On a Clear Day by Walter Dean Myers Read Free Book Online

veil over her eyes. They say some people born that way can see mysterious things.”
    The next profile started oddly. There was an Indian-looking man sitting and staring down. I couldn’t see what he was staring at because the camera just stayed on his face. Every once in a while there would be a movement, an eyebrow would go up, or there would be a twitch in the corner of his mouth. It went on for a long time before I looked at the clock in the corner of the screen. The camera stayed on the guy for another two minutes as I wondered who he was.
    He looked up and quickly down again, then shook his head, and the camera followed his hand down to a chessboard. He took one brown finger and knocked over a piece. Then he stood up and walked quickly away.
    The camera moved around to the other side of the board. There was a young girl who sat there. It was the Asian girl from the meeting, Mei-Mei, the one who sat next to the black guy, Drego. Someone was pushing a microphone in front of her face and asking her questions.
    “This is the third tournament you have won this year,”the interviewer said as a caption in Chinese scrolled across the bottom of the screen. “How does it make you feel to win a tournament of this magnitude?”
    “All tournaments have their interesting aspects,” Mei-Mei said.
    “Your rating is 2515, which is phenomenal in the chess world. How old are you?”
    “Fourteen.”
    “Do you have ambitions to become the top female player in the world?”
    No answer. Just the dark eyes looking at the interviewer, boring into him.
    “Do you think you can compete with men on an international level?” The interviewer was trying to back off.
    Mei-Mei didn’t let him. She stared at him until the camera went away and the screen was full of Chinese characters. I wished I could read Chinese.
    I thought her profile was finished, but the screen lit up again and it was Mei-Mei from the waist up. She looked about the same as she had at the meeting. This time she was sitting at what looked like a teak desk. On the desk there was a green box. Either jade or plastic.
    “I’m called Mei-Mei Lum. My real name is Lum Mei Lan. I play chess and go. I like games because I like to win. That is about all that you need to know about me.”
    Then she opened the box and took out three black rings and put them on the fingers of her left hand. She held them briefly up for the camera to see, and then the screen went dark.
    What the hell was that about?

    The screen was dark for twenty seconds, perhaps a minute. Then it lit up and there was a bunch of kids sitting in what looked like an auditorium. The camera panned the kids, lifted to some more kids on the stage, and then stopped at a little girl. The same hair, the same face, but my eyes looked like pasted-on doll’s eyes. They were so big. Where did they get the tape? It had been made over six years ago, when I was in the sixth grade.
    It was funny, in a way, but it also made me want to cry. I was explaining to the kids, and the judges, how to go about measuring the height of a pyramid. It was simple triangles-and-shadows stuff, but I looked so earnest. I watched myself, the child me, and the tears started coming. I had believed that math was the key to everything. Just get the right numbers and the world made sense.
    My nails looked awful, chipped and uneven from staying up all night chewing on them. My dress had a stiffly starched collar that flared out and made my face look pointy. I wanted the video to go on forever, to show how I felt when I was given the gold certificate laminated on a dark mahogany board. It didn’t, of course. Little Dahlia faded to black. Gone. Forever.
    I was lying on the bed, sniffling myself to sleep. In my mind, a little girl sat at home in a corner doing math problems from a workbook. When she was finished with each problem, she carefully checked the answer in the back of the book. She was so pleased when her answers were correct. She felt so safe, so