Checkmate

“Here are the rules,” Onyx folds her hands calmly behind her row of black chess pieces lined up on the board separating us.

Against the lightning shattering through the cracked window behind her, illuminating her jet black hair and pale features while veiling her in the shadow from the blackout, punctured only by the flickering candlelight on our game table –  she looks absolutely sinister, demonic, wicked. I’m not sure if her appearance unnerves me more or the fact that she looks exactly like me. It’s like staring into a mirror. A broken mirror. 

“I think I know how to play chess,” I tell her, trying to sound more confident than I feel. Three years on the high school chess team suddenly seem like they’ve flown out the window on the violent wind spiraling and ripping outside. Rain sprinkles in through the cracked window, occasionally slashing cold droplets against my cheeks and onto the table, making the chess pieces slick.

Onyx smirks, a distorted curve of her mouth. “Not this type of chess,” she says smoothly, slickly like oil, that it sends a chill down my spine. “We have to make this interesting. Every time you lose a game piece, you also lose a piece of your soul.”

The slamming rain drowns out my pounding heartbeat.

“With each piece you lose,” she continues, “you have to admit to one of your deepest, darkest secrets. You think you don’t have any? Think again. By the time we’re finished, Libby, you won’t even recognize yourself – and that’s even if you don’t get checkmated.” 

She extends her hand in challenge, expecting me to forfeit right away. 

I meet her handshake. “Game on.”

I swear thunder crashes right at that exact moment. 

Onyx leans back casually in her armchair. “White moves first,” she raises a crooked eyebrow. 

I know all my moves. So I know all her moves. Unfortunately, that means she knows all of mine too. It takes a while, but by my eighth move, I lose a pawn. 

“Well, finally, things are getting interesting,” Onyx crosses her legs lazily. “Let’s start with an easy one: what’s the last lie you told?”

My heart stutters, unable to decide whether it should speed up or slow down – either way, it knows that it’s breaking. Because Onyx is right: it’s the easiest question I’ll get, but also the hardest to admit.

“I told Atticus I love him.”

“Damn girl, you don’t hold back!” Onyx crosses her arms pleased, and I hang my head in shame – Atticus could be facing the exact same question right now over his chessboard but he wouldn’t give this as an answer. “What’d the guy do to you? Wait, let me guess: he’s no good? Sloppy kisser, bad in bed? Come on, woman to woman, tell me.”

“No! It’s not like that!” I feel my face flush. “We don’t – we’re not like that.”

“You don’t know if he’s a good kisser?”

“No! I mean, yes, he is a good kisser, but I don’t know the, the rest – what does this have to do with anything?!”

“I just want to know why you lied to him,” Onyx shrugs simply and I stammer for a response. 

I didn’t mean to lie to him. In fact, for a while, I thought I was telling the truth. But it was a desperate truth, the kind you say in the heat of the moment but then it sinks in and you realize it wasn’t as true as you initially wanted it to be. Before we went to our individual game rooms, Atticus said he loved me, and I said it back because I was scared I wouldn’t get a chance to tell him later, after we got swept away by this storm that we might never be rescued from.

“Because it wasn’t the right reason to tell him I loved him back,” I admit. 

“What is the right reason to love someone back?”

I glance up at her, frustrated. “I answered your question already. My turn.” 

I move my rook and catch her in a tight spot, capturing her knight.

“Why do you lie so much?” I spin her original question on her, searching for the root cause.

“Depends. Depends what I need the lie to do. Self-preservation if I want to get out of trouble, convenience if I don’t want to be bothered explaining the real answer. Primal satisfaction from knowing I can trick someone just for fun without them ever realizing. You want to know the reason I get away with it? Because I don’t feel any guilt. When someone feels guilty about a lie, it shows: they can’t look someone straight in the eye, they keep fiddling with something, they eventually start messing up their story. Not me – if I lie, I have a reason for it, and if I can convince myself of that reason, I can tell the most outrageous lie and nobody would ever suspect otherwise.”

“Do you feel guilt for anything?” 

Onyx taps her pointed, plum-painted nails against the chessboard. “That requires another piece for me to answer.”

“Fine,” I huff, returning to the game.

The next piece and the next question belong to Onyx.

“What do you feel most guilty about?”

I swallow hard, like I’m drinking the rain. “Losing my mom’s pearl broach she let me borrow.”

“Really, that’s it? Wow, that’s pathetic.”

“It- it wasn’t just a broach. The broach was a family heirloom, irreplaceable, but it was also the first time she trusted me with something of hers, and I failed. I hate failing, but I hate failing my mom in particular. She got mad, of course, but her anger passed – but her disappointment didn’t and that’s the worst. Even now, I feel like there are times she doesn’t trust me with anything important.”

“Well, can you blame her?” Onyx scoffs and I glance up sharply, tears welling in my eyes. “Hey, I never said I’d be on your side of this little game of ours.”

“No,” I sigh heavily. “No, I don’t blame her. In fact, I often wonder why she still gives me a chance to prove myself. I mean, I know she loves me unconditionally-”

“Unconditionally,” Onyx repeats with a sneer. “Everything has a condition, or at least, a loophole. Maybe that broach is her loophole.”

“I don’t believe you,” I insist harshly – I desperately need to believe it’s not true.

“Would I lie to you?”

“Yes, actually, you would.”

Onyx raises an eyebrow. “Touche.”

Fed up with the subject and feeling it mess with my brain, I turn back to the game to force her to answer to me this time, and I capture one of her pawns. “Why do you have a hard time trusting people?”

“I just admitted I lie without compunction: you think I’m the only one?” she replies, already sizing up her next move. “People eventually let you down. The only thing different is when they let you down.”

“You don’t believe in the good side of people?” 

“Sure, I do. But I also believe the dark side eventually takes over,” she swipes another of my pawns away. “What are you most afraid of?” she asks, dark eyes staring straight into my soul because she already knows.

My voice works slowly. “People letting me down,” I admit – I repeat. 

“Who’s let you down the most?” 

“That’s another question. You need to take another piece before you ask.”

“I’ve got your bishop in two moves so we can do this the long way or just take the shortcut.”

I mentally kick myself, realizing she’s right and bracing myself for my answer. “I have. I’ve let myself down the most. I know what I’m capable of, I can see the plan for how to reach my goal, but in the end, I can’t pull it off.”

“Like what?”

“Like, like the debate championships – I make it to the finals just to screw up the last argument. Like the literary scholarship I was competing for – I blank on what to write about my favorite book.”

“You’re worrying about petty high school things,” Onyx rolls her eyes, bored, and my anger flares, flashing like the lightning forking outside.

“I am in high school – what else am I supposed to be worrying about?”  

“Oh, let’s think, shall we: getting fired from your job because you miss a big deadline, ruining your marriage because you don’t know the right reason to love somebody-”

“Stop!” I smash a fist onto the table, rattling the chess pieces, and Onyx looks amused as I struggle to compose myself back.

“Well, did I finally entice my equal to come out and play?” she smirks. 

“I am nothing like you,” I grit my teeth.

“Maybe true. I definitely play a better match than you – maybe another example of letting yourself down?”

With that, she strikes a nerve and jolts me back to focus on the game. I can’t do anything to save my bishop, but I do capture a pawn of hers in the meantime. Though I should ask a more profound question, I blurt out, “Why are you a better chess player than me?”

Onyx seems to know what I’m thinking and laughs. “Seriously? You’re wasting a question on that? My pieces are not easy to get.”

“Just answer me.”

“Because I’m ruthless. Because I don’t win until I don’t just defeat my opponent but crush them, leaving them broken and in tears and sometimes without a soul left, and I always play to win.”

The glint of conviction in her eyes leaves no room for doubt, and I shudder involuntarily.

“What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done to win?” I ask. 

“Now I believe that’s two questions? But since I’m about to crush you, maybe I can indulge you in a few more answers,” she smiles and it feels so wrong. “Sophomore year internship applications.”

My chest tightens as I take in a sharp breath, and Onyx flashes her sickly grin even wider.

“You remember that, don’t you, Libby? I wonder what Virginia would say if she found out we never printed out her resume in time. And don’t tell me it was an accident, because we both know better than that. We both know she deserved the job more than you and you couldn’t stand it. Though I suspect she’s facing her own demons right now.”

I blink, trying to push back the memory I’ve tried so hard to suppress. “Again, can we move beyond petty high school stuff? I was fifteen.”

“And we’re barely eighteen now – cut me some slack, we don’t have many years to work with here. My point is, are you so confident in your moral compass that given the opportunity, we wouldn’t do the same thing if we were fifty instead of fifteen?”

“Stop saying, we!” My hands are shaking by now.

She finally swipes my bishop and leans forward on her arms. “What angers you the most about me?”

“Everything.”

“Don’t be a petulant child – I asked you for one thing, one thing above all that you despise about me.”

The first tear finally trickles down my cheek and mixes with the mist of rain already sheening my face as I look at her, truly look at her. Look at her black hair matching mine, her dark brown eyes matching mine right down to the wingtip of her eyeliner, her face and features and figure all matching mine. What if our similarities don’t just end at the surface? What if underneath, we are both the boiling, simmering, cunning darkness she embodies, and I’m just a rose-colored carbon copy of the darkness I don’t want to admit to but that still churns inside me.

“That you’re all the parts of me I wish didn’t exist,” I answer her in a hoarse whisper.

Onyx sits back, smugly satisfied. “So you finally see me for who you are.”

“I’m not you,” I repeat but my conviction is wearing down as she breaks me down one piece at a time.

A knight. What are you most jealous of? People who can sing – they can use their voice for something beautiful and all I can do is argue and call it ‘debating’.

A rook. Have you ever stolen anything? No. Think again – remember I know everything about you. Wait, I mean, I’ve stolen people’s chances. Times when I manipulated results or people so I got the opportunities someone else deserved instead. If you could, would you give it back? I think you need another piece for me to answer that. Fine.

Another rook. Well? No, I wouldn’t. Why not? And spare me, I’m running out of pieces to take out of you. Because in the end, I only care about myself. 

A queen. The last piece left. I’m broken and trembling and sobbing as much as the stormy sky. 

“Last question,” Onyx’s eyes glint with electric victory. “Do you think we’re the same now?”

“Yes.”

Lightning flashes blindingly bright that for a moment, I can’t see anything and I close my eyes in pain. Dark overtaking light. 

When I open them, I’m looking at an empty chair across from the chessboard, a white king boxed in as I make my final move with the black queen.

“Checkmate.”

I exit the room and walk down the hall of identical game rooms – I wonder if Ari is finished with Atticus by now.