Solitaire

WHEN I WAKE up, I can’t remember who I am, because I’d been having some crazy dream. Soon, however, I wake up properly to find that Sunday is here. I’m still on the sofa. My phone is in my dressing-gown pocket, and I look at it to check the time. 7:42 a.m.

I immediately head upstairs and peer into Charlie’s room. He’s still asleep, obviously, and he looks so peaceful. It would be nice if he always looked like that.

Yesterday, Michael Holden told me a lot of things, and one of those things was where he lives. Therefore—and I’m still not quite sure how or why this happens—something on this desolate Sunday makes me get up off the sofa and journey to his house on the Dying Sun.

The Dying Sun is a cliff top overlooking the river. It is the only cliff in the county. I don’t know why there is a cliff over a river, because there are never normally cliffs over rivers except in films and abstract documentaries about places you will never go to. But the Dying Sun is so dramatically named because if you stand facing out on the farthest point of the cliff, you are exactly opposite the sun as it sets. A couple of years back, I decided to take a walk around our town, and I remember the long brown house that sat mere meters away from the cliff edge, like it was ready to take a leap.

Maybe it is the fact that I can actually remember all this that causes me to wander up the long country lane and halt outside the brown house on the Dying Sun at nine o’clock in the morning.

Michael’s house has a wooden gate and a wooden door and a sign on its front wall reading JANE’S COTTAGE. It’s somewhere you’d expect either a farmer or a lonely old person to live. I stand there, just outside the gate. Coming here was a mistake. An utter mistake. It’s, like, nine in the morning. No one is up at nine in the morning on a Sunday. I can’t just knock at someone’s house. That’s what you did in primary school, for God’s sake.

I head back down the lane.

I’ve taken twenty steps when I hear the sound of his front door opening.

“Tori?”

I stop in the road. I shouldn’t have come here. I should not have come here.

“Tori? That is you, isn’t it?”

Very slowly, I turn around. Michael has shut the gate and is jogging down the road toward me. He stops before me and grins his dazzling grin.

For a moment I don’t actually believe it’s him. He is positively disheveled. His hair, usually gelled into a side part, flies around in wavy tufts, and he is wearing a truly admirable amount of clothes, including a woolly jumper and woolly socks. His glasses are slipping off his nose. He doesn’t look awake and his voice, normally so wispy, is a little hoarse.

“Tori!” he says, and clears his throat. “It’s Tori Spring!”

Why did I come here? What was I thinking? Why am I an idiot?

“You came to my house,” he says, shaking his head back and forth in what can only be described as pure amazement. “I mean, I thought you might, but I didn’t at the same time . . . you know?”

I glance to one side. “Sorry.”

“No, no, I’m really glad that you did. Really.”

“I can go home; I didn’t mean to—”

“No.”

He laughs, and it’s a nice laugh. He runs a hand through his hair. I’ve never seen him do that before.

I find myself smiling back. I’m not quite sure how that happens either.

A car rolls up behind us, and we quickly move to the side of the road to let it pass. The sky is still a little orange, and in every other direction except the town, all you can see are fields, many abandoned and wild, their long grass flowing like sea waves. I start to feel like I’m actually in the Pride and Prejudice film, you know, that bit at the end where they go out to that field in the mist and the sun is rising.

“Would you like to . . . go out?” I say, then quickly add, “Today?”

He is literally awestruck. Why. Am I. An idiot.

“Y-yes. Definitely. Wow, yes. Yes.”

Why.

I look back to the house.

“You have a nice house,” I say. I wonder what it’s like inside. I wonder who his parents are. I wonder how he’s decorated his bedroom. Posters? Lights? Maybe he painted something. Maybe he has old board games stacked up on shelves. Maybe he has a beanbag. Maybe he has figurines. Maybe he has Aztec-patterned bedsheets and black walls, and teddies in a box, and a diary under his pillow.

He looks at the house, his expression suddenly downcast.

“Yeah,” he says, “I guess.” Then he turns back to me. “But we should go out somewhere.”

He quickly runs back to the gate and locks it. His hair is just hilarious. But kind of nice. I can’t stop looking at it. He walks back and passes me, and then turns and holds out his hand. His jumper, much too big for him, flutters around his body.

“Coming?”

I step toward him. And then I do something, like, really pathetic.

“Your hair,” I say, lifting my hand and taking hold of a dark strand that covers his blue eye. “It’s . . . free.” I move the strand to one side.

I then realize what I’m doing, jump backward, and cringe. I sort of wish I could disapparate, Harry Potter–style.

For what feels like an ice age, he doesn’t stop looking at me with this frozen expression, and after that I swear he goes a little red. He’s still holding out his hand, so I take it, but that almost makes him jump.

“Your hand is so cold,” he says. “Do you have any blood?”

“No,” I say. “I’m a ghost. Remember?”