Checkmate Read Free Page A

lead it in the city of New York.”
    “If I were being burned at the stake would it excuse me from any of your programs, Mr. Culpepper?” Bobbi asked.
    “If you were burning yourself on school property you would be completely responsible for any damage you caused,Miss McCall,” Mr. Culpepper said. “Away from school property would give you more leeway, of course, but would not offer an excuse to be delinquent in your assignments.”
    “I thought so,” Bobbi said.
    Outside of Mr. Culpepper’s office we decided to call a meeting with Sidney to talk over his problems. Everyone except LaShonda thought that was a good idea.
    “It won’t work,” she said. “Sidney ain’t stupid. He knows drugs are wack. So what are we going to say to him?”
    “If we tell him how much we care about him it could make a difference,” I said.
    “And how much we need him on the chess team,” Bobbi said. “I heard that Hunter is hiring a professional chess coach to work with their team.”
    “We can’t do anything until we scope the problem,” I said. “Let’s talk to Sidney and see what’s happening.”
    Everybody agreed to that and I was feeling good about it. Then Bobbi and LaShonda got into it again.
    Me and Kambui usually take things pretty easy. The two girls, LaShonda and Bobbi, get excited about everything. LaShonda is always excited to begin with, and Bobbi, who is always smiling and always giving out hersquinchy-eyed look, is not excited until you disagree with her. Then she gets mad. So when Bobbi announced that she had entered a project for the Cruisers in the Independent Learning Project and LaShonda didn’t like it, the sparks began to fly.
    “Yo, girl, who are you to tell all of the Cruisers what we’re going to be doing?” LaShonda asked.
    “Yo, girl, if you want to be into some project away from the Cruisers, just go for it,” Bobbi said. “You probably can’t handle the theme I put out anyway.”
    “I can snatch all the hair off your little round head!” LaShonda said. “And then beat your butt until you turn red, white, and blue.”
    “How intelligent!” Bobbi was getting up into LaShonda’s face.
    Kambui separated the two girls by stepping in between them.
    “What is your project?” he asked Bobbi.
    “Well, we have to learn one subject all on our own and prove it to a teacher,” Bobbi said. “So I thought we could learn the statistical basis of basketball. I call it In-Your-Face Probability Theory.”
    “You can’t learn no …” LaShonda tilted her head to one side. “You mean like what percentage of shots they make and stuff like that?”
    “There are a lot of basketball stats we can use,” Bobbi said. “And since the final result is numerical, there has to be some angle we can work.”
    “If we can get a math teacher to approve it,” Kambui said.
    I liked the idea of getting basketball involved in an academic program. I was also thinking it would make the Cruisers seem even cooler.
    “I’m not sure, but I’ll go along with it,” LaShonda said.
    “You know, Sidney is good in math, too,” I said.
    “And that can be our way of getting to talk to him without looking too stupid!” LaShonda said. “Zander, you are smart.”
    I knew that.
    Kambui and I had History together and headed toward class. On the way he started talking about Sidney. He said nothing was going to work because people who used drugs wanted to be drug addicts.
    “We don’t know he’s using drugs, Kambui,” I said. “All we know is that he asked about how to get some.”
    “Zander, who doesn’t know drugs are bad?” Kambuiasked. “Everybody knows that. You see crackheads lying around in the street, leaning against buildings, running around looking desperate. They know they’re messed up and they all look miserable. You can’t talk to them because they know everything you know already. And how’s he going to play chess with his head messed up?”
    He had a point.
     

THE CRUISER
A MODEST