The Queen's Gambit by Walter Tevis Read Free Book Online Page A

let herself flop onto the table, twisting herself at the last second so she wouldn’t fall off it. She was inside! She took a couple of deep breaths and climbed down. There was enough light for her to see all right. She walked over to the far wall of the tiny room and stopped, facing the dimly visible jar. It had a glass cover. She lifted this and set it silently on the table. Then she slowly reached inside with both hands. Her fingertips touched the smooth surface of tens of pills, hundreds of pills. She pushed her hands deeper, burying them up to the wrists. She breathed in deeply and held her breath for a long time. Finally she let it out in a sigh and removed her right hand with a fistful of pills. She did not count them, simply put them in her mouth and swallowed until they had all gone down.
    Then she stuffed three handfuls of pills in her skirt pocket. On the wall to the right of the window was a Dixie Cup dispenser. She was able to reach it by standing on tiptoe and stretching. She took four paper cups. She had decided on that number the night before. She carried them over, stacked, to the table that held the pill jar, set them down neatly, and filled them one at a time. Then she stood back and looked at the jar. The level had dropped to almost half what it had been. The problem seemed insoluble. She would have to wait and see what happened.
    Leaving the cups, she went to the door that Mr. Fergussen used when he went to do pharmacy duty. She would leave that way, unlocking it from the inside, and make two trips to carry the pills to the metal stand by her bed. She had a nearly empty Kleenex box to put them in. She would spread a few sheets of Kleenex on top and put the box in the bottom of her enameled nightstand, under her clean underwear and socks.
    But the door would not open. It was locked in some serious way. She examined the knob and latch, feeling carefully with her hands. There was a thick, heavy sensation at the back of her throat as she did this, and her arms were numb, like the arms of a dead person. What she had suspected when the door wouldn’t open turned out to be true: you had to have a key even from the inside. And she could not climb back out the little window carrying four Dixie cups full of tranquilizers.
    She grew frantic. They would miss her at the movie. Fergussen would be looking for her. The projector would break down and all the children would be sent into the Multi-Purpose Room, with Fergussen monitoring them, and here she would be. But deeper than that, she felt trapped, the same wretched, heart-stopping sensation she had felt when she was taken from home and put in this institution and made to sleep in a ward with twenty strangers and hear noises all night long that were, in a way, as bad as the shouting at home, when Daddy and Mother were there—the shouting from the brightly lit kitchen. Beth had slept in the dining room on a folding cot. She felt trapped then, too, and her arms were numb. There was a big space under the door that separated dining room from kitchen; the light had streamed in under it, along with the shouted words.
    She gripped the doorknob and stood still for a long moment, breathing shallowly. Then her heart began beating almost normally again and feeling came back into her arms and hands. She could always get out by climbing through the window. She had a pocket full of pills. She could set the Dixie cups on the white table inside the window and then, when she was back on the stool outside, she could reach in and take them out, one at a time. She could visualize it all, like a chess position.
    She carried the cups over to the table. She had begun to sense in herself an enormous calm, like the calm she had felt that day at the high school when she knew she was unbeatable. When she set down the fourth cup she turned and looked back at the glass jar. Fergussen would know that pills had been stolen. That could not be hidden. Sometimes her father had said, “In for a