Chapter 2: ch.2 [The Pawn WANTS a Promotion]

He pressed Register.

Nothing happened.

Then the screen flashed green.

Registration complete. You are now an Open Challenger.

Seth stared at it.

The fluorescent lights hummed.

The fridge in the corner rattled.

In the back, a hot dog rotated on the roller for the four hundredth time that night.

"I did it."

He barely breathed the words.

Then, louder.

"I did it."

Then both fists shot into the air.

"I DID..."

The door chimed.

A woman carrying a milk carton walked in, took one look at his raised fists, and froze in the doorway.

Seth lowered his arms.

"Welcome."

He said it with the dignity of a man who had definitely not been celebrating.

She bought her milk in total silence.

He waited until the door closed.

Then he slid down behind the counter, pressed his back against the cigarette cabinet, and started to shake.

I registered.

I registered to play the World Champion.

I’m not sure which way the L faces on a knight.

His phone buzzed.

Exhibition: Saturday, 2:00 PM. Open challengers will be drawn at random. Please arrive one hour early.

Drawn at random.

He read it four times.

More than a decade of waiting, and it might come down to a name pulled from a hat.

Then I have to be good enough to deserve the hat, he thought, and had no idea what that meant.

He opened his browser.

how to get good at chess fast

The first result was a video called Beat ANY Opponent in 4 Moves!!!

He clicked it so fast he nearly dropped the phone.

A man with very white teeth set up a board.

A bishop slid out. A queen slid out.

Then a fat orange arrow swung across the screen and pointed at one tiny pawn, like an accusing finger.

"Oh..." Seth breathed.

That’s it?

For one glorious minute, he felt like a man who had found a hidden door in the side of a mountain.

Of course, the man continued, this only works on beginners. Anyone above 800 will stop it immediately.

Seth looked at the number on his screen.

412.

"Hm."

So it works on me.

He closed the video.

The next thumbnail showed a man with his mouth wide open, orange arrows exploding across a board, and a title in yellow capital letters.

HE SACRIFICES HIS ROOK AND NOBODY SAW IT COMING

The channel was called GothChess.

Seth pressed play.

The narrator talked like a sports commentator on his fourth coffee.

Words flew past. Pin. Tempo. Desperado.

Seth understood none of them.

He nodded anyway, very seriously, the way you do when someone is speaking another language and clearly having a wonderful time.

An orange arrow pointed at a rook.

Another orange arrow pointed at the square next to it.

The man on screen sucked in a breath.

"WAIT. WAIT. HE’S NOT. HE WOULDN’T..."

A pause.

"HE SACRIFICED THE ROOOOOOKKKKK!"

Seth’s chair shot backward and hit the cigarette cabinet.

"HE SACRIFICED THE ROOK!" he yelled, to no one, slapping the counter with both hands.

Silence.

The hot dog rotated.

Seth sat back down, breathing hard, glasses crooked, face flushed.

He didn’t know why the rook mattered.

He didn’t know who the amateur was, or why the sacrifice was good, or why a grown man was screaming at a wooden piece like it had died heroically in battle.

But he rewound the clip.

"HE SACRIFICED THE ROOOOOKKKKKK!"

And he rewound it again.

"HE SACRIFICED..."

In more than a decade of watching, every chess broadcast Seth had ever seen had been quiet.

Hushed rooms. Polite applause. Men and women hunched over boards as if they were afraid to wake something up.

He hadn’t known chess could be loud.

He hadn’t known it could sound alive.

He scrolled to the next video, grinning so wide his cheeks hurt.

? ? ?

By 4:40 a.m., he had learned that openings had names.

Some of them were animals. Some were countries.

The Sicilian. The Italian. The Scandinavian.

He wrote the last one on the back of a receipt and underlined it twice.

"Scandinavian."

"She’s Norwegian. That’s basically the same thing."

It was not the same thing.

He would not find that out for six more days.

By 5:10, he had learned that Astrid Lind had been World Champion for eleven years.

Seth sat very still.

Eleven years.

The same long years he’d spent beside an empty chair.

She had been up there the whole time, winning, standing alone in rooms full of flashing cameras.

He scrolled through her old matches.

The same posture. The same calm hands.

The same nod after every win.

He counted.

Ninety-three victories on the channel.

Not a single smile.

Seth paused on a frame of her bowing her head, polite and finished, like someone handing in homework.

He didn’t say anything for a while.

Then, very quietly.

"I’m going to make you smile."

It was a ridiculous thing to say to a phone.

He said it anyway.

? ? ?

At 5:32, with twenty-eight minutes left on his shift, he opened the app and hit Play.

Opponent: xX_PawnStorm238_Xx. Rating: 505.

A worthy rival, thought Seth.

He opened with the only thing he’d learned that night.

e4 d5.

Scandinavian.

Then the queen came out on move two. Then, because he had watched exactly one tutorial, he left her out there to wander like a lost tourist.

By move eight, he was losing.

By move eleven, he was losing badly.

By move fourteen, his heart was pounding, his palms were wet, and he found himself looking at his rook, sitting there on the board.

A single glowing square sat next to it.

Do it.

Don’t do it.

DO IT.

Seth took a long breath.

And, with the trembling hand of a man who understood nothing, he pushed the rook forward into the enemy’s camp.

"HE SACRIFICED THE ROOK."

He whispered it to the empty store.

xX_PawnStorm238_Xx stopped moving.

Ten seconds passed.

Twenty.

Thirty.

The opponent, ninety-odd points above him and every bit as lost, stared at the free rook and simply could not bring himself to believe it.

It’s a trap.

It has to be a trap.

Nobody does that on purpose.

He moved a different piece.

It was a terrible move.

Seth saw the fork before he understood what it was.

He just saw two big pieces sitting side by side, and his knight could reach both of them.

He took them.

Then, four moves later, with his hand shaking so hard he nearly misclicked, he put the other player in checkmate.

You won!

Seth looked at the screen.

Rating: 427.

He had gained fifteen points.

He pulled up the Game Review.

Move 14: Rook to e7?? Blunder.

He nodded.

"Fair."

He sounded almost shattered.

It was, technically, the worst move of the game.

It was also the first time, after more than a decade of trying, that he had ever won on purpose.

? ? ?

His shift ended at six.

The sky outside was the color of dishwater.

The air smelled like wet pavement and bread from the bakery down the block.

Seth walked home with his hands in his pockets and his heart still pounding.

Eleven days.

Eleven days to go from 427 to... something that doesn’t make her feel sorry for me.

At the crosswalk, the grin cracked.

What if I freeze?

What if I make my first move and it’s already a mistake?

What if, after all this time, she looks at me exactly the way she looked at that man on TV?

Like I’m just another piece on the board?

Or worse, what if she doesn’t even look at me?

The light turned green.

He didn’t move.

A cyclist rang a bell at him, and he jumped out of the way with a squeak.

? ? ?

His dorm room was exactly as small as he’d left it.

One bed.

One desk.

One window facing a brick wall.

And under the desk, behind a stack of unopened textbooks, a shoebox he hadn’t touched in years.

Inside, folded in quarters and soft at the creases, was a piece of cereal-box cardboard.

Sixty-four wobbly squares.

Six red bottle caps.

Four blue.

He had lost the rest somewhere between three apartments and two schools.

Seth unfolded the board on the floor and smoothed it flat with both hands.

It was smaller than he remembered.

Everything from that year was.

He set the caps up the way he thought they went. Then he moved one red cap forward.

It made no sound.

Bottle caps never do.

He looked up.

The desk chair sat across from him, pushed in, empty.

"Okay..."

His voice came out smaller than he wanted.

"I’m terrible. I know. I’ve had a lot of time to find out."

The silence waited.

"But I said I’d come."

He swallowed.

"And I’m coming."

He picked up the biggest blue cap, the one he’d marked as the queen with a marker when he was eight.

It was warm in his palm.

"I’m going to eat all your pieces."

It had sounded braver the first time.

Seth looked at the cap.

Then at the board.

Then, with great seriousness, at the little blue cap he was fairly certain was the knight.

"...Does this one go sideways first or forward first?"

No answer.

He lay back on the floor, stared at the ceiling, and started to laugh.

Quietly at first.

Then helplessly, with one arm over his eyes and tears running sideways into his hair.

He wasn’t sure whether he was happy or terrified.

He decided it was both.

It was the best he had felt in longer than he could remember.