Because You Love To Hate Me

by Ameriie

  He was everything I could never be, don’t you see?

  Like, do you remember how he waltzed into AP bio the next day, took the exam (the one we’d crammed for all night), and then waltzed right back out with fifteen minutes to spare?

  Ms. Adler didn’t stop him. She just watched him saunter away, hands in his new uniform pockets. She didn’t stop him the next day, either, or any of the days Jim abruptly vanished.

  None of us did! We all just watched him go, thoroughly jealous that he could live by some internal clock only he heard. We guessed he went off to smoke cigarettes or snort Adderall, but we were wrong.

  Jim Moriarty went to the library.

  I know, Jean, because I went there with him.

  It was October. First week, third period. Jim had been at Baker Street Prep for almost a month. I had study hall that period, but rather than go to our dorm to practice the violin (as I should’ve done), I’d gone to the library. I used to go all the time, alone, when the procrastination bug hit or I was keyed up about an upcoming chess match.

  Now, I bet you didn’t know this, Jean, but there’s a chess table in the farthest corner of the library. Like, if you go past the main space with the cathedral ceilings, then circle around that lounge area with the armchairs that have more holes than leather, and you finally duck through those really tall bookcases on the right—the ones that are so close together your shoulders almost touch either side—you’ll find the board.

  It’s beside a dusty window (seriously, I don’t think it’s been washed in a decade). There’s an almost-as-dusty chessboard with two armchairs on either side of the table (mostly still leather since no one ever uses them), lit by a sad little wall sconce flickering overhead.

  I’m, like, 99 percent positive that until Jim Moriarty came along, I was the only person who knew that chessboard was there. I mean, the narrow shelves hold books in French and Spanish and German—and let’s be honest: don’t no one read in French or Spanish or German unless it’s for class.

  So there I sat, staring at the board in a makeshift Boden’s Mate pattern. The chess match against Scot’s Yard High was still a few months away, but I’d been reliving last year’s ass-kicking almost every night. Seriously, I would see pawns and bishops and Boden’s Mate in my sleep.

  The landscaping crew was outside, hazy figures with wide-brimmed hats and a lawn mower that needed a new carburetor. At least, that was my diagnosis based on the hum-hummmm-hum-hummmm sound it made.

  The crew had just scared the house sparrows from their nest above the window, and I was watching those dark, winged shapes swoop and swirl when a voice said, “Black bishop to F-five.”

  I jumped. I might’ve screamed, too. It was actually really embarrassing, but in my defense, no one ever came back there. I mean, I was so accustomed to being alone I’d actually pick my nose sometimes.

  I snapped my gaze to the shelves. Jim was standing there, with one of those little half smiles he does, where only the left corner of his mouth tows up. Elusive, that smile.

  “Can I play?” he asked, motioning to the black side of the board.

  I nodded dumbly, and Jim glided into the empty armchair. Leather squeaked, making him smile with both sides of that perfect mouth now.

  He was amused. An emotion I wouldn’t have known Jim Moriarty could feel, yet there he was. Grinning.

  At me.

  He set a book on the floor beside his chair. I hadn’t noticed he was holding it since I’d been so focused on hiding the tremble in my hands. Madame Bovary, it read. Par Gustave Flaubert.

  “Is it good?” My voice was shamefully tight, but can you blame me? There was a hot, mysterious guy who could read in French and who wanted to play chess with me. Things like that had never happened to Shirley Holmes.

  “The story’s okay” was Jim’s vague reply. Neither a yes nor a no. His gaze had already settled on the board, his forehead knitting down the middle in a way I would soon come to recognize. To look forward to. Because that furrow meant he was playing chess.

  With me.

  “It’s also a scary story,” he said at last.

  “How so?” I shifted my weight to move my hands beneath my thighs. They were still shaking—the bastards.

  “It’s about a woman who spends her whole life believing in fairy tales.” His dark eyes flicked to mine. Then, in a move that would have set the whole school to sighing, he eased off his glasses.

  He looks younger without them. Those thick black frames do a lot to hide his real face. Plus they leave two red marks on the bridge of his nose whenever he takes them off. Something about those marks made him seem . . . vulnerable. Exposed.

  I swallowed. “What’s wrong with believing in fairy tales?”

  “Reality will never live up.”

  “Oh.” This conversation had quickly moved out of my depth.

  Yes, you did read that right, Jean. I’m admitting that there’s something I don’t know better than everyone else, and I’m admitting that I felt—gasp!—uncomfortable by it.

  But then Jim made his move (knight to F3), and I was back in my element. He’d made a mistake, see? Not an amateur move—he clearly knew how to play—but definitely not an advanced move, either.

  I wasn’t about to go easy on him just because I thought he had nice eyes and was quite possibly the Coolest Person Who Had Ever Lived. Instead, I slid my bishop diagonally two squares before settling back to let him stare and frown and stare some more. The rest of the game unfolded in silence.

  A short game because I slaughtered him. Like, I had his king in about ten moves.

  “Checkmate,” I declared, sitting higher. Puffing out my chest. Preening, as you always accuse me of doing.

  He laughed then. A sound that would’ve slayed the school. It slayed me. Such surprise. Such deep delight. Then he was slipping his glasses back on and smiling full wattage. “Play again tomorrow?”

  Deer in headlights. All I could do was muster a nod.

  “Good.” He pushed to his feet, swooped up his book, and headed for the tunnel of shelves. But at the edge, he glanced back. “See you tomorrow, Holmes.”

  It was such a light tone. Playful. Flirty. And leaving me with no clue how to reply. See you tomorrow, Moriarty was a mouthful. And See you tomorrow, Jim was what everyone else in the world would say.

  So I offered up a smirk and said, “See you tomorrow, James.”

  As soon as the reply left my lips, I was cringing inside. No wonder no one ever invited me to the winter formal. I could not—and still cannot—flirt.

  But Jim laughed. That same surprised burst of sound. Sure, it was now muffled by walls of foreign literature, but I, Shirley Holmes, had made him laugh.

  Twice.

  Jim and I played every day after that.

  He got better. So did I, though.

  Especially during the third week of October. Halloween was coming up, and Jim had commented on the heat wave right as we sat down to play.

  “It’s weird,” he said, squinting through the dirty glass at a sunny afternoon. “Halloween should be cold and rattling with leaves. Or, at the very least, kind of cool outside.”

  “Thanks, global climate change!” I moved my pawn to A4. “Seriously, though, James. Get used to it. It’s never cold here, so if you’re looking for a white Christmas, you’ll have to head up north. The only Decembers I’ve ever lived through hotter than these were when my family lived in Johannesburg.”

  I was showing off a little. Hoping he’d ask about my South African mama.

  He did (score!), so I relayed my go-to story about that time baboons broke into my grandmother’s kitchen and crapped everywhere.

  “Your family sounds cool,” he offered at the end of the tale. His face, his tone . . . they were withdrawn. Sad, almost. And I hoped-hoped-hoped he would talk about his family. Or anything at all to do with his past or where he’d come from. I mean, had his parents died in a car crash? Had he been expelled for changing grades?

  The lates
t rumor was that his uncle used to work for the CIA before leaking classified files and then vanishing off the grid, and while I did find a Gregory Moriarty who’d done all that (yeah, Jean, I Googled him), I couldn’t confirm he was Jim’s uncle.

  And Jim certainly didn’t reveal anything about it. Instead, his head tipped back to watch me from the bottoms of his eyes, a hard gaze that set my hands to shaking again.

  Were I someone else, I’d have offered up some kind of “sexy move.” I’d have flashed a coy smile or batted my lashes or . . . or giggled knowingly (that’s a thing, right?). Basically, I’d have done anything other than what I actually did, which was to turn red-faced and plop my knight to a stupid spot on the board.

  “You want to be a lawyer,” he said eventually, attention still on me. It was his turn in the game, but he wouldn’t break that stare. “Your friend Jean Watson mentioned it.”

  My lips puckered to one side. He had spoken to you about me. That had to be a good sign, right? Also, why did you never mention this to me, Jean?

  “I mean,” I said with a shrug, “I’ve always planned on being a lawyer. You know. Go to Harvard, like my dad.”

  “Why?” His eyes finally returned to the board. And I finally breathed again. “Are you just really passionate about heretofores and notwithstandings?”

  “No.” I huffed a chuckle, heat rising up my neck. “I want to help people, actually.”

  “You mean you want to help your wallet,” he countered. “Or maybe it’s your daddy’s wallet.”

  “It’s not like that,” I insisted. Yet even as the argument flew out, I knew that it was like that. Still, I floundered on. “My dad uses the law to win justice. For victims. So I want to do the same.”

  “But you do know that at least ten thousand convictions are wrong each year. Sounds to me like the ‘criminals’ ”—he air-quoted that—“are the bigger victims there.”

  “Come on, now.” I leaned on my knees. “What about the convictions that are actually right? What about the people who really need help, and it’s up to the lawyer to make it happen?”

  “Please, Holmes.” He made a face. A frowning, disappointed thing. “It’s never that simple, is it?”

  Were he my father making that expression, I’d have instantly shriveled. Were he Ms. Adler or the headmistress or basically anyone in the world, I’d have rolled right on my back with my tail between my legs.

  And honestly, if you’d asked me a few minutes before this happened How would you react to Jim Moriarty’s disappointment? I’d have expected to shrivel. I mean, I was crushing on him so hard. But instead, I found heat building in my belly. Found my fingers tightening around my bishop, my knuckles paling as I squeezed.

  And as Jim continued: “Most people don’t steal or kill or sell drugs because they want to, Holmes, or because they love being ‘bad guys’ so much. They do it because they’re born to a life with no exits. No chances. Unlike you or me, they can’t just walk through walls.”

  “Walk through walls?” Squeeze, squeeze, squeeze. “What does that even mean?”

  “It means you’re lucky to be where you are. Who you are.” Abruptly, he shot to his feet, the chair groaning back across the floor. “Wait here.” In three long steps, the towering bookcases swallowed him whole.

  And I just sat there, inexplicably furious. I wanted to smack him. Or to break this bishop in two. I mean, no one—no one—had ever told me that the law was a stupid career path to follow.

  And no one had ever accused me of doing it for the money, either.

  Jim returned in under a minute. “Here.” A book fell onto my lap. Worn hardcover, barely taller than my hand and no thicker.

  Gabriel García Márquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold. The English translation.

  “Read it,” Jim ordered, “and tell me who’s guilty at the end. Tell me who you, as a lawyer, would lock away.”

  “And should I write a five-paragraph essay on it, too, Professor Moriarty?” I shoved a pawn to H3. “Or will there be a pop quiz tomorrow?”

  He sighed and settled back into his seat. “You don’t have to read it. I just think . . . it’s a good book, okay?”

  I didn’t answer. It was childish of me—that sullen silence. Not to mention totally irrational. Yes, I can be abrasive, Jean. But you know me! I don’t ever let my temper come out. I make mistakes when I’m mad, and mistakes are for people who are not the offspring of William Holmes.

  I moved my pawn to E5—a move as foolish as they come. I mean, instantly, the whole game unraveled for me, and in about fifteen turns, Jim said, “Check.”

  A minute passed, during which I only managed to expose my king all the more, and when he finished with “Checkmate, Holmes,” all I could do was glare.

  Remember that night I woke you up because I was crying?

  I told you the book I was reading was sad, which was a lie. I mean, Chronicle of a Death Foretold wasn’t meant to be sad. It was supposed to be a commentary on who’s truly to blame: those who commit a murder or the village that does nothing to stop it?

  Yet underneath, tangled between its sentences and its beats, there was a love story. A girl—Angela—whose life was controlled by the men around her. A girl whose worth was based on what she could give. A girl who finally found what she wanted in life . . .

  But she was too late to claim it, leaving only one end for everyone: a senseless death foretold.

  I didn’t tell Jim I had cried reading the book. I simply said, “The whole village was guilty” when I eased into my armchair the next day.

  The landscapers were right outside our window, weed-hacking and hedge-trimming in a roar of engines and snapping branches. We were halfway into our game before they passed, and I was finally able to add, “The townsfolk knew the brothers planned to kill Santiago, but no one intervened.”

  “So who gets punished?”

  “The brothers.”

  “Even though everyone around them was just as guilty?”

  “Well, the village didn’t stab Santiago twenty times until his intestines fell all over the dirt! That was Angela’s brothers.”

  A shake of Jim’s head, but not with annoyance. His eyes were crinkling behind his glasses as he jumped his knight forward to take my pawn. “You’re way too smart for the law, Holmes. Too smart to believe in things that aren’t real.”

  I slid my rook to D4, claiming a black knight. “And how is justice not real, James?”

  “None of it is.” He waved to the board. “Not the rules. Not the game.” He jerked his head toward the window, hair flopping with that gut-wrenching perfection. “Not the pruned trees or keeping up with the Joneses. Least of all that legal system you plan to get a ‘degree’ studying. They’re just myths. Giant lies that we all agree to believe in. And the only reason they hold power over us is because we let them.”

  I’ll admit that my jaw fell open a little. Then, in a move of ultimate poise and eloquence, I said, “Huh?”

  And Jim laughed. Maybe it was the tenth laugh or maybe the hundredth that I’d conjured from him, yet it was this laugh that sent me tumbling head over heels.

  Yet even though I was falling—so fast and with so much blood roaring in my ears—the idiocy of Jim’s next move (black queen to E6) allowed my brain to operate, my mouth to articulate, “All those things, James. Those . . . myths. They give us order. A framework to live in.”

  “They also give us war, Holmes. And genocide and poverty and”—a wave around the library—“an upper class. Don’t you see it? Shared mythology is what creates us versus them.”

  “Soooo?” I dragged out the word to emphasize my complete and total confusion. “Do you want chaos, then? No school or government or games? Are you an anarchist, James?”

  “Hardly, Holmes.” A snort. “More like . . . Let’s just say that I want to find what’s real. I want to feel it—whatever it might be. And then, while the rest of the world sits cozy and oblivious inside their glass houses, I will be walking through walls.�
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  “Oh?” I said with fake interest. “And how do you plan to do that, sir?”

  “Same way I always do.” And there it was again, Jean. That sad, broken smile—though it vanished two heartbeats later as he rested his elbows on the table. Steepled his fingers over the board.

  “Want to know something about me, Holmes?”

  “Yes,” I breathed with far too much enthusiasm.

  He didn’t notice. His eyes drifted down to the board. “I came to Baker Street Prep for something, and once I find it, I don’t plan on sticking around.”

  Everything inside me went cold. “What is it you’re looking for?”

  “A key,” he said calmly. “To a door that people don’t want opened.”

  It was then that I saw the reality: he was the nephew of Gregory Moriarty, and just like his uncle, he wanted to whistle-blow and declassify and expose people he thought had done wrong.

  But before I could dwell on what that might mean or what key he might be looking for, he said, “Oh, and checkmate.”

  I blinked, lost for a moment. I’d completely forgotten that a game still waged between us. But wait—hadn’t Jim lost his queen to me a few turns back?

  I honed in on the black and white squares . . . and then groaned. Because dammit, he’d used the same move that gets me every time.

  Boden’s Mate.

  Boden’s freakin’ Mate.

  Another month passed. The same routine unfolded each day. Me versus Jim. White versus black.

  Jim won more often, and I didn’t even care. But now the walls were shrinking in.

  Then one day we had our first stalemate. It was early December—the day I skipped fourth-period orchestra, remember? I told you I had cramps, but the truth was that the chess game had run long.

  Dad had told my older brother, Mike, and me the night before that if we didn’t close out our semesters with the highest GPAs, then we were officially uninvited from the family trip to Aruba. What a jerk, right?