Solitaire

WE FAIL TO find out whose house it is, but “the third house from the river bridge” really is right on the river. The broad garden slopes into the water, which laps persistently at the dirt. There is an old canoe tied to a tree that hasn’t been used for probably centuries, and over the river you can see right across the flat countryside. The fields, darkened under the night, blend into the horizon, as if unsure themselves quite where the earth stops and the sky begins.

This “meet-up” is not a meet-up.

It is a house party.

What had I been expecting? I had been expecting chairs. Nibbles. A speaker. Perhaps a PowerPoint presentation.

The evening is cold, and it keeps trying to snow. I desperately want to be in my bed, and my stomach is all tight and tense. I hate parties. I always have. I always will. It’s not even for the right reasons; I hate them and I hate people who go to them. I have no justification. I’m just ridiculous.

We walk past the smokers and into the open door.

It’s about 10:00 p.m. Music pounds. Clearly no one lives in this house—it’s entirely bare of furniture save for a couple of deck chairs set up in the living room and on the garden patio, and I’m aware of a kind of neutral color scheme. The only thing giving the house any life at all is the impressive collection of artwork on the walls. There isn’t any food, but there are bottles and colorful shot glasses everywhere. People are milling around in corridors and rooms, lots of them smoking cigarettes, lots of them smoking weed, very few of them sitting.

Many of the girls I recognize from Higgs, though Michael does not suspect that any of these casual partygoers are the masterminds behind Solitaire. There are older kids I don’t recognize. Some must be twenty, if not older. It makes me feel sort of nervous, to tell you the truth.

I don’t know why I’m here. I actually see the Year 11 girl from Becky’s, the one who had come as Doctor Who. She’s by herself, like last time, and she looks a little lost. She’s walking very slowly along the corridor, without a drink, peering sadly at this painting of a wet cobbled street with red umbrellas and warm café windows. I wonder what she’s thinking. I imagine that it’s somewhat similar to what I’m thinking. She doesn’t see me.

The first people we find are Becky and Lauren. I should have guessed that they would come, seeing as they attend all the parties in this town, and I really should have guessed I’d find them smashed. Becky points at us with the hand that’s not clasping a bottle.

“Oh my God, it’s Tori and Michael, you guys!” She whacks Lauren repeatedly on the arm. “Lauren! Lauren! Lauren! It’s Sprolden!”

Lauren frowns. “Mate! I thought we’d agreed on ‘Mori’! Or ‘Tichael’!” She sighs. “Man, your names just aren’t good enough, like, they don’t work, they don’t work like Klaine or Romione or Destiel or Merthur. . . .” They both giggle uncontrollably.

I start to feel even more nervous. “I didn’t think you guys would be interested in Solitaire.”

Becky waves the bottle, shrugging and rolling her eyes around. “Hey, a party’s a party’s a party . . . I dunno . . . some guy . . . but, like, it’s Solitaire, we’ve, like, infiltrated Solitaire. . . .” She brings her finger up to her mouth. “Shhhhhhhh.” She drinks from the bottle. “Listen, listen, do you know what song this is? We, like, cannot work it out.”

“It’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit.’ Nirvana.”

“Oh right, yeah, oh my God, I thought it was that. It, like, it does not say the song title in the lyrics.”

I look at Lauren, who’s gazing around her in an awed wonder.

“You all right, Lauren?”

She comes back to earth and cackles at me. “Isn’t this party sick?” She raises her arms in an “I don’t know” gesture. “It’s snowing hot guys and the drinks are free!”

“That’s great for you,” I say, the will to be a nice person slowly drifting away.

She pretends not to hear me and they walk off, laughing at nothing.

Michael and I circle the party.

It’s not like in films, or Channel 4 teen dramas, where everything slows down and turns slow-mo, lights flashing, people jumping up and down with pointed hands raised. Nothing’s like that in real life. People are just standing around.

Michael talks to a lot of people. He asks everyone about Solitaire. We run into Rita, hanging quietly with a group of girls from my year. She sees me and waves, which means that I have to say hello to her.

“Hey,” she says as I walk over to her. “How’s Charlie? Heard there was a fight or something. Ben Hope, wasn’t it?” Not much stays private in a town like this, so it’s hardly surprising that everyone knows.

“It wasn’t a fight,” I say very quickly, and then clear my throat. “Er, yeah, he’s all right. Bruised but all right.”

Rita nods understandingly. “Ah, okay. Well, I’m glad he’s not hurt too badly.”

After that, Michael and I end up caught inside a circle of Year 13s in the kitchen. Michael claims that he’s never spoken to any of them.

“No one knows, like, no one knows who made it,” one girl says. She has a very tight skirt on and a lot of unattractive red lipstick. “There are rumors it’s some dealer from the estate, or, like, a teacher who got sacked and wants revenge.”

“Stick around,” interrupts a guy wearing a snapback bearing the word JOCK. “Like, keep checking the blog, innit. I’ve heard things are gonna get well good when they put up the next post later.”

There’s a pause. I look down at the newspapered floor, which isn’t doing much to protect the house from the already numerous alcohol spillages. There’s a headline on one sheet reading 27 DEAD and a picture of a burning building.

“Why?” says Michael. “Why’s that?”

But the guy just blinks, like a fish, and asks, “Why aren’t you drinking?”

I decide to be a normal person and find something proper to drink. Michael disappears for a long time, so I pick up this big old bottle from somewhere and sit alone outside on a deck chair, feeling like a middle-aged alcoholic husband. It’s gone eleven and everyone’s drunk. Whoever’s DJ-ing relocates to the garden, and after a while it’s unclear whether I’m in some small-town garden or at Reading Festival. I spot Nick and Charlie through the living-room window, kissing in a corner like it’s their last day on earth, despite Charlie’s bruised face. I guess they look romantic. Like they really are in love.

I get up and go inside to look for Michael, but whatever this stuff is that’s in the bottle, it’s kind of strong, so next thing I know I’ve lost all sense of time, space, and reality, and I have no idea what I’m doing. I find myself in the hallway again, in front of that painting of the wet cobbled street with red umbrellas and warm café windows. I can’t stop looking at it. I force myself to turn around and spot Lucas at the other end of the corridor. I’m not sure whether he sees me, but he quickly disappears into another room. I wander away and get lost in the house. Red umbrellas. Warm café windows.

Michael grabs me out of nowhere. He pulls me away from wherever the hell I was—the kitchen, maybe, lost in a sea of Boy London hats and chinos—and we start to walk through the house. I don’t know where we’re going. But I don’t try to stop him. I’m not sure why.

As we’re walking, I keep looking at his hand wrapped around my wrist. Maybe it’s because I’ve had stuff to drink, or maybe it’s because I’m really cold, or maybe it’s because I’d sort of missed him while he’d been gone, but whatever it is—I keep thinking how nice it feels to have his hand around my wrist. Not in some weird perverted way. His hand is just so big compared to mine, and so warm, and the way his fingers are curled around my wrist, it’s like they were always supposed to do that, like they’re matching pieces in a jigsaw. I don’t know. What am I talking about?

Eventually, when we’re outside and in the crowd of manic dancers, he slows and does a spin in the mud. It’s sort of weird when he gazes at me. Again, I blame the drink. But it’s different. He looks so nice, standing there. His hair kind of swishing in the wrong direction and the firelight reflecting in his glasses.

I think he can tell I’ve had a bit to drink.

“Will you dance with me?” he shouts over the screams.

I inexplicably start to cough. He rolls his eyes at me and chuckles. I start thinking about proms and weddings, and for a few seconds I actually forget that we’re just in some garden where the ground looks like shit and the people are all dressed in near-identical outfits.

He removes his hand from my wrist and uses it to flatten his hair, and then he stares at me for what feels like a whole year. I wonder what he sees. Without warning, he grabs both of my wrists and literally kneels at my feet.

“Please dance with me,” he says. “I know that dancing is awkward and outdated, and I know that you don’t like doing stuff like that and if I’m honest, neither do I, and I know that the night isn’t going to last very long and soon everyone will just go home back to their laptops and their empty beds, and we’ll probably be alone tomorrow, and we all have to go to school on Monday—but I just think that if you tried it, you know, dancing, you might feel for a few minutes that all of this, all of these people . . . none of it is really too bad.”

I look down and meet his eyes.

I start to laugh before kneeling down too.

And then I do something really weird.

Once I’m on my knees—I really can’t help it—I kind of fall forward into him and fling my arms around him.

“Yes,” I say into his ear.

So he puts his arms around my waist, lifts us both to our feet, and resumes pulling me through the adolescent expanses.

We reach the center of the crowd clustered around the DJ.

He puts his hands on my shoulders. Our faces are centimeters apart. It’s so loud he has to scream.

“Yes, Tori! They’re playing the Smiths! They’re playing the beautiful Smiths, Tori!”

The Smiths are the band of the internet—more specifically, and unfortunately, a band that many people listen to simply because Morrissey has that vintage, self-deprecating coolness that everyone seems to crave. If the internet were an actual country, “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out” would be its national anthem.

I feel myself slightly step backward.

“Do you . . . do you have . . . a blog?”

For a second he’s confused, but then he just smiles and shakes his head. “Jesus, Tori! Do I have to have a blog to like the Smiths? Is that the rule now?”

And this is the moment, I guess, when I decide that I can’t care less about anything else tonight, I can’t care less about blogs or the internet or films or what people are wearing, and yes, yes, I am going to have fun, I am going to have a good time, I am going to be with my one and only friend Michael Holden, and we are going to dance until we can’t even breathe and we have to go home and face our empty beds. So when we start jumping up and down, smiling so ridiculously, looking at each other and at the sky and not really at anything, Morrissey singing something about shyness, I really don’t think things could be so bad after all.