Prodigy
*Author's Note: I'm still plugging away without much enthusiasm, so I'm giving writing shorter stories a try.
In the past mine averaged about 20,000 words. This one, and the last two or three have been closer to ten or twelve thousand. How a couple meets and why they fall in love are always the main focus along with character development. The time they spend together after they fall in love just won't be as detailed in the hope that writing might again become a passion rather than a chore.
As always, I hope you enjoy it.
*****
He picked up the phone, heard her voice and immediately called out, "Mom! It's Aunt Candy! Tell her we gotta go, okay?"
His mother called back saying, "Okay, honey. I got it."
She picked up the other phone in the landline she kept meaning to get rid of and said 'hey' to her sister.
"Case? What's going on? Where do you have to be that's making you get out of Dodge so fast?"
"City hall."
"City hall? What for? Did you get arrested or something?" her older sister, Candy, teased.
"No. It's for Owen."
"Ah, okay. Must be something to do with chess. Am I right?"
"Ha! What else? He's so excited, you know?"
Candy Williams was 41 and had two children of her own who were ten and twelve, and both of them had passions she shared. In a way, she felt sorry for her younger sister, Casey, who was 38 and didn't even know how to play chess. She felt bad for her in other ways, but in terms of shared interests, she wasn't aware of any her sister and nephew enjoyed together.
Casey had tried to get her son, Owen, who was now nine, to play T-ball, but he hated it. She had him try soccer, too, but he didn't like "running around chasing a stupid ball." Then came bowling, and when he hated that, too, she was looking at ideas online and decided on a whim to download a chess app for her desktop.
Owen preferred his tablet, but he loved playing a game called Minecraft on the larger screen, so maybe, if he liked the game, he'd sit there and play it, too. It was free, so even if he hated it, the worst thing would be wasting a few minutes finding out.
Her son's mind seemed to always be in high gear. So much so that she'd thought about having him checked to see if he might be 'on the spectrum', a nice way of say a child was autistic. There actually was a spectrum where autism was concerned and it ranged from highly intelligent but a little socially awkward to some very profound disabilities that made her shudder to imagine having to deal with. Thankfully, there weren't any of that magnitude.
She knew that in spite of her current situation things could be a worse. A lot worse. So she did her best to deal with stuff as it came and not think too much about what might be down the road.
The app she chose had a tutorial so they could both learn how to play, and for a modest fee, it also connected to other players which meant they could play one other on different devices once they understood the rules. With any luck Owen might enjoy playing, and since playing against other people online didn't require social interaction, it could be the thing she and her son needed but needed for different reasons.
It was simple enough learning how the pieces moved and took, or rather, captured, other pieces which were known collectively as 'material', two terms she'd not known before getting the app. She didn't say anything but thought it was unbelievably boring, but from the moment he finished the tutorial, Owen was obsessed with the game.
Within two hours he crushed her. By the next day he was destroying her every time they played, and she new she could never challenge him. A couple of days later he was playing games online, the modest fee something his mother was more than happy to pay. Within a month he was winning nearly all of them, but even those few games he lost didn't anger him. Owen used the losses to learn from them and never forgot the move that cost him the game.
One day she kind of jokingly asked him how he got so good so fast. Without hesitation her son replied very seriously, "I see the moves before they happen."
She didn't think much about it until she started watching him play against online opponents. As long as his identity and location were unknown to other people his mom had no problem with him playing, and Owen loved challenging players who were better than him.
It was also wonderful for her as it gave her some time for herself. She felt guilty for even feeling that way, but she couldn't change that and did her best to be grateful for this rather odd 'win-win' situation she and her son now found themselves in.
Owen blew through the novice and beginner categories in a few days and was soon beating players with intermediate ratings. One day he came running into the kitchen to find her, a huge smile on his face.
"What's going on, chess master?" she asked as she bowed slightly.
"Mom! I just beat someone with an Elo rating of 1,200!" he declared less than four weeks after his first-ever introduction to the game.
"Oh. That's wonderful!" his mom told him, having no idea what kind of score was good or bad. But without asking Owen explained something called 'the Elo rating system' in chess.
"It was named after a Hungarian-American physics professor who was an eight-time state champion chess master, Arpad Elo. He originally devised his rating system around 1960."
"Originally devised, huh?" his mom said with a laugh as she was used to his adult-like vocabulary, but her son didn't laugh back.
"You really like chess, don't you?" she correctly intuited as she got more serious.
"Uh-huh. I wanna be a grandmaster," her son informed her. "That requires an Elo rating of at least 2,500. I'm already at 1720 according to the way they calculate ratings, so I'm over half way there!"
"Wow. That's...amazing," his mother replied, still unaware of what a phenomenal rating that was for someone with so little experience or how long it took a person to gain an additional 100 points let alone the 800-ish her son needed to make his goal.
What she also didn't know was that he really could 'see' moves in advance. When he learned how the pieces moved and captured material, his brain tapped into an area that had been waiting for him to put to use. He could also divide the board into quadrants in order to maintain control over territory he owned and from which he could attack his opponent.
For some children with a gift of this kind the impetus was music. For others is was mathematics. For Owen, it was chess, and each time he played he was able to visualize more moves further into the game to attack or counter his opponents' attacks.
He was doing his school work, and he still ate with his mom, so she didn't worry too much about him spending every spare moment on his the computer either playing chess or watching videos of games played by grandmasters. She tried watching one with him, but after just two minutes she gave up. She had no understanding of why either player made the moves they did, and were her son not in love with the game, she wouldn't have cared. But Owen cared, and as long as it made him happy, she was fine with it.
She was fine with it, not only because she needed alone time, but also because since the death of his father a little more than two years earlier, Owen had drawn deeply inside himself. That's when she began wondering about the possibility of autism.
After months of debating she did have him seen. The psychiatrist who examined him told he thought there was a possibility Owen might have Asperger's but informed her that without further testing he couldn't say. What he did tell her that Owen seemed to dealing with the loss on a par with other children his age who were dealing with similar tragedies.
"He just needs time," the doctor told her. "That could be a few months or it could even be a few years. Maybe try and find something that really interests him and see how it goes."
That's where the experiments with T-Ball and other sports came in only to no avail. So if chess was what it took to give her back her son, then so be it. She would do her best to tolerate the game while supporting him all she could.
"So what exactly is going on at city hall?" Candy asked in response.
Having momentarily drifted, Casey need a second to process the follow-on question.
"Oh, sorry. The guys at the park told us about a tournament...."
"You mean the old men that play chess there? The uh, the smelly, homeless men?" her sister asked, interrupting her explanation.
"They're not all homeless," Casey said a little too defensively.
"Oh, right. Sorry, you did tell me that. Anyway, Owen beat all of them, right?" Candy asked, knowing her nephew had.
"Crazy, right? Owen says one of them said has an Elo rating of 2,200."
"Okay, you just lost me. Unless you mean the group, ELO, and even there I'm uh...all out of love."
Her sister laughed then said, "That was Air Supply, not ELO."
"You sure about that?"
