Solitaire

THE FIRST THING I do when I get home from school is collapse onto my bed and turn on my laptop. This happens every single day. If I’m not at school, you can guarantee that my laptop will be somewhere within a two-meter radius of my heart. My laptop is my soul mate.

Over the past few months, I’ve come to realize that I am far more of a blog than an actual person. I don’t know when this blogging thing started, and I don’t know when or why I signed up to this website, but I can’t seem to remember what I did before and I don’t know what I’d do if I deleted it. I severely regret starting this blog, I really do. It’s pretty embarrassing. But the only place where I ever find people who are sort of like me is on these blogs. People talk about themselves here in ways that people don’t in real life.

If I delete it, I think I’ll probably be completely alone.

I don’t blog to get more blog followers or whatever. I’m not Evelyn. It’s just that it’s not socially acceptable to say depressing stuff out loud in the real world because people think that you’re attention seeking. I hate that. So what I’m saying is that it’s nice to be able to say whatever I want. Even if it is only on the internet.

After waiting a hundred billion years for my internet to load, I spend a good while on my blog. There are a couple of cheesy anonymous messages—a few of my followers get all worked up about some of the pathetic stuff I post. Then I check Facebook. Two notifications—Lucas and Michael have sent friend requests. I accept both. Then I check my email. No emails.

And then I check the Solitaire blog again.

It’s still got the photo of Kent looking hilariously passive, but apart from that, the only addition to the blog is the title. It now reads:

SOLITAIRE: Patience Kills.

I don’t know what these Solitaire people are trying to do, but “Patience Kills” is the stupidest imitation of some James Bond film title that I have ever heard. It sounds like an online betting website.

I take the solitaire.co.uk Post-it out of my pocket and place it precisely in the center of the only empty wall in my room.

I think about what happened today with Lucas Ryan, and for a brief moment, I feel kind of hopeful again. I don’t know. Whatever. I don’t know why I bothered with this. I don’t even know why I followed those Post-its into that computer room. I don’t know why I do anything, for God’s sake.

Eventually I find the will to get up and plod downstairs to get a drink. Mum’s in the kitchen on the computer. She’s very much like me, if you think about it. She’s in love with Microsoft Excel the way I’m in love with Google Chrome. She asks me how my day was, and I just shrug and say that it was fine, because I’m fairly sure that she doesn’t care what my answer is.

It’s because we’re so similar that we stopped talking to each other so much. When we do talk, we either struggle to find things to say, or we just get angry, so apparently we’ve reached a mutual agreement that there’s really no point trying anymore. I’m not too bothered. My dad’s quite chatty, even if everything he says is extraordinarily irrelevant to my life, and I’ve still got Charlie.

The house phone rings.

“Get that, would you?” says Mum.

I hate the phone. It is the worst invention in the history of the world, because if you don’t talk, nothing happens. You can’t get by with simply listening and nodding your head in all the right places. You have to talk. You have no option. It takes away my freedom of nonspeech.

I pick it up anyway, because I’m not a horrible daughter.

“Hello?” I say.

“Tori. It’s me.” It’s Becky. “Why the hell are you answering the phone?”

“I decided to rethink my attitude toward life and become an entirely different person.”

“Say again?”

“Why are you calling me? You never call me.”

“I need to talk to you urgently.”

There is a pause. I expect her to continue, but she seems to be waiting for me to speak.

“Okay—”

“It’s Jack.”

Ah.

Becky has called about her almost-boyfriend, Jack.

She does this to me very often. Not call me, I mean. Ramble at me about her various almost-boyfriends.

While Becky is talking, I put “Mm”s and “Yeah”s and “Oh my God”s where they need to be. Her voice fades a little as I drift away and picture myself as her. As a lovely, happy, hilarious girl who gets invited to at least two parties a week and can start up a conversation within two seconds. I picture myself entering a party. Throbbing music, everyone with a bottle in their hand—somehow, there’s a crowd around me. I’m laughing, I’m the center of attention. Eyes light up in admiration as I tell another of my hysterically embarrassing stories, perhaps a drunk story, or an ex-boyfriend story, or simply a time that I did something remarkable, and everyone wonders how I manage to have such an eccentric, adventurous, carefree adolescence. Everyone hugs me. Everyone wants to know what I’ve been up to. When I dance, people dance; when I sit down, ready to tell secrets, people form a circle; when I leave, the party fades away and dies, like a forgotten dream.

“—you can guess what I’m talking about,” she says.

I really can’t.

“A few weeks ago—God, I should have told you this—we had sex.”

I sort of freeze up, because this takes me by surprise. Then I realize that this has been coming for a long time. I’d always kind of respected Becky for being a virgin, which is kind of pretentious, if you think about it. I mean, we’re all at least sixteen now, and Becky’s nearly seventeen; it’s fine if you want to have sex, I don’t care, it’s not a crime. But the fact that we were both virgins—I don’t know. I guess it made us equal, in a twisted way. And now here I am. Second place in something else.

“Well”—there is literally nothing I can say about this—“okay.”

“You’re judging me. You think I’m a slut.”

“I don’t!”

“I can tell. You’re using your judgment-y voice.”

“I’m not!”

There’s a pause. What do you say to something like that? Well done? Good job?

She starts explaining how Jack has this friend who would supposedly be “perfect” for me. I think that is unlikely unless he is entirely mute, blind, or deaf. Or all three.

Once I get off the phone, I sort of stand there in the kitchen. Mum’s still clicking away at the computer and I start to feel, again, like this whole day has been pointless. An image of Michael Holden appears in my head and then an image of Lucas Ryan and then an image of the Solitaire blog. I decide that I need to talk to my brother. I pour myself some diet lemonade and leave the kitchen.

My brother Charles Spring is fifteen years old and a Year 11 at Truham Grammar. In my opinion, he is the nicest person in the history of the universe, and I know that “nice” is kind of a meaningless word, but that is what makes it so powerful. It’s very hard to simply be a “nice” person, because there are a lot of things that can get in the way. When he was little, he refused to throw out any of his possessions because to him they were all special. Every baby book. Every outgrown T-shirt. Every useless board game. He kept them all in sky-high piles in his room, because everything supposedly had some kind of meaning. When I asked about a particular item, he’d tell me how he found it at the beach, or how it was a hand-me-down from our nan, or how he bought it when he was six at London Zoo. Mum and Dad got rid of most of that rubbish when he got ill last year—I guess he sort of got obsessed with it, and he got obsessed with a whole load of other things too (mainly food and collecting things), and it really started to tear him apart—but that’s all over now. He’s better, but he’s still the same kid who thinks everything is special. That’s the sort of guy Charlie is.

In the living room, it is extremely unclear what Charlie, his boyfriend, Nick, and my other brother, Oliver, are doing. They’ve got these cardboard boxes, and I mean there’s like fifty of them, piled up all over the room. Oliver, who is seven years old, appears to be directing the operation as Nick and Charlie build up the boxes to make some kind of shed-sized sculpture. The piles of boxes reach the ceiling. Oliver has to stand on the sofa to be able to oversee the entire structure.

Eventually, Charlie walks around the small cardboard building and notices me staring in from the doorway. “Victoria!”

I blink at him. “Shall I bother asking?”

He gives me this look as if I should know exactly what is going on. “We’re building a tractor for Oliver.”

I nod. “Of course. Yes. That’s very clear.”

Nick appears. Nicholas Nelson, a Year 12 like me, is one of those laddish lads who actually is into all those stereotypical things like rugby and beer and swearing and all that, but he also has the most successful combination of name and surname I have ever heard, which makes it impossible for me to dislike him. I can’t really remember when Nick and Charlie became Nick-and-Charlie, but Nick is the only one who visited Charlie when he was ill, so in my books, he’s definitely all right.

“Tori.” He nods at me, very seriously indeed. “Good. We need more free labor.”

“Tori, can you get the Scotch tape?” Oliver calls down, except he says “thcotch tape” instead of “Scotch tape” because he recently lost two front teeth.

I pass Oliver the thcotch tape, then point toward the boxes and ask Charlie, “Where did you get all of these?”

Charlie just shrugs and walks away, saying, “They’re Oliver’s, not mine.”

So that’s how I end up building a cardboard tractor in our living room.

When we’re finished, Charlie, Nick, and I sit inside it to admire our work. Oliver goes around the tractor with a marker pen, drawing on the wheels, the mud stains, and the machine guns “in case the cows join the dark side.” It’s sort of peaceful, to be honest. Every box has a big black arrow printed on it pointing upward.

Charlie is telling me about his day. He loves telling me about his day.

“Saunders asked us who our favorite musicians were and I said Muse, and three people asked me if I liked them because of Twilight. Apparently no one believes that it is possible to have an original interest.”

I frown. “I would like to meet a boy who has actually seen Twilight. Do you not both live in the realm of the FA Cup and Family Guy?”

Nick sighs. “Tori, you are generalizing again.”

Charlie rolls his head through the air toward him. “Nicholas, you mainly watch the FA Cup and Family Guy. Let’s be honest.”

“Sometimes I watch the Six Nations.”

We all chuckle, and then there’s a short, unawkward silence in which I lie down and look up at the cardboard ceiling.

I start to tell them about today’s prank. And that leads me to thinking about Lucas and Michael Holden.

“I met Lucas Ryan again today,” I say. I don’t mind telling this sort of stuff to Nick and Charlie. “He joined our school.”

Nick and Charlie blink at the same time.

“Lucas Ryan . . . as in primary-school Lucas Ryan?” Charlie frowns.

“Lucas Ryan left Truham?” Nick frowns too. “Balls. I was going to copy off him in our psychology mock.”

I nod to both of them. “It was good to see him. You know. Because we can be friends again. I guess. He was always so nice to me.”

They both nod back. It’s a knowing sort of nod.

“I also met some guy called Michael Holden.”

Nick, who had been in the middle of taking a sip of tea, chokes into his cup. Charlie grins, widely, and starts to giggle.

“What? Do you know him?”

Nick recovers enough to speak, though still coughs every few words. “Michael fucking Holden. Shit. He’ll go down in Truham legend.”

Charlie lowers his head but keeps his eyes on me. “Don’t become friends with him. He’s probably insane. Everyone avoided him at Truham because he’s mentally disturbed.”

Patting Charlie on the knee, Nick says, “Then again, I made friends with a mental person, and that turned out pretty spectacular.”

Charlie snorts and slaps away Nick’s hand.

“Do you remember when he tried to get everyone to do a flash mob for the Year 11 prank?” says Nick. “And in the end he just did it by himself on the lunch tables?”

“What about when he gave a speech on the injustice of authority for his Year 12 prefect speech?” says Charlie. “Just because he got detentions for having that argument with Mr. Yates during his mock exams!” Both he and Nick laugh heartily.

This confirms my suspicion that Michael Holden is not the sort of person with whom I would like to be friends. Ever.

Charlie looks up at Nick. “He’s gay, isn’t he? I heard he’s gay.”

Nick shrugs. “Well, I heard that he figure-skates, so it’s not entirely impossible.”

“Hm.” Charlie frowns. “I thought we knew all the Truham gays.”

They pause, and both look at me.

“Listen,” says Nick, gesturing sincerely to me with one hand. “Lucas Ryan’s a cool guy. But there’s something wrong with Michael Holden. I mean, it wouldn’t surprise me if he was behind that prank.”

The thing is, I don’t think that Nick is right. I don’t have any evidence to support this. I’m not even sure why I think this. Maybe it was something about the way Michael Holden spoke—like he believed everything he said. Maybe it was how sad he was when I showed him the empty Solitaire blog. Or maybe it was something else, something that doesn’t make sense, like the colors of his eyes, or his ridiculous side part, or how he managed to get that Post-it note into my hand when I can’t even remember our skin touching. Maybe it’s just because he’s too wrong.

As I’m thinking this, Oliver enters the tractor and sits down in my lap. I pat him affectionately on the head and give him what’s left of my diet lemonade, because Mum doesn’t let him drink it.

“I don’t know,” I say. “To be honest, I bet it was just some twat with a blog.”