No.
I empty my mind again, this time for good, and slowly fall into a dreamless, blessed sleep.
I wake up in the middle of the night, feeling more like myself. When I sneak out to use the bathroom, I find a brown bag outside my door. Inside are a sandwich, a Fanta, and a pack of Twizzlers.
The last day is the perfect combination of challenging chess, high stakes, and teamwork. We already know we don’t have enough points for the gold, but if we play our cards right, we can still make the podium.
And we do. I make the executive decision to put the events of the previous day out of my mind and focus on the play. My opponent tries the Muzio Gambit. I’m briefly confused, then remember going over it with Defne and know exactly what to do. We don’t quite kick Russia’s ass, but we spank it a little bit. At the medal ceremony, we all squeeze onto the lowest step of the podium, the national anthem mixing with the camera clicks in my ears. Tanu pulls me to her, Emil shouts, “It’s what we do!” and Nolan gives us a half-pleased, half-reproachful look. I feel part of something. Like I haven’t in a long, long time.
It’s a stupid chess tournament. I swore I wouldn’t care, and yet I feel happy. In the crowd, I spot Eleni Gataki from the BBC giving me the thumbs-up, and wave back at her, bemused. I guess I’m starting to know people in the chess world.
“Come, Mal—the press wants to interview us,” Tanu calls afterward.
“Oh . . . Actually, I’d rather not.”
“Why? It’s CNN! This is how Anderson Cooper becomes my bestie!”
“I think he already has Andy Cohen. ”
“You have to come,” she insists. “You’re the reason we won. Oh, lower that eyebrow, Emil, you know it’s true!”
“Really, I’m fine.”
“But— ”
“She doesn’t want to,” Nolan says, tone calm but final. I send him a grateful look. He stares back like either he didn’t notice or he doesn’t care about my gratitude. I’m pondering my frustrating, utter inability to read him, when someone taps my shoulder.
“Ms. Greenleaf.” It’s an older man in a gray suit. His beard is garden-gnome- long, his accent from somewhere I cannot place. “May I congratulate you on your victory?”
“Oh . . . sure.” I search for a non-rude way to ask him who he is and find none. “It was a team effort.”
He nods. “But you were by far the most impressive player on the team.”
“No more than Nolan.”
The man laughs. His gaze, however, is sharp. “It’s hard to be impressed by Sawyer these days. He has accustomed us to a certain level of performance. Some people even say that he has ruined chess.”
I frown, thinking about the people who have recognized him in the last few days, telling him that they took up chess after seeing him play. “I don’t think it’s true.” Am I feeling defensive on behalf of Nolan Sawyer? It’ll start raining frogs any minute. “He’s made chess visible and popular.”
“Certainly. But he always wins. He hasn’t had a rival in years, and people rarely get invested in a sport whose outcome is a foregone conclusion. I would know. I organize the Challengers tournament.”
“Oh.” It sounds familiar, but I don’t know why and I don’t care. This man, his hawkish gaze, and the odd things he says about Nolan are making me uncomfortable.
“I’m sorry.” I gesture somewhere behind me. “I need to meet up with my teammates.”
“I’ve been hearing lots about you, Ms. Greenleaf. I believed the rumors were exaggerated, and yet . . .” His look is long and assessing. I want to hug myself. “Run along. You friends will be waiting for you. Whoever they are.”
Yikes.
I wander away, checking my phone to look busy. I find a text from Defne （You done good, kid.） and millions from Darcy— apparently, they both spent the past four days refreshing ChessWorld.com.
DARCYBUTT: BRONZE!!!!!!!!
DARCYBUTT: You and Nolan got the most points in the whole Olympics. You guys should get married and have a child. She’d be so good at chess.
DARCYBUTT: Or she’d suck. She’d trudge through life saddled by crushing disappointment. Resent you well into your old age. Take away your car keys and put you in a home the second you let your guard down. Okay, abort plan.
DARCYBUTT: You’ll be home tomorrow night, right? I miss you. Sabrina only talks to me to say “Ew.”
MALLORY: ofc. and when she says ew she actually means i love you. or something.
MALLORY: what present do you want from canada?
DARCYBUTT: A mate for Goliath.
I sigh. And then the air rushes out of my lungs, because Tanu is hugging me again; a cloud of lavender surrounds me. “Last night in Toronto! You know what that means, right?”
“I was thinking of maybe taking a walk downtown— ”
“Oh, no. No way.” She pulls back and takes my face between her hands. Her eyes are night stars bursting with excitement. “Tonight, Mallory, we play Skittles!”
SKITTLES IS LIKE CHESS.
Actually: skittles is chess— without a clock or scorecard, surrounded by half-empty beer cans and Salt-N-Pepa songs that are older than us, under the light of a starry-sky LED projector that some girl from Belgium brought as a “hotel room– warming present.”
It’s a multicultural frat party, with chess instead of spin the bottle. For reasons that I must attribute to Tanu and Emil’s event-planning skills and Nolan’s reputation, taking place right in our shared area. People have been coming and going in a steady stream for hours, bringing their sets and playing blitz, rapid, Fischer Random.
Strip chess.
“Drinking age’s nineteen, Mal,” Tanu says when I decline a fruity drink for the second time. She lost a bishop and her socks about ten minutes ago. “It’s legal! Like en passant capture! Or queening! Or castling sho— Crap, I’m so sorry!” She spills her glass onto the Italian guy Nolan defeated yesterday and promptly moves to paint whiskers on a cute Japanese guy, forgetting all about eighteen-year- old me.
I go back to focusing on my rapid game against a Sri Lankan girl I bonded with after noticing her Dragon Age Solas pin. She’s very pretty, and a great player to boot, and a-couple-of-monthsago- Mallory would be making a move on her. I swore to Saturn and back that I wouldn’t play for fun. Yes, it’s exactly what I’m doing. Nope, I would not like to talk about it.
“—that time Nolan stole a black knight from Kaporani’s board at GE’s tournament and all matches were delayed by twenty minutes because of the search?”
“That was after Gibraltar, when Kaporani switched my water with distilled vinegar.”
“We’d already gotten revenge for that with the glitter bomb. He sparkled for months.”
People laugh. Emil and Nolan are on the couch, playing tactical team, surrounded by a mix of old friends and fans. There’s a girl, for instance, who’s almost as blond as me, curled up next to Nolan. Hard to tell how he feels about it, since he’s so focused on his game. He must have run a hand through his hair, because it’s vaguely mussed, unbearably attractive.
Something else I’d rather not talk about.