Checkmate (7 page)

“Yo, dig Bobbi.” Kambui pointed his index finger across the table at Bobbi. “She just joined a new terrorist group — Al Calculus.”

“You’re mixing two language groups, Arabic and Latin,” Bobbi said. “The
Al
is from the Arabic, and
Calculus
has a Latin root.”

“Shut up,” Kambui replied.

I could see that Kambui was getting mad so I said I had to go to the media center. He told Bobbi that her nails looked stupid and that the Cruisers weren’t about going goth. Bobbi said that as far as she was concerned the Cruisers might not be about anything soon. She said that to Kambui but she was looking dead at me.

I remembered what she had told me about Mr. Culpepper still wanting to break up the Cruisers, when I saw Caren Culpepper in the hall and caught up with her.

“Hey, Caren, what’s happening?”

“Nothing.”

“Hey, I heard your father was trying to bring some grief to the Cruisers,” I said.

“You think he’s racist?”

“Racist?” I looked at Caren to see if she was serious. She was. “What makes you think that?”

She shrugged and turned into one of the classrooms. I followed her into her Geography classroom. When she started taking some books off the shelf I put my hand on them to stop her.

“He said something?”

“Zander, you’re black and I’m white. So why don’t you call my father and tell him you would like to take me out Friday night,” Caren said, looking over her glasses. “See what he says.”

I felt my stomach jump, as if I was afraid. Caren didn’t look at me, just took the books and went to her desk.

Race wasn’t something I was comfortable dealing with. Even if I felt someone was wrong I wasn’t easy talking about it or confronting them.

The thing was that I always felt bad talking about race but I always thought I should do something if people were
coming down hard on black people. Mr. Culpepper hadn’t said anything against blacks — I didn’t think he liked anybody — but I thought that maybe Caren had heard him say something.

Marc, Mom’s agent, came over for dinner. He brought a huge bag of hamburgers, sodas, and French fries. He was all excited, talking about a perfume gig for Mom.

“Perfume is the gateway to high fashion,” he said, wiping some mustard from his chin. “And high fashion is where the money is.”

“What do I have to do?” Mom asked.

“The way the director laid it out to me is this.” Marc put his burger down and held his hands up with the palms out. “You’re in a dark room. They can barely see you. Behind you, in the distance, there’s New York at midnight. Maybe a few cars pass. Then there’s a small light on you and we see your profile. Then a male voice asks, ‘New perfume?’ Then you hesitate for a beat and say, ‘If you think so.’ That’s it!”

“If I’m in the shadows and they don’t see me, how’s that helping my career?”

“It’s building you up as a woman of mystery,” Marc said.

Mom rolled her eyes toward the ceiling. “Will they see the guy?”

“Only his hand holding a glass of champagne,” Marc said. “It’s going to be interracial, too.”

“Is that good?”

“It can’t hurt,” Marc said.

I thought about what Caren had said. I got a burger, a handful of fries, and started toward my room.

“What do you think, Zander man?” Marc called to me.

“Sounds okay, I guess,” I said.

Everyone in the school had two numbers they had to carry with them all the time. One was Mrs. Maxwell’s and the other was Mr. Culpepper’s. I called our assistant principal, waited for four rings, and was just about ready to hang up when he answered.

“Hello, Mr. Culpepper, this is Alexander Scott,” I said.

“And?”

“Uh, I wonder if I could take Caren to the movies this Friday,” I managed to get out without hiccuping.

“One moment.
Caren!
” I heard Caren answer in the background. “Do you want to go to a movie with Alexander Scott this Friday?”

She said yes.

“Alexander?”

“Yes, sir?”

“I will expect you between six-thirty and seven, and I will expect you to bring my daughter safely home by ten-thirty, is that understood?”

“Yes, sir.”

The phone clicked.

I hung up.

Back into the living room. Marc is showing Mom a bottle of perfume. It looks fancy.

“Zander, are you okay?” Mom pushes the perfume away.

“I just got a date with Caren Culpepper,” I said.

“I don’t know her, do I?” Mom said. “Is that wonderful?”

Question: Should Da Vinci lose its elite status and be open to all students whether they are classified as gifted and talented or not? These essays were written after a discussion moderated by Ashley Schmidt and Mr. Finley.

No!

By Kelly Bena, eighth grade

Gifted and Talented is, perhaps, a bad name for our school. It would be fairer to call the school Hard Work Academy. We are in Da Vinci because we do the work necessary to do well. If we have special status it is because we maintain high enough standards to deserve that status. Bringing in students who are not willing to do the work is no favor to them and lessens the opportunities of those currently working our butts off to make Da Vinci a great place in which to learn.

Yes!

By Demetrius Brown, seventh grade

Maybe everybody would do the work if they felt special. When you play guitar it’s the top four strings that usually play the melody and everybody is happy with them, but the bottom two strings are valuable also and provide the harmonics. Having a school like Da Vinci is like having a school for the top strings when, eventually, all of the strings are needed to make beautiful music. Also, there is a lot of pressure to show that you are gifted when sometimes you only want to be yourself.

No!

By Alvin McCraney, eighth grade

The reason we have elite schools is that we have elite gene pools. Some people are just smarter than others and we have to face that fact. Why hold the smart kids back just so
we can get along with the not-so-smarts? People who know things, who really know things, understand that it’s going to be the smart people who will be the leaders of tomorrow and who will do the inventing, write the books, and create the government that will be of most benefit to all people (including the not-so-smarts!).

Yes!

By Bobbi McCall, eighth grade

The reason we should not have elite schools is that jean pools can be created by anyone.

If I want my jeans shrunk so that they will fit me perfectly I can put them in a big pool created by someone with an IQ of 200 or an IQ of 55. As a matter of fact I left one pair of jeans out on my fire escape by accident and it rained on them and shrank them down. And as far as the leaders of tomorrow … have you ever heard of a war being started by anyone wearing tight jeans? No,
you have not. It’s the baggy pants people of the world who start wars! ’Nuff said?

Editor’s note: I am sorry that the representative from
The Cruiser
did not take this subject seriously, as we think she could have made a real contribution.

I
met Bobbi at the coffee shop on the first floor of the Brooklyn Public Library. She pointed to an empty table and I grabbed it while she went for sodas. A geeky-looking guy came over and asked if the other two chairs at the table were taken.

“One of them is,” I said.

“Which one?” he asked.

“The one my friend is going to sit in,” I said, pulling his chain.

He looked at both of the chairs, then at me, and then walked away.

Bobbi came back and plopped down. “I forgot to ask you what kind of soda you want,” she said, “so I got an orange soda for me and cola for you.”

“I don’t like cola,” I said.

“Then I spit in the orange soda so I would be sure to get it,” she said, not missing a beat.

I took the cola.

We waited fifteen minutes for Sidney. For some reason I thought he would show up half drugged and maybe smoking a joint or something. He didn’t. We knew he had arrived when the sound level went up about a half twist. A couple of the kids started taking pictures. I turned to see who they were taking pictures of and saw Sidney. He had shown up wearing a suit, a tie, and sunglasses.

“Yo, they’re treating him like he’s a star,” I said.

“In this crowd he is,” Bobbi said, waving past me to some Asian kids sitting across the floor. “These are all chess players from across the country. They’re here to see Pullman play.”

“He really that good?”

“Jamie Pullman played the King’s Gambit against a master last week and cooked him,” Bobbi said. Sidney was just reaching our table. “Pullman goes eighteen hundred to two thousand all year and then busts a master with a King’s Gambit? That’s like you going up against LeBron James one-on-one and shutting him out.”

“How you guys doing?” This from Sidney.

“I’m good,” Bobbi said.

“I’m Zander,” I said. “You can draw your conclusions from that. How you doing?”

“Pullman is playing Sam Manzi,” Sidney said. “No big deal. He’s a world-class hockey player but just a bit above average in chess. You just sit long enough and Manzi gets impatient and starts hurrying up his moves. He’s a fast-twitch dude in a slow-twitch game.”

“Yeah, but if you fall behind Manzi you won’t make it up,” Bobbi said. “But I still don’t know how Pullman got by with the King’s Gambit against a master unless the guy was having a bad day.”

“You ever play Pullman?” I asked Sidney.

“Two draws,” Sidney said. “He played Sicilians both times. I think he’s going to try the King’s Gambit against me.”

“And?”

“The next time they play, Sidney will be Black, so Pullman starts the game,” Bobbi said. “He’s got all of the book openings down pat and relies on a strong middle game. You make a mistake and it’s death. It’s going to be a fun match.”

They were talking like gunslingers. I liked it even though I didn’t know what they were talking about half the time.
We were sitting having drinks like we were in Dodge City waiting for the big shoot-out at the O.K. Corral.

Bobbi was doing more talking than Sidney, and I sensed that my man was getting freaked out by the pressure.

A short black guy came to the drinks area, stood between the tables, and then did a little flip-doodle move with his hand for us to get up. All of the geeks and geekettes got up and started toward the stairs.

Okay, so this is how the match was set up. There was a small stage and four chessboards on four tables. Each table had a clock and a chessboard. Above the tables were four computer screens, each with a chessboard and the names of the players. On board number one Pullman was playing a girl named Bashir.

“She any good?”

“She has a 1850 rating in Kenya,” Bobbi whispered to me. “But you can’t trust a foreign rating. I think she’s a rainbow trout.”

“Which means
what
?”

“Cute, but still a fish.”

“Is she a nun?”

“No, Zander, she’s Muslim,” Bobbi said. “That’s the
niqab,
the veil that some Muslim women wear.”

Very cool.

The games moved along slowly, with the geeks and geekettes watching them, analyzing every move and playing them on their own chessboards or on their laptops. For me, it was boring.

“What do you think?” Bobbi leaned over and whispered to Sidney.

“She’s going to force a draw against him if he isn’t careful,” Sidney said.

“You talking about Bashir against Pullman?” I asked.

“It’s the only game anybody is watching,” Bobbi said.

I couldn’t tell who was winning and I was ready to leave. Nobody was making any noise, they weren’t selling hot dogs, they didn’t have any foxy cheerleaders, but they were
intense
!

Bobbi seemed cool, but she was playing the game on her laptop. Every time either Pullman or Bashir made a move she would make the same move and then she and Sidney would look it over. Bobbi kept looking at Sidney when Pullman made a move. Sometimes he would nod, at other times he would give a little shrug.

“How’s he doing?” I asked.

“Okay, but I think he expected to have her by this time,”
Sidney said. He was leaning forward, sitting on the edge of the chair. “He hasn’t broken out of any of the usual variations so far. She could be playing from memory. He’s got to break that.”

“Memory of what?”

A bunch of heads turned toward me when I raised my voice. I leaned forward and asked Sidney again, “Memory of
what
?”

“Most players have the openings memorized through the first twenty or so moves,” he said. “Even the variations. But he’s tippy-toeing around waiting for her to make a mistake. She’s tippy-toeing around waiting for him to make a mistake. It’s going to look bad if he doesn’t get a full point against her.”

I knew that a full point meant a win and a half point meant a draw.

“He should take her inside and slam-dunk over her,” I said, smiling.

Sidney didn’t smile. Neither did Bobbi.

I sat. I watched the game. I sat some more.

Then Sidney slapped my arm. “He made his move!” he said.

“He got her?”

“No, it’s a trap,” Sidney said. “But it’s risky.”

Around the room I saw the other kids who were watching move around in their seats. They all knew something was up. I looked at the screen. I didn’t see anything.

“Bobbi,” I whispered, “I don’t see anything.”

“He’s going after her knight,” Bobbi whispered.

I didn’t see it. I looked at her knight and it looked fine to me.

We waited, and waited, and waited, while Bashir considered her move.

The girl behind the veil rocked slowly forward and back. She seemed calm. I wondered if, behind the veil and the differences, she was nervous, if her heart was beating faster. Finally, after a long while, she reached out her incredibly skinny fingers and made a move.

There was a flurry of movement around the room as all of the spectators made the same move on their boards. Then, as if there was one simultaneous recognition of an event, there was a huge sigh that seemed to float to the ceiling.