"Okay," he said. "I will play you."
He began to reset the pieces.
They sat across from each other at the small folding board on the small low table in the corner of the common room, and the other students on the sofas did not look up, and the small slow piano in the music room had stopped, and the building took another breath between sentences.
He moved first. White.
[A standard opening. How basic.]
She answered.
He answered her answer.
She answered him back.
And then, somewhere around the seventh or eighth move, somewhere in the small space where the early game became the middle game, somewhere in the part of the board where Tara had spent the entire length of her short life feeling at home in the way other people felt at home in the houses they had grown up in, something began to go wrong.
She did not understand it at first.
She made a perfectly good move. A move she had made a thousand times in a thousand games and watched a thousand opponents respond to with the same handful of inadequate replies, this boy did not make any of the inadequate replies.
He made a different reply.
[He has seen something I did not see.]
[He has been playing for three months and he has seen something I did not see. This must be some sort of fluke. He got lucky]
She made another move.
He answered.
She made another.
He answered.
She did not, by this point, fully trust herself to think clearly anymore, because something had begun to happen inside her chest, a small fast something, a small bright unbearable something, and she put it away, she put it away in the box where she put away everything she did not have time to feel, and she focused on the board, and she made what she believed to be a good move, and he answered.
He answered as though the answer had been waiting for her move all along.
He answered as though the game had already been over for several turns and he was being polite enough not to mention it.
She tipped her king over.
She did it before she had consciously decided to do it. Her hand simply reached out and tipped the king over and laid it on its side on the board with the small wooden sound a king makes when its game is finished, and she sat back, and she looked at the boy across from her, and the boy across from her looked at the board, and then looked at her, and then said, in his flat voice, the worst sentence she had ever heard another human being say out loud.
"Was that the right move," he said. "I wasn't sure about the rook earlier. I thought maybe I should have moved the bishop instead. I'm still not very good at telling which one is better."
[He is not sure. He thinks he might have made a mistake. He has just beaten me, he has just beaten me at the game I have spent every single waking hour of my entire conscious life trying to be the best at.]
She stared at him.
She stared at him for a very long time.
She stared at him until the flat-faced boy across the chess board began, very slowly.
"Are you," he said. "Okay?"
[Am I okay.]
[Am I okay.]
[Am I okay?]
What kind of stupid question is that supposed to be? I'm supposed to be a genius, a goddamn genius. How did this absolute swine….]
[He has been playing for three months.]
[Three months.]
[I do not have a mother. I do not have a father. I do not have a friend, I do not have a hobby, I do not have a single thing in the world that is mine except this, and he has been doing this, in his bedroom, for the length of time it takes a person to grow out a haircut, and he is better than me.]
[Am I not a genius? Then what the hell was everything for? What was sacrificing my social life even for? Everything….everything I've dedicated my life towards. And it didn't matter, none of it mattered. I'm useless…I'm so absurdly useless. What purpose do I even serve when this stupid stupid stupid piece of crap managed to beat me when he only has three months of experience!!?]
She stood up.
She did it slowly, in the way a person stands up when they have not yet entirely decided what they are standing up to do, and the boy across from her watched her stand up with the same flat surgical expression, and the small group of students on the sofas did not look up, because the small group of students on the sofas were busy with their phones and their conversations and their small dull lives, and nothing of any consequence ever happened in the common room, and nothing of any consequence was about to.
"Did you want," he said. "To play again. Because I should probably tell you that I have a class in ten minutes and I don't think we have time for another full game, but if you wanted we could maybe set up a position and just…"
"SHUTT YOUR FUCKING MOUTH!!"
With a gutteral scream of pure, unadulterated fury, she lunged across the table, her hands flying out to scatter the plastic pieces in every direction before her fist connected solidly with the side of his jaw.
The impact sent a jarring shockwave up her arm, but she barely felt it as she scrambled over the table, entirely consumed by a manic desire to destroy the entity that had just invalidated her entire existence.
His head snapped to the side from the force of the blow, his body swaying slightly, but his expression remained completely vacant and analytical even as a thin line of dark crimson blood began to trickle from the corner of his mouth. He did not display fear, anger, or surprise; instead, he looked at her with a profound, clinical confusion as she rained down an unstable flurry of frantic punches upon his face and shoulders.
The board on the table jumped, and the pieces fell over, and Tara, looking down at her own hand in something like wonder, hit him again.
She hit him in the temple.
She hit him in the nose.
"Why did you punch me? I don't understand what would warrant such an action from you? I'm confused on what you're feeling," He stated in his flat, mechanical voice, even as his head was buffeted back and forth by her desperate strikes.
"Shut up! Just shut your miserable goddamn mouth!" Tara screamed, her voice cracking with a lifetime of suppressed tears and agonizing frustration as she gripped his collar and slammed his head back against the concrete framework of the bench. "You have absolutely no right to look at me like that! You have no right to destroy my entire life and then sit there acting like you don't even care about what you've done!"
He looked at her.
He hit her in the shoulder. Then in the side of the head.
"Since you're hitting me, I guess it only makes sense for me to hit you as well."
Before Tara could process his words or unleash another frantic blow, his large, heavy fist swung forward with the precise, unhurried trajectory of a mechanical piston, striking her squarely in the center of her face.
The sheer force of the counterattack instantly broke her nose with a sickening crunch, sending a blinding flash of white light through her consciousness and knocking her completely off balance.
She got up.
She went at him again.
[Why is anyone doing anything? When their lives are so unimaginably pathetic and useless!?]
She hit him in the chest. He hit her in the mouth. She tasted, with a small clinical interest, blood and then he hit her in the temple, and the room went sideways, and the ceiling tilted, and the small group of students on the sofas were standing now, all of them, all of them on their feet at last.
"Dude come look, they're fighting!"
[It hurts... everything hurts so much... but if I lose this fight, then I truly have absolutely nothing left in this entire miserable world...]
The world around them began to spin and fade into a dark, blurry vignette as their frantic movements grew increasingly sluggish and heavy from the sheer amount of physical trauma they were inflicting upon one another. His final, desperate punch connected with the side of her head at the exact same moment that Tara gathered the absolute last of her remaining strength to drive her fist straight into his temple.
The boy was swaying.
He was swaying the way she was swaying, and his face, his small flat surgical face, was finally, finally, doing something, was finally, finally, attempting an expression, was attempting, she saw with the last clear part of her vision, the expression of a person trying to ask a question and then his knees gave way, and he went down at the same time she went down, and the last thing she saw was his face on the carpet a foot from her own face, his eyes still open.
[Am I going to die? Or am I just going to lose consciousness? I can't tell the difference anymore. It's not like it matters, even if I die, my life will not have amounted to anything anyways, whatever I do, there will always be someone better]
[Damn it, I remember his stupid name now. Julian…you bastard]