How (Not) to Find a Boyfriend

by Allyson Valentine

  He clicks his mouse and takes my rook with a pawn. “Pay attention to the game,” he says. “And it’s me we’re talking about. What would I rather do on a Friday night than play chess?” He pauses. “But I need to leave at nine thirty. I’m going over to Malinda’s.”

  “Nine thirty? Isn’t that kind of late for a playdate?”

  Phil hesitates. “It’s, um, you know.” He clears his throat. “It’s a sleepover.” The pixilated image of his face on my computer screen tinges cranberry.

  My brother, Phil, nerd extraordinaire, is spending the night with a girl. I make a tsk-tsk sound and click my digital queen into position. “You should pay attention to the game,” I chide him. “Checkmate.”

  Phil clutches the sides of his desk. “No way!”

  Exactly. No way out of the trap I’d set.

  “In the words of my friend Ben Franklin,” I say, “‘You had the best of the game, but something happened to divert your thoughts, and that turned it in my favour.’”

  If you want to divert a guy’s thoughts? Talk about girls.

  I raise my fists over my head in a high V. “I have defeated the fabulous Phil!”

  Phil spends the next fifteen minutes dissecting the play to figure out where he went wrong. He looks over his shoulder. “Uh, hang on,” he says.

  I hear the door open and close. There’s an exchange of greetings. Perhaps I get to meet the roommate? Phil’s face appears on my monitor. “Hey, tell you what. Since you just beat me, how about instead of another game with me you take on a more worthy opponent?”

  “Sure.” Leave it to Phil to room with a chess geek.

  The guy slides into Phil’s chair and I nearly fall out of mine. It is not Phil’s roommate. Not even close.

  “Hi, Nora.” He smiles nervously.

  “Dad?”

  Stop it, stomach! Knock it off, heart!

  His eyes search the little Nora face at the bottom of his screen. “My god,” he says. “You’ve gotten all grown up!”

  I miss him. I love him. I hate him.

  “I hope you don’t mind me showing up like this,” he goes on, “but when Phil told me you’d been online with him every night, I couldn’t stand the thought of not getting a little time with you myself. You’ve been—shall we say—difficult to connect with.”

  He’s being generous. The truth is that I have been impossible to connect with. I have avoided him like he is a rat infested with fleas infested with the bubonic plague. Phil, who obviously had this whole thing planned, will receive a metric ton of crap the next time we’re online. I stare blankly at the little framed image of Dad shifting uncomfortably in his chair. I don’t remember his hair being so flecked with gray. And his hairline has made a bold retreat toward the back of his head. But then, I was twelve the last time we were face-to-face—digitally or otherwise.

  “I, uh, I understand you have a big chess match tomorrow,” Dad says. “I’d love a game with you, if you’re up for it.”

  Phil’s face appears alongside Dad’s. “She’s up for it,” he announces with authority. “It’s her last chance to practice. So, I’m going to take off and leave you two to your game.” He’s gone before I can lambast him for setting this up.

  It’s just me and Dad. I staunchly tuck my emotions away. I know that Phil is right, I should take any practice sessions I can get, and who better to play with than Dad? I speak almost without moving my mouth. “Okay, I’m white.”

  We play in silence. My move. His move. Fifteen minutes pass. Thirty-five. An hour. I concentrate, calculating several moves into the future before I touch a piece. At each turn, Dad makes a popping sound with his lips as he studies the board anticipating my move. I’d forgotten about that annoying little tic of his and finally it’s too much.

  “Excuse me.” I fumble for the book—the one Dad sent for my birthday. “There’s a little something I’d like to share with you from Ben Franklin about chess etiquette.” I read to him from “On the Morals of Chess”:

  You should not sing, nor whistle, nor look at your watch, not take up a book to read, nor make a tapping with your feet on the floor, or with your fingers on the table, nor do anything that may disturb his attention. For all these things displease; and they do not show your skill in playing, but your craftiness or your rudeness.

  I continue, “See? So I’m going to hit my mute button if you keep making that noise.”

  Dad smiles. “I’m glad you like the book.”

  “Oh. Uh, yeah. Thanks.”

  “And the chess set?” he asks. “Did you like that, too?”

  I shrug. “Not so much at first.”

  “See?” he says. “If you mute me, we can’t talk.”

  “We’re not talking,” I remind him. “We’re playing chess.”

  He sits back in his chair. He removes his glasses and cleans one, then the other lens with a rag he’s grabbed from somewhere off camera. I’m pretty sure it’s a pair of Phil’s roommate’s underwear. He shakes his head. “What do you say we let the chess wait, Nora. I’d really like to catch up with you.” He says the next line like he’s rehearsed it so many times it’s gone stale. “I can’t stand the distance that’s grown between us.”

  Snap! The rubber band holding the pieces of my heart in place explodes and I practically spit into the camera. “Distance? You’re the one who created the distance when you moved all the way across the country!”

  Dad’s eyes are fixed with concentration. He examines his freshly cleaned glasses, then puts them back on. “You know what? You’re right. I created the distance. But still, for a while there you came out to see me. I thought everything was okay—that we’d worked out a routine. You loved those summer camps at the Museum of Science. Remember? What was that one where you built a little vehicle that knocked over my fish tank?”

  I cringe. The fish, named Lumpy, was one of those goldfish that looks like its gelatinous brains are attached to the outside of its head. When my camp creation smacked into the tank, Lumpy splooshed out and flopped on the floor until Phil scooped it into one of Dad’s shoes.

  “The camp was called Exploring Solar and Fuel-Cell Cars,” I say. I can’t help smiling at the memory. “And Phil went to the Mini Med School camp—I can still see him trying to give poor Lumpy CPR.”

  “See?” says Dad, visibly encouraged. “We can talk. But not if we don’t even try.”

  Silence. The truth is, I don’t like the distance that has grown between us any more than he does. And while he created the physical distance, I know it’s me who created the emotional chasm that has gotten so wide that I don’t know if there is even a way to cross it. How do you fix something when it’s gotten so broken?

  “What happened?” he goes on. “I know, your mother and I always agreed that it should be your choice, and Phil’s, whether you wanted to spend your summers on the East Coast with me. But suddenly, you refused to come. Whenever I visited during trips to Seattle, you’d make plans with friends. You don’t answer my calls. Your e-mail replies are thin at best. What changed, Nora?”

  More silence. My finger rests heavily on the mouse. With a click I could disconnect our call. But something stops me. I glance down at the book still lying open in my lap. I reread a line I’ve read before—the one in which Ben Franklin says that, in chess and in life, we should acquire the “habit of hoping for a favourable change, and that of persevering in the search of resources.”

  Maybe it’s time for that change? And maybe Nora Fulbright is the resource that can make it happen? Hanging up would be like sweeping the pieces off the board because your king is in check, when there still may be a move you haven’t seen—a chance for a “favourable” change. Maybe it’s time to make the move I should have made all those years ago and just tell Dad the truth. It worked with Krista. It worked with Chelsey.

  “When you left, it crushed me,” I say.

  “But—” Dad tries to interject and I stop him.

  “See? You always do that. You stop me before I can
get my words out.”

  Dad opens his mouth to speak, then closes it. He steeples his fingers and presses the top of the steeple to his lips.

  “You left, and I cried for—seriously—months. Then I would see you in the summer, and when I came back to Seattle I would cry again. No kidding, Dad, for months. It was on the airplane trip back home the summer after I killed Lumpy that Phil dragged out his stupid little magnetic chessboard, and something inside me just flipped. I decided that I was done reliving the whole tragic ‘good-bye, Dad’ thing over and over again. If I never said hello anymore, then I never had to say good-bye, either. Then, every time you called, every time you wrote, I thought, okay, this is getting crazy. We need to fix this. But I would think again about how much it hurts to say good-bye and I would go back to sort of pretending you didn’t exist.”

  Dad sighs, then sheepishly raises his hand. “May I?”

  I turn my face away from the camera and make him wait while I consider. “Yes, you may.”

  “Thank you. Since you quoted the venerable Mr. Franklin, I will do the same. ‘A man wrapped up in himself makes a very small bundle.’”

  He gives me a few seconds to digest his words, then hangs his head. “Nora, I am such an idiot! When I left for Boston I was so damned wrapped up in myself, thinking of the new post at MIT and my career, I didn’t stop to think that you were just eight years old. You were always so bright—I treated you like a miniature thirty-year-old. I never stopped to ask how you were feeling, because, honestly, you always seemed fine.”

  “I never let myself cry in front of you,” I say. “I knew it would make you sad.” I swallow hard. “I hate you for leaving.” I drag my sleeve beneath my nose. “And I wish you’d never left.”

  Dad’s mouth tightens. He reaches toward the screen and I imagine that with the back of his hand, he brushes the cheek of the little digital Nora struggling not to cry at the bottom of the screen. “I’ll bet that if we said hello more often, it would take the sting out of the good-byes,” he says.

  I suspect he’s right. And what’s done is done. Dad left. But in a funny way, I feel like I just got him back. “I guess life really is a lot like chess,” I say. “Once you’ve made your move, you can’t change your mind. What’s done is done and you need to just play your game the best you can from that point on.”

  Dad smiles and it is my own smile looking back at me. The same shape mouth. The same small, square teeth, although his show years of excessive coffee drinking.

  “You know, Dad,” I say, “I have this friend, and her dentist told her that if you drink your coffee through a straw it’ll keep your teeth from getting stained.”

  He nods. “Duly noted. Now, what do you say, shall we keep this game moving forward?”

  We play on. Dad takes his role of coach seriously, and when I ultimately lose, he explains where I went wrong and how I might possibly have recovered. We talk about me. We talk about school. Dad reminisces about his days as Riverbend High’s chess champion. “Do they still have that chessboard up on the gym roof?” he asks.

  “They do, but the door is locked, so no one ever plays.”

  “That’s a shame,” says Dad. “There was no better place to spend those rare lunch periods when it wasn’t raining. You really should think about college on the East Coast.” His eyebrows lift hopefully. “Here, there’s this big yellow thing in the sky called the sun. I think you might enjoy it. And I know how much I would enjoy having you here. Just think, we could play chess all the time, me and my little Judit Polgár.”

  “It’s kind of late for that, Dad. I’m never going to be a chess champion.”

  “You’ll always be my chess champion,” he says.

  And when the game is done, we agree to a rematch in a week so that we can say, “See you next week,” instead of “Good-bye.”

  Twenty

  IT IS FINALLY THE SATURDAY afternoon I’ve been working so hard for. After a football game that trudged into triple overtime, the school bus rumbles down the highway as we make our way back to the school. Staring out the window, I alternate between ruminating on last night’s game with Dad and catastrophizing about showing up too late to play. I don’t even realize the ferocity with which I am chewing the skin rimming my fingernails until Krista gently pulls my hand away from my mouth.

  “You’ll get an infection,” she warns, and offers me Skittles instead.

  I scoop the pile from her hand and toss them onto my tongue—orange, yellow, green—who can be picky at a time like this? Nothing fuels anxiety like sugar. And noise! Not only did the game run late, but our bus broke down and we’re forced to ride back to school with the band. At the front of the bus a couple of band guys cheer on Jazmine, who’s putting a trombone, and us, through a slow painful death. Nearby them, Chelsey faces backward in her seat. She claps a beat, and shouts an ad-libbed cheer:

  Eagles like to eat up fish

  Today the fishies got their wish

  Cutthroats dragged the eagles down

  Held ’em under, made ’em drown

  Beside Chelsey, Becca wiggles and uses her hands to make like she has a dorsal fin on her head. With her sucked-in cheeks and puffed-out lips, she looks like a hot teenage trout.

  I thrum my fingers on the back of the seat in front of us. “When are we going to get there?”

  Krista glances at her phone. “Calm down. The chess thing doesn’t start for twenty minutes and we’ll be at school in fifteen. You’ll get there on time.”

  “I thought I’d have time to shower and change, and”—it’s loud and crazy but still I lower my voice—“Chelsey and I had this talk way back on the first day of school about how chess is for nerds, and I don’t know what she would think—”

  Krista throws up her hands. “Enough!” She switches to a snarky little voice meant to sound like me. “Krista won’t like me because I’m too smart. Adam won’t like me because I’m too dumb. Chelsey won’t like me because I’m a geek.” She changes back to her angry Krista voice. “Get over it, Nora! What would happen if you were just you, Nora Fulbright, who is smart and dumb and geeky all at the same time? Anybody who doesn’t like you for who you are is someone you shouldn’t waste your time being (finger quotes) ‘friends’ with. If you’re genetically predisposed to play chess? Play chess! Stop worrying about what everyone else thinks! Popularity is great—but not if you have to live a lie to get there.”

  My teeth are clenched so tight, my jaw spasms.

  “Think about it.” Krista moves to the front of the bus and joins Chelsey in another verse of her victory cheer. The tapping of my foot on the bus floor makes a dull thud-thud-thud as I watch the trees out the window plod by. Phil is King Nerd, but he’s having a great time at school, he’s got friends who adore him, not in spite of his nerdishness, but because of it. And he has Malinda.

  What do I have? Butterfly wings that I still have not quite figured out how to operate.

  We arrive at school with four minutes to spare. I squeeze to the front as we pull in so I can be first off the bus.

  “Hey, Nora!” Chelsey grabs my elbow. “We’re heading over to Flying Pie to celebrate. Want to come?”

  I glance from Chelsey to Krista, who is watching me intently. “Actually,” I say, “I’m playing in a chess tournament that starts in about three minutes.”

  Krista nods almost imperceptibly. Chelsey rolls her eyes. “You are one weird girl, Nora.” She starts to turn away, then turns back. “But show them that cheerleaders rule, okay?”

  I match her smile with one of my own. “I’ll do my best.”

  I find Eric waiting just inside the library doors, wearing a black polo shirt with a small embroidered pawn on the chest.

  “Nice shirt,” I say. “Very chess appropriate.”

  He glances dubiously at my pleated skirt, my V-neck top and the extra-large bow clipped just above my ponytail, then says with a smile, “Wish I could say the same for you.”

  I flinch. “The football game ran really l
ate. I didn’t have time to change.”

  “I thought maybe you’d changed your mind and decided to just show up and cheer on your favorite player,” he says, and when my face contorts he adds a quick “Just kidding.” He gestures to a table with pitchers of juice, cartons of store-bought cookies and, of course, a tub of licorice. “Help yourself to some food. We’re about to get started.”

  With scattered conversations going on everywhere, the library is much noisier than on a typical school day. As I make my way to the food, I search the small groups of people standing around. There are chess players, and friends and family of chess players. It’s not long before I spot the chess player I’m looking for. Adam is over by literary fiction, talking with a couple of other guys. He’s got on the faded blue sweatshirt I spilled sea urchin guts on at biology lab. The tail of a pale yellow shirt hangs halfway down his butt. His sleeves are pushed up his forearms with his hands buried deep in his front pockets, and the right leg of his jeans is still rolled up from having ridden his bike here.

  I press my fingertips to a spot above my heart and send it a silent message to calm down. I am nervously gnawing on my second piece of licorice when Eric joins me at the food table. “So I told all the guys that I was giving up my spot to a last-minute entrant, and that I would officiate instead of play,” he says.

  “And they were okay with that?” I glance at Adam. The guy beside him says something, and Adam laughs out loud, tipping his chin toward the skylights. I want to make Adam laugh like that!

  “They weren’t thrilled at first,” admits Eric. “But I used your line, and reminded them that with me out of the running they all stand a better shot at being school champion.”

  I pour myself a cup of lemonade. “So who do you think is going to win?”

  “Could be Mark. He’s the guy in the white shirt talking to Adam. But I think Adam is the guy everyone needs to watch.”

  Oh, I’ll be watching him. In fact, I am having a very hard time keeping my eyes off him. A sudden thought makes my already tattered nerves fray just a bit more. “Please tell me I’m not playing him in the first round!”