Solitaire

SOMETHING IS DIFFERENT in the air as we stroll down the road. We are hand in hand but definitely not in a romantic way. Michael’s face spins around and around in my mind, and I come to the conclusion that I do not know the boy walking next to me. I do not know him at all.

Michael takes me to a café in the town named Café Rivière. It is next to the river, hence the unoriginal name, and I have been here many times before. We are the only people there apart from the elderly French owner sweeping the floor, and we sit at a table with a gingham tablecloth and a vase of flowers by a window. Michael drinks tea. I eat a croissant.

Dying, though I don’t know why, to make conversation, I start with “So why’d you change schools?”

The immediate look on his face tells me that this was not the casual question that I had intended it to be.

I cringe. “Oh, sorry. Sorry. That was nosy. You don’t have to answer.”

For several long moments he continues to drink his tea. Then he puts down the cup and stares into the flowers between us.

“No, it’s fine. It’s not too important.” He chuckles to himself, as if remembering something. “I, er, didn’t get on too well with the people there. Not teachers, not students . . . I thought a change of scene might do me some good. I thought maybe I’d get along better with girls or something stupid like that.” He shrugs and laughs, but it’s not a funny laugh; it’s a different sort of laugh. “Nope. Obviously my personality is far too fantastic for both girls and boys to handle.”

I don’t know why, but I start to feel quite sad. It’s not my normal type of sad, you know, the unnecessary and self-inflicted pity-party sort of sad, but it’s a sad that’s kind of projected outward.

“You should be on Waterloo Road or Skins or something,” I say.

He laughs again. “Why’s that?”

“Because you’re . . .” I finish my sentence with a shrug. He replies with a smile.

We are silent for several moments more. I eat. He drinks.

“What are you doing next year?” I ask. It’s a bit like I’m giving him an interview, but for once I’ve got this odd feeling. Like I’m interested. “University?”

He absently fondles his cup. “No. Yeah. No, I don’t know. It’s too late now anyway—the UCAS deadline was yesterday. How am I supposed to decide on a university course? Most of the time at school I can’t even decide which pen to use.”

“I thought our school, like, makes you apply to uni in Year 13. Or at least apprenticeships and stuff. Even if you don’t accept the place in the end.”

He raises his eyebrows. “You know, school can’t really make you do anything.”

The truth of this statement is like a punch in the face.

“But . . . why didn’t you apply to a few unis anyway? Just in case you decide you want to go?”

“Because I hate school!” This is quite loud. He starts to shake his head. “The idea of having to sit in a chair for three years and learn about stuff that isn’t going to help me in life literally disgusts me. I’ve always been crap at exams and I always will be, and I hate that everyone thinks that you have to go to university to have a decent life!”

I sit there, dumbstruck.

We say nothing for a minute or so before he finally meets my eyes.

“I’ll probably just stick with sports,” he says, calm again, with a sheepish grin.

“Oh, right. What do you play?”

“Huh?”

“What sport do you play?”

“I’m a speed skater.”

“Wait, what?”

“I’m a speed skater.”

“Like racing? On ice?”

“Yup.”

I shake my head. “It’s like you just picked the most random sport.”

He nods, acceptingly. “I guess it is.”

“Are you any good?”

There is a pause.

“I’m okay,” he says.

It has started to rain. The drops fall on the river, water meeting water, and trickle down the window like the glass is crying.

“Being a skater would be pretty cool,” he says. “But, you know. It’s hard. Things like that are hard.”

I eat a bit more croissant.

“It’s raining.” He leans on his hand. “If the sun came back out, there’d be a rainbow. It’d be beautiful.”

I look out the window. The sky is gray. “There doesn’t need to be a rainbow for it to be beautiful.”

The café owner mumbles something. An old woman with a walking stick hobbles inside and sits near us by a window. It seems to take her a great deal of effort. I notice that the flowers on our table are fake.

“What shall we do next?” asks Michael.

I take a moment to think.

“They’re playing The Empire Strikes Back at the cinema this afternoon,” I say.

“You’re a Star Wars fan?”

I fold my arms. “Is that surprising?”

He looks at me. “You’re very surprising. In general.”

Then his expression changes.

“You’re a Star Wars fan,” he says.

I frown. “Er—yeah.”

“And you can play the violin.”

“Erm . . . yeah.”

“Do you like cats?”

I start to laugh. “What in the name of fuck are you talking about?”

“Humor me for a minute.”

“Fine. Fine, yeah, cats are pretty fabulous.”

“And what’s your opinion about Madonna? And Justin Timberlake?”

Michael is a very strange person, but this conversation is advancing more and more toward the insanity line.

“Er, yeah. Some of their songs are good. But please tell me what you’re talking about. I’m starting to worry for your mental health.”

“Solitaire.”

We both freeze, staring at each other. The Star Wars prank. The violin video. The cats, “Material Girl,” Justin Timberlake’s “Sexy Back”—

“Are you suggesting what I think you’re suggesting?”

“What do you think I’m suggesting?” Michael asks innocently.

“I think you’re suggesting that Solitaire has something to do with me.”

“And what do you say to that?”

“I say that’s the most hilarious thing I’ve heard all year.” I stand up and start to put on my coat. “I’m literally the dullest person on the face of the earth.”

“That’s what you think.”

Instead of arguing further, I ask, “Why are you so interested in them?”

He pauses and leans back again. “I don’t know. I just get curious about this stuff, you know? I want to know who’s doing it. And why.” He chuckles. “I have a pretty sad life as it is.”

It takes a few seconds for the full impact of his final line to reach me.

It’s the first time I’ve heard Michael Holden say something like that.

Like something I would say.

“Hey,” I say. I nod at him, earnestly. “So do I.”

Before we leave the café, Michael buys the old woman a pot of tea. Then he takes me to the ice rink to show me how fast he can skate. It turns out he’s BFFs with every single staff member. He high-fives them all on the way in, and they insist on high-fiving me as well, which is kind of weird but also makes me feel sort of cool.

Michael is an insane skater. He doesn’t skate past me, he flies, and everything slows and I watch his face turn toward me and this smile, his smile, stretches outward and then he just vanishes, leaving only dragon breath. I, comparatively, fall over seven times.

After I’ve been wobbling around on the ice for quite some time, he decides to take pity and skate with me. I clutch his hands, trying not to fall flat on my face, as he skates backward, pulling me along and laughing so hard at my concentration-face that tiny tears emerge out of the corners of his eyes. Once I get the hang of things, we figure-skate round the rink to “Radio People” by Zapp, an underrated eighties gem and coincidentally my favorite song from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. On the way out, after an hour or so, he shows me the picture of him on the Skating Club board, aged ten, holding a trophy high above his head.

There’s no one in town apart from a few oldies. Sleepy Sunday. We visit all the antiques shops. I play on a secondhand violin, and I manage to remember a surprisingly large number of pieces. Michael joins in on a piano, and we jam until the shop owners decide we’re too annoying and chuck us out. In another shop, we find this amazing kaleidoscope. It’s wooden and slides outward like a telescope, and we take it in turns gazing at the patterns until Michael decides to buy it. It’s expensive, too. I ask him why he bought it. He says because he didn’t like the thought of no one ever looking into it.

We walk along the river and throw stones in and play Pooh Sticks on the bridge. We go back to Café Rivière for a late lunch and more tea for Michael. We go to the cinema to see The Empire Strikes Back, which, of course, is excellent, and then we hang around to watch Dirty Dancing because apparently it’s Back to the Eighties day. Dirty Dancing is a very stupid film. The main girl is probably the most irritating individual I have ever had the misfortune to encounter. Mostly due to her outfits. And her voice.

Midway through the film, I get another message on my blog.

Anonymous: Thought for the day: Why do people leave newspapers on trains?

I show this one to Michael.

“What a fantastic question,” he says.

I fail to see how it’s a fantastic question, so I delete it, just like I did the other.

I don’t know what the time is but it’s getting dark now. We go back to the Dying Sun. A little farther along the cliff is Michael’s house, glowing against the sky. This cliff top really is the best place in the world. The best end of the universe.

We balance on the edge, letting the wind flow past our ears. I dangle my legs off, and after some persuasion, so does he.

“The sun’s setting,” he says.

“The sun also rises,” I say before I can stop myself.

His head turns like a robot. “Say that again.”

“What?”

“Say that again.”

“Say what?”

“What you just said.”

I sigh. “The Sun Also Rises.”

“And who, might I ask, wrote that literary jewel?”

I sigh again. “Ernest Hemingway.”

He starts shaking his head. “You hate literature. You hate it. You can’t even bring yourself to read Pride and Prejudice.”

“. . .”

“Name three other Hemingway novels.”

“Really? You’re really going to ask me to do that?”

He smiles.

I roll my eyes. “For Whom the Bell Tolls. The Old Man and the Sea. A Farewell to Arms.”

His mouth opens in astonishment.

“It’s not like I’ve read any of them.”

“Now I’m going to have to test you.”

“Jesus.”

“Who wrote The Bell Jar?”

“. . .”

“Don’t pretend you don’t know it, Spring.”

That’s the first time he’s called me by my surname only. I’m not sure what this says about our relationship.

“Fine. Sylvia Plath.”

“Who wrote The Catcher in the Rye?”

“J. D. Salinger. You’re giving me really easy ones.”

“Okay, then. Who wrote Endgame?”

“Samuel Beckett.”

“A Room of One’s Own?”

“Virginia Woolf.”

He gives me a long look before: “The Beautiful and Damned.”

I want to stop myself saying the answers but I can’t. I can’t lie to him.

“F. Scott Fitzgerald.”

He shakes his head. “You know all the names to books, but you haven’t read a single one. It’s like it’s raining money, but you refuse to catch a single coin.”

I know that if I persisted past the first few pages, I would probably enjoy some books, but I don’t. I can’t read books because I know that none of it is real. Yeah, I’m a hypocrite. Films aren’t real, but I love them. But books—they’re different. When you watch a film, you’re sort of an outsider looking in. With a book—you’re right there. You are inside. You are the main character.

A minute later, he asks, “Have you ever had a boyfriend, Tori?”

I snort. “Clearly not.”

“Don’t say that. You’re a sexy beast. You could easily have had a boyfriend.”

I am not a sexy beast in any way whatsoever.

I put on an accent. “I’m a strong, independent woman who don’t need no man.”

This actually makes Michael laugh so hard that he has to roll over and hide his face in his hands, which makes me laugh too. We continue laughing hysterically until the sun is almost completely gone.

Once we calm down, Michael lies back in the grass.

“I hope you don’t mind me saying, but Becky doesn’t really seem to hang around you much at school. I mean, if you didn’t know, you wouldn’t guess that you were best friends.” He looks at me. “You don’t really talk to each other very much.”

I cross my legs. Another sudden topic change. “Yeah . . . she . . . I don’t know. Maybe that’s why we are best friends. Because we don’t need to talk much anymore.” I look back at him stretched out. His arm is laid over his forehead, his hair is splayed out in the dark, and the remaining light swirls in kaleidoscope shapes in his blue eye. I look away. “She has a lot more friends than me, I guess. But that’s all right. I don’t mind. It’s understandable. I’m quite boring; I mean, she’d have a really boring life if she just hung around with me all the time.”

“You’re not boring. You’re the epitome of not-boring.”

Pause.

“I think you’re a really good friend,” he says. I turn again. He smiles at me, and it reminds me of his expression when he walked through C16’s door that day—wild, shining, something not quite reachable about it. “Becky is really lucky to have someone like you.”

I would be nothing without Becky, I think. Even though things are different now. Sometimes it makes me tear up thinking about how much I love her.

“It’s the other way round,” I say.

The clouds have mostly cleared now. The sky is orange at the horizon, leading up to a dark blue above our heads. It looks like a portal. I start thinking about the Star Wars film we watched earlier. I wanted to be a Jedi so badly when I was a kid. My lightsaber would have been green.

“I should go home,” I say eventually. “I didn’t tell my parents I was going out.”

“Ah. Right.” We both stand up. “I’ll walk home with you.”

“You really don’t have to.”

But he does anyway.