A Game of Chess

By Michael J. D’Alfonsi

The first time I played Brooke Davidon she was twelve and had just discovered how to weaponize her voice. “Checkmate,” she declared, the moment her hand left the bishop. Her tone was almost apologetic, like she genuinely pitied my stupidity. It was six in the evening and the windowless multi-purpose room. 

Now, a year later, I hovered in that same multi-purpose room, and it still reeked of pine cleaner, latex paint, and teenage sweat – a chemical blend I’d come to associate with defeat.

I watched Brooke and her current victim, a tenth-grade physics refugee named Jimmy, as they played out a miniature war on Board 3. Her hand moved like a doll’s, mechanical and absolute; the rest of her—a runty body drowning in a giant hoodie, wire glasses fogged from the heat—remained perfectly still, except for the eyes. Even when she blinked, I didn’t see it happen. My own eyes, on the other hand, felt like sandbags. I’d been awake since five.

The Obama High Multi-Purpose Room wasn’t built for chess tournaments. The ceiling was low, the lighting a brutal fluorescent grid, and at that hour the only natural illumination came through a glass block at the top of the south wall, glowing orange with the promise of another hundred-degree Saturday. “You realize,” said Bill Jordan, the Tournament Director leaning in the doorway and gnawing a toothpick, “that the only other people in here on a weekend are the custodians and the SAT prep kids.” He tapped his clipboard, a cartoon of a pawn with fangs inked on the corner. “What does that say about us, Malc?”

I didn’t answer. I was busy pretending I didn’t care about the match at Board 3; while simultaneously calibrating my own sense of doom for the moment Brooke and I met in the last round of the tournament. This would be our fourth meeting, and she won the earlier three. The fact that I was an Expert-level player and she was a Class B player was something she brandished like an indictment.

I drifted among those players already done, offering encouragement— “Nice fork, Will,” or “That’s a clean tactic, Marcos”—and mostly getting shrugs in return. My students didn’t idolize me, which was a relief. When you look older than you are (30, but the crow’s feet and graying hair said 50) and teach remedial Algebra to sophomores who think equations are a conspiracy, you learn to expect very little. Even the chess prodigies just saw me as a slightly less annoying adult, a step above the security guards who called everyone “boss.”

Jimmy had lasted thirty moves before he left his queen unprotected. He stared at the board, then at Brooke, then at the board again, as if somewhere in the geometry of black and white he could conjure a way out. Brooke waited, hands folded in her lap, eyes glazed with pity or boredom—hard to say which. After the handshake, she looked up at me with that clinical detachment kids get when they’re too smart for their own good. 

Since hers was the last game of the round Bill recorded the result and calculated pairings for the next one.  As expected, Brooke and I faced each other on Board 1.

We sat down across from each other.  I had earlier substituted my own wood set in place of the standard tournament board and pieces.  I’d rescued it from a Goodwill in Diablo after my ex took the nice one during the split. The board smelled like wood oil and burnt popcorn.

The time control was game in one, meaning we each had sixty minutes to make all our moves.

I set the clocks and pushed the button to start hers and she opened with e4. I responded with e6 initiating the French Defense.  I found myself watching her hands, the way she cupped each piece like a secret, the way her fingers hovered a millimeter above the square before committing. I remembered being that young and that precise. I remembered my own coach’s voice—a gruff, nicotine-clotted rumble—telling me that “perfection is for machines, not men.”

My strategy, if you could call it that, was to play positionally, that is, to build a strong setup, anticipate her threats and blunt her tactics before she could get an attack going.  

The room around us faded; the other games dissolved into a mush of sighs and timer bleeps. Somewhere in the hall, Bill Jordan was regaling a parent with stories about the year he’d almost made state champion.  I noticed people gathered around us struggling between courtesy and curiosity.

At move twenty, I blundered. It wasn’t catastrophic, just a lazy knight move that let her pin my bishop. The kind of error that, years ago, I would have called “amateur hour.” Brooke’s lips curled in a ghost of a smile. She exploited the opening ruthlessly, developing quickly and grabbing space. On the surface I looked doomed, but my defense held, and she couldn’t land a death blow.

Move the piece.  Punch the clock.  Write the move.  Move.  Clock.  Write.  Move, clock, write.  The syncopated rhythm of the game went back and forth trying to one-up the other, trying to create an imbalance or tactic.  At that point in the game one lost pawn or weak square could make all the difference between a win or a loss.

Brooke fidgeted in her chair as if trying to muster extra energy to bear in the battlefield.  Her big green eyes darted around the board, betraying an impatience and befuddlement I Jad never seen on her before.

Then it happened.

She moved her Queen from one side of the board to the other.  The hair on the back of my neck bristled and I could smell my own tension as I thought about whether this was danger or opportunity in front of me.  I wiped the sweat from my brow as I analyzed the board.  

I lost seven precious minutes from my clock as I ran through variations and side notes in my head but then I had my answer.  I would have to sacrifice two pawns, and it took eight moves to birth a winning attack.

It started with a simple rook retreat.  She took the first sacrificed pawn so fast I didn’t have time to punch my clock.  The next seven moves played out exactly as I had envisioned, giving Brooke two choices:  immediate checkmate or give up two bishops and put off the inevitable for a couple more moves.

She looked over the pieces, trying to come up with some response or defense.  With only a minute left on her clock she knocked over her king. 

I wanted to scream, to jump up and down and do a victory dance.  But I didn’t.  To celebrate my victory like that, even though it felt like the greatest victory in my life, would be undignified.

Soon, the elation faded.  I realized I would never beat her again.  She was on the way up and I was barely holding my place.

“Nice game,” I said.  She shook my hand weakly and gave an indifferent nod.  She made a couple of notes on her score sheet, gathered her things and exited the room without looking back.

After she left, I listened to the other games winding down. The sounds were familiar: the soft clack of pieces, the angry shuffling of chairs, the occasional bark of triumph or despair. It was a soundtrack of minor victories and terminal disappointments.

I thought of my ex, of the years I’d wasted trying to be a person worth respecting, of the way even my small successes were immediately devalued by the people around me. The worst part was that I could almost understand it. Maybe it was my job to be a sad, competent adult, to absorb all the tiny humiliations so prodigies like Brooke could shine without distraction.

When the last game ended, I helped Bill pack up the sets and folded the tables, the motions automatic. The smell of pine cleaner had faded, replaced by the chemical tang of whatever the janitors used to strip the floors. 

Outside, the sun was already punishing, the parking lot an oven. Bill Jordan was standing by his van, arms folded, a thin line of sweat running down his temple.

“She’s got the stuff,” he said, nodding toward the building. “Give her three years and she’ll be making all the chess boys cry.”

I shook my head.  “She already is my friend.  She already is.