When Bullies Play Chess

When I was in the fourth grade - about nine years old - I had a bully.

Now, he was hardly the first, and very certainly not the last. I have memories of being bullied as early as four years old by other kids, and of course stories from Quite Recently about being bullied by adults.

But this one, stood out... like almost no others have. There was something extra vicious, relentless, and intense about the hurt he threw at me. The marks he left are unlike any of the other abuse I've sustained - a mystery I've been deeply curious about for years now, but have never really managed to understand.

Anyways, I'm going to call this kid D, because that was the first letter of his name.

D wasted no time making my life hell, but I honestly only remember a tiny handful of incidents. The most vivid one involved me and my chess board.

Now, as far as I had any clue, carrying a small travel chess set to school every day is perfectly normal nine year old girl behavior, so the entire incident really caught me off guard, despite knowing full well that D was going to find way to treat me like shit.

I'd brought the board to school lunch hour a couple of times before he wandered over and showed interest. Nobody else really wanted to play; something else that went completely over my young head at the time, but here we are.

It was a little fold-up plastic board, with a metal plate under the checkered surface. The pieces were barely bigger than my fingernail, little rough blobs of plastic with tiny magnets glued to the bases. It wasn't comfortable to play on, and certainly wasn't fancy, but it fit into a backpack among the rest of my school stuff, and was easy enough to break out at the lunch table for a few minutes before classes resumed.

D came over and confidently challenged me to a game, boasting loudly to anyone hanging around (which, honestly, probably wasn't a lot of people - I was not exactly a charismatic magnet of a kid). He was certain he would beat me at this, and prove his "superiority" over me in chess like everything else.

I calmly accepted his challenge, and quietly told him I was pretty sure I could beat him in less than five moves.

He scoffed at this, and we began to play.

Sure enough, a few moves later, I had won - I was a huge fan of rapid opening strategies at the time, and used a trivial method (often called the Scholar's Mate) to shut him down extremely quickly. I liked using it as a joke opener on unwary opponents who underestimated me; my usual habit was to share a laugh, offer to declare it a "practice game", and restart again.

For most of the people I'd played against - generally much older adults - it was a friendly and gently amusing way to warn them to take me seriously. It usually worked out great; they'd realize they needed to be careful, and we'd generally go on to play actually interesting, stimulating, challenging games.

D was different.

I extended my usual offer - this one doesn't have to count, we can just play again. He was livid, and spent the rest of the day in a complete rage.

But he also left me alone that entire afternoon.

The next day, he approached me again, and asked if I would play him again. Hoping for an actual decent match, I agreed, and offered him his choice of which color to play - to be as sporting as I could.

He chose black a second time, and I pulled the board out of my bag and set it up, and made my first opening move.

I was fully unprepared for how D responded. He stood up on the seat, fully looming over the lunch table, and grabbed a random piece from his side of the board.

Instead of moving it correctly, he reached over to my king, smashed the piece off the board and onto the ground, and loudly began yelling that he had won the game and beat me in his first move.

I was bewildered by this, more than a bit upset at his mistreatment of my prized plastic and magnets chess set, and fully unable to do anything more than quietly put everything away and go back to trying as hard as I could to avoid him at every turn.

In a way, he sort of did win; I never brought a chess set to school again, after that.

Of course, he also lost, in all the most meaningful ways. But that's not what my heart remembers of the experience. It's never really been much more than cold comfort.

I don't know much about what happened to D. His parents removed him from the school and relocated a few months later. I never heard anything about any of them again. I did look him up on the internet once, in the past few years, and as near as I could tell he's had a pretty bad life.

I'm not surprised, but I am a tiny bit sad for him. He never got past flinging chess pieces off the table and claiming to be the winner, it seems. It's a rough way to live, I'm sure.

Anyways, I generally do my best to ignore news and current events, especially around politics. The stress isn't worth it and the news cycle is intentionally weaponized to distract and exhaust us - to keep us from doing anything real to unseat the tyranny of the status quo.

But every now and then I hear about something or other going on in the world politically.

And I'm reminded a lot, these days especially, of the experience of D "playing" chess with me.

D may not have found any meaningful status or success in life. But a lot of people like him have.

I smile about this, whenever I think about the comparison. As much as it sucks to have our pieces flung onto the ground and be jeered at by someone towering over us, they all end up losing at everything that matters.