Chapter 6: ch.6 [A Contract?]

By morning, Seth Pawn was the most searched name in the country.

Well, not really, but it felt like it.

He had done exactly one thing to earn it.

He had no idea why anyone cared.

? ? ?

His phone had not stopped buzzing since the hall.

It buzzed in his pocket on the walk from Astrid’s building. It buzzed on the bus. It buzzed in a long, unbroken rattle against his thigh, like something alive trying to get out.

By the time he reached the convenience store, the battery was at nine percent and he had four hundred and six notifications.

He didn’t look at them.

He tied on the green apron, stood behind the counter, and told himself the oldest lie in the world.

Nothing has changed.

At 10:15, the door chimed.

A man in a gray coat walked in.

He did not go to the coolers.

He did not go to the chips.

He walked straight to the counter, looked at Seth for a long moment, and spoke very quietly.

"It is you."

"Can I help you?"

"Thank you."

Seth blinked.

"For... the gum?"

"I haven’t picked a gum."

"Then for what?"

"You know for what."

"I really don’t."

The man pressed his lips together. His eyes were wet.

He put a pack of gum on the counter, paid in exact change, and left without another word.

Seth stared at the door.

Did I overcharge him?

At 10:40, a teenager asked him to sign a receipt.

At 10:55, a woman in scrubs touched his sleeve as if checking he was solid, and whispered God bless you.

At 11:05, a man in his fifties stopped at the counter, opened his mouth, and said,

"More than a decade. I’ve watched every game she’s played."

"She’s very good."

Seth said it politely.

"No, I mean..."

The man put a hand over his face, shook his head, and walked out.

By eleven-fifteen there was a line.

It went past the coolers.

It went past the lottery stand.

It went out the door and onto the sidewalk, where people stood in the cold holding up their phones like candles.

Most of them didn’t buy anything.

They just looked at him, the way you look at someone who has done something enormous and doesn’t know it.

Near the back, he spotted the man who bought one banana.

The man held up the banana, solemnly, like a toast.

Seth had spent nineteen years being invisible.

He had thought he’d be ready for the opposite.

He wasn’t.

He was a boy in a green apron, with ink still faded on his palm, being photographed over a rack of beef jerky while a woman whispered oh my God, he’s taller in person, he’s socute.

I lost in twenty moves, he thought, baffled.

I hung my queen.

I hung it in front of the entire world.

Is that... a good thing?

At 11:40, Gus came out of the back room.

Gus was the night manager. He was around his sixties.

He had worked here for twenty-two years, and he had never once looked pleased.

He looked at the line.

He looked at the sidewalk.

He looked at a woman in a blazer standing by the milk, holding a microphone with a station logo on it.

Then he looked at Seth, and the lines in his face went very still.

"Kid. Back office."

? ? ?

The office smelled of cold coffee and cardboard.

Gus shut the door and sat down heavily on a stack of paper towels.

"Insurance guy called. Fire marshal’s on his way. I’ve got forty people in a store that fits twelve, and a reporter in aisle four asking my cashier about her feelings."

"I’m sorry."

"Don’t be sorry. You didn’t do anything."

"Then why is everyone..."

"Because you can’t be here." Gus rubbed his eyes.

"I’m not firing you. I want that clear. You’re off with pay through Friday, and when this blows over, your shift is still yours."

Seth’s throat tightened.

"Okay."

"It’s not about the money." Gus glanced at the door, at the shapes moving behind the frosted glass.

"These people don’t know you. They don’t care what happens to you tomorrow. I’ve seen it. Somebody gets famous overnight, and everybody loves them for a week, and then the week ends."

Seth said nothing.

"Take the back door."

Something landed in his arms.

A gray hoodie. Enormous. Faded.

It said DAD’S FISHING TRIP 2019 across the chest.

"Lost and found. Nobody’s claimed it in two years."

Then a paper bag, warm through the foil.

"Last hot dog."

Seth looked down at it.

He had worked here three years.

He had never been given a hot dog.

He had never been given anything.

"Gus."

"Go."

"I..."

"Kid." Gus held the back door open with one shoulder, and for the first and only time, he almost looked kind.

"Eat something. And don’t talk to anybody holding a camera."

The door shut behind him.

The alley was dark, and cold, and entirely, wonderfully empty.

He stood in it for a long time with the hood up and the bag against his chest, and he could feel his own heartbeat in his teeth.

? ? ?

The dorm was four blocks away.

He made it as far as the corner.

There were people out front, fifteen, maybe twenty.

A woman with a camera on a pole.

A man in a suit speaking quietly into a phone.

Someone had hung a bedsheet from the tree by the entrance, with three words painted across it in red.

WHO IS SETH PAWN

Somebody had found his building in under four hours.

Somebody always does.

His phone buzzed.

An email, from the university.

Dear Mr. Pawn, Housing and Student Affairs has been made aware of a high volume of visitors to your residence. For the safety of other students, we strongly advise you to stay elsewhere tonight.

Please contact our office Monday at 9:00 a.m.

Elsewhere.

Seth stood on the corner and read the word four times.

He did not have an elsewhere.

He had a brick wall, a shoebox, and a mother who would answer a request for help with a text message, so he would never ask.

He sat on a bus bench at 3 a.m. and ate the hot dog in four bites.

Then, because the night was going to be terrible anyway, he opened the video.

Cardio.

Eleven seconds. Astrid, mid-question.

Seth, flushed and wide-eyed, hair plastered to his forehead.

2.3M views.

Someone had set it to music.

Someone else had set it to different music.

That wasn’t the one with the most views.

The most-watched clip was forty seconds long, and it was called SHE SMILED.

6.1M views.

He didn’t remember pressing it.

It was the end of the match. The mated king.

The hall so silent you could hear the clocks.

And Astrid Lind, across the board from him, with one corner of her mouth coming undone like a knot.

Seth watched it with the sound off.

He had been there. He had seen it.

He had understood what it meant to him.

He had not understood what it meant to everyone else.

He scrolled down into the comments.

she smiled

OVER A DECADE. I have watched every championship since I was twelve and she has NEVER smiled on camera. I’m crying in a Wendy’s.

i showed my dad. my dad doesn’t even like chess. he said "huh" and went outside for twenty minutes

Ninety-three wins on the official channel. Zero smiles. I counted. I actually counted. Now I have to update the spreadsheet.

who is this kid

i don’t care who he is.

i’d die for him.

Seth’s thumb stopped.

Ninety-three wins.

Zero smiles.

He had counted too.

He had sat on the floor of a convenience store at five in the morning and said it out loud to a phone.

I’m going to make you smile.

He had said it as a promise to one person.

He had never imagined the whole world had been waiting at the same door.

He looked at the little frozen frame of her face.

A decade of cameras.

A decade of a girl who bowed like she was handing in homework. And somewhere out there were thousands of strangers, lonely in their own ways, who had watched every game, hoping for one flicker.

And he had been the one sitting across from her when it came.

Not because he was good.

Because he was bad, and wide-eyed, and the first person in a very long time who had looked at her as if she were the one who needed to be asked how she was.

The man in the gray coat.

The woman in scrubs.

Thank you.

"Oh..." said Seth, very quietly, to the empty street.

He wasn’t a hero.

He was just the person in the chair when the miracle happened.

He sat there with the phone dark in his hands and a traffic light changing, red to green, over nobody.

They love the smile.

Not me.

What happens when she stops?

? ? ?

At 5:58 a.m., he knocked on a door on the ninth floor.

It opened before his knuckles landed.

Astrid Lind stood in the frame with her white hair loose over one shoulder, the way it had fallen on a television screen when she was seventeen. She was fully dressed. Perfectly. As if she had been standing behind that door for some time.

Her eyes went over him once.

The hood.

The glasses.

The fish.

"Your outfit."

"Lost and found."

"It says Dad’s Fishing Trip."

"It isn’t my dad."

She stepped aside.

The apartment smelled faintly of smoke.

On the ceiling, the smoke detector had a strip of tape over it.

Astrid followed his gaze.

"The battery was removed. By Ingrid. After the second incident."

"What happened in the first?"

"A kettle. Then a pan. Last night was the third."

"You... cooked last night?"

"I attempted dinner."

"What happened?"

"I would prefer not to discuss it."

On the table, the board was already set.

Beside it lay a pen, a cold cup of tea that had been made with enormous concentration and abandoned, a thick stack of paper clipped at the corner, and a second, even thicker stack.

Seth squinted at the top sheet of the second one.

Seth Pawn (wiki)... Height...

"You printed the wiki."

"Ingrid says reading it on a screen is bad for my morale. She printed it."

"How many pages?"

"Two hundred and eleven."

Astrid laid a hand on it with great dignity.

"I have read nine. I was not prepared for the section on your gait."

"My..."

"They have diagrams."

Seth looked at the World Champion, who could see forty moves ahead in a position she had never studied, and who was now frowning at a stack of paper like it had insulted her.

He felt something warm and enormously inappropriate begin to rise in his chest.

"Sit."

He sat.

She did not.

She stood at the window with her arms folded, watching the street the way you watch something that might change.

"There were nineteen people outside your dormitory when Ingrid’s driver passed it. Four of them are journalists. One was selling the bedsheet."

"I know."

"The store you work at has been named in nine articles."

"My manager sent me home."

"With pay?"

"Through Friday."

"Good." She turned. "I like him."

It was said so simply that Seth almost missed it.

Then the stillness came back into her face.

"Seth. You may not be able to go back."

She did not dress it up.

He looked at the board.

At the white pieces, standing in perfect rows.

Go back to what? he almost said.

A room the size of a closet. A brick wall.

A counter at three in the morning, and a man buying one banana.

He found he could not say it out loud.

"For how long?"

"I don’t know."

"A week?"

"I don’t know."

"That’s not very comforting."

"It isn’t meant to be."

She crossed the room and slid the first stack of paper in front of him.

"It’s meant to be accurate."

He looked down.

EMPLOYMENT AGREEMENT.

His eyes went across the first line, then the second.

Position: Live-in household manager.

Duties: cooking, cleaning, laundry, groceries, and general upkeep of the residence.

"You want me to..."

"Cook. Clean. Keep the apartment alive."

"I’m a chess student."

"You are also a man with nowhere to sleep."

Seth opened his mouth.

He closed it.

"I can’t cook."

"You can’t?"

"I can make eggs. And boxed pasta. And I know seven things you can do with a hot dog."

"That is seven more than I know."

She said it with perfect composure.

"Don’t you have... someone? For the apartment?"

"A woman comes on Thursdays."

"Who?"

"I do not know." Astrid considered it.

"Ingrid handles her. I assume she exists. The floors are clean on Fridays."

Seth pushed the paper back an inch.

"I can’t take this."

Astrid did not move.

"I don’t want to be someone you rescued."

It came out rougher than he meant.

His ears were hot, and his hands were pressed flat against his knees.

"I mean it. No charity. I’ll find somewhere. A friend’s couch, or..."

"Do you have a friend?"

It wasn’t unkind.

It was just true.

Seth said nothing.

For a long moment, the only sound in the room was the clock over the stove.

"No one rescued me."

She wasn’t looking at him.

"I would have liked someone to try."

It was a very small sentence.

It crossed the room and hit him in the chest.

Then her face closed again, calm and smooth as a frozen lake, and she reached for the pen.

She uncapped it.

She looked at it.

She looked at the cap.

She tried to put the cap back on the wrong end.

She said it with the dignity of a woman who had not just done that.

"This is not charity. It is a job. You may refuse it."

She set the pen down on the paper.

She did not push it toward him.

She let it lie there, an inch from his hand.

? ? ?

Refuse it, said the sensible part of Seth.

Pride, said another part.

You have known her for one day. She is a stranger.

She is the most famous woman in your world, and you are a boy with a keychain, and this is exactly the kind of thing that ends badly in the movies.

He looked at the table.

At the pen.

At the empty chair across from him, and the one he was sitting in, still too stiff to have learned his shape.

A chair.

I have been telling a chair for over a decade that I would get here.

And it’s here.

It’s right here, with a pen on it.

He wanted to say it was too fast.

He wanted to say a decent man would think it over.

But the truth was that he had been thinking it over since he was eight years old.

"Okay."

His voice came out thin.

Astrid’s hand twitched, once, against her sleeve.

"Okay?"

"I’ll do it. I’ll read it first, though."

"Of course."

He picked up the first page.

THIS EMPLOYMENT AGREEMENT is made between the Employer, hereinafter "the Employer," and the Employee, hereinafter "the Employee," WHEREAS the Employer...

He read it twice.

Then the second page.

Then the third.

...shall be paid a monthly compensation of $4,800, exclusive of room and board...

He read the number.

He read it again, with one finger under each digit.

It was more than he made in four months.

...non-disclosure of the Employer’s residence, schedule, and personal habits, in perpetuity...

...indemnification against claims arising from the Employee’s association with the Employer’s public image...

...the Employee acknowledges that the Employer’s prior attempts at cooking constitute a hazard...

Seth looked up.

"Section seven."

"The federation’s lawyer called at midnight and asked for a full account of the kitchen. I was thorough."

"It says hazard."

"It was accurate."

He looked back down.

Section 11(c). The Employee shall refrain from rearranging, alphabetizing, or otherwise reorganizing the Employer’s bookshelf.

Section 12. The Employee shall be responsible for the operation, maintenance, and explanation of all household appliances.

Section 14. In the event of the Employee’s fainting...

The words began to swim.

He put one hand flat on the table.

"Seth?"

"I’m fine."

"You’ve gone gray."

"It’s the numbers."

"Which?"

"All of them."

The room tilted, very gently, like a boat.

"Seth."

"Section fourteen has a fainting clause."

"Breathe."

"It has subsections."

"I said breathe."

She was suddenly beside him, one cool hand on the back of his chair, not touching him, but close enough that he could feel the warmth of it through the cloth.

She had no idea what to do with the other hand.

It hovered.

It lifted.

It lowered.

It adjusted the collar of her own shirt.

"Put your head down."

"I’m not going to..."

"Seth Pawn." Her voice dropped to something low and dry.

"I am not carrying you."

He put his head down.

He laughed, helplessly, into his own folded arms, with tears prickling behind his glasses and a pen digging into his elbow.

"Is this normal?"

"I have no idea."

There was something dangerously close to a smile in her voice.

"I have never hired anyone."

"Really?"

"I paid the last woman to leave."

He lifted his head.

She was looking at him.

For one second the whole ice-cold surface of her seemed to waver, and he saw something flicker underneath, quick as a fish.

Then she straightened.

"Sign when you are ready."

He took the pen.

His hand wasn’t quite steady.

Seth Pawn.

It looked ridiculous written down. Like a stranger’s name.

"There."

Her voice was soft.

She picked up the page and held it very carefully, the way you hold something that might break.

"Lesson one."

? ? ?

She took one pawn off the board and set it alone in the middle of the table, on the bare wood.

"Now?"

"You came at six."

"I assumed after all that..."

"Chess does not care about your circumstances."

The corner of her mouth moved, barely.

"Neither do I."

She pointed at the pawn.

"What does it want?"

Seth blinked.

"It’s a pawn."

"What does it want?"

He looked at it.

The small, round head. The plain little base.

The piece he had borrowed his name from, and made a promise with, and hung his queen beside.

He thought of a boy on a carpet with a bowl of soggy cereal.

"To not get captured."

"Wrong."

"To get across the board?"

"Closer."

"To..." He stopped.

To become something else.

To be seen.

"To be a queen."

He said it quietly.

Astrid’s hands went still.

It was nothing dramatic.

They had simply forgotten, for one second, where they were.

"Yes."

Her voice had gone strange.

"Everything on the board wants something, Seth. When you stop seeing wood and start seeing want, you have begun."

Seth stared at her.

A moment ago, she had lost a fight with a pen cap.

Now she spoke like someone reading the first page of the world.

That’s the thing.

She’s only fluent in one language.

She slid the pawn back to its square.

Her fingertip rested on its head a moment longer than it needed to.

"That is your homework."

? ? ?

Ingrid arrived at 7:30 with two coffees and a file.

She left with neither.

"No."

Seth sat on the far side of the kitchen door with a glass of water and no intention of listening.

He listened to every word.

"Absolutely not. He’s nineteen. He’s a stranger. He has two million strangers watching him right now, and you want to put him in your home? You hired a man before I’d had my coffee."

"I already have."

"Astrid, he has your face on his phone."

A silence.

"I noticed."

"A keychain. Your newsletter. A wiki about your schedule."

A rustle of paper.

"The press will say he’s been circling you for years, and they won’t even be wrong. He knows your calendar better than I do."

"I know."

"Then you know how it looks. To the press. To your sponsors. To me." Ingrid’s voice cracked, just slightly, with something that wasn’t anger. "A young man who has built his life around you, living in your apartment, in an arrangement the whole world will watch. I’ve seen that story end. It does not end kindly."

"He isn’t like that."

"You’ve known him for one day."

"Yes."

"You don’t know."

"No."

Seth pressed his forehead to the wall.

She’s right.

That is exactly what it looks like.

He had never once seen it from the outside.

"Then I’ll find him a hotel." Her voice was softer now.

"A security detail. A lawyer. I’ll find him six lawyers."

"I don’t want six."

"Then why? Why him? You cannot even operate a microwave."

"It has too many buttons."

"You called me from the supermarket because you couldn’t find the eggs."

"It was a large supermarket."

"They were under a sign that said EGGS."

"It was a very small sign."

"It was a banner."

A pause.

Then, much lower, with all the fight gone out of her:

"You can’t look after yourself, Astrid. How are you going to look after him?"

Seth stopped breathing.

It was the question he’d been dreading.

"I’m not."

"Then..."

"He is going to look after me."

Silence.

It went on for a very long time.

Ingrid spoke at last, barely above a whisper.

"That is the most terrifying thing I have ever heard you say."

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Because I want to."

The front door closed.

? ? ?

When Seth stepped out of the kitchen, Astrid was standing at the window with her back to him, and she did not turn around.

"You have not slept."

"I work nights."

"You will sleep in the afternoon."

Her shoulders eased, just slightly.

"It is the afternoon."

"It’s eight-thirty."

"It is the afternoon somewhere."

She pointed at the sofa.

He lay down in the gray hoodie, with his glasses still on, intending to stay awake.

He was asleep before she turned off the lamp.

? ? ?

Ingrid came back at four.

She carried a folder.

She did not look at Seth.

She walked past him to the table, set the folder down, and opened it with great and visible reluctance, like a woman signing her own surrender.

"I’ve amended it."

Every page was marked in red.

"Clause four. No press. Clause six. He does not touch the trophies. Clause nine, he does not post, comment, or in any capacity look at the wiki."

"That last one is unenforceable."

"I’m aware."

"Clause eleven?"

"A separate bedroom. With a lock."

Seth’s ears went hot.

Ingrid finally turned and looked at him.

It was a long, level, measuring look, the look of someone testing a bridge before crossing it.

"You. Do you understand what you’ve agreed to?"

"I think so."

"No," Ingrid said.

"You think it’s a job. It isn’t. It’s a position inside a story that is going to get very large, very fast, and some of the people reading it will be cruel."

"I know."

"You have no idea." She stepped closer.

"Tell me why you’re doing this."

Seth looked at his hands.

Because I told a chair.

Because a girl on a screen looked into a camera and I was eight, and I knew.

He could not say either.

"I’m not here for the Champion."

It was the truest thing he had.

Ingrid’s expression didn’t change.

"That is exactly what a fan would say."

The words landed like a slap.

Seth didn’t flinch.

"Then watch me."

Silence.

Behind her, Astrid had gone very still, one hand flat on the table.

Ingrid held his eyes a moment longer.

Then she looked at Astrid.

She spoke to no one in particular.

"In six years you have never asked me for anything."

"No."

"Not once."

"No."

Ingrid closed the folder.

"Initial every page. In ink. Three months’ probation."

She picked up her coffee that wasn’t there, realized it, and put her hand down.

"And if one photograph of him in that hoodie gets out, I resign."

She left.

She did not slam the door.

It was, Seth thought, the most violent thing she could have done.

? ? ?

He came back at 11:40 that night with one duffel bag and a shoebox.

A black car had taken him to the dormitory’s service entrance.

Ingrid had arranged it.

Ingrid had arranged everything, with a face like granite and a clipboard like a sword.

He had packed in nine minutes.

He didn’t own much.

The key was already in his hand.

Astrid had left it on the table that afternoon without a word, beside the pen.

He turned it, and the door opened.

The apartment was dark, except for one lamp.

It was burning in the far corner of the long pale room, and its light lay across the floor like a doorway.

It hadn’t been on that morning.

He stood very still in the hall with the shoebox against his chest.

On the refrigerator, under a magnet shaped like a tiny crowned queen, hung a note.

Neat handwriting. Black ink. Not one letter out of place.

He had known another note like it, under a magnet shaped like a lemon.

This one was not cold.

It was the most beautiful handwriting he had ever seen, and it belonged to a woman who could not find eggs.

Dinner is on the stove. I made it myself. Please do not judge it.

I will be awake. - A.

Seth read it once.

Twice.

Three times.

On the stove sat a small pot, covered, still faintly warm.

The smoke detector over his head had a fresh strip of tape across it. Someone had put it there very carefully.

He lifted the lid.

It was rice.

It was, he thought, mostly rice.

The bottom had gone entirely black.

Something in his chest turned over, very slowly, like a key in a lock.

He carried the pot to the table.

Astrid was there.

She sat in the dent of the old chair with her arms folded across the board and her head resting on them, white hair spilled over one sleeve.

Asleep.

A cold cup of tea stood beside her.

One hand was curled around a single black pawn.

Seth looked at it.

It was the pawn from the lesson.

She had been holding it for hours.

She had not gone to bed.

She had said she would be awake.

She had waited up.

He didn’t wake her.

He took a spoon from the one drawer that had spoons in it, sat down across from her in the chair that had never learned his shape, and ate every grain of burnt rice in the pot.

It tasted like smoke.

It was the best meal of his life.

Nobody had ever waited up for him.

He ate slowly, so it would last.