Jan Week 2: Thursday-Extra Curriculars-Chess Club

She glanced at the clock and saw she had five minutes before the first wave of social misfits arrived to claim their kingdom. Leah had never played chess competitively, unless you counted two traumatic rounds against her chess-obsessed cousin when they were eight. Her sum total knowledge included the horsey moved in L-patterns, the Queen could apparently do everything, and that there was such a thing as chess porn (she’d learned this only recently, via a YouTube rabbit hole that started with “Queen’s Gambit” fan edits and ended in a place where people moaned suggestively with every pawn capture). Regardless, once Principal Howard and she had agreed to act as the new club sponsor, her fate was sealed.

She'd spent her lunch hour printing off rules sheets and attaching clip art of knights and pawns to every available surface in the history classroom. The effect was less “intellectual haven” and more the aftermath of a medieval-themed toddler birthday, but whatever.

Students started to come into the classroom, some she didn't even know their name. She nodded and greeted them with the practiced ease of a professional educator.

"Come on in and take a seat!"

"Good afternoon!"

"Welcome! Welcome! Take a seat, we will get started soon."

Leah took a moment behind her teacher desk—throne of the after-school club monarch—surveying the first meeting attendees with a ****, toothy smile. Not that she was nervous. No, she was a professional. She had spent hours in front of judgmental teens, so the sight of six senior boys arrayed like dead-eyed chess pieces across three mismatched tables shouldn’t have fazed her. But there was something about the utter intensity of their attention, the laser fixation of their eyes that made her throat dry up on approach. It didn’t help that they’d all clustered in the front row, literally the front row, leaving the rest of the room a barren wasteland save for her own frantic decorations.

She took a quick, silent inventory: four band kids, one debate team defector, and a theater kid who tried to be edgy all the time. The only thing they had in common was that they were all male, and, of course, the hungry, slightly glazed look in their eyes, which Leah knew from experience had little to do with chess, and everything to do with her chest. She chose to ignore it entirely, as one does when one is a female teacher with good looks and tasked with instructing post-pubescent boys in a state with minimal HR oversight.

“Hi, everyone!” she began, projecting the same perky, singsong voice she used to greet the students she liked slightly more than average. “My name is Miss Williams, I’m the new sponsor for Chess Club this semester... You probably already know me from, um, the history hallway or, you know, the football games or stuff.” The entire room nodded in perfect sync, like bobbleheads.

Not missing a beat, Leah flicked to the first slide of her hastily constructed PowerPoint. The title read: WELCOME TO CHESS CLUB in Impact font, rainbow gradient, with a stock photo of a pawn that looked suspiciously like a butt plug. She’d noticed, too late, that it was the first image to come up when you Googled “exciting chess piece.” She soldiered on.

“I, uh, put together a little presentation just for today—mostly administrative stuff, like when we’ll meet, expectations, that kind of thing.” She advanced the slide and continued, “I know most of you guys have played competitively, or at least recreationally, so I don’t want to bore you with the basics.”

By the twenty-minute mark of bullshitting about the history of chess, Leah was getting the distinct impression that the boys had come to chess club less for the thrill of pawn promotion or her current talk about the origins of chess and far more likely for the hope that her skirt might ride up if she bent over a chessboard. She was used to this. Still, she’d learned to deflect with humor and a heavy reliance on the “teacher tone.” They were all staring at her and she could tell that they could tell that she was winging it. Leah took a deep breath and then she was just honest with the students.

“Look y’all,” she gave them a sweet smile, “I am not going to lie to you. I am not that great at chess, but Principal Howard said the school needed someone to help out and sponsor it. So here I am. I want to apologize in advance if I accidentally mess up any rules or mispronounce the names of famous master players. I’m just here to make sure we are within regulations that y’all have a place to play, and that y’all don’t kill each other with the clock.”

This elicited a few nervous snickers and exactly two “yes ma’ams.”

“Ah its okay Miss Williams, we are just happy to be able to meet and compete,” one student said with a genuine smile.

Leah went over some of the scheduling and ideas of practice routines (that she had of course Googled). Everyone knew how to play, luckily.

“Sadly it seems that y’all didn’t really have a great budget for chessboards.” Leah pointed her arm at the pile of cobble together boards. The students all laughed.

“Yeah—football gets all the money around here—but isn’t that everywhere?” one student said with a chorus of agreements from his peers.

“I would say, lets go ahead and dive into practicing. Play some games and see how you do?” Leah trailed off as the boys all ambled to the battered game sets and began to pair up. There was an awkward, competitive scramble for the “best” board, which had the fewest mismatched pieces. The band kids gravitated together, as did the debate and drama kids. She watched as they set up, the clattering of wood and plastic oddly soothing after a day of institutional chaos.

The first meeting came to a close a bit early as it was--after all just a first meeting.

"See y'all next week!" Leah said as the students departed after cleaning up the chessboards. She was ready to get home. One more day left that week.