The Difference Between You And Me {Petekey}

Chapter seven

"I don't, actually," Mikey admitted. It wasn't very commonplace in his time. He knew the general rules of the game from his general knowledge of the past, but he had never had a chance to learn. 

Lindsey smiled. "Can I teach you then?" she asked.

"Sure," Mikey agreed. He supposed now was a good time as any to learn how to play. It would probably benefit his logic and reasoning. Plus, it could pass the time better than rereading A Tale Of Two Cities.

Lindsey ran off into the living room, gesturing for Mikey to follow her. He did as she told him, smiling at her playfulness. Once he caught up to her, she was already pulling out a box and opening it to reveal a board and the black and off-white pieces. She set the board onto a game table in the corner, then sat down at one end. Mikey followed her lead, sitting at the other. She began setting up the board, piece by piece, talking about the different roles each piece had. 

"The front line is made up of pawns. There's eight of them, so they're not all that significant. They can move one space at a time, and forwards only, with the exception of their first move, which can be two spaces. They capture the other pieces by going diagonally..."

-

In the end, Lindsey ended up beating Mikey by a landslide. He kept forgetting how to capture the different pieces and what each one of them did. She reassured him that he would get better with time, and he told her that it wasn't all that big of a deal that he lost.

That being said, though, he challenged her to a game every day until he could beat her at it.  She agreed, and after she left the room, Mikey rearranged the pieces to see how he could have prevented his loss. He was determined to learning how to play chess as best as he could. 

He had always loved learning new skills, ones he had been wondering about how they were done for long amounts of time. He loved knowing the mechanics of things he was passionate about, which he assumed was why Gerard loved makeup so much. It was like his painting, but there was no consequence if he ruined the piece by trying something new that didn't work out. It was art, but it wasn't a job like painting was. 

Mikey wondered if anyone he knew from his own time could play chess. Were they any good? If he had to guess one person he knew could do it, who would it be? Probably Pete. Pete had all sorts of hidden talents that were never brought up until they were useful. He was working on a project with him when it came up that he could pick a lock in under thirty seconds while blindfolded. Something he'd picked up while pining for a girl in high school who told him she'd go out with him if he guessed her locker combination. Mikey almost didn't believe him, but Pete was Pete, and there was no doubt in Mikey's mind that Pete would do something like that.

Was Pete any good at chess, or did he just know the rules? Mikey thought while inspecting the placement of his bishop and trying desperately to remember how he had used it. Was there an interesting backstory like the one for his lock-picking competency or was it just that someone taught him what they thought was a valuable skill?

Realizing he couldn't possibly figure out where the bishop was before, he picked the piece up and threw it to the floor in annoyance. He wanted to be good at this, dammit. That, and he was coming to realize how much he needed Pete with him when he Travelled. 

The thing about Pete was that you never knew enough about him. He was, for lack of a better word, a mystery. A puzzle with infinite pieces. He was a bunch of random facts and ideas and questions that didn't seem to make any sense to anybody but him. You had to listen to Pete, you had to experience him and take him seriously in order to get any kind of meaning from his words. He and Mikey, they were so different, but Mikey felt like he understood him. They had things in common, despite the obvious spontaneous/logical dichotomy. They both had ideas that were different from anything a normal person would think of. And their ideas were both disrespected and ignored. Mikey had always been put on a pedestal but no one had really cared about his deeper emotions. He understood how Pete felt, despite the fact that Mikey got attention and he didn't. The attention was never genuine. Nobody actually cared about Mikey, at least none of his teachers and definitely not his mom.