Perpetual Check by Rich Wallace Page B

October, leaning back on the lowest row of the bleachers with his arms crossed. A few of his soccer teammates were there, but Zeke wasn't paying much attention to them. He was watching a group of girls dancing together near the deejay. He was trying not to look like he was watching, but he was.
    In walks Randy, of all people, holding hands with a girl that Zeke couldn't quite bring himself to admit was rather cute.
    People were going over to Randy and his date, joking around, laughing. After a few minutes, Randy and the girl started dancing. They kept at it for quite some time, mostly dancing fast but then doing a couple of slow ones.
    “This is the lamest thing I've ever been to in my life,” Zeke finally said to Donny Curtis, the goalie. “I'm out of here.”
    He drove down to the Turkey Hill convenience store and bought a pack of Yodels, then went home and watched three episodes of
The Simpsons
on DVD.
Anybody could get a girlfriend like that one,
he told himself, even though he'd never had one of his own.
        
    Randy takes Zeke's remaining bishop with a knight, leaving the knight under attack by a pawn. Zeke winces slightly and takes the knight, but it wasn't quite an even exchange of pieces. There's the age-old argument of whether a bishop outranks a knight. But Zeke knows that—in Randy's hands at least—it does.
    It's another of those small disadvantages that Zeke knows he can't afford. He'd been winning that first game because of a couple of big hits, most notably knocking out Randy's queen in the early going. But this one is turning into a slow battle of attrition, and that always falls to Randy's favor. Those small cuts eventually bleed you dry. And Zeke's got more cuts than Randy does.
    The coaches at both Bloomsburg and Kutztown have said he can try out if he gets admitted, but there wouldn't be more than two or three roster spots for walk-ons at either school. Zeke desperately wants to continue playing soccer in college, so a season at a local two-year school like Lackawanna might be a better bet. But then what would he do about housing? Commute to Scranton? Keep living with his parents? There has to be a better alternative.
    Having his father telling him what a star he is for all those years hasn't been a plus after all. Somehow it made him decide that an extra hour of working on his ball control was plenty, no need to make it two; that fifty sit-ups after practice were just as good as a hundred; that sometimes it wasn't worth running hills in the pouring rain. He was great; he was unbelievable. His natural talent would carry him as far as he wanted to go. It was heady stuff at twelve or thirteen or fifteen.
    Randy never got caught up in all that, despite how outstanding he'd been when he was little. He never wanted to dothat hard work, so he had no reason to pretend that he was anything other than what he was. He had no reason to try to fulfill some image his father had of him. No reason to be anybody but himself.
    The game has been brutal, but Zeke has virtually no way to win it. His only real hope is a draw, to lure Randy into a stalemate.
    Randy has been moving his last remaining pawn up the board toward promotion. Zeke's king and his lone pawn are stacked on the edge of the board, with the king in the seventh rank and the pawn one spot in front of it. Randy's king is in the next spot in that file, blocking Zeke's pawn from moving.
    Randy advances his pawn. It's three spaces to the side of Zeke's king and one move away from promotion.
    Zeke shifts the king one space to the side, still protecting his pawn. Randy promotes his pawn, then leans back to make a decision.
    Zeke quickly reviews all of Randy's possible exchanges. The queen is nearly always the right choice for promotion, but is it in this case? A knight would put Zeke in immediate check, but he'd have five different moves to get out of it. Only one of those moves would really make sense, because he still needs to protect his pawn from