Part I.
Evening Mass.
Evan.
THE OVERHEAD LIGHT flickered as he waited for her to enter the dormitory hallway.
His door was wide open and he stood just inside the lip of it, angled toward the hall. It was Day 40, which meant he’d lived across the hall from her for forty days, and this was the first day he’d left his door all the way open. He’d covered his walls with basketball posters and lit a candle that smelled like pine trees. His hair was long enough now that it was starting to turn upward at the bottom, like the boy she said she liked from 3rd Rock from the Sun—Joseph Garden Whoever He Was. He’d even found one of his signature button-ups in the Lost and Found.
It was delicate, being in the right spot at the right time. It usually involved several minutes of standing in the right spot, waiting for the right time, and sometimes being placed in the right dorm and waiting forty days. Today, he held a Goosebumps book to his face, pretending to read and staring over the top at the hinge across the hall where at any moment, her door would open, and Emma would come gliding out.
He checked his watch: twenty minutes to mass. A few students passed but none of them noticed him standing at attention behind the book. It was easy to blend in at Redemption; the fact that everyone came from different parts of the world meant students were always doing unexpected things. One of the lessons you learned in week one was to always look the other way, and before too long, you didn’t have to try. It was better that way. Forty days on this floor, and only two or three other students knew his name.
Across the hallway, the hinge creaked open, and Emma rushed out the door with her head down. She turned left.
Evan leapt forward, brushing past her in the opposite direction. His right hand dropped, and the book slipped from between his fingers, but he kept moving down the hall away from her.
He counted off ten seconds before chancing a look back. The Goosebumps book hung in her doorframe, blocking the latch.
Emma walked alone to church every Thursday night. Twenty minutes early, down the Human Sciences dorm hallway to the stairwell in the lounge. A stop at the water fountain on the way. The third pew in chapel. Hands crossed the whole time. A solo prayer at the outdoor cross afterward. A walk back with Neesha. A painted smile every time some plebe tried to say hi to her. A half hug for every pretend friend. Emma lived in a loop.
It wasn’t just Emma. The whole world was like that. In a loop. You could find a pattern in anything, if you stood far enough away from it. Day becomes night, success becomes failure becomes success becomes failure, green becomes yellow becomes red. All of it could be predicted.
And beaten.
That’s how you win at chess. You can’t solve the game; the game is objective. There’s an absolute mechanical parity to the pieces on both sides of the board. You solve the other person. You study their pattern. Every time they sacrifice a pawn to protect their bishop, they tell you about their carelessness. Every time they bring a castle back to protect their queen, they reveal an insecurity. Most people broadcast their mistakes before they even know they’re going to make them. So you load up not where they’re weak but where they’re going to be weak, and when they inevitably play the part they’ve been telling you they’re going to play, you take them.
Evan rushed down into the Human Sciences Lounge and out into the fog. It was thin today, the kind you could see through. The chapel was a quarter of a mile across the lawn, and the yellow light atop the wooden cross was the only one on the school’s back complex to guide the students. They were told to walk carefully through the fog, with their eyes on the ground, following the network of dirt paths, avoiding the rock formations and wild grass in between. He ran, his eyes up, around a slow-curving path that banked along the forest, until the gold in her hair broke through the fog, twenty feet ahead.
Emma stopped at the mouth of the path and stared into the mass of students. People came from all directions toward the stairs of the chapel, but where she stood, slightly elevated, it gave the illusion that they were all converging on her. She hid her eyes as a group of instructors passed. Someone tried to wave but she wasn’t paying attention. Evan followed her gaze and noticed a dark-purple-and-yellow jacket, hovering near the woods. By the time his eyes found Emma again, Aiden Mallet had descended on her.
Evan kept moving in a wide path around them, settling on one of the benches in front of the chapel. Aiden was trying to hug her, and she wasn’t hugging back. Her eyes were fixed on the ground. Her arms were around her chest like a protective vest. Her fingers were twitching against the sleeves of her sweater.
Evan held his breath. This was it.
Aiden was a terrible boyfriend. He could barely read and write; he sucked at math, history, science, and philosophy. He could shoot a basketball, but that was a useless skill. He was attractive by American standards, with thick blond hair and broad shoulders, but to Evan he looked like a floppy-haired Hulk. He had one real value, but it was universal and easy to understand: Aiden was rich. His parents owned a chain of grocery stores on the East Coast, and he was their only child, and the heir apparent to their fortune.
None of that would have mattered if not for Emma. If not for Emma, Aiden would have been just another zero-value life filling the void of everywhere else. But he wasn’t. Something about being popular and rich and average at basketball gave him the right to Emma, and everybody went along with it, because it’s high school and that’s how the pattern is supposed to go. And Aiden went along with it, because that’s how the pattern of his life had always been. But Aiden didn’t deserve her, and Emma knew it, and Aiden knew it, and he’d made her life miserable for it.
But Emma had been altering her routine to avoid him. No more Wednesday morning breakfasts. No more walks home from mass. No more looks at him during church. No more invitations to her dorm after curfew. Aiden’s days were numbered, and today, they’d run out.
Evan sat on the edge of the bench, watching the conversation in his reactions, between groups of passing students. First, Aiden was nervous. He knew what was coming. A group of Year Ones stood in the way, so Evan craned his neck around them. Aiden was holding Emma’s shoulders to stop her from speaking. Evan sat up even further on the bench. A seven-foot-tall boy ran in front of them, so he slid left, just in time to see Aiden’s face morph into a smile.
“Hey.”
Evan’s face fell. Aiden was still smiling, bigger, and nodding along.
“Hey!”
Standing over her like a hungry lion, he mouthed one word; a question and an answer, a confirmation and a lifeline; the worst possible word that could come out of his mouth—“Tonight?”
“Hey!”
A large gloved hand grabbed Evan by the shoulder, and he fell backward.
“Can I sit here?”
Peter Novak was six foot three and razor thin, draped in a puffy orange coat, blocking the light from the top of the cross. He nodded to the bench next to Evan and sat without waiting for a response.
“So,” he said, burying his hands in his pockets. “You’re the kid who beat the chess computer?”
Evan nodded.
“Yeah, when my girl told me that, I thought, ‘No, that’s Bobby Fischer.’ You’re not Bobby Fischer, buddy.” Peter was from Eastern Europe, so his vowels were thick with an accent, but he was also on the debate team, so he spoke at two times the normal human speed, spitting as he went. “I guess you could do it too, but . . . that’s gotta suck, right? Being the second guy to invent the wheel? I mean, we kinda only need the one wheel.”