Work Text:
June 1974
It’s the summer of 1974 when everything changes. Florence has just turned 23. On Monday, she begins a hard-won summer internship at The Morgan.
Today is Saturday. Today, Florence stands hunched over a folding table outside a school auditorium in Queens, filling out her information on a sheet in front of her as the wiry man sitting behind the table watches, looking slightly perplexed.
“You know there’s a women’s tournament next week, right?”
Florence doesn’t look up at him until she’s finished writing. She sets the pen down firmly and straightens up. “Yes,” she lies.
She only knows about this tournament because she happened to see a flyer on a bulletin board two days ago. She’d walked right past, putting it out of her mind that day. She has too much to do right now, and Florence hasn’t played chess competitively since before she started university. But… the thought of it nagged at her. She couldn’t sleep, thinking about it. She’d gone back the next day to take down the information, and now…
Here she is, handing the man at the table $5 for the honor of playing chess for the first time in five years.
She’s just about to walk into the auditorium when she hears a shout from the direction of the front doors.
“Sign me up, Gary!” calls a blond man with sunglasses perched precariously on top of his head as he speedwalks to the table. He’s wearing raggedy jeans with holes in them and a white oversized hoodie, and has a messenger bag slung over his shoulder. He looks to be around Florence’s age, maybe a tad younger.
Gary sighs wearily. “Hello, Freddie,” he says. Freddie drops a $5 bill on the table dramatically. “There are so many better things you could be doing right now, you know.”
“I need grocery money,” Freddie says. “Come on, I don’t have all day.”
Gary capitulates, filling in Freddie’s name and information for him on the registration sheet. Freddie snatches his papers and stack of scoresheets out of Gary’s hand when they’re offered to him, and then he makes his way to the auditorium door, where Florence is currently standing and watching the whole procession.
He blinks up at her in surprise. “Oh, hey. Are you playing?” he asks, glancing down at her own registration sheets.
“Yes,” she says, ready to be on the defensive. He just gives off the airs of being an asshole, and Florence has met plenty of chess assholes.
“You any good?” he asks.
Florence isn’t quite sure how to answer that. She doesn’t really know anymore, does she? “I used to be,” she settles on.
He grins at her and gives her a little thumbs up. “Cool,” he says. “See you inside.” He passes by her and slips through the auditorium doors, and then he’s gone.
At the time, Florence doesn’t think much of it, other than the passing thought that he seems very American. Of course she’s been surrounded by Americans for the better part of the last year, but most of the people she comes across on Columbia’s campus aren’t quite as… rough as he is.
Florence waits around with the others in the auditorium for registration to close and for the day’s match pairings to be posted. She doesn’t talk to anyone. There are a couple of other women in the room, but none of them have scoresheets, so she assumes they’re wives or girlfriends of other players. Florence spots Freddie on the opposite side of the room, having dragged a chair away from one of the tables set up in the middle. He sits in the corner with his bag on the floor next to him and a book open on his lap. Occasionally, he looks up and makes eye contact with someone in the room. Once, he flips someone off. Florence wouldn’t have paid attention if it it weren’t for all the grumbling she overhears.
It’s all generally along the same lines: ‘what is he doing here?’ or ‘wasn’t the one last month enough?’ or ‘doesn’t he get tired of coming to things like this?’ or even, ‘well, I guess we’ll see who gets second place.’
So he’s good. Honestly, Florence doesn’t know anything about the American chess scene. She’s been trying very hard to focus on schoolwork. However good this Freddie person is, it doesn’t really bother Florence—she didn’t come here with the intention of winning anything. It would be nice, but mostly she just wants to play again. She’d been able to ignore the call for years, but it never goes away.
Finally, they get their assignments, and Florence posts up at her table. Her first opponent is a polite, quiet older man who shakes her hand and gives her a kind smile before they start playing, Florence on black.
It’s like riding a bike. It all comes back to her in a rush, enveloping her in warmth and fond memories—the hours and hours she’d spent studying games while she was in school, the friends she made on her chess team and the competitions they’d won together, all the way back to her father sitting her on his knee and showing her how each piece moved. The last five years melt away into nothing, leaving only her, her opponent, and the board and pieces between them. She tries not to smile too much—she doesn’t want to come off as rude to the man she’s beating.
She wins three more games before she plays Freddie for the first time. He saunters over to their table 38 seconds before the clock is supposed to start and smiles brightly at her as he takes a seat. She can’t tell if it’s supposed to be cocky, flirty, or something else, but she isn’t terribly impressed.
“How’s it going?” he asks.
“I haven’t lost yet,” she says.
“Nice. I guess you still got it,” he says. “Where are you from, England? How’d you end up here?”
She’s spared from having to answer—they’re all given the signal to start their clocks, and Florence makes the first move of the game.
Freddie is good. Not only that, he’s fast—for the first half of the game, he moves his pieces almost immediately, and while Florence didn’t come here expecting to win anything, she feels the pressure grow with every move he makes. She used to love playing speed chess, but she’s out of practice. It’s taking all her attention to keep from making any major blunders and mount some kind of working defense.
Something changes about halfway through the game. Florence briefly notices Freddie switch from watching the board to watching her, a contemplative look on his face. All of a sudden, he slows down, taking more care with his moves. If nothing else, it makes Florence feel a little less harried. His plays are unpredictable, but also fascinating. She mentally takes note of each one, especially when they remind her of other games and players she’s studied. She tries to assimilate it all, working through what his thought process could be for as long as she can hold out.
Ultimately, she has to resign. He pushes relentlessly, and she recognizes she’s trapped in the end.
“You’re good,” he says as he shakes her hand over the board. “Are you part of a club around here? I’ve never seen you before.”
“Oh, no, I haven’t played in a few years. I’m in gradschool and I just haven’t had the time,” she explains.
“Huh,” he says, his head tilted to the side like a confused golden retriever. “…Okay. Well, you should join one. I can give you some recommendations, if you want. Help you find one that isn’t filled with assholes.”
It startles a laugh out of her. Florence still isn’t quite sure about him, but there’s nothing about what he’s said or done so far that’s set of any alarm bells. “Maybe after graduation,” she says. “I have a lot on my plate right now.”
Freddie shrugs. “Your loss,” he says. “It’s Florence, right? See you in the next round.”
“See you,” Florence waves as he leaves.
She plays one more game, and that’s the end of the round. Half the participants are knocked out at this point, and the rest of them are told to come back the following day to finish out the tournament. Florence sails easily into the next round. Freddie, unsurprisingly, is leading in points with zero losses or draws.
Florence gets a deli sandwich from across the street and spends the subway ride home thinking over her and Freddie’s game. She tries to pinpoint patterns in the plays he’d made, and come up with ways she could potentially defend herself. She consults the small handful of chess books she’d brought with her from England. By the time she’s back the following morning for the next round, she’s got a few strategies to pick from, at least to try.
It’s a much smaller group now, with half the contestants disqualified. Most didn’t bother to come back and watch the rest of the games, but there are a couple of people on the outskirts that Florence instantly pegs as reporters that weren’t around yesterday. She notices that a few of the players that are left are sending nervous looks Freddie’s way. He doesn’t seem to notice—he studies the matchings with his hands in his pockets of the same white hoodie, idly bouncing up on his toes. She accidentally catches his eye and he sends a smirk her way.
The next time they play, she’s a lot more surefooted. She finds a space to try out one of her planned strategies, and he looks delighted as he looks for ways to counter it. They end up at a draw, and that’s when people really start watching her.
It’s always a little bit uncomfortable, but Florence has had practice tuning them out. When she played in school, the vast majority of the other teams were from boys’ schools. It always felt like people were staring at her. Here, just as she did then, she tells herself that they’re watching the game, not her, and that makes it a little easier to stomach. Her other opponents are better now, but they aren’t on Freddie’s level. She can see why everyone was so frustrated with his appearance at this relatively low-level competition. She wins two more games and draws another.
In the end, it comes down to her against Freddie for first place. Florence knows her running score, but she still feels surprised to have come so far. It had only been a whim, and yesterday she’d told herself that she didn’t care what the outcome was. Now that she’d had another taste of winning, of the adrenaline rush? Even if she loses this game, she’s going to be riding this high for days. She didn’t realize just how terribly she’d been missing the game.
“Okay, I’m not gonna go easy on you anymore,” Freddie says as they sit across from each other for the third time.
“Oh, is that what you were doing?” Florence laughs. Nothing about any of their games has been easy.
Gary, now playing the part of arbiter, clears his throat expectantly. Florence motions to the clock, and he starts it for her. As soon as she reaches for her first pawn, the cameras start to flash. Freddie pulls down his sunglasses over his eyes and keeps them there for the duration of the game.
Florence plays as hard as she can, meeting all his attacks with her own. She spots a gambit he’s trying to set up four moves ahead and foils it, which gets her a pleased smirk when she glances up at his face. The game drags on, with both of them running up against their clocks. It gets very, very close. But in the end, with only a handful of pieces left, she can see the writing on the wall. She offers her hand to him in resignation, and he flicks his sunglasses up and smiles at her as he takes it, and the funny thing is, his smile looks genuinely warm.
As soon as Freddie stands, people start to flock to him. It seems like more attention than a tournament like this warrants. Florence is given a $30 check for her trouble, which is far more than she was expecting.
She waits for a little while. She’s kind of hoping to talk to him for a moment, so she putters around, rearranging her scoresheets, but it doesn’t look like she’s going to get the chance. It doesn’t matter, anyway—she really shouldn’t have even come. Florence knows herself, and knows that diving back into chess is a terrible idea. She just doesn’t have the time right now, and she already feels her heart breaking at the thought of giving it up again. Her internship starts in the morning. She needs to go home.
Florence is already outside the front doors of the school and halfway down the block when the door bursts open again. “Hey, wait!” Freddie calls. She stops where she is and turns to look at him, so he leaps down the cement stairs and jogs to catch up with her.
“You’re really good,” he says. “Are you sure you haven’t played in years?”
“I’m certain,” Florence says. “Not since I started university five years ago.”
“Five years. And you almost beat me,” Freddie marvels.
Florence smiles at him. Even if it’s a little backwards, her ego appreciates the compliment. “I could have won with more time.”
He grins brightly at her. “You really think so?”
“I do.”
Freddie laughs. “You wanna find out?”
Florence weighs her choices. She shouldn’t. She’s going to have a long day tomorrow.
She wants to win.
By that point, most of the crowd has dispersed, but the auditorium isn’t cleaned up yet. Freddie grabs the nearest table and sets up the board, and they start to play. He lets Florence have white again. This time, they don’t use the clock.
The two of them play, and around them, a couple people clear everything else away, packing up the chess sets and stowing the tables and chairs in a storage closet. Eventually, Gary makes his way gloomily over to their table.
“We have to clean up, Freddie,” he says.
Freddie waves him away distractedly, not taking his eyes off the board. “Let us finish,” he says.
“If I do that, I’ll be here all night. Stop flirting and go somewhere else,” Gary grumbles.
Freddie looks up sharply, glaring daggers at him. Then, without looking away, he pushes the board off the side of the table. The pieces bounce and scatter all over the place. Gary just rolls his eyes and bends to pick them up.
“Come on, I know a spot,” Freddie says to Florence.
She really shouldn’t, but she follows him to a coffee shop. They grab a table and he pulls a travel chess set out of his bag and proceeds to recreate their game exactly. They play over dinner. That game ends in a draw, and then Florence wins the next. They’re in the middle of a third when they get shooed out.
Now, the sun is gone and the stars would be visible if it weren’t for all the light pollution. They stand out on the sidewalk, unsure what’s supposed to come next. Florence is about to excuse herself, but Freddie speaks first.
“There’s a bar a couple blocks away that doesn’t card,” he says.
Florence laughs in surprise. “How old are you?” she asks.
“None of your business,” he grins. “I’ll buy you a drink?”
She really should go home.
“One drink,” she says.
It’s more than one drink.
They finish their third game at the bar, and then play a few rounds of speed chess, although the quality of their play is variable by that point. Finally, the conversation evolves into talking through games they played during the competition, and then games from the big names that they’ve studied. This is what really gets her.
Florence still gets the magazines sometimes, still reads the annotations and does the puzzles. She used to rush to the store every time there was a new issue, so she could take it to her team and spend hours after school doing exactly what she’s doing right now in this bar, far too late on a Sunday night. And it’s probably the alcohol talking, but Freddie? It feels like he’s on the exact same wavelength. He gets it, he understands what she’s saying when she says it, she can’t remember the last time someone got it like this—they’re finishing each other’s thoughts, moving pieces for each other, and the games are unraveling in front of her like a map of infinite possibilities. She feels giddy with it. How could she have ever left chess behind? How could she have ever let it go for so long? She doesn’t want it to ever end.
But, not even the dinky bar Freddie has taken her to stays open all night. Eventually, they’re kicked out along with all the serious alcoholics. Florence realizes with a start that it’s 1AM, and she needs to go home.
She’s going to hate herself in the morning. Now? She wouldn’t have passed this up for the world.
The two of them walk to the nearest subway station together. Out of nowhere, Freddie asks, “have you ever been to Chicago?”
She blinks at him, trying and failing to make sense of the question in her head. “No. Why?”
He doesn’t look at her, instead preferring to track the streetlights they walk under. “Do you wanna go with me?”
“Excuse me?” she asks. “What. What’s in Chicago?”
“The US Championship,” Freddie says.
“You’re going?”
“Yeah. I came in third last year,” Freddie says. Suddenly, so many things click into place. “I’m gonna win this year. You should come and be my second. I’ll pay for your ticket.”
Florence stops walking, and it takes him a few steps to realize and turn around. “You came in third place?” she asks dumbly. “In the United States Chess Championship?”
“Yeah,” Freddie grins, seeming to realize the humor in the situation a lot more quickly than her. “You really don’t know anything about American chess, huh?”
“No!” Florence practically shouts at him. “I’ve only lived here a year, and I’ve had other things on my mind!”
“Well, it’s a month and a half away. We have plenty of time to fill you in,” Freddie says.
None of this is fitting in her head. She can’t make sense of it. “You can’t be serious. You don’t even know me,” Florence says. “And I don’t know you! Why would I agree to go to Chicago with you?”
“Hey, it’s not a weird thing. You can have your own room,” Freddie says. “What do you have to lose?”
Florence shakes her head. She really doesn’t know Freddie, but she doesn't get the feeling he’d understand. “I—I start an internship tomorrow, and I have an article my adviser wants me to finish and submit for peer review before the next semester starts, and I need to start the reading for my next classes—”
Freddie waves his hands to get her to stop. “Florence. Listen. I’m going to be world champion someday,” he says. And Florence would laugh if he didn’t look so completely earnest when he says it, like there’s not a doubt in his mind. “Think of it—getting to see the world! The fame, the money, all for chess! What could be better than that?”
This is dangerous territory. As soon as he says it, she wants it.
Once, Florence had fantasies of winning more than just the British Schools Chess Championship, of going all the way. It felt absurd to even voice such a thing, and she tried her best to put it out of her mind. And yet, here those fantasies are again, spread out in front of her. Fame, respect, achievement, travel—Florence had turned down a spot at Oxford just because she was desperate to live somewhere else—and she can’t come up with a single reason to say no.
“I’m going to need a second,” Freddie continues quickly. “I’m really good, but all the best players have seconds. Your analysis is amazing, especially for someone who hasn’t played in five years—you figured out how to beat one of my favorite tricks after playing me once. We can win here, Florence. You and me.”
“Alright,” Florence says, before her brain can catch up.
Freddie looks surprised, in spite of his impassioned speech. “Really?” he asks.
“I’ll go with you to Chicago,” she says. “After that—I don’t know, we’ll see what happens. I’m not making any commitments.”
Freddie ignores her warning and pumps his fists in the air in triumph. “This’ll be great, just you wait. We need to start training,” he says. “When’s your thing over tomorrow?”
Florence closes her eyes and tries not to think about the miniscule amount of time between now and when she has to be at her internship. She’ll be lucky if she gets any sleep at all, at this rate, and that’s to say nothing of her impending hangover. “Five. It’s at The Morgan library in Manhattan,” she says.
“Great. I’ll meet you there,” Freddie says. He digs into his bag and pulls out last month’s chess magazine, and then a pen. He flips through until he finds a page with a blank space on it, and uses the brick wall next to him as a hard surface to write down his phone number. “Here, just in case something happens. I’ll bring some stuff for you to read and take home, too.”
“Alright,” she says, taking the magazine when it’s offered. “I’ll be there.”
They go in opposite directions at the subway station. As soon as Freddie is out of sight, Florence feels distinctly like she’s just stepped out of a bizarre dream. Surely she must have hallucinated the whole ordeal—things like this don’t just happen, and Florence doesn’t just agree to jump right into them. But she still has last month’s Chess Life in her hand, and a $30 check in her bag that she needs to cash.
She takes a seat on her train and rolls and unrolls the magazine in her hands until the doors slide shut and they start to move. Then, she flips the magazine open and starts to read.