You should teach her yourself.”

“What does she need to learn for?”

“She wants to. She idolizes you.”

I snort. “She calls me Mallopee and constantly makes me ‘Lamest Greenleaf’ graphics in Photoshop— which I illegally downloaded for her, by the way. Ingrate.”

“She wants to be like you.”

“I’ll never teach her.”

“Why?”

I turn away. The road is deserted, and the pines are becoming thicker. “Chess is a bad idea.”

“Why?”

“Look where it got me.”

“It got you here. To me.”

Blood rushes to my cheeks, but his tone is matter-of-fact, not suggestive. He doesn’t mean it like that. He means . . . I don’t even know.

“It was you who saw him, wasn’t it?” Nolan asks. I look back at him, puzzled.

“What?”

“Your father. Something happened between him and that woman— that arbiter at the Olympics. You found out. Your mom kicked him out. I’m assuming you were estranged for a few years. And later his accident happened.”

I straighten. The seat belt tightens into my sweater. “How— how do you know? When did you— ?”

“I didn’t. But I remembered some rumors going around the tournament circuit at the time. About Archie Greenleaf. The rest . . . I just guessed.”

“You guessed? How?”

“Little things. Your reaction at the Olympics. You obviously love chess but talk yourself into thinking that it’s a loathsome thing. You feel responsible for your family, not just your sisters but your mother, too.” His tone is even, idle, like he’s reading a boring textbook to the rest of the class. “You constantly act like you’re guilty of something awful. Like you deserve nothing but scraps for yourself.”

Me. The boring textbook— it’s me.

“Because I am guilty,” I blurt out. Surprising myself. It’s not something I’ve verbalized out loud to anyone before. But if I hadn’t told Mom about Heather Turcotte, if Dad hadn’t left home, if he hadn’t had a reason to be driving drunk at 3:00 a.m. . . . If. If.

If.

“Did you know,” he says conversationally, “that I was the reason my grandfather was institutionalized?”

“What does this . . . No. I didn’t.”

“He’d been acting weird for a while. He’d say and do really inappropriate stuff, sometimes in public. My parents had gotten wind of it, but I think they just chalked it up to my grandfather being old. And I was staying with him a lot at the time, so I covered for him when I could. I honestly thought he just needed to sleep more or some shit like that. But then . . . it was his birthday. I went to his apartment, the one you’ve been to. I walked upstairs— same doorman as now, he doesn’t give a shit— and let myself in. I had a present for him, a chess set I’d made. Nine months of woodworking.”

He signals right and takes the exit. We must be home. Nearly. “We’d met the day before. We met every single day, but this time he didn’t recognize me. Or he did, but thought I had bad intentions. I’ll never know, I figure. He wasn’t a violent man, but he had a knife. I saw him take it out of the block and thought he wanted to . . . chop celery? I can’t fucking remember. But instead he stared into my eyes, ran at me, and the cut was deep. I needed stitches, which meant going to the hospital, which meant filing a report, and that was it. My father had the ammo he needed to lock him up. Said it was for the best, and maybe it was, but that’s not why he was doing it. He’d always hated his father for caring more about chess than he ever did about him.”