Chapter 3 — Chess

Even though I don’t like school that much, there’s some fun parts to it. Specifically, when I get to hang out with my friends at lunch time in the cafeteria.

I usually have a group of friends I sit with at lunch. Sometimes the group changes. Some people leave, others join, and they leave too. And sometimes I like to sit with other people at other tables, depending on my mood.

Life is like the tide as the moon waxes and wanes. Change is inevitable. But I hate change. I like permanence and things that endure. Like unperishable gold that doesn’t taint or corrode like silver does.

But silver has its uses too.

Demons hate silver. That’s why I wear a silver cross around my neck every day, which I never take it off. I wash it daily with water from the sink, leaning against the sink while bathing my cross with the pouring water.

When I get married, I’m going to wear a silver ring. Not a gold ring, even though the ring from The Lord of the Rings with embedded Elvish text looks really cool.

My mom and dad don’t wear rings. They’re married legally, but they don’t love each other.

Something I never told anyone was that my dad’s not my real father. My real father’s someone else.

Maybe I’ll tell Mike someday.

But we’re not talking right now.

Right now, I’m with my friends. Lunch time is always fun. We play games like MASH and tic-tac-toe and sometimes we even have board games. I like playing cards, I’m good at poker. My father taught me poker and chess and even how to maintain a poker face. He’s stoic, always was. My mom says I’m a lot like him.

Today, we’re playing chess. More specifically, I’m playing chess and I’m dominating everyone.

I don’t tell most people this, but I play in chess tournaments on weekends. I’m going up the ranks, I’m going to earn my way to grandmaster eventually. So it’s no surprise that I’m better than everyone in my grade.

I’m better than my brother at chess, and he’s so jealous that he tries to throw away my trophies every time I win one. My mom collects them though and stashes them away somewhere secret. She’s good at hiding things.

No one has managed to beat me at chess. The other kids have accepted this as a fact, that I’m boss at chess, and they’re just going to lose when they play me. But they take it as a learning opportunity. I like to teach them chess, and I explain the best moves to make when playing.

I’m done explaining chess to my friend, when Mike slides in the seat in front of me, facing me over the chess board on the cafeteria table. He smirks at me, his eyes narrowed and his arms crossed. I stare at him, a bit confused. We haven’t talked for a month.

“What are you doing?” I say.

He sets his chin on his hand.

“Playing you. I heard you’re the best player in our grade.”

“You play chess?”

“Yeah. I play in tournaments. I’m pretty good.”

My mouth drops open. Another tournament chess player? I thought I was the only one in our grade. And how did I not know this?

My eyes widen and I grin at him.

“Let’s play, I want to see how good you are.”

“Sure.”

We arrange the pieces on the board. I let him be white, and I’m black. He swiftly moves a pawn and I move mine.

The opening game develops in a matter of minutes. Mike’s a fast player and seems to play more reflexively. I’m like that too, but I like to put more thought in my moves.

The first capture is mine. I take his knight with my bishop, and he glares at me. I smile a little. He has really expressive eyes. They change like the summer sky, cloudy one moment, sunny the next moment, thunder and storm the next.

They say the eyes are the window to the soul. And Mike has a complicated soul, from the looks of it.

I like complicated people. Unraveling them and taking the time to get to know their ins-and-outs makes it fun.

And I’m learning more about Mike the longer we play chess.

He’s good. He’s really good, even better than some of the big boys I play at tournaments. I play regional tournaments, sometimes states, and I might go to nationals in the spring.

The other kids are looking on, surrounding us as we play each other. They whisper to each other, but I’m too focused on the game to hear them.

Mike takes my rook. That’s a heavy loss for me. I’m a bit stunned by the move, but I compensate by taking his queen.

He groans, slapping his hand to his forehead. The other kids whoop and clap me on the shoulder.

“I should have seen that coming!”

Without his queen, it’s a matter of minutes before I checkmate his king. His king falls.

Mike sighs and places his hands on the table. He’s breathing kind of hard, and his eyes look a bit dazed.

But he smiles at me, a forced smile, and says,

“You’re good. The best player I’ve gone against so far my age. Not as good as my dad though, he’s amazing at chess. Who taught you?”

I busy myself by cleaning up the board and putting the pieces back into the box. Not looking at him, I say,

“My father. He’s really good too.”

He glares at me, crossing his arms.  

“You have got to stop copying me. This can’t be a coincidence, we’re way too similar.”

I lift my chin up at him.

“Not really. We have common threads, but we’re completely different people.”

He hesitates, pondering what I just said.

“Yeah. You can say that again.”

He watches on as I set the table. I push my food tray in front of me, picking up my fork to take a bite out of my lunch. I thought that was the end of our conversation, of our interaction, when he suddenly says out of the blue,

“You think you’re better than me or something?”

I stop what I’m doing. I didn’t expect this. My face reddens, a slow burn creeping up my body.

“N-no. Why do you think that?”

He doesn’t answer.

Silence. No one’s talking, the other kids are staring at us.

Something’s wrong. His face is flushed. His voice sounds strained, and his hands are clenched. He’s breathing faster, and he’s shaking a bit. His palms are clenching and unclenching and he’s beginning to shudder.

I think he’s in pain. Not pain over losing, but actual physical pain.

I can tell the signs. My mom’s a cardiothoracic surgeon, and she takes me to her hospital all the time and I see patients with her.

Mike’s acting like the patients my mom sees.

And for that reason, I think he’s having a heart attack.

“Where are you hurting?” I blurt out.

A boy standing next to me says with contempt,
“What do you mean where is he hurting? He’s just a sore loser. And an asshole.”

Mike starts breathing faster, gasping.

I ignore the boy’s insult. “He’s not an asshole, he’s my friend.”

I repeat to Mike,

“Mike, where does it hurt?”

He brings his right hand to his chest.

“My chest. It’s burning. I can’t move my arm.”

Symptoms of a heart attack. Textbook, really. But this is bad. The adults in our school don’t care about us kids, and we have to fend for ourselves most of the time.

So, I’m going to fend for Mike.

I quickly get up and hurry to the other side of the table.

“Mike, you’re having a heart attack. Let’s go to the nurse’s office.”

Taking his arm, I wait patiently as he slowly gets up from his desk. He staggers, not able to walk.

I pause and then make a quick decision. Might as well. I put his arms around my shoulders and hoist him on my back.

“W-wait, don’t.”

“Kind of have to.”

A boy says,

“What are you doing? He’s not having a heart attack, he’s just pissed he lost the game.”

I ignore him and lift Mike up slowly. He’s heavy, sort of, but I’ve held heavier people.

I walk slowly away from the lunch table.

“Kids don’t have heart attacks!”

I don’t answer, focused on getting Mike help.

The kid’s wrong. Children can have heart attacks, according to my mom, if they have congenital heart defects. If they were born with a malfunctioning heart, they will suffer from the pain and not be able to function normally. They have to be treated right away with medication or even surgery or else they’ll die.

I strongly suspect that Mike has a congenital heart defect. It explains why he can’t run that fast during recess and gym class. He’s always gasping and heaving when he runs.

I’ve been watching him since the day he introduced himself to me in class. We haven’t talked, since the day he got mad at me. I’m stubborn, and he’s even more stubborn. It’s a bad combination.

But I couldn’t take my eyes off of him.

He sits with a group of boys at lunch time, but he doesn’t talk much. He listens mostly. He’s not as energetic around others as he is with me. He’s withdrawn around people he doesn’t like, I noticed.

With people he does like, he’s loud and boisterous and impertinent. And he makes a joke a minute, talking like a truck driving through the highway.

He doesn’t eat cafeteria lunch. He brings a paper bag with food, a tuna avocado sandwich that his mom made for him. He enjoys it, munching slowly on the sandwich while occasionally taking a chip from his bag of Layer’s chips. I like watching him eat, he has this sensuality and calmness to him that I find comforting.

“I like comfortable people,” I once said loudly to my friends while sitting near him and his group. He looked up but didn’t say anything, his brow furrowed as he munched on his chips.

I hesitated before saying to him, making eye contact with him,

“I’m talking about you.”

He shrugged and looked away.

He still wasn’t talking to me.

He likes to wear sweatshirts and cargo pants. Green is his favorite color, which brings out his eyes. He doesn’t talk in class, ever. He doesn’t participate and says one word sentences to teachers.

I heard him saying to his friend once,

“I hate teachers.”

That was unlike me. I felt the need to please teachers. Our teacher was a tall Spanish young woman in her 20’s who was obese and had shiny black hair pulled in a pony tail. She yelled a lot, but to me she gave candy and pulled my cheek when I said thank you.

Mike hated her.

He hates fat people.

That’s another thing I heard him saying.

I overheard a lot of things he says, sitting near him but not able to talk to him. There was this divide between us, this invisible wall that was somehow insurrected when we fought and that I didn’t know how to surmount.

So I was surprised when he sat down in front of me to play chess.

Maybe now, we can talk again.

Maybe now, I can surmount the divide.

And with his heart problem, I can save him.

I know how to. My mom taught me medical knowledge from her litany of textbooks from medical school. I would pore over them in class, even when the other kids made fun of me. I didn’t know whether I wanted to be a surgeon like my mom, she made me cut open mice, which was gruesome and unsanitary. I cried a lot unlike my mom, and I didn’t think I had the personality of a surgeon.

But as I carried Mike to the nurse’s office, I had this epiphany.

I want to be able to save Mike’s life. If he really is having a heart attack, which I know he is, and if he is in danger of dying, I want to prevent it. And if we get through this, this day without any worse wounds, I want to be able to save his life for all the morrows from here on out.

And in the moment, I felt a little more convicted that I might be a good doctor.

I open the door to the nurse’s office. The nurse is a man in his 50’s with thin graying hair, tall but strict. He doesn’t care about his job and doesn’t care about children. I didn’t think he would help, but I had a mission in mind.

“Hi. I need some aspirin.”

The nurse doesn’t resist, and instead he points to a shelf and I scan it. I see the bottle, and I take it from the shelf. Taking a pill out, I fill a cup with water and give it to Mike.

Mike was breathing hard and shivering and spasming while sitting on the ground.

“Take it. It’ll help.”

He opens his mouth, and I pop the pill in and hold the cup to his mouth. He take a sip and swallows.

 I wait. A few moments pass.

He stops spasming. He sits up and says,

“The burning stopped.”

“Yeah. Aspirin helps with the symptoms.”

The nurse grunts,

“Get out of my office, you two jackals.”

I pull Mike’s arm up and we walk out of the office. The hallways are empty, there’s no one around, it’s just us two. Lunch has ended and people are in class, but I didn’t want to go back to class right then.

Without speaking, we go to the staircase connecting the floors. We sit on the steps.

And I start sobbing.

Which is strange because he’s the one who almost died from a heart attack. And I’m the one who’s crying while he’s calm and still processing what just happened. His breathing has slowed down and his face is a normal color now.

He’s not saying anything as I’m crying.

But after a while, he opens his mouth and turns to me and says,

“How did you do that?”

In between heaving and sobs, with emotions overriding my thoughts and voice, I blurt out,

“M-my mom. She’s—she’s a doctor.”

He doesn’t say anything.

But he puts his arm around me, and the space changes.

I feel it again. Comfort. His presence comforts me, and I stop crying.

He takes a tissue from his pocket and hands it to me.

I say, “Thanks.”

I blow my nose. Wiping my face with my hands, I say,

“You’re comfortable.”

He says,

“Thanks.”

And a thought came across my mind, left unvoiced.

And I hope you feel the same way around me too.

-

Later that day, I talked to my mom, and she told me to bring Mike to her office at her hospital. She listened to his heart and found a murmur. They did an endoscopy and an MRI and they found a hole in his heart. He needed surgery, my mom said.

His parents wept when they found out. Mike didn’t say anything when the doctors told him, but later he told me in private,

“I hope I die. This world sucks.”

I cried again when he said that.

“Don’t die, Mike. I don’t want to live without you.”

I cried and cried and cried, at home, in class, in the bathroom. And Mike couldn’t say anything when I cried, he never could.

But one day, when tears were flowing down my cheeks, Mike sat next to me and he kissed me.

And he said,

“I’m not going to die without you.”

I wasn’t going to die without him. And I wasn’t going to live without him either. Given the choice, between life or death, I choose life, with him, with our family. I didn’t want to be with anyone else, and I wasn’t going to have any other way. And it wasn’t up to me either, it was up to God.

Holy Spirit said to me that day in church when I first really saw him that I was going to marry him.

And I did.