Checkmate

by Walter Dean Myers

  He kept going on about how he should have been asking for some help but he didn’t think it would get away from him.

  “You can’t always make it by yourself,” LaShonda said.

  Bobbi asked if Sidney’s family knew about the drugs and he said they did.

  “It really hurt my parents,” he said.

  All of a sudden the whole thing seemed like a lame reality show to me. Sidney was crying and covering his face with his fat, stubby fingers. Bobbi and LaShonda both looked like they wanted to go over and give Sidney a hug. I wanted to ask him more questions. The first thing was where he was getting any drugs and how come he had to ask somebody where to get some more. He was really upset, but I wasn’t sure if he was upset about using drugs or not getting them, or maybe he was even getting them for somebody else and just taking the blame. I didn’t want to come down too hard because if he was on the edge I wouldn’t want to be the dude that pushed him over.

  I made sure that Sidney put everybody’s number on his cell phone.

  “Look, man, you really got to get yourself straightened out,” I said as we left the media center.

  “Zander, I know,” he said. “Culpepper got all over me today and told me what was going to happen if I got into trouble again.”

  “What did he say?”

  “What he actually said was that I would get kicked off the chess team, probably suspended, and maybe even get kicked out of the school,” Sidney said. “That was what was coming out of his mouth but he looked like he wanted to kill me on the spot.”

  “Did he say anything about seeing a doctor or anything like that?” I asked.

  “He said something about talking to a psychiatrist,” Sidney said. “He said that maybe I had an addictive personality like Arthur Conan Doyle, who wrote Sherlock Holmes.”

  “I don’t know about that,” I said. “But just call one of us when things get hard, okay?”

  We were on the street and Sidney shook my hand when the bus pulled up to the stop. I watched him get on and felt really bad. Drug addicts were supposed to be weird-looking guys sneaking around in hoodies and looking nervous all the time, not kind of fat white guys who played great chess.

  They were also supposed to look desperate. Sidney looked miserable but not desperate. Maybe that would come later.

  THE CRUISER

  THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE AND 50 CENT

  By Kambui Owens

  So Stephen Crane didn’t even fight in the Civil War. In fact, he wasn’t even alive during the war. He published The Red Badge of Courage in 1895 and if it took him two years to write the book he was writing it when he was about 22 or 23. So if everybody is saying you should write what you know, and Stephen Crane didn’t know anything about fighting in a war, should we change the whole scene to write what you can imagine? We’re studying this book in school way over a hundred years after it was written by a guy much younger than any of the writers that we know about today. Stephen Crane was born in New Jersey and eventually made his way into New York City, where he got a job as a reporter.

  He was probably a cool dude but he didn’t follow any of the rules that we learned about writing. So I think he was the first Cruiser. My man was laid-back, wrote a great war book, and checked out before he was 30.

  If I write a book on war I will, like Stephen Crane, make the whole thing up because I don’t want to have to get shot at for real. Which brings us to 50 Cent. Yo, he’s bragging on how many times he’s been shot and how hard he is, like so many of the other rappers, DJs, and what-have-yous. But I don’t know if we’re going to be talking about 50 Cent a hundred years from now.

  Can u dig where I’m coming from?

  The thing is that you don’t always have to be on a real tip to get over. But you do have to know the difference between the real and the unreal, the Way and the Play, what’s Game and what’s Lame. Stephen Crane did The Red Badge from the heart and not the eyes. Can we follow him or do we have to walk the walk and talk the talk and blues dues our way to heaven? Speak to a Brother!

  CHAPTER FOUR

  She Eats Sushi by the Seashore

  Are you going to have your clothes on?”

  “Zander Scott! Yes, I’m going to have my clothes on. I can wear a snowsuit if you want me to. I’m just going to do a run-through of the commercial. And I’d like you to come to see me at work. Is that too much to ask?”

  That’s how I ended up in a studio on Ninth Avenue and 43rd Street. There were two couches and I sat on one of them with Marc, Mom’s agent, and someone from the agency. Two guys took Mom into another room to get her ready. There was a glass panel on the wall opposite Marc and me, and through it I could see a huge blue screen.

  “Is she going to be on that screen?” I asked Marc.

  He shrugged. “I didn’t see the script,” he said. “They were still working on it yesterday.”

  “The screen’s going to be behind her,” the woman from the agency said. “This is a wonderful account. I hope she pulls it off.”

  “I thought she had the job already,” I said.

  “We look for ongoing accounts,” the woman said. “Not one-shot deals.”

  “She’ll pull it off,” Marc said. He didn’t sound too confident.

  We waited for another five minutes before they rolled a camera into the room. Then Mom came in, dressed in a kimono. She waved to me and I waved back.

  The guy who was directing the shoot was in the room, too, and we could hear his voice through a speaker.

  “Okay, let’s just run it down cold,” he said. “You look down at the x that’s on the floor. Do you see it?”

  “Yes,” Mom replied.

  “Then look up and do the lines,” the director said. “Frank, you ready?”

  Another voice. “Okay, one, two, three … whenever she’s ready.”

  Mom was looking down, then she looked up with this big smile on her face.

  “My husband cannot resist a great smile!” she said.

  “Frank?” The director.

  “Looked good,” the videographer said.

  “Do I see a shadow on her forehead?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Let’s try it again.”

  Mom looking down. Mom looking up.

  “My husband cannot resist a great smile.”

  “Jack, how’s the audio?”

  “It works for me.”

  “Let me see the clip,” the director said. “Everybody relax.”

  We waited for a few minutes and the director was asking if they should shoot Mom while she was sitting and the videographer said she might be too tall for a good angle.

  From somewhere another voice came through the speaker announcing that the clip was ready.

  Mom moved to one side and leaned against the wall. The back wall lit up, and there was a picture of Mom with her head down. Behind her there was Ninth Avenue, with cars moving and all kinds of color going on. Mom lifted her head, and out came some Japanese!

  “Miriam, how’s it look out there?”

  “Fabulous!”

  “Looks good here, too,” the director said. “It’s a wrap. Thanks, Melba.”

  Everybody shook everybody else’s hands and we left. That was it. We went down in the elevator with Marc and grabbed a taxi to go uptown.

  “That was it?” I asked. “How come they didn’t use a Japanese model?”

  “They weren’t sure if they wanted to use a black model or a Japanese-American model,” Mom said. I saw the cab-driver look at Mom in the mirror. “But then the Japanese girl got sick. She has an eating disorder.”

  “She’s too fat?”

  “Too thin.”

  “I thought models were supposed to be skinny.”

  “The Japanese don’t like their models too thin,” Mom said. “Also, she overdid it. There’s a lot of pressure on American models to be thin for high-fashion work. It’s hard if you have a tendency to put on weight.”

  The whole gig looked easy to me.


  My cell beeped. It was LaShonda texting me saying that Bobbi had texted her with a freak-out. Sidney had called Bobbi asking if he could borrow twenty-five dollars and he wouldn’t tell her why he needed the money.

  i think he wants to buy some you-know-what!

  what chu wanna du Zman?

  kidnap him and have 1 of thoz interventions like they do on tv? LaS

  That might have been fun to do but I didn’t like it. If we got Sidney somewhere all we were going to say to him were the same old things we had already said. Also, I knew that he could run it all down to us the same way we would run it down to him.

  We got uptown, stopped at La Supermercado, and bought hamburgers, buns, and cheese. Mom was all bubbly and feeling good about herself and smiling the same smile she had on when she did the commercial.

  “You look like you’re going to bust out with some Japanese any minute,” I said.

  “You going to pay me?”

  “I’m your son, Mom,” I said. “I shouldn’t have to pay you for a smile.”

  She gave me a big smile, which was a little strange because I had just seen her do her smile for money and knew she could put it on anytime she wanted. I was cool, though, and didn’t say anything about it.

  I called Kambui and told him what LaShonda had said.

  “Yeah, she texted me, too,” he said. “I think that sometimes you just got to let people go through what they got to go through. Druggies know they’re foul, so what are you going to tell them that’s going to make a difference?”

  “How about that Scared Straight program?” I said. “You ever see it when they take those kids to jails and let the prisoners scare them?”

  “They didn’t scare some of the kids but they scared the heck out of me,” Kambui said. “I think if I had the choice between going to jail and going into the army to fight I’d choose the army. At least you have a gun to protect yourself.”

  “If I can pull it off, will you back me?” I asked. “I can call my uncle Guy.”

  Guy was my mom’s brother. He was my height but real big in the shoulders and chest. He worked for the police department in gang relations and Mom worried about him a lot. She said that when they were young anybody who wanted to go out with her had to ask Uncle Guy’s permission.

  “Then he would look them over and say yes or no.”

  “How did you like that?” I asked her.

  “I always told him which ones to say yes to so I liked it fine,” Mom told me.

  I told Mom about Sidney wanting to borrow money from Bobbi and that I wanted to call Uncle Guy to see if he could bring Sidney to a jail to scare him.

  “If you think it might work,” she said. “Guy’s good with young people.”

  We found Guy’s number at home and Mom called him and ran down the whole situation. Then Guy wanted to talk to me and I was ready to tell him that I thought that Sidney was a good kid and just needed help but he didn’t want to hear that.

  “Joe Weinstein still running the sports over there?” he asked.

  “Yes.” Cody Weinstein’s father was a gym teacher in Da Vinci’s athletic department.

  “I’ll talk to him and let you know,” Guy said.

  “Sidney’s not an athlete,” I said.

  “Did I ask you if he was?”

  “No.”

  “No what?”

  “No, sir.”

  Hey, I’m not using drugs. It’s Sidney. That’s what I thought about saying, but you don’t say too much to Uncle Guy. I could see why he was a policeman.

  I called Kambui and said that we might get Sidney to see prison life and scare him away from drugs.

  “You know what a guy told me?” Kambui asked. “He said it would be cheaper to give addicts free drugs than to put them in jail.”

  “It’d be cheaper to shoot them, too,” I said. “My uncle Guy said he’d see about showing Sidney something that would change his mind.”

  “Yeah, okay,” Kambui said. “Look, what did you do today?”

  “Went down and watched my mother shoot a commercial,” I said. “She did it in English and then they dubbed in some Japanese over her so it looked as if she was speaking Japanese.”

  “You ever wonder why people speak different languages?” Kambui asked. “I can see it in the old days when everybody was separate, but now that what happens gets around the world in two seconds I don’t see why we don’t just settle on one language so we could understand each other.”

  “And we wouldn’t have to take language in school.”

  “And you know what else I was thinking?” Kambui went on. “In Africa they have languages with different kinds of sounds, not just regular syllables. Swahili has clicks in it. How do you teach kids how to do that?”

  Good point.

  THE CRUISER

  A TRIP TO THE LIBRARY

  By Zander Scott

  What I wondered was why didn’t we have clicks and whistles and maybe even a few hums in English. So I took a trip to the library. The old subway car rumbled and rattled all the way downtown before coming to a screeching halt at 42nd Street. I ran up the stairs, huffing and puffing all the way, because I knew it was late. Phew, just made it before closing time! I shuffled up to the third-floor reading room. The librarian put her fingers to her lips and shushed me. I didn’t know what was bugging her because I had squelched all the noises except the rustle of paper as I got ready to take notes.

  “How come we don’t have any hums and clicks in English?” I whispered.

  Her eyes fluttered for a moment. “Huh?”

  “I said, how come we don’t have any hums and clicks in English?”

  She pointed toward the computer and told me to Google the subject. I went over to the library PC and clicked on Internet Explorer. I could hear the hard drive whizzing for a moment and then stopping. I whacked the computer hard enough to hurt my hand.

  “Ouch!”

  “Shh!” A guy with horn-rimmed glasses.

  The computer started up again, purring away, and then poof! a screen popped up saying that the library was now closed.

  “Ugh!”

  On the way back to the subway, I stopped at a small store, plunked my money down on the counter, and bought a soda. I snapped off the cap, watched it fizz for a minute, and then gurgled it down.

  On the way uptown I realized I didn’t care if English didn’t have any clicks.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Scared Straight, Kinda

  The Cruisers are a very interesting group,” Mrs. Maxwell said in the hallway. “You are very bright and very resourceful. I spoke to your uncle this morning.”

  “He was at the school?”

  “No, he called for permission to take some of you on a field trip this Saturday afternoon,” Mrs. Maxwell said. “I called the parents of all the Cruisers and they were quite concerned but understood what we are trying to do. Once they discovered that their own children were not involved with drugs they were quite cooperative. Oh, yes, and Cody Weinstein is going with you. Apparently, your uncle and his father played something together.”

  “Oh, good,” I said. That sounded kind of lame but I was thinking as fast as I could. I didn’t like Mr. Weinstein that much. He was a gym teacher and kind of jocky. He once told me that I could play better basketball if I got a lot tougher. I thought he meant to play nastier, and I didn’t like that. His son, Cody, was the best athlete in the school and could play any sport, but he wasn’t on any team his father coached, which was football and soccer. He played basketball well and was always up-front with what he said. I liked him a lot. I was even thinking of asking him to join the Cruisers.

  When Mrs. Maxwell said we were going on a field trip in the afternoon I thought she meant right after lunch. It turned out she meant after school.

  We had agreed to meet on Morningside Avenue and 125th Street, in front of St. Joseph’s. Kambui and I got there first and then Bobbi and then LaShonda.

  “Suppose Sidney doesn’t show up?” Bobbi asked. />
  “Cody is going to pick him up,” I said. “He said if there was a problem he’d call me.”

  “Suppose a prisoner grabs us … or something,” Bobbi said. “Some of these guys have been locked up for years.”

  “Then I’ll turn Zander loose on them,” Kambui said. “He’ll bust out with his Tae Kwon Do and it’ll be all over. They’ll be in lockdown and Zander will be writing it up for The Cruiser. Ain’t that right, Zander?”

  “It’s the word you heard,” I said.

  Cody and Sidney showed up in a gypsy cab a minute later. Cody had on jeans and a polo shirt, looking like an advertisement from JCPenney, and Sidney had on a suit and a bow tie.

  “Don’t crack on the bow tie,” LaShonda whispered as we watched them get out of the cab.

  We all gave Sidney and Cody high fives and tried to make small talk but I dug that Sidney’s eyes were already getting bigger. He was scared before the scaring got started.

  Uncle Guy showed up with a van marked NEW YORK POLICE DEPARTMENT, and Cody and the Cruisers piled in, with Kambui and Bobbi leading the way.

  “Did you see some of the vendors looking at us?” Kambui asked. “They were probably wondering what we were doing going with the police.”

  “They’re probably going to think we’re undercover cops,” Cody said.

  “We got black guys with us,” Bobbi said. “They’ll probably think we’re felons.”

  I had called Sidney and told him that I wanted to show him something and that maybe that would help him make up his mind about messing with drugs.

  “I don’t think I can be helped,” he’d answered.

  He sounded real bad on the phone and I wondered if he was more into drugs than we knew about. I remembered what he had said once about playing chess, that in any position there were good moves and then there was the best move.