If there was one thing I loved almost as much as animals, it was books. Reading transported me to exotic locales, fascinating periods in history, and worlds that were vastly different from my own. My mother, frantic with worry one afternoon when I was eight, found me outside in our tree house on a snowy December day engrossed in my favorite Laura Ingalls Wilder book, the one where Pa got caught in the blizzard and ate the Christmas candy he was bringing home for Laura and Mary. She’d been searching for me for half an hour and had called my name for so long she’d lost her voice. Though I explained it to her repeatedly, she couldn’t seem to grasp that I was simply playing the part of Laura waiting in the cabin. Sitting in the cold tree house made perfect sense to me. When I’d discovered I could pursue a career that would allow me to spend my days in a library, surrounded by books, the joy I’d felt had been profound.
Until my dad taught me to play chess at age seven, there wasn’t a single thing I was good at. I did not excel at sports, and I was all over the board academically, earning either the very highest or the very lowest marks, depending on the class and how much it interested me. Debilitating shyness prevented me from participating in school plays or other extracurricular activities. But much like books, chess filled a void in my life that nothing else had been able to satisfy. Though it took me a long time to figure it out, I know that my brain does not work like other people’s. I think in black-and-white. Concrete, not abstract. The game of chess, with its strategies and rules, matched my worldview. Animals and books sustained me, but chess gave me the opportunity to be a part of something.
When I played the game, I almost fit in.
* * *
The Illini Chess Club met in the food court area of the student union on Sunday evenings from 6:00 to 8:00 P.M. The number of attendees varied widely. At the beginning of the semester, when members weren’t yet bogged down by their course loads or busy studying for exams, there might be thirty students. By the time finals drew near, our numbers would plummet and we would be lucky to have ten. The Sunday chess club meetings were casual, consisting mostly of free play and socializing. The chess team meetings—for members who wanted to participate in competitive play—were held on Wednesday evenings and focused on competitive training games, the solving of chess puzzles, and analyzing famous chess matches. Though I possessed the necessary skills and would have preferred the more formal structure of the chess team meetings, I had no desire to compete.
Jonathan joined us on a Sunday evening early in my senior year. While the rest of the club mingled and talked, I fidgeted in my customary spot, board set up, ready for play. I’d kicked off my shoes as soon as I sat down, pressing the soles of my bare feet down on the cool smooth floor because it felt so good to me in a way I could never explain to anyone no matter how hard I tried. I watched as Jonathan approached Eric, our club president, who smiled and shook his hand. A few minutes later, Eric called the meeting to attention, raising his voice to be heard above the din.
“Welcome, everyone. New members, please introduce yourselves. Pizza at Uno afterward if anyone’s interested.” Eric turned back to Jonathan and then pointed toward me. The gesture filled me with dread, and I froze.
I almost always played with Eric, for two reasons: One, we’d joined the chess club on the same day our freshman year and as the two newest members, it made sense for us to partner up for our first game, and two, no one else ever wanted to play with me. If Eric and I finished our game quickly, he moved on to play with someone else and I went home. I liked playing with Eric. He was kind, but that never stopped him from playing his hardest. If I beat him, I knew I’d earned it, because he spared me no handicap. But now that Eric had been elected president and spent some of the meeting answering questions or handling other administrative functions, he wasn’t always available to play with me.
My stomach churned as Jonathan walked toward me, and I calmed myself by flicking my fingers under the table as if I were trying to remove something unpleasant from the tips. When I was a child, I would rock and hum, but as I got older, I learned to keep my self-soothing methods hidden. I nodded my acknowledgment of his presence when he sat down across from me.
“Eric thought we could partner tonight. I’m Jonathan Hoffman.”
His jaw was square and his eyes were bright blue. His short dark hair looked shiny, and I wondered if it would feel soft and silky under my fingertips. He smelled faintly of chlorine, and while I hated most smells, for some reason that one didn’t bother me.
“Annika Rose,” I said, my voice barely above a whisper.
“Monica?”
I shook my head. “No M.” The confusion surrounding my name had been a constant my whole life. In seventh grade, a particularly vile girl named Maria had shoved my head into a locker. “A weird name for a weird girl,” she’d hissed, sending me fleeing in tears to the nurse’s office.
“Annika,” Jonathan said, as if he were trying it on. “Cool. Let’s play.”
Eric and I alternated who played white and therefore took turns enjoying the slight advantage that came with it, and if we’d played together that night it would have been his turn. But since I’d been paired unexpectedly with Jonathan, the pieces in front of him were white and he went first.
His opening sequence displayed his affinity for the moves of World Champion Anatoly Karpov. Once I identified his strategy, I chose my defense accordingly and immersed myself in the game, the sounds and smells of the food court fading away along with my nervousness. I no longer heard snippets of the students’ conversations as they ate their burgers and fries, or the sizzle of the wok from a fresh batch of chicken fried rice. I didn’t smell the pepperoni pizza hot out of the oven. I played ruthlessly from the start, because every game I played was a game I played to win, but I also took my time and concentrated on my next move. Neither Jonathan nor I spoke.
The game of chess is largely silent, but to me there is great beauty in the lack of sound.
“Checkmate,” I said.
There was a long pause and then he said, “Good game.” He looked around, but only a few of our members remained. Everyone else had left for dinner while we were still playing.
“You too,” I replied, because the victory had been as hard won as any I’d earned from Eric.
“You going out for pizza and beer?”
I stood up, grabbed my backpack, and said, “No. I’m going home.”
* * *
The lingering smell of sandalwood incense and Lysol greeted me when I opened the door of the campus apartment Janice and I had lived in for the past two years. The incense was to cover up the faint scent of pot that always clung to her boyfriend’s clothes. Janice would never have allowed Joe to get stoned in our apartment, and she couldn’t detect the smell on him herself. But I had a very sensitive nose and I knew what it was the moment she introduced us. Janice understood that the memories it triggered were something I simply couldn’t handle.
The Lysol was to counteract the aftereffects of whatever Jan cooked for Joe. She loved to experiment with recipes and spent hours in the kitchen. Her palate ran toward the gourmet side of things, while mine aligned more closely with the dietary habits of a six-year-old. More than once, I’d seen Joe staring at the grilled cheese or chicken nuggets on my plate while Janice stirred something complicated on the stove. I appreciated her willingness to keep the smells in our apartment to a minimum, but didn’t have the heart to tell her that the Lysol and incense only added two of them to the mix. And because I wasn’t the easiest person to live with, I never would.
“How was chess club?” Janice asked when I came in, threw my backpack on the floor, and flopped onto the couch. It would take hours for me to fully unwind, but being home allowed me to relax slightly and my breathing to grow deeper.
“Horrible. There was a new member, and I had to play with him.”
“Was he good-looking?”
“I’m super exhausted.”
She sat down next to me. “What’s his name?”
“Jonathan.” I kicked off my shoes. “I’m so mad at Eric. He knows we always play together.”
“Who won?”
“What? Oh. I did.”
Janice laughed. “How’d that go over?”
“The same way it always does.”
“You want me to make you a grilled cheese? I made one for Joe earlier. I had everything in the fridge to make chicken Florentine, but that’s what he wanted. And you said you had nothing in common with him.”
“He didn’t take me seriously.” Jonathan had made the mistake that others who’d come before him had frequently made: he’d discounted my abilities while being overconfident in his own. I would soon learn that it would be the first and last time he ever made that mistake with me.
“Next Sunday, you’ll play with Eric.”
“I’m too tired to eat.”
“I have no idea what the two of you are saying to each other,” Joe had said the first time he witnessed one of our conversations. To be fair, it wasn’t only because I suspected he was high at the time. Janice had had three years to learn how to communicate with me, and to her credit, she’d mastered my native language like an expert linguist.