On the train back home, I think about Easton’s fake your way advice. It won’t be hard. I’m not going to fall in love with chess again— not if I’m not playing and just reading about distant, abstract scenarios.
“How did the new job go, honey?” Mom asks when I let myself into the house. It’s past six and the family’s having dinner.
“Great.” I steal a pea from Sabrina’s plate, and she tries to stab me with her fork.
“I don’t get why you needed to change jobs,” Darcy says sullenly. “Who would rather organize bocce tournaments for old people than tinker with cars?”
There is a specific reason I’m lying to my family about my new job, and that reason is:
I don’t know.
Obviously, chess is tied to painful memories of Dad. But I’m not sure that justifies making up an entire new workplace— a senior rec center in NYC I’ve been hired to manage because a former hookup recommended me. And yet, when I told Mom I’d left the garage, the lie just rolled off my tongue.
I figure it won’t make a difference. A job’s a job. And this one’s temporary, to be left at the door when I come home.
“Old people are nice,” I tell Darcy. Unlike Sabrina, who’s currently ignoring me and texting thumb-sprainingly hard, she’s thrilled to let me steal her peas.
“Old people smell weird.”
“Define old.”
“I dunno. Twenty-three?”
Mom and I exchange a glance. “Soon you’ll be old, too, Darcy,” she says.
“Yes, but I’ll be living with the monkeys like Jane Goodall. And I won’t be hiring young people to come to the park to help me feed the pigeons.” She perks up. “Did you see any cute squirrels?”
I slip out silently around nine, when the entire house is asleep. Hasan’s car is parked at the end of my driveway, the internal light soft on his handsome features. We’ve been doing this all summer, and when he leans in for a casual peck, as though we have a routine, as though this is a date, I think that maybe it’s good he’s leaving soon.
I don’t really have room for that. Not with everything else going on.
“How are you?”
“Good. You?”
“Great. Taking some really cool courses this semester. I’m thinking of declaring my major— medical anthropology.” I listen and nod and laugh in the right places as he tells me about a professor who once said prostituted instead of prosecuted, but the second the car is parked, I hand him a condom, and then it’s hushed words, hurried movements, muscles clenching and releasing.
Easton, who’s surprisingly romantic and painfully monogamous, once asked: Do you feel close to them?
To whom?
The people you hook up with. Do you feel close to them?
Not particularly. I shrugged. I like them as people. We’re friendly. I wish them the best.
Why, then? Wouldn’t you rather be in a relationship?
Truth is, it seems safer not to. In my experience, commitment leads to expectations, and expectations lead to lies, and hurt, and disappointment— stuff I’d rather not experience, or force others to experience. But I still like sex as a recreational activity, and I’m grateful that I was raised by a very open-minded family. No your-body-is-a-temple, it’s-time-to-have- the-talk crap in the Greenleaf household. Mom and Dad discussed sex in almost embarrassingly honest terms, like they would opening a credit card: You’ll probably want to try it, there’ll be pros and cons, do it responsibly. Here’s birth control. We’re here if you have any questions. Need a diagram? You sure?
Dad had been gone for almost two years when Alesha Conner smiled at me shyly from across the homeroom, then brushed her hand against mine during a lacrosse game, then giggled while pulling me inside the second stall from the left in the restroom next to the chem lab. It was clumsy, and new, and good. Because it felt good, and because for a moment I was just . . . me. Not Mallory the daughter, the sister, the maker of mistakes, but Mallory the breathless, pulling up her panties and sucking one last bruise into Alesha’s skin.
I don’t have room to care about anything that’s not family. I don’t have room to care about myself— not that I deserve it. But it’s nice to steal brief, harmless, contained moments of fun. To wave Hasan goodbye less than thirty minutes after he’s picked me up, slide into bed relaxed and with no intention of thinking about him for months.
After last week’s scare, everything’s fine. The mortgage is paid （well, the most overdue month, anyway）， so are the roller derby fees, and everything is fine. At night I dream of Mikhail Tal telling me with a heavy Russian accent that I should go into the hallway to dial 911, and everything is fine.
DAY TWO IS MORE OF THE SAME. LONG COMMUTE, READING, memorizing. Pondering the hows and whys of this weird schedule Defne put me on. I consider texting Easton and asking her opinion, but we haven’t talked since she left last week, and I’m afraid to disturb her while she’s . . . I don’t know. Beer-ponging, or discovering Leninist Marxism, or having a foursome with her dorm RA who happens to be a sapiosexual furry. She knows what she left behind, but I have no clue what she’s doing, what I’m competing with, whether she’s already forgotten about me. Is this FOMO? Yikes. Either way, I’d rather not reach out and avoid being sad because she didn’t answer. Plus, the sound of me texting might give Oz a seizure.
I replay Bobby Fischer’s games, trudge through a dissertation on the pros and cons of Alekhine’s Defense, learn about the Lucena position in the rook and pawn versus rook end game. It feels like a diluted version of chess, with everything exciting sucked out of it. Like taking the tapioca balls out of bubble tea: what’s left is okay, but just tea.
I don’t care, though, because this is just a job. And it’s still just a job on Wednesday morning, when I step into my office and Oz is already there, in the same position as yesterday. I want to ask if he went home to sleep, but I won’t, because I also want to have my eyes not gouged out of my skull, so I just spend four hours reading about king safety. At lunch I go to the park and read my commute book （Love in the Time of Cholera— kinda sad）。 When I come back, I’m supposed to learn about pawn structure, but instead I glance furtively up at Oz— still in the same position; does he need to be watered daily?— and hide my book inside a larger one to keep on reading about Fermina’s questionable romantic choices. At four I almost pick up my bag and head to Penn Station, then remember:
W– F: Meet with GM trainer to go over weaknesses
The schedule doesn’t say where. “Oz? If you had to meet with a GM, where would you go?”
He looks up for the first time in three days— eyes blazing, nostrils flaring. He’s going to unhinge his jaw, eat me, and then dissolve me in his gastric acids. “Library,” he barks. I hurry across the hallway before I become a statistic, expecting to find the rainbow-loving Delroy. The only person inside the room is Defne, sitting at a massive wooden table.
“Hi. Maybe I’m in the wrong place. Oz said— ”
“Oz spoke?”
“Under duress.”
She nods knowingly.