Checkmate (6 page)

“So you’re going to get Sidney to write about using drugs?” she asked. “That’s, like, a confession. They could put him in jail and then it would be your fault.”

“No, he can write about anything he wants,” I said. “Remember when Miss Ortiz was talking about how some famous writers worked out their problems by writing stories?”

“Go on.”

“Well, maybe if Sidney wrote about his problems he
would work them out by himself,” I said. “And if it was anything incriminating, we wouldn’t publish it.”

“Just tell him to write anything he wants?”

“That way there’s no pressure,” I said.

“Call me back and let me know if he’s going to do it,” Bobbi said.

I didn’t want to call her back, I wanted her to do it. I said okay, though, and then I called Kambui.

“Yo, Kambui, I was thinking about Sidney,” I said. “This thing is really getting to me.”

“What are you doing?”

“Trying to figure out Sidney’s problem,” I said.

“No, I mean right now. You sitting at the table? You eating a sandwich? What are you doing?”

“I’m lying on the floor right next to my dumbbells thinking maybe I’ll get to some exercise,” I said. “What you doing?”

“I’m texting Zhade Hopkins,” Kambui said. “I’m thinking about asking her to go out with me.”

“Zhade is too fine for you,” I said.

“No, I think she digs me,” Kambui said. “I think you and I should go out with her and her sister. On a double date.”

“Where do you want to take them?”

“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.

By LaShonda Powell (sent to
LaFemme)

There are scary things
That lurk in the corners
That bump and creak in the shadows
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

A
nother 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.”