Work Text:
October 1962
Freddie stares out the window of the backseat of a beat up hatchback, watching the streetlights and the shadows beyond them.
It’s nearly 1AM, according to the faint red glow of the car’s clock. This is way past Freddie’s bedtime, but her mother didn’t really care about that. She’d barged into Freddie’s room after a lot of shouting, a lot of banging—both from Freddie’s parents and from the apartment next door, shouting at them to keep it down—and started hastily packing a bag for her. Freddie had been awake then, too, reading one of the chess books she’d stolen from the library by flashlight. It wasn’t enough to drown everything else out, but it helped.
Freddie’s father left soon after.
“Where are we going?” she finally asks.
“We’re going to stay with your grandparents for a few days,” her mother says.
This happens sometimes, but it isn’t the answer she’s hoping for. Inevitably her father will call and beg them to come back, but it takes longer each time they go. Freddie misses school, and her mother keeps losing waitress jobs because of it.
She doesn’t want to ask, but she does anyway. “Are we going to be back in time for the tournament?” she asks, squeezing her little hands into fists. It’s all she’s wanted for months, all she’s thought about. She’s only eight years old, but she already knows this county chess tournament will be the most important event in her life.
Her mother takes a deep, angry breath, blowing it out of her nose as she turns onto the highway at last—taking them out of Pittsburgh and to the east. Freddie wishes she’d kept her mouth shut. Her mother gets like this, after fights.
“I don’t know, dear,” she says, her tone cold and biting, at odds with her words. “Frankly, there are more important things in life than chess.”
Freddie hates it when she says things like that. Because she’s dead wrong—there isn’t anything more important than chess.
Her parents don’t get it, and they never will. It makes her so angry, and she doesn’t have anything she can do with that angers. It burns inside her, mixed with frustration and want, and she has to sit with it. They don’t get it—they don’t get her. They won’t even call her by the name she likes, how could they ever understand?
She wants to play so badly it makes her want to scream. There are never enough people to play with her—the chess club at school only meets once a week, and her teachers don’t have time, and her parents aren’t any good, and she doesn’t have any siblings, and the old man who lives down the hall is in the hospital half the time—she just wants to play. This tournament was supposed to give her that.
She thinks about calling her father to pick her up once they get to her grandparents’ house, and thinks about what an argument that would start. She thinks maybe she can get her aunt to drive her back, that maybe she’ll see why this is important where her mother won’t. She thinks about screaming and crying until her mother turns the car around, or at least pulls over so she can jump out and run all the way home. She can stay in the house alone. She knows how to make cereal and sandwiches for herself, she knows how to take the bus to school—or maybe she won’t go to school, she’ll just play through the games in her library book until Saturday.
Her mother reaches for the radio and turns it on, and the men on the air are talking about nuclear missiles in Cuba just like they have been for days. Freddie wishes she wouldn’t. She feels like she can’t breathe when she hears them talk about it. She wakes up in a cold sweat after dreaming about mushroom clouds like she’s seen on TV taking the place of Pittsburgh. Now, though, she wishes it would happen. She wishes they would drop an atom bomb on them, right here, right now. It couldn’t be any worse than this.
She reaches for her backpack and holds it close to her. This isn’t the one she takes to school, it’s the one she keeps packed and ready for trips like this. She learned her lesson the last time, when there hadn’t been time for her to grab her chess set. She has to sit with it.
She leans her head against the door and stares out the window into the darkness, watching as the rare set of headlights from other cars light up the road for a moment, then disappear.