What Friends Are

 

THEY WERE ON the road again an hour later. Dad drove this time, and Mom set out the magnetic chess set. She and Rex played tournament-style, with a little timer monitoring how long they took for each turn. Odette sat next to Rex, attempting to read.

She tried to fold her legs up on the bench seat, but the table was too close. Though she managed to wiggle one knee up, it got stuck, and when she stretched her leg back down, her knee banged against the bottom of the table, rattling the chessboard.

“Good thing Odette’s not stronger than the magnets,” Rex said, his eyes like magnets themselves, transfixed on the little plastic chess pieces that wobbled but did not tip.

Mom laughed. Odette held back the impulse to shove him. It was so annoying how he always had a comment for everything, often mean-sounding, and how Mom always laughed. If Odette ever said anything like the things Rex said, Mom would protest, “Oh, Odette. Be nice.”

Odette knew it was because Rex hadn’t started talking until he was almost three. She remembered how worried her parents had been about that. And when he finally did begin to speak, in grammatically perfect sentences full of fancy words, Mom and Dad had been so grateful that what he said hardly seemed to matter.

It was Rex’s turn. Odette could see from the board that he was closing in on Mom’s queen. It was just a matter of time. Mom probably knew it too, but losing never seemed to bother her the way it bothered Odette.

She looked up at Odette and gave her a sympathetic look. “Want to talk about it?”

“No,” said Odette. She flipped the page of her book even though she’d only read half of it.

“You know,” said Mom, talking anyway, “there are lots of kinds of friendships. Some last forever, some are situa­tional. And that’s okay. Not all friendships have to look the same.”

“Uh-huh.” Now Odette couldn’t even make out the words of the page she was pretending to read; tears blurred her vision.

“Like, you might have one set of friends for surviving high school, and another set entirely for going skiing with.”

“They’re not friends if you’re just using them to get through things or just to hang out with,” said Odette without looking up. “That’s not what friends are.”

“Ah,” said Mom. She moved her rook in a noble attempt to protect her queen. The chess pieces, Odette thought, moved an awful lot like zombies. Slowly and deliberately, rarely in more than one direction at a time.

“Sometimes a friend can be someone you don’t know for very long, but someone you connect with anyway. Someone who comes into your life and then leaves it,” Mom said.

“Check,” said Rex. He hadn’t looked up from the board the whole time.

“You little rascal,” said Mom, but she sounded proud. Not mad.

“I don’t want any friends that I can’t keep around,” said Odette.

“You might need to expand your definition.” Mom made a last-ditch effort to save her king, moving her queen to block a castle that threatened it. But it was too little too late.

Rex didn’t even hesitate to knock the queen out of the way. Two moves later it was all over. “Checkmate,” he said.