3

When Max was in second grade he joined the chess club at school. At first he went one afternoon a week. He got hooked pretty fast. He started going two afternoons a week, then three. That summer he went to sleepover camp for the first time. It was a chess camp.

I’m not surprised Max is so good at chess. He’s good at math, too. He’s one of those kids who can do math problems in his head. He can solve a Rubik’s Cube in less than two minutes. You might say he’s a bit of a brainiac. He’s not like me. I can barely do one side of a Rubik’s Cube and even that takes me a little while. You could give me a week and I still couldn’t solve a whole Rubik’s Cube.

Max taught me to play chess when we were in third grade. I even beat him once. Max was surprised when I won. At first he claimed he wasn’t really trying. Then he said I had made an illegal move that cost him the game.

“Illegal?” I said. “When did I make an illegal move? I won. You know I won.”

“You didn’t win,” said Max. “You made an illegal move two turns ago. You can’t move your knight the way you did. You cheated!”

“I didn’t cheat,” I said. “Anyway, if I was cheating then, why didn’t you say something? You can’t complain about something I did two moves ago. It’s not fair.”

“I didn’t know I was going to lose,” he said. “If I knew I was going to lose I would have said something.”

That was the last time we played chess together.

Last November Max led the chess club to a second-place finish at the citywide Fifth Grade Fall Chess Challenge. Everyone on the team got a silver medal. They wore their medals to school the next day. They started to act like they were in some sort of secret society. They had their own little jokes that only they understood. It was obnoxious.

When they were getting ready for the Fifth Grade Spring Chess Challenge, Max and his teammates practiced all the time. They even practiced on the weekends. Max and I were supposed to go to the movies one Saturday afternoon but he canceled. He said he had to go to chess practice instead.

“Can’t you miss one little practice?” I said. “Can’t you say you have other plans?”

“I can’t,” he said. “The whole chess team is counting on me to be there.”

“But I was counting on you, too,” I said. “We were going to see The Revenge of Gravity Man. We’ve been talking about seeing it for ages.”

“We can go another time, Henry,” said Max. “The Fifth Grade Spring Chess Challenge is a big deal. We have to practice if we want to win.”

“I know.”

I knew the Fifth Grade Spring Chess Challenge was a big deal. And I knew he had to practice before the tournament. But knowing all that didn’t make me feel any better. Max was spending more and more time with the chess club and less and less time with me. I almost started to wish I was in the chess club, too.

And then, Max and the chess club won the Spring Chess Challenge. They all wore their gold medals to school. There was even a special Assembly of Champions where each member of the team was introduced and they got to show off their trophy. Chess was all Max and the rest of the team talked about at lunch. They kept on telling the same stories about all the funny things that had happened at the Challenge.

I looked for other people to sit with at lunch, but that didn’t work out so well. When you’ve been sitting beside the same person for so long, it’s not so easy to suddenly switch places. Everyone has their usual spot, so I couldn’t really move around without taking someone else’s spot. I ended up sitting by myself at the far end of the fifth-grade lunch table. Max didn’t seem to notice. He was busy with all his new friends. The truth is I still wanted to sit with him. I just wanted him to get tired of his chess friends.

Max was changing. I wasn’t changing at all. He had his chess club and his chess club friends. What did I have?

I had Max. Sort of. That was it.