Free Checkmate by Walter Dean Myers Page B

pushing me into corners I hadn’t been to before, opening my eyes to pressures that you couldn’t just walk away from. And the whole thing with the chessboard and Sidney’s code meant that he was having trouble dealing with the program. It reminded me of the way I dealt or, I guess, didn’t deal with my parents being split up. I didn’t think chess could slip-slide intothe world of just about violence. The Zander man tiptoeing down Wrong Street.
    I knew everything wasn’t okay at all, but I didn’t want to push it. Sidney hadn’t been convinced, he just took it. Maybe he felt we were putting him down. I wanted to call him back and say we weren’t, but that might have felt like we were treating him differently, which we were in a way, and that might have made him feel … Where were the easy answers?
    I called Bobbi and told her what happened. She said she would send the board assignments to Thurgood Marshall.
    NO BID, SID!!!
    Sidney Aronofsky, Da Vinci’s lone hope for glory, has chosen to RUN AWAY from a match with Pullman in the upcoming chess match. We see Da Vinci’s true colors as one yellow streak fading rapidly into the sunset!!!!
    This was the flyer two girls from Pullman’s school, Thurgood Marshall Academy, were handing out in front of our school at lunchtime. They had come all the way to our school to mess with us. I hoped that Sidney wouldn’tsee the flyer. He didn’t have to. Mr. Culpepper saw it and called Sidney to the office. Then he called the Cruisers.
    “No way!” he said. “Sidney is first board and he will remain first board. He is not a Cruiser and if this is your idea of how to dis-inspire our student body then I will go to Mrs. Maxwell and even beyond to see that your influence ceases once and for all! Do I make myself clear?”
    “You’re clear but you’re wrong, sir,” I said. “If Sidney doesn’t want to play first board …”
    “Sidney, what do you want to do?” Mr. Culpepper spoke softly but it was as if his voice was coming out all in capitals or something.
    “I’d rather play fourth board,” Sidney said, his voice hardly above a whisper.
    I looked at Mr. Culpepper. He was turning red. Then a brighter red. Then he took several deep, slow breaths, held his breath for a minute, exhaled slowly, and said, “You may all leave my office now.”
    I felt real bad for Sidney. Kambui and LaShonda were telling him that he had done the right thing, and Bobbi was just looking kind of lost. I knew she felt bad. Our idea had been a good one, but the way Mr. Culpepper had putit, and the way the kids from Thurgood Marshall had put it, Sidney looked bad either way.
    “You want to hang out after school?” I asked.
    “No,” Sidney replied.
    “We meant to do the right thing,” I said.
    “I know.”
    I didn’t have anything else to say and had to watch him leave with his head down.

CHAPTER TEN
Game Day
    G oing to a chess tournament is like going to an opera that’s sung in a foreign language. You see everybody moving around but you don’t really know what’s going on. The game was at Da Vinci, and the Thurgood Marshall team arrived in a stretch limousine. No lie. The game was in the media center and there had to be a hundred kids from Marshall there to sit around and watch. The boards were set up in a semicircle near the windows. The blinds had been drawn and the windows shut to keep out the noise. The Marshall players took their seats first, and there was a murmur from the crowd. I looked up, but I didn’t see anything going on.
    “Pullman’s on board four!” Cody Weinstein said.
    They were putting their best player on the board thatSidney was going to play. There was a brief discussion, and then Bobbi came over to me.
    “Zander, they’re switching to get at Sidney,” she said. “They asked permission to make a change. If we say no it’s going to be even worse than it looked.”
    “Where’s Sidney?”
    Bobbi looked around. “I thought I saw him down the hall,”