Read Last Night at the Circle Cinema for Free Online Page B

jacket.
    â€œHeat’s still broken,” I said as I backed out of the driveway. It was my mother’s car originally, and she hadn’t been feeling well lately, and that meant not working much which translated as no extra cash to throw at her rotting vehicle. At some point it would just give up completely and sit dead in the driveway.
    â€œIt’s okay,” Livvy said. She turned to look out the window, her left hand was very close to the gearshift where my right hand was. “I found out about you,” she said without turning.
    â€œOh yeah?” I forced my voice to be even, though I was nervous. What had she found out? Browser history? Evidence of some prank I’d pulled at school? Counting the pills in my medicine cabinet?
    â€œOh yeah. Not that I was lurking or anything, but I found stuff about how you were ...” She moved her hand on top of mine, shifting through first gear at the red light through second and into fourth when we were on Apple Street, away from traffic. “... A chess prodigy. How come you never said anything?”
    When I was nine years old, I was the fourth-ranked chess player in the Northeast. After school and on Saturdays, I played the old guys in Brookville Square, the ones who used to be good but had started to drink, or the one Russian homeless guy who taught me the Catalan Opening for when I played white. I was an anxious kid—always picking at my cuticles and making up reasons why I shouldn’t leave the house. And our house had the charm and grace of an old marathon sock, so you knew something was off. But chess was structure and planning and theory, and the confines of it made it easy for me.
    I shrugged. I pulled over because while I wanted to be the kind of guy who could drive with a beautiful girl’s hand on mine in a gesture open to innumerable interpretations, I wasn’t. I was the kind of guy who pulled over and asked about it.
    Livvy’s turn to shrug. “I’m cold?” she sounded unsure. “I don’t know. Doesn’t it feel okay?”
    â€œIt does,” I said. I did not add, But what does it mean? “But so, yeah, I used to compete.”
    â€œAnd then?” Livvy kept her hand on mine and I kept mine on the gear.
    â€œAnd then I stopped.” I moved my hand out from under hers, and when she looked the tiniest bit wounded by this I touched her hair, which sort of spilled out from her flimsy crocheted hat, the kind of hat a grandma probably made and that someone—other girls—would only wear in front of that grandma to be nice, but that Livvy actually pulled off without incident.
    â€œBut if you were, you know, this chess star, why would you just—”
    â€œBecause I woke up one morning and it was no different than any other morning and I didn’t feel like going to play and I didn’t feel like reviewing strategies. There’s this term, adjournment , which is when you suspend a game with the intention of returning to it later on.”
    â€œAnd was your break sort of an adjournment?” Livvy bit her lip as my fingers looped around her hair.
    â€œI thought it was, at first.” Her hair felt like new grass, soft and fine and impossible not to want to touch or smell. “And then I just never went back.”
    Livvy shifted around, knocking my hand out of her hair, wrestling something from her back pocket. She unfolded a piece of paper to show me a grainy picture of myself, little, three maybe, with my hands folded on a chessboard, my chin resting on my hands. “How cute are you?” She paused. “I mean, you still are, of course.”
    â€œOf course,” I said. There’s this old cliché in chess: planlessness is punished. And I knew right then that I was planless. In chess, you need the ability to evaluate your position and formulate a plan. I felt that I was often meticulous at planning certain things—a prank in which I filled the