Checkmate

by Walter Dean Myers

  “Never mind, she just texted me back and called me a frog,” Kambui said. “Why did she have to go there?”

  “Maybe she’s hoping to kiss you and turn you into a handsome prince,” I said.

  “I didn’t like her anyway.”

  Lie.

  “So, getting back to Sidney,” I went on. “I think he knows drugs are bad but he hasn’t really seen how bad so he’s, like, into some kind of movie version.”

  “What movie?”

  “I don’t know, man, some movie,” I said. “It’s, like, you see guys get shot in pictures and then the next day you see them on television talking about how good the film was. It makes the killing part not too bad.”

  “So you think we should get him some heavy drugs and let him OD or something?” Kambui asked.

  “This afternoon I told him that we wanted to publish a picture of a crackhead in The Cruiser,” I said. “I asked him if he could get us one.”

  “Look, Zander, I know you and Sidney are friends,” Kambui said. “But as far as I’m concerned he’s just weirding out. Maybe all that chess he plays has got his head twisted. You know — mad genius stuff?”

  “The guy’s a chess wizard,” I said. “Plus, he’s a good guy and he goes to our school. I was shocked when he got arrested for trying to buy drugs. If he does come up with a picture I’m going to put it in The Cruiser.”

  “I don’t see how it’s going to help,” Kambui said. “But it doesn’t cost anything, so why not?”

  “I have to do something,” I said.

  “I got to get to my homework,” Kambui said. “I have fifteen thousand more pages to read.”

  “You think if I texted Zhade and asked her about us double-dating with her and her sister she might say yes?” I asked.

  “I wouldn’t even go out with her now,” Kambui said. “Where did she get that frog bit?”

  “That was kind of cold,” I said.

  Kambui said he had to finish his homework and would see me in school. When I had hung up it was easy to see that Kambui was more into Zhade than he was into Sidney’s problems. But Kambui was my main man and I knew he would be thinking about it. That’s the way he is. You say something to him and you think he’s forgotten about it and then two or three weeks later — bam! — he’s right back on the case.

  I was still lying on the floor when Mom came to the door and pointed to the cell phone she was holding. Somebody was calling for me and she wanted to know if I wanted to answer it. She put the phone behind her back and said it was a lady.

  For a wild moment I thought it was going to be Zhade. Zhade is so hot she can melt a Hershey bar from across the room just by looking at it. It wasn’t Zhade, it was Bobbi calling me back.

  “Hey, Zander, I’ve got the game with Powell all figured out.” She was chirping again. She does that when she’s happy. “I have four numbers. If we manage to get three of them we’ll win.”

  “The first number is one,” I said. “If we get one more point than the other team, we’ll win.”

  “The first number is nine,” Bobbi continued, ignoring me. “One player has to get nine rebounds. The second number —”

  “Why nine?” I asked.

  “The second number is seventy. That has to be our free-throw percentage.”

  “Where are you getting these numbers?”

  “Each number represents a phase of the game that we have to dominate,” she said.

  “You’re not playing, Bobbi,” I said. “We’re playing.”

  “I’m giving you the tools to win the game,” Bobbi said. “So it’s nine rebounds by one player, seventy percent of our free throws, the third is team assists — we need nine — and the last number is thirty-five. We need to hit thirty-five percent of our three-point tries. That’s it. What do you think?”

  “Bobbi, you don’t know diddlysquat about basketball,” I said.

  “Yeah, I do,” Bobbi said. “Because it’s really about numbers and percentages.”

  “So what do you think about Sidney’s problem?”

  “What do you think about my math solution?”

  “We’ll check it out when we play Powell on Thursday,” I said. “And if we get those numbers and lose we’ll burn you at the stake.”

  “And if you win you can put a photo of me in the trophy case,” Bobbi said.

  “Can we get back to Sidney?” I asked.

  “He’s the best player on our team,” Bobbi said. “I’m second board, John Brendel is third, and Todd Balf is fourth.”

  “I could probably beat all of you with my eyes closed,” I said.

  “In your dreams, baby,” Bobbi said. “In your dreams!”

  Okay, the basketball team, Bobbi, LaShonda, Kambui, and Ashley Schmidt from the school newspaper, The Palette, went all the way to 147th Street and Amsterdam Avenue to play against Adam Clayton Powell. On the way Bobbi kept passing around her numbers.

  “Zander, you have to get the nine rebounds,” she said. “You’re the tallest.”

  “The secret to basketball,” Coach Law said, “is having the will to win. Without that will you’re going to lose.”

  “Numbers don’t lie,” Bobbi said. “Numbers are a way that God slips us the truth.”

  “Spoken like a true young lady,” Coach Law said.

  “Spoken like a sexist basketball coach,” LaShonda said.

  Coach Law grinned.

  Powell’s basketball team was okay but I didn’t like them because the whole school thought they were hot stuff. They had had Mae Jemison come up to the school once, and President Clinton and some author from New Jersey, so they thought they were special.

  “Can you get nine boards?” Cody asked me.

  “Yeah.”

  “If you keep crashing the boards you’ll get fouled,” Cody said. “I’ll drive more down the lane so I should pick up a couple of fouls, and the whole team will work on assists.”

  Coach Law kept talking about the will to win and Cody kept looking at Bobbi’s numbers. I was wondering if Cody was going soft on Bobbi. Ashley had a copy of Bobbi’s numbers, too, and she wanted to write them up in The Palette.

  The game started and I gave up everything to work on the boards. The dude I was up against, a West Indian brother I knew, was strong and did a lot of pushing but he couldn’t really sky. I was snatching bounds pretty easy.

  The whole thing was that all of us went into the game with Bobbi’s numbers in our heads. It was a little freaky at first, but I didn’t want to fall down on my count.

  In the end we beat them. No, we crushed them. Okay, we left them bleeding and whimpering on the court! Cody scored thirty points and was getting so mean I had to help Powell defend him. I only scored sixteen points because I’m a merciful kind of guy.

  I felt great about the game and especially about beating Powell. But the way that Ashley wrote it up in The Palette you would have thought that Bobbi beat Powell all by herself.

  I saw Kambui in the media center and he asked me if Bobbi was going to replace me on the team.

  “I just hope the coach doesn’t fall in love with those numbers,” I said.

  “Did Sidney show up with a picture of a crackhead?”

  “No, he gave me a picture of a chessboard with numbers on it,” I said. “Very strange. But we’ll publish it just to make him feel good.”

  Kambui said that publishing something that didn’t make sense was stupid. I wanted to help Sidney but I didn’t want to do stupid stuff. I had given the chessboard to Bobbi to put together with the stuff we were going to publish in the next issue of The Cruiser. Now I wasn’t sure and texted her saying that maybe we shouldn’t publish it.

  if it don’t mean anything lets not do it Z-Man

  Z-Man, wake ↑ it’s a simple substitution code figure it out – Bad-B

  SHADOWS

  By LaShonda Powell (sent to LaFemme)

  There are scary things

  That lurk in the corners

  That bump and creak in the sha
dows

  There are clouds that chill

  The damp hallways

  Filling the cracks beneath the doors

  Muffling the sadness

  Stifling the sobs

  An odor like flowers at a funeral

  Floats inches above the floor

  Sweet fragrance of death

  Sticking to the skin

  Mixing with the sweat of fear

  They say that smell

  Is close to taste

  It is bitter, and I must swallow

  Eyes closed, arms folded

  Kids I never knew

  Lie curled in tight circles

  Dreaming of better times

  There is a small square room

  In the corner of my heart

  It lies behind a door

  I hope I never open

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Da Vinci Code

  Another teenager got shot in the Bronx,” Mom said. “A young girl. And you know the sad part about it?”

  “She got killed?”

  “No, but she’s fighting for her life,” Mom said. “The sad part about it is that it didn’t even make the front page. Don’t you think that’s sad?”

  “Yeah.” I knew what she meant, that a girl got shot and it wasn’t a big thing. I looked over Mom’s shoulder and moved her hand so that I could see what had made the front page. It was a story about a girl rapper throwing her shoe at a cop. There was a picture of the girl and she looked really mad. I had heard some of her raps and they weren’t anything special. “I guess people being shot isn’t a big deal.”

  “She’s Puerto Rican,” Mom said.

  “You think that makes a difference?”

  “My grandfather used to say that, when he was a boy, if a black person got shot or killed you had to wait until Thursday to find the details,” Mom said. “That’s when the black newspaper came out. They didn’t print news about black people in the white papers.”

  “Really?”

  “Really,” Mom said. “You can tell a lot about how well people are doing just from what’s written about them in the newspapers.”

  That gave me a whole idea in one sentence. Bobbi was going to deal with basketball and numbers and I liked that, but maybe we could also check out how different kinds of people were being treated by just looking at old newspapers and seeing how they were covered. I told the idea to Mom and she didn’t like it.

  “You’d have to read five hundred thousand newspapers,” she said. “What are you giving up? Basketball? Sleep?”

  I still thought it was a good idea.

  At first everyone was saying that the chessboard and numbers that Sidney published in The Cruiser represented a perfect chess game. Then they were saying that the numbers were New York City zip codes. That made more sense.

  “It’s got nothing to do with zip codes,” Bobbi said. “It’s a simple substitution code.”

  “You know what it says?” Kambui asked.

  “Yes, but I think maybe we should let Sidney tell us.” Bobbi was painting her fingernails black. “The message is kind of personal.”

  “If we’re going to be the ones who help him, we need to know what the problem is,” Kambui said.

  “If we’re going to be the ones who help him then we’d better make sure that we can help him,” Bobbi said, looking up from across the lunchroom table. “And we need to know if he wants our help.”

  “So what you saying we should do?” Kambui asked.

  “Sidney and I are going to a chess tournament Saturday to watch Jamie Pullman, a student at Thurgood Marshall Academy,” Bobbi said. “He’s first board. Why don’t you guys come and we can talk to Sidney casually after the match.”

  “I can’t go,” Kambui said. “I’m working Saturday.”

  I said I could go and Bobbi and I agreed to meet at her house in Brooklyn. The chess tournament was being held at the Brooklyn Public Library, which was only a few blocks from where she lived.

  “I don’t get all the mystery,” Kambui said. “Why can’t you just tell us what the message is and get it over with?”

  “You don’t understand why Sidney is messing with drugs, either,” Bobbi answered. “But he’s got a real problem and your simple answers don’t always work.”

  “Yo, dig Bobbi.” Kambui pointed his index finger across the table at Bobbi. “She just joined a new terrorist group — Al Calculus.”

  “You’re mixing two language groups, Arabic and Latin,” Bobbi said. “The Al is from the Arabic, and Calculus has a Latin root.”

  “Shut up,” Kambui replied.

  I could see that Kambui was getting mad so I said I had to go to the media center. He told Bobbi that her nails looked stupid and that the Cruisers weren’t about going goth. Bobbi said that as far as she was concerned the Cruisers might not be about anything soon. She said that to Kambui but she was looking dead at me.

  I remembered what she had told me about Mr. Culpepper still wanting to break up the Cruisers, when I saw Caren Culpepper in the hall and caught up with her.

  “Hey, Caren, what’s happening?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Hey, I heard your father was trying to bring some grief to the Cruisers,” I said.

  “You think he’s racist?”

  “Racist?” I looked at Caren to see if she was serious. She was. “What makes you think that?”

  She shrugged and turned into one of the classrooms. I followed her into her Geography classroom. When she started taking some books off the shelf I put my hand on them to stop her.

  “He said something?”

  “Zander, you’re black and I’m white. So why don’t you call my father and tell him you would like to take me out Friday night,” Caren said, looking over her glasses. “See what he says.”

  I felt my stomach jump, as if I was afraid. Caren didn’t look at me, just took the books and went to her desk.

  Race wasn’t something I was comfortable dealing with. Even if I felt someone was wrong I wasn’t easy talking about it or confronting them.

  The thing was that I always felt bad talking about race but I always thought I should do something if people were coming down hard on black people. Mr. Culpepper hadn’t said anything against blacks — I didn’t think he liked anybody — but I thought that maybe Caren had heard him say something.

  Marc, Mom’s agent, came over for dinner. He brought a huge bag of hamburgers, sodas, and French fries. He was all excited, talking about a perfume gig for Mom.

  “Perfume is the gateway to high fashion,” he said, wiping some mustard from his chin. “And high fashion is where the money is.”

  “What do I have to do?” Mom asked.

  “The way the director laid it out to me is this.” Marc put his burger down and held his hands up with the palms out. “You’re in a dark room. They can barely see you. Behind you, in the distance, there’s New York at midnight. Maybe a few cars pass. Then there’s a small light on you and we see your profile. Then a male voice asks, ‘New perfume?’ Then you hesitate for a beat and say, ‘If you think so.’ That’s it!”

  “If I’m in the shadows and they don’t see me, how’s that helping my career?”

  “It’s building you up as a woman of mystery,” Marc said.

  Mom rolled her eyes toward the ceiling. “Will they see the guy?”

  “Only his hand holding a glass of champagne,” Marc said. “It’s going to be interracial, too.”

  “Is that good?”

  “It can’t hurt,” Marc said.

  I thought about what Caren had said. I got a burger, a handful of fries, and started toward my room.

  “What do you think, Zander man?” Marc called to me.

  “Sounds okay, I guess,” I said.

  Everyone in the school had two numbers they had to carry with them all the time. One was Mrs. Maxwell’s and the other was Mr. Culpepper’s. I called our assistant principal, waited for four rings, and was just about ready to hang up when he answered.
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  “Hello, Mr. Culpepper, this is Alexander Scott,” I said.

  “And?”

  “Uh, I wonder if I could take Caren to the movies this Friday,” I managed to get out without hiccuping.

  “One moment. Caren!” I heard Caren answer in the background. “Do you want to go to a movie with Alexander Scott this Friday?”

  She said yes.

  “Alexander?”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “I will expect you between six-thirty and seven, and I will expect you to bring my daughter safely home by ten-thirty, is that understood?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The phone clicked.

  I hung up.

  Back into the living room. Marc is showing Mom a bottle of perfume. It looks fancy.

  “Zander, are you okay?” Mom pushes the perfume away.

  “I just got a date with Caren Culpepper,” I said.

  “I don’t know her, do I?” Mom said. “Is that wonderful?”

  THE PALETTE

  Question: Should Da Vinci lose its elite status and be open to all students whether they are classified as gifted and talented or not? These essays were written after a discussion moderated by Ashley Schmidt and Mr. Finley.

  No!

  By Kelly Bena, eighth grade

  Gifted and Talented is, perhaps, a bad name for our school. It would be fairer to call the school Hard Work Academy. We are in Da Vinci because we do the work necessary to do well. If we have special status it is because we maintain high enough standards to deserve that status. Bringing in students who are not willing to do the work is no favor to them and lessens the opportunities of those currently working our butts off to make Da Vinci a great place in which to learn.

  Yes!

  By Demetrius Brown, seventh grade

  Maybe everybody would do the work if they felt special. When you play guitar it’s the top four strings that usually play the melody and everybody is happy with them, but the bottom two strings are valuable also and provide the harmonics. Having a school like Da Vinci is like having a school for the top strings when, eventually, all of the strings are needed to make beautiful music. Also, there is a lot of pressure to show that you are gifted when sometimes you only want to be yourself.