Solitaire

SITTING NEXT TO Charlie on the Wednesday-morning bus journey calms me. I have a lot of unread messages on my blog, but I don’t want to read them. It’s much, much too sunny today. We meet Nick outside Truham. Nick gives Charlie a quick kiss, and they start talking to each other, laughing. I watch him and Charlie walk in, and then head up the road to Higgs.

I’m feeling sort of all right because Michael and I are okay now. I don’t know why I made all that fuss the other day. No, that’s a lie. I do know why. It’s because I’m an idiot.

Mr. Compton, my unintelligible imbecile of a maths teacher, decides, for one lesson only, that we need to work in pairs with people we do not usually sit with. This is how I end up sitting next to Ben Hope in Wednesday’s Period 1 maths lesson. We exchange pleasantries, and then sit in silence while Compton begins to explain the trapezium rule in the most complicated way imaginable. Ben does not have a pencil case. He carries a pen and a small ruler in his breast pocket. He has also forgotten his textbook. I feel that this may have been deliberate.

Halfway through, Compton leaves to photocopy some sheets and does not return for some time. To my dismay, Ben decides that he needs to talk to me.

“Hey,” he says. “How’s Charlie doing?”

I turn my head slowly to the left. Surprisingly, he looks genuinely concerned.

“Um . . .” Truth? Lie? “Not too bad.”

Ben nods. “Yeah. Okay.”

“Charlie said you used to be friends, or something.”

His eyes open very wide. “Erm, yeah. I guess. But you know. Like, yeah. Everyone knows Charlie. You know?”

Yeah. Everyone knows. You don’t stay off school for three months without everyone finding out why.

“Yeah.”

The silence between us returns. The rest of our class are chattering and it is nearly the end of the lesson. Has Compton been eaten by the photocopier?

I suddenly find myself talking. Talking first. This is pretty rare.

“Everyone loves Charlie at Truham,” I say, “don’t they?”

Ben begins to tap his pen on the table. A weirdly nervous grin spreads across his face.

“Well, I wouldn’t say everyone, exactly,” he scoffs. I frown at him, and he quickly covers himself with “No, I mean, like, people can’t be liked by everyone, right?”

I clear my throat. “I guess not.”

“I don’t know him anymore, really,” he says.

“Yeah. Okay.” Usually people like Charlie, nice people, are forgotten. Usually the popular people are the loudest and funniest, the ones with the opinions, with the outfits, with the big smiles and crushing hugs. Nice people are vulnerable because they don’t know how to be mean. They don’t know how to put themselves at the top. And you would think that it would be someone like Nick who was at the top at Truham—loud, attractive, house captain, rugby player. But no. It’s Charlie.

What I’m trying to say is that Charlie is a nice person, and despite everything I’ve just explained, everybody seems to love him. And I think that is a modern miracle.