Because You Love to Hate Me(27)

Everything inside me went cold. “What is it you’re looking for?”

“A key,” he said calmly. “To a door that people don’t want opened.”

It was then that I saw the reality: he was the nephew of Gregory Moriarty, and just like his uncle, he wanted to whistle-blow and declassify and expose people he thought had done wrong.

But before I could dwell on what that might mean or what key he might be looking for, he said, “Oh, and checkmate.”

I blinked, lost for a moment. I’d completely forgotten that a game still waged between us. But wait—hadn’t Jim lost his queen to me a few turns back?

I honed in on the black and white squares . . . and then groaned. Because dammit, he’d used the same move that gets me every time.

Boden’s Mate.

Boden’s freakin’ Mate.





Another month passed. The same routine unfolded each day. Me versus Jim. White versus black.

Jim won more often, and I didn’t even care. But now the walls were shrinking in.

Then one day we had our first stalemate. It was early December—the day I skipped fourth-period orchestra, remember? I told you I had cramps, but the truth was that the chess game had run long.

Dad had told my older brother, Mike, and me the night before that if we didn’t close out our semesters with the highest GPAs, then we were officially uninvited from the family trip to Aruba. What a jerk, right?

On top of that, Jim kept asking me questions about you, Jean. What’s it like for her being a senator’s daughter? Has she ever been to the Capitol? Does she ever talk about her mom’s policies?

I was jealous, and I was pissed. It was the basic recipe for Shirley Losing at Chess, which was why I ended up whittled down to just my king.

In my defense, though, Jim wasn’t much better off: he had only his king and a rook left.

We were seriously stuck, and I was tired of running my piece back and forth across the board.

“Stop chasing my king,” I snarled.

“If I saw a way to do that,” he clipped back, “then obviously I would. How about, instead, you stop running away from my rook?”

“Let’s just draw, James. This game is never going to end otherwise.”

A pause. Then his eyebrows perked up with mischief. “And what would happen if it never ended, Holmes?”

“I’d miss orchestra, which would be bad.”

“Why? Will it trigger the apocalypse? Fire! Pestilence! Famine!”

“Ha-ha.” I snapped my king over a square. The same move I’d been making for a full ten minutes.

And he scooted his rook after . . . only to pause, fingers twirling across the jagged top. Then his lips curled up. He moved his rook diagonally. Yeah, not sideways, but diagonally.

I blinked. Then wagged my head like a cartoon who’d just been slapped. “You can’t do that.”

“Says who?”

“The rules!”

“Which we know don’t matter, Holmes. Not if we both agree to stop believing in them.” His grin spread wider and wider, and I knew from the hair prickling on the back of my neck that I had stepped right into his trap.

But I didn’t care. Because my pulse was picking up speed. My stomach was spinning in a good way. This wasn’t like that time I had salmonella. This was like that roller coaster at Universal Studios.

And I wanted more of it.

So when Jim next declared, “From now on, rooks go diagonally, and kings can move like queens,” I didn’t argue. I simply settled into the new rhythm until at last I won. An hour later, right before the bell rang for the end of fourth period.

And guess what? The apocalypse didn’t come, and Mike told me Aruba sucked anyway.





In January, Scot’s Yard won the chess match. Of course. Dad was irate (do you remember that phone call? You said you could hear his shouts from the girls’ bathroom), but I didn’t care.

Oh, the chess team thought I cared. You should’ve seen how they hung their heads on the bus ride back to Baker Street. All of them bracing for my shouts . . .

But I didn’t shout. I was scarcely thinking about Scot’s Yard or how, yet again, I had fallen for effing Boden’s Mate—my eternal curse, that move.

No, instead, I was wrapped up in a new book from Jim. Pedro Páramo. A tale swirling with ghosts and purgatory and the lives that could have been.

I loved the book. Devoured it in a night. Even in all its magical realism and intangible betweens, it felt real to me. Familiar.

Yet the next day, I said, “I hated it. It never felt grounded.”

A crooked smile. Jim knew I was kidding, but he didn’t push me for a real reaction. He just eased his pawn to D6.

A bad start for him, but I was feeling charitable that day. Plus I didn’t want the game to end. Not yet. Not after reading that book and putting the puzzle pieces together.

Oh, don’t you see? Jim is a ghost. Forever just passing through. That day in the library, he was trapped in purgatory until he found whatever mysterious key he needed to move on. Meanwhile I was just beginning to realize that one day I would blink a heartbeat too long and find that when my lashes had lifted, Jim was gone.

I wasn’t ready for that. Those stolen moments with him in the library had become precious to me. I’m sorry, Jean, and so ashamed to admit it. But it’s true. We had built an entire world trapped in time, perfect in all its layers. In its dust motes and sunshine. In its broken carburetor to rattle above the sparrows’ cries. In the stink of bio-lab hand sanitizer to burn over the must of old French pages.