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chairs sat inside the U, facing the black pieces, but there were no chairs facing the white ones.
    It had been twenty minutes since the stop at the Pure Oil station and she was no longer trembling, but her eyes smarted and her joints felt sore. She was wearing her navy pleated skirt and a white blouse with red letters spelling
Methuen
over the pocket.
    There was no one in the room when they came in; Mr. Ganz had unlocked the door with a key from his pocket. After a minute a bell rang and there were the sounds of footsteps and some shouts in the hallway, and students began to come in. They were mostly boys. Big boys, as big as men; this was senior high. They wore sweaters and slouched with their hands in their pockets. Beth wondered for a moment where she was supposed to sit. But she couldn’t sit if she was going to play them all at once; she would have to walk from board to board to make the moves. “Hey, Allan. Watch out!” one boy shouted to another, jerking his thumb toward Beth. Abruptly she saw herself as a small unimportant person—a plain, brown-haired orphan girl in dull institutional clothes. She was half the size of these easy, insolent students with their loud voices and bright sweaters. She felt powerless and silly. But then she looked at the boards again, with the pieces set in the familiar pattern, and the unpleasant feelings lessened. She might be out of place in this public high school, but she was not out of place with those twelve chessboards.
    “Take your seats and be quiet, please.” Mr. Ganz spoke with surprising authority. “Charles Levy will take Board Number One, since he’s our top player. The rest can sit where they want to. There will be no talking during play.”
    Suddenly everyone was quiet, and they all began to look at Beth. She looked back at them, unblinking, and she felt rising in her a hatred as black as night.
    She turned to Mr. Ganz. “Do I start now?” she asked.
    “With Board Number One.”
    “And then I go to the next one?”
    “That’s right,” he said. She realized that he hadn’t even introduced her to the class. She stepped over to the first board, the one with Charles Levy sitting behind the black pieces. She reached out, picked up the king’s pawn and moved it to the fourth rank.
    The surprising thing was how badly they played. All of them. In the very first games of her life she had understood more than they did. They left backward pawns all over the place, and their pieces were wide open for forks. A few of them tried crude mating attacks. She brushed those aside like flies. She moved briskly from board to board, her stomach calm and her hand steady. At each board it took only a second’s glance to read the position and see what was called for. Her responses were quick, sure and deadly. Charles Levy was supposed to be the best of them; she had his pieces tied up beyond help in a dozen moves; in six more she mated him on the back rank with a knight-rook combination.
    Her mind was luminous, and her soul sang to her in the sweet moves of chess. The classroom smelled of chalk dust and her shoes squeaked as she moved down the rows of players. The room was silent; she felt her own presence centered in it, small and solid and in command. Outside, birds sang, but she did not hear them. Inside, some of the students stared at her. Boys came in from the hallway and lined up along the back wall to watch the homely girl from the orphanage at the edge of town who moved from player to player with the determined energy of a Caesar in the field, a Pavlova under the lights. There were about a dozen people watching. Some smirked and yawned, but others could feel the energy in the room, the presence of something that had never, in the long history of this tired old schoolroom, been felt there before.
    What she did was at bottom shockingly trivial, but the energy of her amazing mind crackled in the room for those who knew how to listen. Her chess moves blazed with it. By the end of