Checkmate Read Free

quirky, the kind of person I don’t know anything about but I like her a lot. Her thing is numbers. She’s fascinated with anything that has numbers attached to it and she can play around with numbers and come up with stuff that looks absolutely useless but is still somehow interesting. She also plays second board on the chess team, so you kind of get the picture of what her brain must look like.
    I’m Alexander Scott but my friends call me Zander. I would like to be a writer one day. My folks are divorced and my dad lives all the way out in Seattle. He’s a local weatherman. My mom is a model and sometimes she gets small roles in films or television.
    Mr. Culpepper liked to say that he hated faces.
    “Show me a child’s face and I don’t know anything about him,” he would say. “Show me his school record and I will tell you everything about his past, present, and future!”
    The grades of the Cruisers were mostly in the just-get-by range, but the thing about the kids at Da Vinci is that we’re all smart. You can almost hear the wheels clicking when we start thinking.
    “The paper will be the bomb,” Kambui said. “It’ll be the four of us keeping it real and speaking truth to power.”
    Mr. Culpepper smiled. It was the kind of look that an alligator gets just before he pounces. The grades of all the kids in the room were floating around the C+ area, and he couldn’t get us on that. But if we messed up with the newspaper idea, and you could tell he thought we would, he would have us.
    “Well, it sounds like a plan, doesn’t it?” he said. “But we will see,
won’t
we?”
    Mrs. Florenz Maxwell, our principal, is a saint. Where Mr. Culpepper is loud, she’s quiet. When he gets excited, she is calm. Sometimes I think they work together, but I hope she really doesn’t like him. I know she likes the Cruisers because she told me. So when Mr. Culpeppercalled the Cruisers into his office the day after he had called me at home and I saw her sitting there I felt good.
    Okay, we were in the office. Mr. Culpepper shuffled through the papers he keeps around just to shuffle, then he cleared his throat and spoke.
    “Sidney has been arrested for attempting to buy drugs from an undercover policeman,” Mr. Culpepper said. He looked around at us carefully before going on. “He was down in Alphabet City.”
    Da Vinci Academy is in Harlem. Alphabet City is what they call the section where the avenues are Avenue A, Avenue B, and Avenue C. I don’t know if they ran out of names or what, but everybody knew there was some drug dealing going on down there. Also, a bunch of good poetry and some great music.
    “I think that since he only inquired as to the availability of drugs, and the particular amount involved is not classified as dangerous, there won’t be further prosecution,” Mr. Culpepper said. “What we were hoping was that some of his peers, you people, could talk to Sidney and see if there are problems that need handling. He won’t tell us anything.”
    “We want to do everything we can for Sidney,” Mrs.Maxwell said. “But sometimes we don’t know what to do. If he has a problem at home, perhaps we can point him in the right direction before he gets into further trouble.”
    “What do you think, Bobbi?” Mr. Culpepper looked toward her. “You’re both on the chess team, aren’t you?”
    “Beats me,” Bobbi said. “I’m really surprised. Zander’s his friend.”
    “Mr. Scott?” Culpepper looked in my direction.
    “Sidney’s okay,” I said. “We’ll talk to him.”
    “Our concern is that there is a slippery slope that has to be avoided when any drugs are involved,” Mr. C. went on. “Sidney’s a major asset to this school and we don’t want him incapacitated.”
    “Or be by himself if he has a real problem,” Mrs. Maxwell added quickly.
    “And this won’t excuse you from the IL program,” Mr. Culpepper said. “Independent Learning will be the wave of the future, and Da Vinci will