Check & Mate

by Ali Hazelwood

Plan Fake Your Way Through Chess is going to need some serious reworking.

But it’s okay, a voice rebuts. You’re thinking of prize money. You’re not falling in love with chess again. You’re firmly out of love. Yeah. Exactly. Precisely. That.

I look at where she’s pointing. Then immediately flatten myself as deep into the driver’s seat as I can go. “Shit.” “Should you be saying shit in front of us?” Darcy asks. “Yeah— what happened to the pedagogical modeling of appropriate behaviors?” Impossible. He’s not here. He can’t be. I’m hallucinating. Paranoid delusions. Yes. From the chemicals in the Twizzlers. All that dye.

“What’s wrong with her?” “A stroke, maybe? She’s starting to be of a certain age.”

“No— Sabrina, don’t call nine- one- one. I’m fine. I just thought I saw . . .” I glance to the porch again. He is still there. Nolan. Sawyer. Is. On. My. Porch.

“Do you know him?” Sabrina asks. “She sure looks like she does,” Darcy says. “Is he another one of your sex friends?” “Maybe he’s her stalker,” Sabrina offers. “Mal, you have a stalker?” Sabrina snorts. “You didn’t let me watch You because I’m fourteen, and now I find out that you have your own stalker?” “Should we run him over? Does blood stain wood?”

Darcy and Sabrina exchange a long, dangerous look. Then they jump out of the car with an overeager “Let’s go meet him!” I hurry after them, hoping this is a lucid dream. Well. Nightmare.

He’s wearing jeans and a dark shirt, and maybe it’s because there are no chessboards, no arbiters, no press in sight, but he almost doesn’t look like himself. He could be an athlete. A college student on a football scholarship. A stern, handsome young man who has not (allegedly) dated a Baudelaire, who has not (confirmedly) called an interviewer a dickhead for implying that his game looked tired.

He cocks his head. Studies her. Doesn’t smile. “Are you Mal’s friend?” If the world were fair, Darcy and Sabrina would roast him and heckle him off our property. And yet, they giggle like they usually do in Easton’s presence. What the—

She said you work together?” He nods. “We do.” “At the senior center?” Nolan hesitates, puzzled. Looks at me for the first time. Finds me on the verge of a panic attack. Then says, “Where else?”

There is, I believe, a bit of a standoff. Where I look at him, he looks at me, and we’re both fairly still. Assessing. Feeling each other out. In my case, monitoring escape routes.

“Are you going to run away?” I frown. “What?” “You usually run away from me. Are you going to?”

He’s right. He’s also rude. “You usually lose your king to me. Are you going to?” I was aiming for a sharp, jugular- cutting jab. But Sawyer does something I d...

I freeze. Force myself to relax. “I hope you won.” I hope you humiliated him. I hope he cried. I hope it hurt him. I miss him.

Nolan smiles at her, looking not at all like the sullen manchild I know him to be.

I know what Nolan sees: Mom’s in her late forties, but looks older than that. Tired. Fragile. And I know what Mom sees: a young man who’s taller than tall and handsome to go with that. Polite, too.

That’s what I’m thinking when I open my mouth to tell Mom that Nolan really can’t stay. What I’m thinking when Nolan is just a fraction of a second quicker and says, “Thank you, Mrs. Greenleaf. I would love to.”

nodding gravely when Darcy asks, enthralled by his appetite, “Do you happen to have a tapeworm?” He obviously enjoys Mom’s cooking.

He made a deep, guttural sound after the first bite, something that reminded me of . . . I flushed. No one else paid attention.

I stiffen, spearing a single green bean. I press my knee against Nolan’s under the table, to signal him to be quiet.

“It has its ups and downs. I used to love it, but a little . . . sameness set in, and I actually thought about quitting. Then Mallory arrived.” His knee suddenly pushes back against mine. “Now I love it again.”

Mom cocks her head. “You two must work very closely together.” “Not nearly as much as I’d like.” Oh my God. Oh. My. God.

“He’s kidding.” I kick Nolan’s calf, hard. He doesn’t seem to care, but he does trap my foot between his own. “He’s known for his terrible sense of humor.” My leg is now twined with his. Cool. Cool.

“Okay.” Sabrina sets her glass down. “I’ll go ahead and ask it, since we all want to know: Are you guys having sex?” “Oh my God.” I cover my eyes. “Oh my God.” “Sabrina,” Mom chides, “that is really inappropriate.” She turns to me. “But yes, are you?” “Oh my God,” I moan.

My twelve- year- old sister, who sleeps with a stuffed fox, just asked the world’s number one chess player if he came over to bang me.

Sabrina shoots me a triumphant smile. Sistercide. Sistercide is the only option. I’ll make Darcy help me hide the body. Or Mom. Or Goliath.

“So,” Darcy interjects, “when are you guys going to have sex?” Nolan’s “Hard to tell” overlaps with my “Never!” and completely swallows it. I face- palm.

but after dinner Nolan gets talked into staying “just a little bit longer! Pleeeeease!” and watching TV with my sisters.

Goliath is in his lap. (“What a strangely familiar beast,” Nolan said when she deposited him in his hands. “I wonder if I’ve recently seen a portrait of him.” I nearly forked him in the eye.)

“And he seems to have great taste.” “Because he ate a stomach-pumping amount of your meat loaf?” “Mostly that. Only secondarily because he doesn’t seem to be able to look away from my most oblivious daughter.”

I still have no idea why he’s here. He’s asking my sisters “Which one of the characters is Riverdale?” with his soothing NPR voice, making them giggle and slap his forearms, and I want him gone from my house. Stat.

“I’m going to bed,” Mom says, a tad too pointedly. I look outside the window: the sun’s not done setting. “Nolan’s leaving, too.” “He doesn’t have to.” She gives him a brilliant smile and walks away, leaning on her cane. “Yes, he does,” I yell after her.

Hands on my hips, I turn around to face him. At dusk he’s even more imposing than usual, the angles and curves of his face clashing dramatically against each other.

Honestly, it doesn’t make sense. I shouldn’t find him this handsome, because he simply isn’t. His nose is too large. His jaw too defined. Lips too full, eyes set too deep, those cheekbones too . . . too something. I shouldn’t even be thinking about this.

“Does your family think we’re dating?” He doesn’t look upset. More in the ballpark of proud.

I want him to say yes, and then throw in his face that it’s his fault for showing up unannounced.

He’s so assured. So effortlessly at ease. You’d expect a known sore loser with temper problems who spends 90 percent of his time studying opposite- colored bishop end games not to excel in social situations. And yet. I think about the mountains of self-confidence he must have within himself.

When he reaches out for me, I’m ready to roundhouse kick him in the chin, but he pushes a loose strand of hair away from my face. I’m still dizzy from the brief contact when he says, “I want to play chess.”

“I don’t think you understand.” He holds my eyes. I think his throat moves. “I want to play chess with you, Mallory.”

“It should have been you, yesterday. It was . . . I had you there. In front of me, across the board.” His lips press together. “It should have been you.” “Yeah, well.” It would have been fun if it had been me.

this sullen, handsome, odd guy— was the most fun chess I’ve ever played.

“Malte Koch had other ideas.” “Koch is a nonentity.” “He’s the second- best player in the world.” “He has the second- highest rating in the world,” he corrects me.

“Have you considered that Koch might be less of an allaround jerk to all of us if you spent a couple of minutes per week pretending to indul...

His hand wraps around my forearm. “I want to play.” “Well, I don’t play.” His eyebrow lifts. “Could have fooled me.” I flush. “I don’t play unless I’m at work.” “You don’t play unless you’re at Zugzwang?” He’s clearly skeptical.

He scoffs. “You think about chess all the time, Mallory, and we both know it.” I would laugh him off, but I’ve been going over Koch’s games all day in my head, and the jab hits close.

He leans in. His face is just a few inches from mine. “I want to play chess with you,” he repeats. His voice is lower. Closer. Deeper. “Please, Mallory.”

There’s an openness to him. A vulnerability. He suddenly looks younger than I know him to be, a boy asking someone to do something very, very important for him. It’s hard to say no. But not impossible.

“I’m sorry, Nolan. I’m not going to play against you unless it happens in a tournament.” “No.” He shakes his ...

“That’s not true,” I protest, even though I have no idea. His stubborn, displeased, near-worried expression lets me know that it likely is. Something twists in my stomach.

“Then why?” “Because,” he near- growls. “Because I— because you— ” He stops abruptly and takes a few steps away. He makes a frustrated, abortive gesture with his arm, something I recognize from his rare losses at chess. I guess I won, then.