Free The Grinding by Matt Dinniman

a project, when we first met my
sophomore year. I’d joined the chess club—the Rooks—to fill the
after-school time between cross country ending in the fall and track starting
in the spring. Back then my family and I had just moved to Tucson, and my dad
didn’t have a steady job. I hated coming home after school to find him sitting
on the couch, staring into nothing like one of those Easter Island heads,
watching TV while my mom worked cleaning hotel rooms. She’d come home dead
tired, but would clean the house and cook us dinner every night.
    Samantha was only one of two girls on the whole
chess squad, the other being Pandora Miller, and I’m only 80% sure that girl
wasn’t a dude.
    Samantha was a whole year older, and everything
about her fascinated me. She and I were paired together, and we got along
pretty well. She had red hair, which is like kryptonite to nerds like myself,
and her pale blue eyes bore a hole in you while she waited for you to make your
next move on the chessboard. She had braces with different colored bands every
time I saw her, and I used to go out of my way to make her smile so I could see
what color she had that day.
    Her favorite band was Slayer.
    Playing chess, somehow she always knew where you
were going to move. Four or five moves into a match, and she had you cornered.
Once she even beat me in four moves. I never beat her. Nobody ever beat her.
    She acted like that in real life, too: smart,
manipulative, driven. That summer between 10th and 11th grades we ended up
talking on the phone all the time, and I always had the sense that our
conversations were orchestrated dances where I had no real control. This was
another chess game to her, only this time I didn’t even bother to move the
pieces myself.
    She would pick me up in her red Nissan, and we’d hang
out at the mall. I’d always get that look. Why is she hanging out with him ?
I didn’t have much of a style back then. I hadn’t many friends yet. I wandered
from activity to activity, seeing if I could find something that would stick. I
was a faceless, personality-less schoolboy drone. I didn’t have tadpoles or a
forest to explore that summer, and I had no idea what to do with myself.
    A clean slate, I was. One that Samantha could
paint in her ideal image. She didn’t even hide the fact that’s what she was
doing to me, and I didn’t care. She decided she liked me in black concert
shirts featuring old-school metal bands. And I wore them. I didn’t mind. And
once I was introduced to the music, I decided I liked it anyway.
    The only thing I could beat her at was solving
Rubik’s Cubes. It drove her crazy. She’d sulk when I pulled a cube out to
fiddle with it. I once saw in her room that she had borrowed a book from the
library on how to speedcube. She never admitted it though. And I never called
her on it. I guessed she never got any better than me. If she had, she would’ve
happily demonstrated it.
    We started to date once school started up again,
and we started having sex right away. I was a virgin, and after that first
time, I told her she was my first. She laughed at me. Of course she knew. I
asked her if it was hers, and she said yes, but I didn’t believe her.
    We did it every day. Sometimes before school,
almost always after school, and often during lunch in her car. This wasn’t your
average, awkward and uncomfortable elbows and knees teenager sex, either. This
was wild howler monkey sex, though I didn’t realize it at the time. Sometimes
I’d need days to recover, only she didn’t give me days. I’d come home covered
in bruises and scrapes from the different ways and positions she always
insisted on trying. I told my dad I was on the wrestling team.
    One day, we broke up. Just like that. She went on
a vacation over the weekend with her family, and when she got back, she drove
me up to the top of Mount Lemmon and told me she didn’t want to see me anymore.
When I asked her why, she said she’d gotten bored