Solitaire

DAD GETS ME to school at 6:55 a.m. the next day. I am in a trance. In the car, he says, “Maybe if you catch them in the act, you’ll get a community award.”

I don’t know what a community award is, but I feel that I’m probably the least likely person in the world to get one.

Zelda, her prefects, the nominated helpers, and even old Kent are in the hall, and I’m the only one there who came in school uniform. It’s basically nighttime outside. The school heating hasn’t started up yet. I praise myself for putting on two pairs of tights this morning.

Zelda, in leggings and running trainers and an oversized Superdry hoodie, takes charge.

“Okay, guys. Today’s the day we’re catching them, yeah? Everyone’s got a separate area of the school. Patrol that area and call me if you find anything. Nothing’s been done to the school since Friday, so there’s a chance they won’t turn up today. But we’re going to do this until we feel that the school is safe, whether we end up catching anyone or not. Meet back in the hall at eight.”

Why did I even come here?

The prefects begin to chat among themselves, and Zelda speaks to each person individually before sending them off into the unlit, unheated depths of the school.

When she gets to me, she presents me with a piece of paper and says, “Tori, you’re patrolling the IT suites. Here’s my number.”

I nod at her and go to walk off.

“Er, Tori?”

“Yeah?”

“You look a bit—” She doesn’t finish her sentence.

It’s 7:00 a.m. She can piss off.

I walk away, throwing the piece of paper in a bin as I pass it. I come to a halt upon finding Kent standing ominously by the hall entrance.

“Why me?” I ask him, but he just raises his eyebrows and smiles at me, so I roll my eyes and walk away.

Wandering around the school like this is peculiar. Everything’s so still. Serene. No air circulation. I’m walking through a freeze-frame.

The IT suite is in C Block, on the second floor. There are six computer rooms: C11, C12, C13, C14, C15, and C16. The usual whir of the suite is absent. The computers are all dead. I open up C11, peer inside, and repeat this for C12, C13, and C14 before giving up and taking a seat on a swivel chair inside C14. What does Kent even think he’s doing involving me in this? As if I’m going to do any kind of “patrolling.” I kick the floor and spin. The world hurricanes around me.

I don’t know how long I do this, but when I stop to read the time, the clock waves in front of my eyes. When it calms down, it reads 7:16 a.m. I wonder for at least the sixteenth time what I am doing here.

It is then that I hear a distant sound of the Windows booting-up jingle.

I get off my chair and step into the corridor. I look one way. I look the other. The corridor dissolves into darkness both ways, but out of the open door of C13 glares a hazy blue glow. I creep down the corridor and go inside.

The interactive whiteboard is on, the projector whirring happily, the Windows desktop on display. I stand before the board, staring into it. The desktop wallpaper is a sloped green field beneath a blue sky. The harder I stare, the wider the board seems to spread, wider and wider, until the fake pixelated world invades my own. The computer that is linked to the screen hums.

The door to the room shuts by itself, like I’m in Scooby-Doo. I run and grab the handle but it’s locked, and for a second I just stare at myself in the door window.

Someone’s locked me in an IT room, for God’s sake.

Stepping backward, I see the board change in the blank monitors’ reflections. I spin on the spot. The green field has gone. In its place is a blank page of Microsoft Word with the cursor flashing on and off. I try smashing at the keyboard of the computer that’s hooked up to the board and wildly swishing the mouse across the table. Nothing happens.

I’m starting to sweat. My brain isn’t accepting this situation. I come up with two possibilities.

One: This is a sick joke by someone I know.

Two: Solitaire.

And that’s when text rolls across the white screen-scape.

Attention Team Ops,

Please refrain from panic and alarm.

Pause.

What?

SOLITAIRE is a friendly, neighborhood-watch organization, dedicated to aiding the adolescent population through targeting the most common cause of teenage anxiety. We are on your side. You should not be afraid of any action we will/will not take.

We hope that you will support SOLITAIRE’s future actions and come to feel that school need not be a place of solemnity, stress, and isolation.

Someone is trying to deliberately freak the prefects out. As I am not a prefect, I am choosing not to freak out. I don’t know what I feel about this, but it definitely isn’t freaked out.

We leave you with a video that we hope will enlighten your morning.

SOLITAIRE
Patience Kills

The page of text remains on-screen for several seconds before Windows Media Player pops up in front of it. The cursor zooms to the play button, and the video begins.

The footage is kind of blurry, but you can make out two figures on a stage, one at a piano, one with a violin in her hands. The violinist holds her instrument up to her chin and raises her bow, and together, the two begin to play.

Only after the first eight bars, and after the camera has zoomed in, do I realize that the musicians can be no more than eight years old.

I don’t know what the piece of music is. It doesn’t matter. Because sometimes I hear a piece of music and I can’t do anything but sit there. Sometimes in the morning, the radio turns on and a song is playing and it’s so beautiful that I just have to lie there until it’s over. Sometimes I’m watching a film, and it’s not even a sad scene, but the music is so sad that I can’t help but cry.

This is one of those times.

Eventually, the video ends and I just stand there.

I guess Solitaire thinks it’s being intellectual and deep. Making us watch that video and writing with such eloquence, like people who think that they’re hilarious for using the word “thus” in school essays. It half makes me laugh and half makes me want to shoot them.

The fact remains that C13’s door is still locked and I’m still trapped here. I want to cry out but I don’t. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do.

I threw away Zelda’s number, like the idiot I am. I don’t know anyone else here.

I can’t call Becky. She wouldn’t come here. Dad’s at work. Mum’s in her pj’s. Charlie won’t get to school for another forty-five minutes.

There is only one person who would help me.

There is only one person who is going to believe me.

I pull my phone out of my blazer pocket.

“Hello?”

“Before I say anything else, I have a question.”

“Tori!? Oh my God, you actually called me!”

“Are you a real person?”

I’ve been considering the possibility that Michael Holden is a figment of my imagination. This is probably because I fail to understand how someone with a personality like his could survive in this shitty world and also because I fail to understand how someone with a personality like his would take any interest in a misanthropic, pessimistic asshole like myself.

I found his number posted in my locker yesterday lunchtime. It was written on one of those Solitaire pink Post-its with an arrow drawn on it, except now he’d added his phone number and a smiley face. I knew that it was Michael. Who else would it be?

There is a long pause before he says, “I promise—I swear—that I am a completely real person. Here. On the Earth. Living and breathing.”

He waits for me to say something, and when I don’t, he continues, “And I can understand why you would ask me that, so I’m not offended or anything.”

“Okay. Thanks for . . . erm . . . clearing that up.”

I proceed to explain in the most nonchalant way I can muster that I am locked in an IT classroom.

“Lucky for you that I decided to turn up to help today,” he says. “I knew something like this would happen. This is why I had to give you my number. You’re totally a danger to yourself.”

And then he appears, strolling casually past, phone pressed to his ear, not even aware that I’m only meters from him.

I pound my hand repeatedly on the door window. Michael reverses several steps, uncharacteristically frowning, and peers at me. Then he grins, hangs up the phone, and waves wildly.

“Tori! Hey!”

“Get me out,” I say, laying my hand flat against the window.

“Are you sure it’s locked?”

“No, I just forgot how to open a door.”

“I’ll open it if you do something for me first.”

I bash the window several more times, as if he is some kind of animal and I am trying to scare him into action. “I quite literally do not have time for this—”

“Just one thing.”

I stare at him, hoping that it’s strong enough to paralyze, if not kill, him.

He shrugs at me, though I don’t know why. “Smile.”

I slowly shake my head. “What is wrong with you? You don’t understand what just happened to me.”

“If you prove to me you have the capacity to smile, I will believe that you are a human being and I will let you out.” He’s completely serious.

My hand drops. I could not be smiling any less than I am now. “I hate you.”

“No, you don’t.”

“Just let me out.”

“You asked me if I was a real person.” He adjusts his glasses and his voice suddenly gets quiet. It’s unnerving. “Did it occur to you that I might not believe that you are a real person?”

So I smile. I don’t know what it ends up looking like, but I move my cheek muscles and wrench the sides of my mouth up a little to make the crescent moon shape with my lips. Michael’s reaction reveals that he had not, in fact, expected me to do it. I immediately regret giving in. His eyes stretch wide and his own smile drops and is gone.

“Holy crap,” he says. “That was actually really difficult for you.”

I let it go. “All right. We’re both real. Turn the lock.”

And he does.

We look at each other, and then I start to barge past him but he steps in front of me, placing his hands on each side of the door frame.

“What?” I’m going to have a breakdown. This guy. Jesus Christ.

“Why were you locked in an IT room?” he asks. His eyes are so wide. Is he—is he concerned? “What happened in there?”

I glance to one side. I don’t really want to look him in the eyes. “Solitaire hacked the whiteboard. Sent round a message to the prefects. And a video.”

Michael gasps like a cartoon. He removes his hands from the door frame and places them both on my shoulders. I cower backward.

“What did it say?” he asks, half-amazed, half-terrified. “What was the video?”

In any other situation, I don’t think I’d bother telling him. I mean, who cares, right?

“Go look for yourself,” I mutter.

I step back into the room, and he skips around me toward the projector computer.

“It’s just something stupid,” I say, collapsing onto a swivel chair next to him. “And actually you won’t be able to do anything on that computer anyw—”

But Michael is moving the mouse totally normally, flying the cursor back toward the Word document.

He reads the entire message aloud.

“Patience kills,” he mumbles. “Patience kills.”

He then insists that we watch the video, which I agree to mostly because I thought it was so lovely the first time. When it finishes, he says, “You thought that was ‘just something stupid’?”

There’s a pause.

“I can play the violin,” I say.

“Seriously?”

“Er, yeah. Well, not anymore. I stopped practicing a few years ago.”

Michael gives me this weird look. But then it’s gone, and suddenly, he’s impressed. “You know, I bet they’ve hacked the whole school. That is absolutely outstanding.”

Before I have a chance to disagree, he’s opened up Internet Explorer and typed in solitaire.co.uk.

The Solitaire blog pops up. With a new text post at the top of the screen.

Michael breathes so loudly I can hear him.

00:30 11 January
Solitairians.
The first Solitaire meet-up will take place on Saturday, 22 January, 8:00 p.m. onward, at the third house from the river bridge.
All are welcome.

When I look up at Michael, he is carefully taking a photograph of the post on his phone.

“This is gold,” he says. “This is the best discovery I’ve made all day.”

“It’s only half past seven,” I say.

“It’s important to make lots of discoveries every day.” He stands back up. “That’s what makes one day different from the next.”

If that statement is true, that explains a lot of things about my life.

“You look so freaked out.” Michael sits down in the chair next to me and leans forward so that his face is parallel to my own. “We made progress. Be excited!”

“Progress? Progress with what?”

He frowns. “The Solitaire investigation. We have made a significant leap forward here.”

“Oh.”

“You still don’t sound excited.”

“Can you imagine me being excited about anything?”

“Yes, I can, actually.”

I glare at his stupid smug face. He starts tapping his fingers together.

“Anyway,” he says, “we’re going to their meet-up.”

I hadn’t thought about that. “Er—we are?”

“Er yeah. It’s next Saturday. I will drag you there if I have to.”

“Why do you want to go? What is the point of this?”

He opens his eyes very wide. “You aren’t curious?”

He’s delusional. He’s more delusional than I am, and that’s saying something.

“Um, look,” I say. “It is perfectly okay to hang out, like, if you want. But I don’t care about Solitaire, and to be totally honest, I don’t really want to get involved. So, er, yeah. Sorry.”

He gives me a long look. “Interesting.”

I say nothing.

“They locked you in this room,” he says, “and you still don’t care. Why not consider it this way: They’re the evil criminal organization and you’re Sherlock Holmes. I’ll be John Watson. But we’ve got to be the Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman Sherlock and Watson, because the BBC Sherlock is infinitely greater than all other adaptations.”

I stare at him.

“It’s the only adaptation that gets the bromance right.”

“You’re a fangirl,” I whisper, with mock horror.

Another pause, in which I abruptly wonder whether the Sherlock fandom is right and there really is sexual tension between Sherlock Holmes and John Watson.

Eventually we get up and leave. Or at least, I do. And he follows, shutting the door behind him. For the first time I realize that he is wearing just his shirt, tie, and trousers, no jumper or blazer.

“Aren’t you cold?’ I say.

He blinks at me. His glasses are enormous. His hair is so neat that it’s almost made of stone. “Why, are you?”

We head down the corridor, and after we’ve almost reached the end, I notice that Michael is no longer at my heels. I turn around. He has stopped directly in front of C16 and opened it up.

He frowns. It looks a little odd on his face.

“What?” I ask.

It takes him longer than it should to answer. “Nothing,” he says. “I thought there would be something here, but there’s nothing.”

Before I have a chance to question what the bloody hell he’s talking about, someone behind me cries, “Tori!”

I spin back around. Zelda is striding toward me with an expression on her face that will one day provide her with premature wrinkles. “Tori! Have you found anything?”

I think about whether to lie or not.

“No, we didn’t find anything. Sorry.”

“What do you mean ‘we’?”

I turn back to Michael. Or the space where Michael had been standing. But he’s not there. Only then do I wonder what it really was that made him decide to turn up at school at half past seven in the morning.