“What’s up with that?” Nolan asks once we’re on the road.
“You mean, with the way my sister would love to drown me in a barrel of mead?”
His mouth twitches. “I did sense some animosity.”
“I’m not sure.” I sigh. “I’m doing my best with her. I make sure she has everything she needs and nothing to worry about.”
“Maybe that’s the problem.”
“What do you mean?”
“When you’re with your sisters, you act like they’re your responsibility. Like you’re their parent, almost. It works with Darcy, but Sabrina might find it infantilizing.” He shrugs. “Maybe she just wants you to be her sister.”
“What do you even know about sisters?”
“Nothing. What do you know about defensiveness?”
I cannot help laughing, and then we fall quiet for a while. Nolan drives like he plays, steady and focused, and for once I don’t feel antsy for not being at the wheel. I let my eyes wander over the halo of the streetlights, the snow weighing down the pine trees, his firm hand as he shifts gears, like he’s moving a bishop across the board.
He’s thinking about chess. He’s thinking about the Koch game we analyzed this morning, the one with the Queen’s Gambit that he lost to Davies three years ago. I know it. Not sure how I know what’s in Nolan’s head, or when it started, but here I am. Knowing.
“Knight e5 was a stupid move,” I say.
He doesn’t skip a beat. “Koch’s attacks backfire a lot. Well.” He shrugs. “Backfired. Before he ate spinach and got an upgrade.”
“It might be a good strategy, luring him into becoming aggressive.”
“Yeah.”
I think wistfully about the tactics I’d use against Nolan if I were the challenger. He’s such an unpredictable player, always thinking of long-term advantages, of seemingly silent moves to exploit later, unexpectedly. I’ve heard commentators say that our styles are similar, but I think we’re oceans apart. I like to strangle my opponent, wear them down slowly, drain them of active play and attack possibilities one by one, until it’s just us— me and their king.
But Nolan would know how to deal with me. What to be on the lookout for. To beat him, I’d have to learn to let go of minute positional advantages and take more overt risks, earlier on. I watch him stretch his neck, strong muscles tensing under his skin, and think that maybe it would work, seducing him into a blunder. Maybe it wouldn’t, but it would keep him on his toes. He’d give me one of those long, knowing looks. Smile, even. He’d smile at me, and I’d get to smile back as I took his king.
It sounds like a dream. A thing imagined.
“Darcy pulled me into your room,” he says, “and conspiratorially whispered that she’s ‘in the know.’ ”
“Unlike Mom and Sabrina, she googles. Probably hangs out on the dark web. Signs up Goliath for Piggie-Tinder.”
“She asked me to teach her to play chess.”
“Darcy?” I perk up. “For real?”
“She said it’s . . . hot shit girl?”
I laugh. “Hot girl shit. You should really try to be online a little.” Most of the other top-ten players have Twitch and You-Tube channels. Nolan: Twitter and Instagram— both with NOT DIRECTLY MANAGED BY NOLAN SAWYER written in all caps in the bio. I bet his social media guy got sick of people DMing him nudes. “Why are you not online, anyway?”
“I’m online way too much.”
“What do you mean?”
“There are pictures of seven-year- old me mining his nose for boogers while playing Nakamura. Throwing a tantrum like a whiny brat after a loss at fourteen.”
“Oh.”
“We all have embarrassing phases growing up, but mine were immortalized. Whoever’s online looking for me already has plenty to find.”
I remember Emil’s words: It’s not easy, growing up as a prodigy in front of the cameras. “Do you mind it? Your . . . troublemaker reputation.”
“You mean, total piece of shit?” He laughs softly. “It’s deserved. I was one. I can only try to be different in the future.”
He’s succeeding, too. I try to recall recent incidents and come up empty. “You still get mad at the people who beat you.”
“Is that what you think?” He shakes his head. “I get furious at myself. For making mistakes. For not being the best I can be. And every time you blunder, you feel the same.”
“Not true. I— ”
He gives me a side look, and I fall quiet. Whatever.
“I showed Darcy how the pieces move,” he says quietly.
“How?”
“She had a set under her bed. Pink and purple.”
I close my eyes. A knot tightens in my belly. “I thought I’d gotten rid of that.”
“You should teach her yourself.”
“What does she need to learn for?”
“She wants to. She idolizes you.”
I snort. “She calls me Mallopee and constantly makes me ‘Lamest Greenleaf’ graphics in Photoshop— which I illegally downloaded for her, by the way. Ingrate.”
“She wants to be like you.”
“I’ll never teach her.”
“Why?”
I turn away. The road is deserted, and the pines are becoming thicker. “Chess is a bad idea.”
“Why?”
“Look where it got me.”
“It got you here. To me.”
Blood rushes to my cheeks, but his tone is matter-of-fact, not suggestive. He doesn’t mean it like that. He means . . . I don’t even know.
“It was you who saw him, wasn’t it?” Nolan asks. I look back at him, puzzled.
“What?”
“Your father. Something happened between him and that woman— that arbiter at the Olympics. You found out. Your mom kicked him out. I’m assuming you were estranged for a few years. And later his accident happened.”
I straighten. The seat belt tightens into my sweater. “How— how do you know? When did you— ?”
“I didn’t. But I remembered some rumors going around the tournament circuit at the time. About Archie Greenleaf. The rest . . . I just guessed.”
“You guessed? How?”
“Little things. Your reaction at the Olympics. You obviously love chess but talk yourself into thinking that it’s a loathsome thing. You feel responsible for your family, not just your sisters but your mother, too.” His tone is even, idle, like he’s reading a boring textbook to the rest of the class. “You constantly act like you’re guilty of something awful. Like you deserve nothing but scraps for yourself.”
Me. The boring textbook— it’s me.
“Because I am guilty,” I blurt out. Surprising myself. It’s not something I’ve verbalized out loud to anyone before. But if I hadn’t told Mom about Heather Turcotte, if Dad hadn’t left home, if he hadn’t had a reason to be driving drunk at 3:00 a.m. . . . If. If.
If.
“Did you know,” he says conversationally, “that I was the reason my grandfather was institutionalized?”
“What does this . . . No. I didn’t.”