The apartment was quiet.
There was no hum of someone else's breathing in another room, no clatter of dishes being moved by hands that weren't hers.
There was only the soft tick of the clock on the wall above the kitchen counter, and the softer click of a wooden piece being set down on a board.
She stared at the empty chair across from her, the chair where an opponent might have sat if she had ever invited anyone into the apartment, which she had not, and would not, and could not imagine doing.
The board was made of walnut. The pieces were weighted, the felt on their bases worn down from years of being slid across the same sixty-four squares. She had bought the set with her own money when she was eleven, after winning a regional tournament that gave out a check instead of a trophy because the organizers, she had decided at the time, were people of unusual good taste.
She moved a piece.
She ran a hand through her abruptly cut, pitch-black hair, noting how the jagged strands fell precisely against her cheekbones without requiring a single moment of vain maintenance or unnecessary care.
"Humanity…is so fragile."
Outside her window, the bustling city whispered her name with a reverence that bordered on the absurd, celebrating the local prodigy who had mastered the geometry of the board before she had even learned to properly navigate the social hierarchies of youth.
She leaned her head on the table, lifting up a chess piece into the air, her eyes focusing on the small green platform underneath.
"The people that raised me…. dissolved so quickly. It stands to reason that there is no merit in having any kind of emotional investment in another human being. They're all going to die anyways."
She was seventeen now.
The clock ticked.
She stared at the empty space across the table where her father used to sit before the screeching tires.
Following that devastation, her mother had slowly dissolved into a pathetic, weeping ghost, drowning her maternal responsibilities in an endless sequence of amber bottles.
—
In the morning she walked to school the way she always walked to school, which was to say, with her hands in her coat pockets and her eyes on the middle distance.
She walked with a deliberate, aggressive stride that practically broadcasted her desire to be left entirely alone.
The streets of the city were narrow and old and lined with bakeries that opened too early and bookshops that opened too late, and Tara passed all of them.
A woman in a green coat called out her name from across the street.
"Tara! Tara, dear, my son saw you in the paper again, he wanted me to tell you he thinks you're absolutely brilliant, absolutely, he said so himself, can you believe it?"
Tara waved without turning her head. The wave was small and economical and the kind of wave you give to a pigeon that has flown too close to your sandwich.
[Her son is twelve and his name is something with an L. Lucas. Liam. Something. He plays piano. He is not, I think, brilliant. But parents always seem to have an unnecessarily high image of their child. If I truly invested my time in the piano, I could surpass the child in a matter of days]
She kept walking.
–
The school was a tall grey building with tall grey windows and a tall grey reputation, and Tara had been attending it for three years.
[I despise this place.]
She climbed the stairs to the second floor, where the older students had their lockers, and she opened her own locker, which contained: one chess book, one chess magazine, one notebook in which she recorded her own games against herself, one apple, and a sweater she had forgotten was there since approximately October.
A girl named Petra was leaning against the locker beside hers, talking to another girl whose name Tara had never bothered to commit to memory because the girl had once laughed at a joke that wasn't funny and Tara had decided, in that moment, to file her away as decoration.
"…and so I told him, I told him, if he wants to take me to the cinema he can at least pick a film that isn't subtitled, because I am not, I am simply not, going to spend two hours reading on a date, that is not a date, that is homework with popcorn…"
Tara closed her locker.
[I don't see the point in film, most of them are meaningless slop meant for consumerism, very few even seem to intrigue me, and those very few aren't worth looking through hundreds of hours worth of movies]
She walked to class.
–
"As I'm sure you all know, the assignment for Friday is the essay on symbolism in the second act, and as I'm sure you all know, I will not be accepting late submissions, and as I'm sure you all know, the minimum word count is fifteen hundred, no exceptions, no negotiations, no creative interpretations of what the word count actually means."
[Why express what can be said in three hundred words as fifteen hundred?]
She opened her notebook and wrote, in small neat letters at the top of the page, the date.
Then, in slightly smaller letters underneath, she wrote the opening four moves of a game she was working through in her head.
She would write the essay tonight. Search up the topic on the internet and plagerize most of it. She had been avoiding the teacher's detection by taking snippets from niche online creators expressing their opinions about the topic and combining it into one huge mess.
Her classmates were currently engaged in a remarkably vapid conversation regarding some trivial social media drama, their voices rising in a discordant chorus that made her teeth grind with intense irritation.
[Am I too afraid to speak up? Of course not, how could someone as great as me ever engage in mindless chatter. I'm not lonely, I'm a loner, there's a difference. I choose to be alone.]
She opened her notebook, which contained no actual schoolwork but was instead filled to the brim with complex, hand-drawn diagrams of theoretical board positions that she analyzed during the tedious lectures.
The teacher began to drone on about historical events that held absolutely no relevance to her, his voice becoming nothing more than background static to the symphony of logic playing out inside her mind.
[History is merely a record of human error and chaotic impulses, I can't stand things I can't control. I can't stand things I cannot predict. I can't stand uncertain variables.]
–
At lunch she sat by the window in the cafeteria because the window seat was the seat farthest from the door, and the seat farthest from the door was the seat least likely to be approached by anyone with the misfortune of recognizing her.
[The Tribune ran the photograph again last Tuesday. The one where I'm holding the trophy and looking at the photographer.]
She ate the apple from her locker. She did not eat anything else. She had not been hungry, in the proper sense of the word.
A boy two tables away was laughing too loudly at something his friend had said.
[He is laughing because he wants the girls at the next table to notice that he is the kind of boy who laughs. Girls these days seem toprefer softer boys who are able to make them laugh. I could never bother myself with a performance for another person]
She bit into the apple.
[I prefer living by myself]
"Excuse me?"
Tara glanced at her, she was a tall woman with long blonde hair and a short skirt, Tara was baffled that they let a teacher dress this skimpy for the eyes of the vulgar boys in her class.
"What is it?"
"Tara, aren't you lonely? You should talk to your classmates more often."
She looked the teacher up and down, her eyes wandering over the tight dress.
"I'd rather not. I can't stand any of them."
[Go away already.]
"Come on, if you take your time and introduce yourself to them, eventually you'll find someone that is willing to talk to you."
"No."
[The few good students aren't worthmy time looking through a bunch of slop]
–
The walk home took her past the small park where, on warmer days, old men sat at concrete tables with weather-beaten chess boards painted directly onto the surfaces, and played each other for cigarettes and small bills and the right to brag about it later in the cafe across the street.
She had played them, once, when she was twelve. She had beaten all of them in a single afternoon, one after the other, while a crowd of pensioners gathered to watch and murmured to each other in a language she half understood.
They did not invite her back.
[They did not invite me back because losing to a child is one thing, and losing to a child eight times in a row is another, and old men, like all men, do not like getting humbled by someone younger than them, after all that's the only thing they have left to tether themselves to this world, to remind themselves that their lives are still meaningful. Their experience. They can't bear to see themselves get humbled by someone who isn't even one-eighth of their age]
She walked past the park without looking at it.
The apartment, when she returned to it, was exactly as she had left it. The board on the table.
The clock above the counter still ticking, the kitchen still empty, the photograph of her father on the bookshelf still smiling out of its small wooden frame, frozen at thirty-six years old, the age he would now be forever.
She set down her bag.
She did not look at the photograph.
Her eyes deliberately fixed on the carpet, moving in a straight line to the chair at the table, and sitting down with her back to the bookshelf, so that the smiling man at thirty-six could continue to smile out at the empty wall, undisturbed by his daughter's avoidance.
[He died on a Tuesday. I was nine. The car was blue. The other car was red. I have never since been able to look at a red car without feeling, in the very lowest part of my stomach. For every force, there is an opposite and equal reaction. This must be my fault for being such an impeccable child, the universe's way of balancing my life]
She moved the knight.
Her mother had drowned, was the word people used, in alcoholism. She had drowned in it the way other people drowned in oceans, slowly at first and then all at once, going under for the last time on a Sunday morning when Tara was fourteen and had come downstairs expecting breakfast and finding, instead, a woman face down on the kitchen tiles, who would not be getting up.
The funeral had been small. The reception afterwards had been smaller. Tara had stood by the wall in a black dress that did not quite fit her and listened to her aunt, the only living relative who had bothered to come, explain in a low voice to a neighbor that the girl was quite self-sufficient, really, quite remarkably so, you almost wouldn't know she'd been through anything at all.
[I had been through everything. But the aunt was correct that you would not have known it.]
She moved the bishop.
The thing about chess, Tara thought, sitting alone in the apartment as the afternoon light slid sideways across the kitchen floor, was that chess did not require you to be loved.
Chess did not require you to be liked, or understood, or noticed, or held, or remembered on your birthday. Chess did not require you to have a mother who could stay awake past noon. Chess did not require you to have a father who could survive a Tuesday.
Chess required only that you sit down, and look at the board, and think.
[And I can think. I can think very well. I can think better than almost anyone I have ever met, and I have met, by now, a great many people, and I have evaluated each of them, and I have found each of them, in their own particular way, lacking.]
She moved the rook.
[This is not arrogance. I can't understand the speech of lower people, I can't comprehend their thinking process]
She fell asleep at the table that night with her cheek against the wood and a pawn under her hand, and when she woke at three in the morning the apartment was the same dark shape it had been when she closed her eyes, and the clock was still ticking, and her father was still smiling out of the wooden frame at the empty wall, and her mother was still nowhere.
She went to bed.
She lay on her back and looked at the ceiling.
[I have made myself unnecessary to everyone, and I have made everyone unnecessary to me. No lower being can understand me, they can't understand what it feels like to be completely objective]
She closed her eyes.
[So why does the apartment feel, sometimes, when I am tired, like the inside of a coffin. It feels claustrophobic]
Humans are social animals.
They want others to love and others to love them, they'll do anything to the point where they act in strange ways just to seek validation.