Solitaire

I HEAD INSIDE, go into the dining room, and say hello to my family. They’re still at dinner, as usual. Well, except Oliver. Since dinner’s kind of a two-to-three-hour job in our house, Oliver’s always allowed to leave the table once he’s done, and I can hear him playing Mario Kart in the living room. I decide to join him. If I could swap bodies with someone for a day, I would choose Oliver.

“Toriiii!” As soon as I enter, he rolls over on the futon and stretches his arm toward me like a zombie rising out of the grave. He must have got yogurt all down his school jumper today. And he has paint on his face. “I can’t win on Rainbow Road! Help me!”

I sigh, sit down on the futon next to him, and pick up the spare Wii remote. “This track is impossible, bro.”

“No!” he whines. “Nothing’s impossible. I think the game’s cheating.”

“The game can’t cheat.”

“It is. It’s cheating on purpose.”

“It’s not cheating you, Ollie.”

“Charlie can win. It just doesn’t like me.”

I produce a large and exaggerated gasp, springing up from the futon. “Are you suggesting that Charlie is better at Mario Kart than moi?” I start to shake my head. “Nope. Nuh-uh. I’m the Mario Kart empress.”

Oliver laughs, his fluffy hair waving around atop his head. I fall back onto the futon, lift him up, and sit him on my lap.

“All right,” I say. “Rainbow Road is going down.”

I don’t keep track of how long we’re playing, but it must be quite a while because when Mum comes in, she’s pretty irritated. And that’s extreme, for her. She’s a very emotionless person.

“Tori,” says Mum, “Oliver should have been in bed an hour ago.”

Oliver doesn’t seem to hear her. I glance up from the race.

“That’s not really my job,” I say.

Mum looks at me, expressionless.

“Oliver, it’s bedtime,” she says, still looking at me.

Oliver quits the game and trots off, high-fiving me on the way. Even when he’s gone, Mum doesn’t stop looking at me.

“Do you have something to say?” I ask.

Apparently, she doesn’t. She turns around and leaves. I get in a quick round of Luigi Circuit before heading to my own room. I don’t think my mum likes me very much. That doesn’t really matter, because I don’t really like her either.

I put the radio on and blog until the early hours. The radio is playing all this dubstep crap, but I’ve got it on quietly so I don’t care too much. I can’t be bothered to leave my bed except to make at least five trips downstairs for more diet lemonade. I check the Solitaire blog, but there’s nothing new. So I spend ages scrolling down all my favorite blogs, reblogging screencaps of Donnie Darko and Submarine and The Simpsons taken out of context. I write a couple of whiney posts about I don’t even know what, and I almost change my display picture but can’t find anything where I look normal, so I fiddle around with my blog theme’s HTML for a bit to see if I can remove the gaps between each post. I stalk Michael’s Facebook, but he seems to use it even less than I do. I watch a bit of QI, but I don’t really find it interesting or funny anymore, so instead I watch Little Miss Sunshine, which I didn’t finish yesterday. I never seem to be able to finish watching a film on the same day I started it, because I can’t bear the thought of the film ending. After a while I put my laptop by my side and lie down. I think about all the other people who were at the restaurant who are probably now drunk and getting off with each other on Lauren’s parents’ sofas. At some point I fall asleep, but I can hear all these creaky noises coming from outside and something in my brain decides that there is definitely some kind of giant and/or demon stomping around in the road, so I get up and close the window just to make sure that whatever it is cannot get inside.

When I get back into bed, every single thing that you could possibly think about in one day decides to come to me all at once, and suddenly there’s a small lightning storm inside my head. I think about Solitaire and then I think about Michael Holden and why he said we should be friends and what he was really like when he was at Truham. Then I remember Lucas and how embarrassed he was, and I wonder why he spent all that effort trying to find me. Then I remember his Hawaiian shirt, which still enormously irritates me because I hate to think that he’s become some indie band wannabe. So I open my eyes and wander around the internet to take my mind off it all, and, once I feel relatively okay again, I fall asleep with the glare of my blog home page warming my face and the hum of my laptop soothing my mind like crickets at a campsite.