The Danger of Being Me (17 page)

Not yet.  Someday, but not today.

All at once I was sure I was going to cry.  That was not something I would let Amber see.  So I crossed to the door, yanked it open, and stalked back into the night.

I hauled myself up those concrete steps, my breath streaming as I passed the grimy green dumpster hunched against the wall with the letters BFI stenciled on the front.  I heard the door rattle open behind me, heard Amber's daniblack Platinum Glitters clicking across the asphalt.  I didn't want her to follow me.  I wanted to pile into the Wagoneer, drive home too fast, crank up Anthrax so loud that my ears rang.  If I cried, then so be it.

"Michael," she called out.  I stopped in the middle of the parking lot, halfway to the car.  I didn't want to turn around.  I didn't want to see her caramel eyes or her russet hair looking freshly washed and hastily bundled with a sheer scarf.  I didn't want her to see my naked hurt.  If I could keep that to myself, then the joke would remain incomplete.  The punchline wouldn't be delivered.

I took another step toward the Wagoneer.  "Hey," Amber said, her voice forceful enough to stop me again.  I bit the inside of my cheek, and turned back to her.

Amber had pulled up ten feet from me, keeping her distance.  "What in the hell was that all about?"

"Oh, come on," I said.  The pleading tone of my voice sickened me.  "We're all in on it now."

"In on
what?
" she demanded.  In my indignation, I didn't even hear her own desperate confusion.

I laughed.  It came out hollow, humorless.  It made me think of black ice.  "Was it his idea, or was it Gale's?"

"Was w
hat
whose
idea?"  Impatience, now, on top of bewilderment.  In the tightening gyre of my own self-pity, that edge to her voice sounded like the hoax coming apart.  And I convinced myself that her admission would make it all somehow more bearable.  I could spend the deafening solitude of the ride home indulging my fury.

"Humiliating me," I accused.  The spite tasted coppery, like blood.  It tasted good.  It had all been about her.  And the piss-poor nobody from the ghetto of Prophecy Creek who thought she'd be flattered by a few flowery quatrains.  I spit on the asphalt.  "McCleary must've thought it'd be a fuckin riot to set me up."

"
Set you up?
" she erupted.  Each word was a bullet, and I smelled spent cordite in the metallic night air.  "What the fuck is wrong with you?"  I flinched back, shocked.  I never would have imagined that she was carrying such a fury.

My certainty shattered in the moonlight.  Panic moved into its place, icy, jittery, so much worse.  Hurt mounted in Amber's expression.  And right behind it, like the black shadow of that hurt, I saw her monolithic anger.

"How about that comment? 
You might get tossed aside
?" I demanded.  Except it wasn't a demand.  Not now.  Not without that immovable certainty of twenty seconds ago.  Now it was nothing but an impotent plea.

Her face went blank, and she blinked at me.  Then the fury rushed back in and she shook her head at me.  "What makes you think that's got anything to do with you?"

That brought me up short.  I stared at her, bathed in a halo of harsh light, her hurt and her anger written into the lines of her face, and I considered that what just happened might have entirely between her and McCleary.  I didn't know this girl, after all; I didn't know anything about her or her life or the characters that made up her story.

And I was suddenly sure again that I was going to cry.  For underestimating Amber so fantastically.  For thinking so little of her.  For botching this evening so horrendously, and almost certainly ruining what might have been.

My mouth opened to start the work of repairing the monumental damage I'd done.  But there were no words.  My lips were dry.  My throat worked.  I was choking on my own breath.  I thought I was going to throw up, but I didn't want to do that in front of Amber.  Then I thought I ought to.  It might show her my awful anguish.

I fumbled for words, managed only a gagging sort of regret.  Amber waited, watched me expectantly, rejecting my wordlessness.  I respected the hell out of her for that.  However painful this might get, whatever might happen later, she would get an answer.  She deserved that.

I looked down at my feet.  The lump of spit glittered in the halo of harsh light.  A single sobbing laugh tumbled out of my mouth at the sight of it.  I tried to look up, to meet Amber's eyes, to give her that much.

I didn't have it in me.  "Sorry."

"
Sorry
," she repeated, but her fury sounded forced.

"I was wrong."  I still couldn't look up at her.  "Just… wrong."  Another sobbing laugh.  "Again."

Amber didn't answer.  She rejected my refusal to meet her eyes now, and I would surrender to that as well.  Not yet, but soon.  My lips wrinkled into a thin, grave grin, and I brought my eyes up.  It was tedious, and worth the effort.

I might have expected that phenomenal fury.  I would have understood that.  Instead, she looked at me with a wounded compassion so startling that it left me winded.  The corners of my eyes burned.  The tears didn't come, but I almost wished they would.  She deserved that much.

"Why do you think I would do something like that?" she asked, quiet and firm.  There was something in her wording, or her tone, or her posture, or some combination of the three, that implied that she understood, maybe unconsciously, that it wasn't really about her.

I coughed up that sobbing laugh again.  "I don't."

"You did," she said.  Not an accusation any more.

I shook my head.  "No," I lied.  I shook my head again, and convinced myself it wasn't a lie.  "Whoever I thought would
set me up
– "  I shook my head at myself.  The idea sounded as ridiculous to me now as it must have sounded to Amber minutes ago.  "That wasn't you."

It must have made some kind of desperate sense.  Or maybe Amber just wanted it to make sense, and decided to believe that it did.  Because she nodded, crossing the parking lot toward me, closing the gap between us.  "I'd never hurt someone like that," she said gently.  I felt untold tragedies all her own propping up her words, and then that fury flashed one last time as she hissed, "Never."

"I know," I said. It was true. "I know you wouldn't."

"Good," she said.  She sighed, seeming satisfied to have the matter settled.  Her breath puffed out in a shifting mist that wafted across my face.  I blinked, smelled spearmint and lime.  When my eyes opened, I saw Amber flashing that beauteous smile again.  Not even the underlying fury that I'd seen or the intimate wounds I'd intuited could dim the magnificence of her expression.  I smiled back.  She reached out for me, took my hands, pulled at me.

"Now come back inside," she said.

4.

On Saturday afternoon, Donovan Blake leaned in over the stone tabletop toward Charlie Carmichael.

"I can talk to her myself!" he said.  His voice was low, almost a snarl.  Charlie bore Blake's burst of indignation stoically enough.  But then Blake jabbed a finger in the shorter kid's direction.  "I don't
need
your help."

"Oh, really?"  Charlie's eyebrows shot up.  He leaned back in his seat, astonishment, hurt, and umbrage mixing across his face.  "Suddenly you don't need my help?"

"No," Blake insisted.  He sounded convinced and convincing.  "I don't need you to speak for me."

Charlie watched the taller kid across the arrangement of chess pieces.  They both had the same chocolate-colored hair, and they both wore it short and spiked.  Charlie grinned, sure that Blake had to be joking.  "Yesterday you couldn't rhyme a couplet," he said.  He moved his white bishop off of c4 to capture Blake's pawn at d3.  "You're telling me you woke up this morning with the soul of Francesco Petrarca and the tongue of Pablo Neruda?"

Blake considered the board.  Charlie leaned forward, resting his elbows on the table.  "You
don't
need me to speak for you.  That's true enough.  But you've certainly gotten a fair bit of mileage out of my words."  Blake slid his queen two spaces to her left to h5.  "We've got a lot of work to do," he told Blake, contemplating his next move.  "But I've got a couple of really good ideas that I think—"

"No," Blake repeated.

Charlie looked up from the board.  "Seriously?"

Blake shook his head, resolved.  Charlie sighed and moved one of his knights from e4 to f6, checking Blake's king.  "You know this isn't going to go well for you, right?"

"Doesn't matter."  Blake smirked, and slid his g-file pawn to f6, capturing Charlie's knight.  "She deserves more from me than a bunch of second-hand sentiments."

Charlie flashed a brief grin, but it was gone an instant later.  It was a lamentable but necessary sacrifice.  He answered by shifting one of his own pawns from e5 to f6, taking Blake's pawn.  He sat back again, cocked his head, twitched a tight grin.  "I wasn't talking about her."

Blake shot the shorter kid a sarcastic look.  He was going to lose this game, and they both knew it.  He could resign, and he knew that he probably should.  He was tragically outmatched.  But he wasn't going to resign, because that was not how Donovan Blake played.

"Look," he said impatiently, scrutinizing the table.  "I know how I feel about her."

Charlie rolled his eyes.  "How you feel about her has never been the issue."  Now he stabbed a finger in Blake's direction.  The taller kid flinched.  "Your problem is your inability to articulate how you feel."  Blake moved his king-side rook out of its corner to g8.  Charlie crossed his arms over his chest.  "That's why I'm here in the first place."

Blake didn't look up from the board.  Charlie glared at him over the pieces, and didn't even bother to look at the table as he moved his queen-side rook to d1, beside its twin.  Blake still didn't look up, considering his next move.  His rook on g8 had the white pawn on g2 pinned in defense of Charlie's king.  After a few seconds of silence, Blake shifted his queen to f3, capturing the last white knight.  He looked up, as if he'd proven a point.

"I'm not some poor player," he said with unmistakable defiance, "strutting and fretting across a stage."

I grinned at that bit of scripting, despite myself.  I was damn proud of that line.  A bit of Shakespeare in the midst of Rostand.  Of course, the complete allusion depended on the delivery of the next line, and Charlie came through impeccably.  I had no doubt that he would.

"Yeah?" he said, deadpan.  He didn't look away from Blake.  "Well you're acting like an idiot full of sound and fury."  Then he set his endgame into motion, sending a rook up the e-file to capture the knight on e7 and check Blake's king again.  "Signifying nothing."

The trap was set.  Blake might have intended to capture Charlie's pawn at f2, checkmating the king with his bishop at e6, or he might have been planning to take the pawn at g2 and mate the king with the rook at g8.  Now he could do neither.  The threat of the queen was neutralized.

"Honestly," he started, settling for capturing Charlie's rook at e7 with a knight from c6.  "The way you get going, I'd think
you
were in love with the girl."

Charlie scoffed a little too loudly, a little too forcefully.  The sound was perfectly cavalier and dismissive.  Blake watched him.  Charlie shook his head, and laughed again.  "You figured me out, brother," he laughed a bit too hard.  "All this time I've just been using your pretty face."

Blake didn't look away from Charlie.  I had tried to work a line into the dialogue where Blake told Charlie that
the poet doth protest too much
, but I'd ultimately decided against it.  Instead, he just kept staring down the shorter kid until ad-libbing the two-word line, "your move."

Charlie made a daring play.  He reached for his queen, moving her to d7 to capture the pawn.  The move checked Blake's king again, and put the white queen into position for a bold sacrifice.  Blake grinned.  He slid his king out of the eighth rank and captured Charlie's queen.

Charlie's lips curled for a brief moment.

Blake had taken the bait.

"Do tell," Charlie said, making a show of scrutinizing the board.  His voice lacked its edge.  "What bit of baroque lyricism have you planned for this first solo performance?"  He considered his remaining pieces – both bishops, a rook, and six pawns – and reached for a bishops.  He slid the piece from d3 to b5 to check Blake's king yet again.

"I don't have a plan," Blake answered, as if that were good.  He moved his king back to e8 and the protection of his remaining knight.  "I'll just speak from the heart."

"The heart.  The heart," Charlie repeated with a reflective smile.  He gave chase, moving his bishop from f5 to the freshly-vacated precincts of d7.  Blake's king was checked for the fourth time in a row.  "The strongest heart is no more than a blood-pump.  It has nothing to say."

Blake's king retreated further.  He moved it to f8, which would turn out to be its final resting place.  The piece was boxed in: a rook stood beside it at g8, a pawn stood in front of it at f7, and Blake's final knight stood at e7.  So when Charlie used his second bishop to capture that knight and seize command of the space, the king had nowhere to go.

"That's checkmate.  In case you were wondering."

Charlie smiled.  Blake stared at the board as if he thought the kid might be lying.  When he was satisfied that both of his available moves would, in fact, result in the capture of his king, he leaned over the table, propped on his forearms, looking at Charlie over the last of the pieces.

"I'm going to talk to Roxane.  Myself."  He stood from the table, grabbing his jacket off his seat and pulling it on.  "And it's going to go just fine.  Because I love her."

Then he bent again, and with his index finger, tipped the king, laying it on its side.  "And all you need is love."

I grinned again.  I couldn't help it.

But this next shot was our last hurdle.

I'd settled on the pavilion at Asterion Park because of the stone chess tables.  Those tables were more than two-and-a-half centuries old, and still immaculate thanks to the dedication of the retirees at the Prophecy Creek Historical Society.  The one we'd chosen stood ten feet from the pavilion's northern wall.  The 18th century brickwork provided an austere backdrop to the chess match, as well as minimizing the potential for accidental extras.