I’ll admit that my jaw fell open a little. Then, in a move of ultimate poise and eloquence, I said, “Huh?”
And Jim laughed. Maybe it was the tenth laugh or maybe the hundredth that I’d conjured from him, yet it was this laugh that sent me tumbling head over heels.
Yet even though I was falling—so fast and with so much blood roaring in my ears—the idiocy of Jim’s next move (black queen to E6) allowed my brain to operate, my mouth to articulate, “All those things, James. Those . . . myths. They give us order. A framework to live in.”
“They also give us war, Holmes. And genocide and poverty and”—a wave around the library—“an upper class. Don’t you see it? Shared mythology is what creates us versus them.”
“Soooo?” I dragged out the word to emphasize my complete and total confusion. “Do you want chaos, then? No school or government or games? Are you an anarchist, James?”
“Hardly, Holmes.” A snort. “More like . . . Let’s just say that I want to find what’s real. I want to feel it—whatever it might be. And then, while the rest of the world sits cozy and oblivious inside their glass houses, I will be walking through walls.”
“Oh?” I said with fake interest. “And how do you plan to do that, sir?”
“Same way I always do.” And there it was again, Jean. That sad, broken smile—though it vanished two heartbeats later as he rested his elbows on the table. Steepled his fingers over the board.
“Want to know something about me, Holmes?”
“Yes,” I breathed with far too much enthusiasm.
He didn’t notice. His eyes drifted down to the board. “I came to Baker Street Prep for something, and once I find it, I don’t plan on sticking around.”
Everything inside me went cold. “What is it you’re looking for?”
“A key,” he said calmly. “To a door that people don’t want opened.”
It was then that I saw the reality: he was the nephew of Gregory Moriarty, and just like his uncle, he wanted to whistle-blow and declassify and expose people he thought had done wrong.
But before I could dwell on what that might mean or what key he might be looking for, he said, “Oh, and checkmate.”
I blinked, lost for a moment. I’d completely forgotten that a game still waged between us. But wait—hadn’t Jim lost his queen to me a few turns back?
I honed in on the black and white squares . . . and then groaned. Because dammit, he’d used the same move that gets me every time.
Boden’s Mate.
Boden’s freakin’ Mate.
Another month passed. The same routine unfolded each day. Me versus Jim. White versus black.
Jim won more often, and I didn’t even care. But now the walls were shrinking in.
Then one day we had our first stalemate. It was early December—the day I skipped fourth-period orchestra, remember? I told you I had cramps, but the truth was that the chess game had run long.
Dad had told my older brother, Mike, and me the night before that if we didn’t close out our semesters with the highest GPAs, then we were officially uninvited from the family trip to Aruba. What a jerk, right?
On top of that, Jim kept asking me questions about you, Jean. What’s it like for her being a senator’s daughter? Has she ever been to the Capitol? Does she ever talk about her mom’s policies?
I was jealous, and I was pissed. It was the basic recipe for Shirley Losing at Chess, which was why I ended up whittled down to just my king.
In my defense, though, Jim wasn’t much better off: he had only his king and a rook left.
We were seriously stuck, and I was tired of running my piece back and forth across the board.
“Stop chasing my king,” I snarled.
“If I saw a way to do that,” he clipped back, “then obviously I would. How about, instead, you stop running away from my rook?”
“Let’s just draw, James. This game is never going to end otherwise.”
A pause. Then his eyebrows perked up with mischief. “And what would happen if it never ended, Holmes?”
“I’d miss orchestra, which would be bad.”
“Why? Will it trigger the apocalypse? Fire! Pestilence! Famine!”
“Ha-ha.” I snapped my king over a square. The same move I’d been making for a full ten minutes.
And he scooted his rook after . . . only to pause, fingers twirling across the jagged top. Then his lips curled up. He moved his rook diagonally. Yeah, not sideways, but diagonally.
I blinked. Then wagged my head like a cartoon who’d just been slapped. “You can’t do that.”
“Says who?”
“The rules!”
“Which we know don’t matter, Holmes. Not if we both agree to stop believing in them.” His grin spread wider and wider, and I knew from the hair prickling on the back of my neck that I had stepped right into his trap.
But I didn’t care. Because my pulse was picking up speed. My stomach was spinning in a good way. This wasn’t like that time I had salmonella. This was like that roller coaster at Universal Studios.
And I wanted more of it.
So when Jim next declared, “From now on, rooks go diagonally, and kings can move like queens,” I didn’t argue. I simply settled into the new rhythm until at last I won. An hour later, right before the bell rang for the end of fourth period.
And guess what? The apocalypse didn’t come, and Mike told me Aruba sucked anyway.
In January, Scot’s Yard won the chess match. Of course. Dad was irate (do you remember that phone call? You said you could hear his shouts from the girls’ bathroom), but I didn’t care.
Oh, the chess team thought I cared. You should’ve seen how they hung their heads on the bus ride back to Baker Street. All of them bracing for my shouts . . .
But I didn’t shout. I was scarcely thinking about Scot’s Yard or how, yet again, I had fallen for effing Boden’s Mate—my eternal curse, that move.
No, instead, I was wrapped up in a new book from Jim. Pedro Páramo. A tale swirling with ghosts and purgatory and the lives that could have been.
I loved the book. Devoured it in a night. Even in all its magical realism and intangible betweens, it felt real to me. Familiar.
Yet the next day, I said, “I hated it. It never felt grounded.”
A crooked smile. Jim knew I was kidding, but he didn’t push me for a real reaction. He just eased his pawn to D6.
A bad start for him, but I was feeling charitable that day. Plus I didn’t want the game to end. Not yet. Not after reading that book and putting the puzzle pieces together.
Oh, don’t you see? Jim is a ghost. Forever just passing through. That day in the library, he was trapped in purgatory until he found whatever mysterious key he needed to move on. Meanwhile I was just beginning to realize that one day I would blink a heartbeat too long and find that when my lashes had lifted, Jim was gone.