by Don Hall

“Let’s start a chess club!”

The ten players in the room got quiet. Ted was always the activist in the group of mostly sophomores. He was a senior, after all.

Jeremy raised his head. “Why?”

“Why?” Ted was animated. He was passionate. “Because the football team gets all the funding for trips, all the attention during Homecoming. You all remember them trashing our parade float...”

“...it wasn’t really a float. It was your Pinto with a paper mache rook attached to the trunk with duct tape...” muttered Sarah.

“And I’m tired of playing second fiddle to a bunch of spoiled, privileged jocks! Let’s start a CHESS CLUB!”

And start a chess club they did. They didn’t have the numbers that the marching band did but the marching band was aligned with the football team so it didn’t matter. Ted managed to get Mr. Warren to sponsor the club and Mr. Jackson got Ms. Johansson to grant a few hundred dollars for chess boards and pieces. Things were looking up for Ted’s activist tendencies.

A month later, while the club was meeting (a scene of now fifteen geeky kids playing chess in the library drinking cans of Mountain Dew Extreme and gnawing on Taco flavored Doritos) Monica came in and sat down next to Ted.

“I want to join the club.”

“Do you play chess?”

“No. Hate it. But me and my friends are into Magic...”

“The game?”

“Yeah. We think the chess club could be more inclusive of other games.”

“Inclusive?”

“The notion that an organization or system is welcoming to new populations and/or identities. We identify as gamers so we want to be included in your club.”

Monica was cute so Ted figured “Why not?”

Soon, word got around that the chess club was open to members into gaming. By November membership had grown to include fifteen chess players, four Magic gamers, two kids who loved Texas Hold’Em, a trio of Monopoly enthusiasts, and a kid who no one really talked to but had convinced Monica that his tendency to eat Glue Sticks and stack the empty cylinders was a ‘game.’

Mr. Jackson finagled a few more hundred dollars to take the club to the regional chess tournament downstate. Ted decided that only the actual chess players should get to go (there wasn’t a lot of cash to spread around and they’d still need to sleep five in a room) but the group resisted this.

“What about us?” The poker players felt it wasn’t fair that the club received money from the school that they weren’t able to access. “We could take that money and triple it in an online tourney!”

“We could get an updated set of Magic cards,” said Monica, defiant in her look.

“And this Monopoly board is a thousand years old,” declared Ben.

Suddenly the Glue Stick kid started screaming “CHESS CHESS CHESTER CHESS! It’s all about fucking chess but what about ME! WHAT. ABOUT. MEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!” and he rapidly swallowed three pawns off of one of the closer games and choked himself until the school nurse could get him to vomit them up.

It turned out Monica was bi-sexual and had a girlfriend. The money was returned and reappropriated to help buy traffic cones for drivers ed. Mr. Jackson decided to sponsor the speech team instead.

Meanwhile the football team won the state championship.