Chapter 11: ch.11 [Unranked Feelings]

She knocked

twice.

And waited.

Nothing came from

the other side of the door. Then something did.

It was not loud.

A breath that caught on the way in.

A second one that never made it out.

The thick, muffled sound of a face pressed into a pillow so the wall wouldn’t hear.

Astrid knew that sound.

She had taught it.

to herself in a hotel in Reykjavik at eleven, with a pillow over her mouth and her mother asleep three feet away.

By thirteen, she could do it without moving her shoulders.

Nobody had ever told her it was a skill.

Her hand was still raised.

Go back.

It was a sensible thought.

It had a sound position behind it.

A man was entitled to his door, and the only courtesy a door asked for was to be left shut.

She had spent her whole life on the wrong side of that courtesy.

Nobody ever knocked.

The sound stopped.

She heard the pillow shift.

A breath drawn very slowly, like someone lowering a heavy thing onto a table.

Bare feet on the floor.

The faint, wet scrub of a sleeve across a face.

She lowered her hand.

She did not step back.

The door opened.

He had washed his face.

It hadn’t helped.

Water still clung to his lashes, his nose was pink, and his glasses sat crooked above it.

One hand pressed his phone flat against his

chest, as if he were holding his own ribs together.

He tried to smile.

It was the worst one she had ever seen.

"Hey," said Seth. "Did I wake you?"

The lamp is always on.

"No."

"Sorry. The walls are..."

"I know about the walls."

Her eyes went to his.

Then past him, to the pillow on the bed, one corner of it dark.

She looked at the lamp instead.

"May I come in?"

He blinked.

She had never asked to enter a room in her life.

Rooms were simply where she was put.

He stepped aside.

She crossed the threshold, and the room, which had seemed generous enough when he’d moved in, took one look at her and shrank.

The ceiling lowered.

The nightstand drew in its elbows.

The lamp hung at the exact level of her eyes, like a thing that had never expected company.

She sat on the edge of the bed.

The mattress dipped.

Her knees rose, absurdly high, and she folded them away with all the dignity the situation could spare.

She said nothing about the pillow.

She said nothing about the sound.

She would not say it later, either.

? ? ?

Seth sat down.

beside her, a careful forearm’s length away.

The phone was still in his hand.

He didn’t know why he held it out.

He had never shown anyone a message from his mother.

Well... There had never been anyone to show.

She took it in both hands, the way you take a bird from a stranger.

It was short.

Saw you on the news.

I need $2,000 by Friday. Rent. Please. - M.

That was all.

Not congratulations.

Not are you eating.

Not I’m proud of you.

Please.

In almost two decades, she had never once said it to him.

Not for the dishes. Not for the door.

Not at the bottom of a note under a lemon magnet.

Now she had finally learned the word, and it had cost him two thousand dollars.

"It’s the please..."

he said.

His voice came out thin and ordinary, the way it did when the thing was too big for any other kind.

"I keep reading it. And I can’t tell if she means it. Or if it’s just the right word for asking."

Astrid didn’t answer.

"I don’t know how to reply." He laughed.

It broke in the middle.

"I never have. She says something, and I say okay. Or sure. Or nothing. And then it goes away."

"Has it ever gone away?"

"No."

The word sat down in the room with them.

She turned the phone over and laid it face down on the blanket, gently, as if it might wake.

Then her hand came up.

It stopped an inch above his head and hovered there.

He saw it from the corner of his eye.

It lifted.

It lowered.

It nearly went to her own collar, the way it had in the kitchen on the day of the contract.

She doesn’t know what to do with it.

he thought.

Neither do I.

Her palm landed on his hair.

On the stubborn piece at the back that had never once lain flat.

She patted it.

Twice.

It was the most awkward thing he had ever felt.

She patted like a woman who had read a

description of the gesture in a book and was working from memory.

It was also the first time in his life anyone had done it.

Then she did something he did not see coming.

She leaned.

All of her.

The whole long line of her, which had looked down on tournament halls and television cameras and one thin boy on a stage, bent sideways like a tree

giving way to weather.

Her shoulder dropped.

Her spine curved.

She made herself low enough to be reached.

She has never done that.

Seth thought, with a clarity that frightened him.

Not for anyone.

He was stiff as a plank.

For a second he held there, refusing.

Then something in his neck gave out.

His temple came to rest against her collarbone.

It fit.

The gray hoodie smelled of cold air and

bergamot and, very faintly, burnt rice.

"Shh..." Astrid said warmly.

Her hand moved once down the back of his head.

"I know what you are feeling right now."

He did not trust himself to speak.

"You know..."

Her voice cracked faintly.

It was only a hairline.

A fault running through a sheet of ice.

He felt it through the bone of her shoulder before he heard it.

"I have also been through something similar."

She stopped.

He felt her breathe in, and hold, and set the piece back where it belonged.

"I will not say more tonight. But I want you to know that I will be here. We do not know each other well. I am aware of that. I am aware that it is a strange thing to say."

"It’s not strange."

"It is slightly strange."

"It’s okay."

"Good."

Her hand patted him again. Twice.

"As for the money."

He started to lift his head.

Her palm pressed him gently back down.

"I will lend it to you. Do not think about it. It is a number, and numbers are the one thing I

am qualified to solve."

"Astrid, I can’t..."

"You are my student and my employee. A student with a problem at two in the morning is not

a good student at five. So we will focus on our goals."

"Our... goals?"

"Yes."

He closed his eyes.

"I’ll pay you back," he said into the hoodie.

"Every cent."

"You will. Ten percent of your salary, no interest. Section fifteen. I will have Ingrid draft it."

"She’s going to resign."

"She resigns weekly. It has never taken."

He made a sound that was most of a laugh.

It left a wet patch on the shoulder of her sweatshirt.

She said nothing about that either.

? ? ?

An hour later, the lamp was still burning.

And there was a pot of tea on the nightstand that Seth had made himself, because the alternative was Astrid.

He sat cross-legged against the headboard with a blanket around his shoulders.

She sat at the foot of the bed with her back to the wall and her knees drawn up, holding her

cup like a very small bomb.

"There is something else..." said Astrid.

"Okay."

"In about half a year, there is a tournament. An open. Rated players, and one section for the

unrated."

"Unrated?"

"Players with no official rating. Who have never played one."

"That’s me."

"That is you."

She sipped.

"Your app number does not count. It is a toy."

"Ouch."

"It is an almost accurate toy."

"So you’re saying..."

"I am saying that I will prepare you. Six months. You will play it. And you will not be among the

worst."

"That’s a really high bar."

"Do not be insolent."

"Sorry."

"It is a section for beginners."

Her eyes flicked to him over the rim of the cup, dry and level.

"You will have a chance of winning it."

A chance.

He turned the word over.

Nobody had ever given him one.

He’d always had to take it, and by the time he reached for it, it was usually already gone.

"What if I lose?"

"Then you will lose having looked at the board."

She set the cup down.

"I do not coach the outcome. I coach the looking.

In chess sometimes you win and sometimes you learn."

"That’s..."

"Yes?"

"Kind of a lot."

"Remember, Seth."

She glanced at him sidelong.

with the faintest dryness at the corner of her

mouth.

"I am the World Champion. I know one or two things."

"One or two?"

"I am being modest."

"Wow."

"I practiced it."

He laughed.

He laughed properly this time, the cracked, startled sound, and the small room seemed to

shift on its feet to make space for it.

? ? ?

She had not meant to ask.

It came out of her at the worst possible moment, while she was trying to be a person who sat

at the ends of beds.

"Tell me something."

"What?"

"Not that." She nodded at the phone.

"Something else. Anything."

He pulled the blanket tighter and looked at the ceiling as if the answer might be written

there.

"Do you know how I started playing chess?"

"I assumed a video."

"That was the second time."

He smiled, a little embarrassed.

"The first time, I was eight. I

had the TV on."

She went still.

"It was your last game. The one where you won everything. I didn’t know what chess was. I even thought the horses were toys."

"They are horses."

"I know that now."

He was warming up.

"And there was this announcer, and he kept screaming. She has devoured the knight!

The bishop! Now she’s coming for the rook!"

"I..."

"I thought you were eating them."

She stared at

him.

"The pieces. I thought you were picking them up and eating them. Like, actually eating. And everybody in the room was just sitting there,

too scared to say anything."

"Seth."

"I thought you must be really, really hungry. And really strong."

A sound escaped her.

She turned it into a cough.

It did not work.

She lowered her forehead onto her knees, and her

shoulders went, and the long white braid slid down her arm.

"I have never eaten a piece..."

she said into her knees.

"I figured. Eventually."

"They are wood."

"I was eight!"

She laughed until the mattress shook.

He watched her with bright, wet eyes, and she thought that if he kept looking at her like that,

she would have to open a file on the evening’s damages.

He did not say what had come before the TV.

She noticed.

He had stepped around a room in the story,

the way you step around a sleeping person in a

hallway.

She knew the shape of that.

She had been stepping around her own

all night.

Not yet.

She let him keep it.

"And then I saw you..."

He wasn’t looking at her anymore.

He was looking at the ceiling.

With the soft, faraway face of a boy at a window.

"You were sitting so straight. And your hair was so white. I’d never seen hair like that. It looked like snow. And I thought..."

He stopped. Then said the rest in one rush.

"I thought you looked like a queen. From a storybook. Like someone who walked out of the pages by mistake. And I thought, she’s so pretty."

He winced.

"I mean. I was eight. Eight-year-olds just think things. It’s not..."

He waved a hand at the air.

Astrid did not hear the end of the sentence.

She was looking at the blanket.

Something had happened in her face.

And she did not have the standing to stop it.

A faint heat had started at the base of her throat, climbed across both cheekbones.

And settled there, warm and small and entirely irretrievable.

Pretty.

Thousands of people had said it.

In interviews.

In forums.

In a deeply upsetting wiki.

Not one of them had said it like a boy describing snow.

She laid the back of her hand against her cheek, as if checking a surface for dust.

Across the bed, Seth went on staring at the ceiling.

He didn’t notice.

His own ears, naturally, were a red visible from space.

"Anyways..." he said.

"That’s it. That’s the good part."

"The good part."

"Yeah."

He turned his head and found her looking at him, composed, calm, perfectly smooth.

"I just wanted to tell somebody."

She held the composure for four seconds.

"Thank you," she said.

It was the only thing she had.

"For telling me."

"It’s not that big of a deal."

"It is."

She stood.

She smoothed the front of the hoodie and set her cup on the tray, squared to the edge.

At the door she stopped with one hand on the frame, where the strip of light from the hall lay across the carpet and ended inside his room.

as if it had finally arrived somewhere.

"Five o’clock."

said Astrid.

"I haven’t answered my mom."

"It is a number. We will solve it in daylight."

"Okay."

"Seth."

"Yeah?"

"You will not be the worst player there."

He smiled, small and crooked.

"Okay."

She left.

The door closed.

The lamp stayed on.

? ? ?

She stood in the hall.

With her palm flat against the wall.

Feeling her pulse knock through the

bone of her hand.

Ninety-four.

She did not count it.

In her room, her phone lay on the nightstand where she had left it. She picked it up.

One folder.

One email.

One word in the subject line.

Vesla.

Her thumb hovered over it.

On the other side of the plaster, a boy had said please out loud, in the dark, like someone testing

a word in a foreign language.

And tonight she had sat on his bed and told him that she would be there.

It was very easy to be brave on someone else’s door.

She turned the phone facedown.

Not yet.

Through the wall, a mattress creaked once.

and settled.

On the nightstand beside it, a blue bottle cap sat on a folded sheet of paper, and a boy lay down

with his glasses still on and slept.

Neither of them had said a word about the knock.

Neither of them would.