My Name Is Tani . . . and I Believe in Miracles by Tanitoluwa Adewumi

Author:Tanitoluwa Adewumi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Published: 2020-02-07T00:00:00+00:00

30

AN IMPOSSIBLY EXPENSIVE ACTIVITY

OLUWATOYIN

Ever since I met Kayode I have known him to work hard. But after just two weeks of washing dishes, he wasn’t just tired—he was exhausted.

Naturally, I wanted to help him. If I was in the room with him during the day, I’d make sure that I kept quiet and let him sleep as long as he could. There were other things I did as well. I worked hard to keep any burdens from him that he didn’t need to worry about. If he asked me how I was doing, I would tell him “fine,” even if I was feeling trapped or tired or sad about the way things had ended back in Dallas. I tried my hardest to keep all that to myself, pull myself together, and get over whatever it was that was trying to weigh me down.

But when Tani came home from school saying that he wanted to enroll in the after-school chess program and showed me a letter that said it would cost $330 for one semester, I didn’t know what to do.

Telling Kayode about it was a bad idea that I wanted to rule out at once. I knew that $330 was an impossible amount of money for us to spend on an after-school activity that ran for only two and a half hours each week. Kayode’s job was bringing in a maximum of $300 each week, and we were spending more than half of it on food and travel. The rest we used for essentials. What was left each week was never more than a few dollars.

But there was something about the way Tani spoke about the club and a man named Coach Shawn that made me want to think a little harder and not just dismiss the idea out of hand.

Tani had been talking about it all nonstop, and not just in the way Tani usually speaks about whatever he is passionate about at the time. On almost every walk to or from school, he told me about chess in a way that made it clear to me he was really thinking deeply about it.

“Coach Shawn says that some people like chess because it’s competitive. They like winning, and if you do like forty or fifty chess puzzles each week and go to practice and work really hard, you will get better. But some people like it because maybe they’re not good at sports or have never been on a team, and so when they join the chess program, they’re part of a real team that goes to tournaments and competes together. Some people like chess because they like the way they have to do what he calls ‘deep thinking’—”

“Wait, Tani,” I said, grabbing his backpack and stopping him from stepping into the road. “The light’s not green yet.”

“Deep thinking is when you have to make your brain really concentrate harder than you’ve ever made it concentrate before and imagine all the possible moves that could follow when you make a certain move.

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