Sometimes you find friendship where you least expect it...
Tess Goodwin's life in rural Iowa is sheltered and uncomplicated.
Although she chooses to spend most of her free time playing chess with her best friend Zander, the farm-boy from next door, her skills as a bovine midwife and tractor mechanic ensure that she fits in with the other kids at East Chester High. But when her veteran father reenlists in the Army, moving her family halfway across the country to North Carolina, Tess is forced out of her comfort zone into a world she knows nothing about.
Tess approaches the move as she would a new game of chess, plotting her course through the unfamiliar reality of her new life. While heeding Zander's long-distance advice for making new friends and strategizing a means to endure her dad's imminent deployment to the Middle East, she quickly discovers how ill-equipped she is to navigate the societal challenges she encounters and becomes convinced she'll never fit in with the students at her new school.
When Leonetta Jackson is assigned as her mentor, she becomes Tess's unexpected guide through the winding labyrinth of cultural disparities between them, sparking a tentative friendship and challenging Tess to confront her reluctant nature. As the pieces move across the board of her upended life, will Tess find the acceptance she so desperately desires?
Tess Goodwin's life in rural Iowa is sheltered and uncomplicated.
Although she chooses to spend most of her free time playing chess with her best friend Zander, the farm-boy from next door, her skills as a bovine midwife and tractor mechanic ensure that she fits in with the other kids at East Chester High. But when her veteran father reenlists in the Army, moving her family halfway across the country to North Carolina, Tess is forced out of her comfort zone into a world she knows nothing about.
Tess approaches the move as she would a new game of chess, plotting her course through the unfamiliar reality of her new life. While heeding Zander's long-distance advice for making new friends and strategizing a means to endure her dad's imminent deployment to the Middle East, she quickly discovers how ill-equipped she is to navigate the societal challenges she encounters and becomes convinced she'll never fit in with the students at her new school.
When Leonetta Jackson is assigned as her mentor, she becomes Tess's unexpected guide through the winding labyrinth of cultural disparities between them, sparking a tentative friendship and challenging Tess to confront her reluctant nature. As the pieces move across the board of her upended life, will Tess find the acceptance she so desperately desires?
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Chapter one
My best friend Zander is buried in his phone, playing Clash of Kingdoms in the passenger’s seat beside me on our way to school. Normally I’d be annoyed by his disinterest since there’s nothing I hate more than feeling like his chauffeur. But this morning, I’m actually relieved his preoccupation with securing a new realm has left him oblivious to both my distracted driving and my somber mood.
As we sputter into the West Hancock High School student parking lot in my ancient Volkswagen Jetta, Lacey Pemberton darts out from behind a parked car to where her boyfriend is leaning against the bed of his pickup. I slam on my breaks to avoid hitting her, and Zander finally looks up from his game.
“If any part of you wanted take her out, that woulda been your chance,” he says, turning off his phone as I pull into an empty parking spot at the far end of the lot. “No one woulda blamed you. She clearly wasn’t watching for oncoming traffic.”
Although it’s sweet of him to express his continued solidarity where Lacey is concerned, retribution for her long-standing aggression toward us is the last thing on my mind. Yesterday I might have joined him in one of our exhaustive analyses of her tyrannical hold over the student body. But today? Today the foundation of my life is crumbling beneath me. Her cruelty is no longer relevant.
“I mean, seriously, there’s a perfectly good crosswalk twenty-five feet away that her student council petitioned for last year. Where are her ‘safety first’ buttons now?”
I climb out of the car and slip both arms into my backpack straps. It took every ounce of willpower I possessed not to break down to him on the way to school about the bombshell my dad dropped on my family after breakfast this morning. Zander and I share absolutely everything with each other and to keep this secret from him, if only for an hour, feels something like betrayal. But as I stretch my canvas coat closed across my chest and trudge through the parking lot toward the side entrance of the school, I don’t have the strength to make my announcement more than once. He’ll have to hear my news along with everyone else.
“See how easy it is to glance both ways before you cross?” He makes a big show of turning his head to the left and the right before stepping onto the street. “It takes two seconds and you don’t have to worry about accidentally getting run over.”
Corn flakes churn in my stomach, sloshing around undigested as I stew about my traumatic morning, which started normally enough before taking an unexpected turn. Everything was fine until after breakfast, when instead of heading out to the barn for our typical morning chores, my sister Ashley and I were waylaid by Dad at the kitchen table where he blindsided us with his big news. Now, I can barely keep my knees from buckling as I brace myself against the cab of a classmate’s beater pickup, recalling his plan. I’d hoped the initial shock would be worn off by the time we got to school, but the realization keeps hitting me in waves, and I’m forced slow my pace across the parking lot to steady my breathing.
Zander waits for me by the entrance after noticing I’ve fallen behind, and I can tell by the suspicious look on his face he’s finally realized something’s up. “Nothing? Really? Come on, Tess, this is the part where you say, ‘Accidents are painful. Safety is gainful.’” He laughs aloud. “Remember those signs Lacey hung all over last year?”
He holds the door open and I manage a weak smile. “I remember,” I say stepping into the building.
His eyes narrow as if he’s about to ask what’s wrong, but before he can inquire our friend Pete careens through the door behind us, throwing himself onto Zander’s back. “Chess club in the house!” he hollers. “You two headed to the library?”
It’s a rhetorical question because he knows we are. Along with a handful of other members, the three of us have been meeting in the partitioned corner of the library we call the War Room every morning before first bell since we established the school’s inaugural chess club freshman year. Even back then, Zander recognized the need to get creative if we hoped to build stand-out resumes for college applications. With less than two hundred people in the entire student body, our extracurricular options consist of a few sports, National Honor Society, and the drama club. Zander always teases that if there’s a spot on Harvard’s application for artificial cow insemination, he’ll be a shoo-in, but we both doubt there is. We founded the chess club with Mike, Bruster (whose given name is Horace), Claire, Pete, and Will to impress admission specialists with something outside our agricultural endeavors, but none of it seems important this morning given my current situation.
By the time we get to the War Room, Claire and Bruster are already embroiled in a game they’ve been playing since late-September, and Mike is scribbling furiously onto a loose sheet of notebook paper. He looks up as Zander collapses into the seat beside him, but instead of joining them as I normally do, I linger just inside the door.
“I swear to God if I have to look at one more tangent or cosine, I might end it all right here in the library. Because at this point I don’t care how tall the stupid tree is. I’d actually love if it fell on my head and put me out of my misery.”
“Don’t you have some fancy calculator for that trigonometry crap?” Zander asks. He pulls his morning pop out of his backpack, and I relish the familiar fizzing sound as he cracks it open. “Breakfast of champions,” he says to me.
“Yeah,” Bruster chimes in without taking his eyes off the chess board, “say that a little louder with all the dairy farmers in the room.”
“If milk were caffeinated, I’d make the switch. Until then, I’ll start my day with a pop.”
Zander’s pop of choice is Sioux City Sarsaparilla which makes me crazy because he will drive miles out of his way to find some instead of drinking a readily-available Coke like everyone else. He likes flapjacks but not waffles. His left foot is two sizes bigger than his right. And he cries at the movie Rudy every time he sees it. It’s taken me a lifetime to learn everything there is to know about Zander. The thought of ever having to cultivate new friendships seriously makes me want to puke.
I venture a nervous glance at the wall clock over their heads from my post along the periphery of the room. There’re only twelve minutes left until the bell rings and several members of the group have yet to make an appearance. I’m considering holding off on my announcement until lunch when Liam, Tina, and Will arrive.
“What’s up?” Will says, chucking his backpack onto the floor. He and Zander shake hands in this ridiculous way they assume makes them appear tragically hip but really only accentuates how incredibly middle-American they are. I’ve encouraged them not to do it in public on several occasions to no avail. This time, I don’t even have the strength to roll my eyes.
“My dad said something about you guys getting a new cultivator,” Zander says to him.
Will pulls their game board from the shelf and sets it gently on the table between them, careful not to disturb any of the pieces. “Yeah. Sorta. It’s a used New Holland we’re co-opting with the Millers and the Burns. It’s way better than the Massey we’ve been using though so hopefully things’ll go more smoothly this spring than they did last year.”
From across the room, I listen to the guys talking about their dads and the machinery and the beautiful routineness that embodies what it means to grow up on a farm. The milking, feeding, and mucking, ever present regardless of the season, pressing us forward through the steady monotony of our chore-filled days. The cycle of life. The reaping. The sowing. Births. Deaths. The unexpected cold snap or drought or locust invasion. All these things I can handle. All these things are as much of who I am as who we all are.
But who would I be without my farm, my herd, and everybody I already know?
Thinking about it causes me to unwittingly cry out.
“I’m moving. To North Carolina. Right after Christmas.”
Everyone stops what they’re doing as if I’ve pushed pause on the soundtrack of our morning. Slowly, their faces distort into looks of concern. Brows furrow. Lips purse.
“You’re doing what now?” Bruster asks.
I explain again, this time with slightly more detail, trying desperately to talk around the lump that’s taken residence my throat. “My dad reenlisted in the Army. It’s like some…” I pause, searching for a neutral explanation which doesn’t express the actual shock and horror I’m experiencing before I continue. “Midlife crisis or something. Because the farm can’t support our family financially anymore. And I don’t know, some civic duty thing because of the war in Syria.”
I force myself to go on, pressing the heels of my hands into my temples and averting my gaze since I can no longer be trusted to look at any of them directly without bursting into tears. Zander, of course, is the worst. He’s gaping at me like I’ve slaughtered his prize pig.
“He already has his orders, and he’s been assigned to Fort Bragg in Fayetteville,” I say to the floor. “We’re selling the farm. We’re leaving right after Christmas.”
No one speaks. There’s only my heartbeat pulsing inside my head and my jagged breathing.
In one swift motion, Zander stands. I don’t know what he’s doing, but he’s coming at me fast. Before I can react, he’s got me in an embrace which can only be described as a cross between a headlock and a vice grip, and he’s squeezing me. Hard. I’m about to pass out from lack of oxygen when he releases his hold to punch me in the shoulder.
He looks crushed. Worse than the day I told the class he peed his pants in second grade. “That’s for not telling me sooner,” he says.
It was cruel not to have divulged my secret to him in private on the way to school. In hindsight, it’s what I should’ve done. But I’d been selfish and cowardly, not wanting to rehash the details of my departure half-a-dozen times. “Sorry,” I manage, letting myself fall into his arms for the second time. “The whole thing is so…”
I want to say ‘stupid’ but stop myself. Because is it stupid? Is it stupid my dad wants to provide what he hopes will be a better life for me and Ashley? And is choosing to serve his country in the process such a bad thing?
“Unfortunate,” is the word I land on.
The others are watching us now, afraid to speak. Afraid of disturbing what should have been our private moment. Maybe that’s the real reason I didn’t tell him alone in the car, the second he slid into the passenger’s seat. Maybe it’s because I was too afraid we’d get stuck, unable to keep going on with our day unless there was an audience encouraging us along.
I wonder how we look to them now, with my head tucked into Zander’s chest and his arms clutched tightly around my shoulders. Does it look like we’re holding onto each other as though our lives depend on it? Because that’s exactly how it feels to me.
“We should have a party,” Claire offers, finally breaking the silence. “A farewell send-off over Christmas break.”
I smile at her, grateful for the gesture, but it’s going to take way more than a party to ease me gracefully out of Iowa.
