Check & Mate by Ali Hazelwood

Then I read the tag below: Sawyer vs. Gurin, 1978. World Chess Championship.

“He is . . .”

“Yup.” Defne steps to my side.

“You knew him?”

“I trained with him.”

Right. Yeah. “How was he?”

“Very positional. As Black he almost always played the Najdorf Sicilian— ”

“I mean, what kind of person?”

“Oh. Let’s see.” She purses her lips, eyes on the photo. “Quiet. Kind. Dry, sharp sense of humor. Honest, almost to a fault. Stubborn. Troubled, sometimes.” She takes a deep breath. “He’s the reason I have Zugzwang.”

“What do you mean?”

“He gave me the money to buy it. A loan, I thought, but once I could pay him back, he wouldn’t take it.”

Sounds like someone I know: generous, sarcastic, bad at lying.

Somber eyed.

I bet he didn’t know how to take a no. I bet he was singleminded and mercurial and inscrutable. I bet he was charismatic but also arrogant and obstinate. Mulish, and difficult to understand, stupid, irritating, necessary, annoying, so, so addictive in that frightening, out-of-control way, so warm and gentle and genuinely funny, right, ruthless, impossible to get over—

“Mal?”

I startle away from the picture. “Yeah.”

“Your training . . . What we have been doing, studying your play, it’s good. Focusing on your weaknesses is good. But we should really take a look at some of his— ”

“No,” I interrupt her. We’re not talking about Marcus Sawyer anymore, but it doesn’t need to be spelled out.

“I don’t understand why you refuse to— ”

“No.”

She huffs. “It’s only fair. And expected. This is not a tournament, Mal, it’s the World Championship— the match between the two best players alive. You should be honing your skills with your opponent in mind, not training on old games and overanalyzing your own style. He’s probably studying your games, and I doubt that he’d expect you not to— ”

“No,” I say for the last time, and she knows it’s final just as well as I do. “Let’s continue as planned.”

Defne frowns. But she nods nonetheless.



I’M BAD AT CONSOLIDATING.

I attack too early. Or too late.

I’m not decisive enough, except when I’m so decisive, I blow my advantage.

I cannot comfortably trade into end games.

I rely too much on my favorite openings— a cardinal sin, since players with preferences are players with weaknesses.

I should focus on the sides to take the center.

And:

“This game against Chuang,” Oz is saying. “Your queen was completely open. Not saying go all ministry of defense, but— ”

“Okay. Okay, I . . .” I rub my eyes. “You’re right. Let’s go back to the engines. I feel like I’m— ”

“It’s past midnight, Mal.” Defne is shaking her head. “You should go to bed.”

Shit. “Okay. Tomorrow morning— ”

“We’ve been locked in here for two days, Mal.”

We have. With brief food interruptions and sporadic visitors— Mom stopping by to kiss my forehead; Sabrina barging in on an analysis to show me an article from The Cut in which a journalist begged me to “step on her”; Darcy coming by to ask if her blue top was in my suitcase (it was) and to show me her pretty new pendant.

A murrina, it’s called!

So beautiful. I stared at the colorful circles of flowers. Where did you get it?

N— Mom bought it for me!

“I think you should take a break,” Defne says.

“What do you mean?”

“Tomorrow, take the morning off. Sleep in. Maybe go somewhere with your sisters? You have one day left before the match, and half of it is going to be full of press.”

I frown between her and Oz. “You guys keep saying that my centers are so close, they look like checkers.”

“Yes, but there’s nothing we can do about it now.”

“Okay. Yeah. You’re probably right.” I try not to pout as I amble to the door. My thighs ache from too much sitting.

“Hey.”

I turn around. Oz is putting the sets back together and turning off the computers. I take in Marcus Sawyer’s photo in the background, the sharp contrast to Defne’s pixie hair. “Yeah?”

“I told you once before. But in case you forgot . . . I think you can win the World Championship. I think you can do whatever you put your mind to.”

I smile faintly and walk away.

I’m not sure I believe her. I’m almost sure I don’t.

The hotel has been filling up, to the point that it’s become difficult to walk around avoiding impromptu interviews and pic requests and people wearing T-shirts with my damn face on them. It’s probably why I’ve stopped emerging from the training room: this close to the start of the championship, and I’m feeling more and more like a fraud, like a kid at the adults’ table, like I’m not worth the ink my name is printed with. I’m not good enough. I don’t deserve this. I’m shit with the Night Attack against the Caro- Kann. I heard the words First woman at the World Chess Championship once, and have been trying to expel them from my head ever since. Does it mean that if I lose, it’ll be a failure for all women? Does it mean that I’m suddenly more than just myself? I have no idea, and I can’t deal with any of this. So I don’t, and focus on the way I didn’t know about the Raphael Variation until this very morning.