There's a lot of exposition in this chapter, but I hope that you will agree that knowing the characters is essential to the overall effect. Matt and Emma both turned 18 at the beginning of their senior year of high school, before either of them was sexually active; and everyone else engaged in sexual activities is likewise 18 or older.
I first met Emma on the day that I turned eleven. Her family had just moved in next door a few days prior, and my mom insisted that I invite her to my party. I resisted: a party was for playing with friends, not meeting new people. Certainly not new girls. Shows what I knew.
When my parents asked what I thought of her after the party, my honest answer was 'surprising'. In truth it was somewhere about equally between 'frustrating' and 'fascinating'. Mostly because she had blown straight past me on a deep ball for a touchdown in a backyard game of flag football. She'd loved it: my friends had loved it even more. And I was too impressed to be as embarrassed as I should have been.
A girl could do that?
In those days, my dad's work was making a lot of noise about financial difficulties, and mom had picked up a part time job to help out. Most of her shifts were during the school day, so I never quite realised the extent of her commitment. As far as I could tell, it just seemed to mean that I had to stay late at school a day or two every week. One of the older teachers -- Mrs Williams -- ran an after-school club out of her classroom, and she had the sort of gentle touch with discipline that made her popular with well-meaning but occasionally rowdy schoolkids. Sometimes I look back and wonder why she did it. Unless the school had money then that it doesn't now, I can't imagine that she was paid, at least not enough for it to be worth her time. But you're not here for that sort of speculation.
Anyway: when we weren't keeping ourselves sufficiently entertained, or there was a smaller group, she would sometimes pull out puzzles or boardgames to play. A few weeks before my birthday, she had introduced us to chess, and I had taken to it as only a kid who doesn't realise how uncool it was could. My mom was very pleased on the drive home: she'd been quite good when she was young. But when we got home she couldn't find her old board. Lost in a move, or maybe still with her parents: no playing for us. My birthday list was already full, and though I didn't really understand what 'financial difficulties' meant, I knew enough not to push my luck. So I would play at school, with some other friends who were happy to be uncool, and simply accepted that it wasn't a game for at home.
My mom was, of course, much smarter than I was, though it took some time for me to realise it. Because, as I was opening gifts from friends after they'd left (good manners, I was told, so that no one who brought a small gift or couldn't afford one would be embarrassed), I opened Emma's last -- and inside the neatly-wrapped box was a plastic chess set, just like we had at school. No doubt her parents, sending their daughter to, essentially, some stranger's birthday party, had asked my mom about presents. But it would be years before I put that together: as far as I could tell, she'd simply read my mind.
It was only polite, mom insisted, to invite her over to play; and I think that I took less convincing than she had expected. I was already halfway convinced that Emma was some sort of fairy or other supernatural creature, and I had this dim notion -- I don't know where it came from -- that beating her in a game of chess would limit her power over me.
And I did beat her: the third time. She would later claim that she had felt bad for me after the first two and let me win, but nearly ten years later I can just about smell her lies, and this one doesn't quite come off. Not that anything but the first game really mattered. Armed with the delusion that no 11-year-old could possibly understand the game better than I did, I had to call my mom in after Emma declared checkmate with the smirk that I would come to know so well. When the situation was confirmed, honour demanded a rematch -- which ended with the same smirk.
I could have hated her, I suppose. Maybe I did, a bit: but really I just needed a way to beat her. We were in the same grade, though not all of the same classes; but we did have math together. And that week we had a test. Looking back, it wasn't quite a fair fight, since she'd arrived halfway through the unit, and had obviously been learning something quite different at her old school. But even if I'd thought of that, it wouldn't have changed anything. I needed a win; and I got it. My turn to smirk, as she'd turned to show me a red 92. I held up four fingers and mouthed 'ninety-four'. Her eyes held mine with what I knew was the same look I'd given her from across the chessboard. Defiance, and a conviction that she'd get the last smirk.
This more or less set the tone for the next few years. Whatever we did together -- school, sports, video games -- our honour was at stake in every interaction. A couple of years later we went to different middle schools, which meant that she especially started making new friends, and though we went to the same high school we continued to move in slightly different circles. It feels like a cliche -- the childhood friends who drift apart in high school -- but in truth it wasn't that dramatic. We were, if anything, too similar, and both of our social lives were mostly dictated by sports. But not the same ones. I played baseball, and volleyball in the winter when I couldn't, though I topped out at 5'11 and by the end only got the playing time that I did due to certain defensive skills. But the team was full of my friends, and it was baseball that I really cared about.
Not, I suppose, that you care that much, dear reader. This isn't a story about a high school baseball player with equal talents for slap singles to right field and misreading routine flyballs. I'd more or less figured the latter out by senior year, but in the meantime I'd settled in as a catcher, with strict instructions to get out of the third baseman's way in the event of a pop-up.
Ahem.
Emma, on the other hand, was a swimmer and a handy shooting guard. She reached her full height of 5'8 early, and though eventually others had caught up, her catch-and-shoot game kept her on the court. In hindsight, it probably wasn't an accident that we had settled into different sports. Competition can be exhausting, especially when you're dealing with the other pressures of team sports. But it did mean that we never travelled to tournaments together, and often had clashing practice schedules. So we didn't quite drift apart: it was more like two magnets turned the wrong way, holding each other at a safe distance.
We both turned 18 near the beginning of our senior year, which meant lots of requests from friends to buy alcohol. Great power, great responsibility -- Emma was better at that than I was. I didn't drink much myself, but wasn't above pocketing a finder's fee from anyone in search of my services. I spread my buying out between a few shops, but even then I probably wasn't fooling anyone. Oh well. Simpler times, or something.
As I said, I never got quite as tall as I'd hoped, but at 5'11 I couldn't complain too much. At least I was taller than Emma -- the two years between her first growth spurt and mine had been rough. She could still crow that she, at least, was above average height; but any criticism coming from that close to the ground didn't couldn't leave too much of a mark. Sports kept me trim, and years of swinging a bat filled out my shoulders and forearms. I kept my dark-brown hair at a length that most would call 'shaggy', influenced by some baseball friends who were also on the hockey team. My eyes were brown, too, and my stubble grew in surprisingly fully. School dress code still meant that I had to shave once a week or so, but I could pull off the devil-may-care look pretty well.