Solitaire

WHEN I GET to school on Wednesday, I watch out for Michael Holden in the common room crowds. I wonder whether seeing him will make me feel better or worse. It could go either way. I know I’m dragging him down. Seeing me cannot make Michael Holden feel better. He deserves to have a friend who loves life and laughter, who loves having fun and having adventures, someone to drink tea with and argue about a book and stargaze and ice-skate and dance with. Someone who isn’t me.

Becky, Lauren, Evelyn, and Rita are sitting in our spot in the corner. No Ben, no Lucas. Like the beginning of the year all over again. I stand at the door to the common room, kind of staring at them. Evelyn is the only one who sees me. She catches my eye, then quickly looks away. Even if I could quietly overlook her exceedingly irritating hair and clothing choices like a decent and accepting human being should, Evelyn has always done many things that I have not approved of, such as thinking she is better than other people and pretending to know more than she does. I wonder whether she dislikes me as much as I dislike her.

I take a seat in a swivel chair, away from Our Lot, thinking about all my personal attributes. Pessimist. Mood killer. Unbearably awkward and probably paranoid. Deluded. Nasty. Borderline insane, manically depressed psychopa—

“Tori.”

I spin around on the chair. Michael Holden’s found me.

I look up at him. He’s smiling, but it looks weird. Fake. Or am I imagining that?

“It’s Wednesday today,” I say instantly, unwilling to build up our conversation with small talk but doing it anyway.

He blinks but doesn’t act too taken aback. “Yes. Yes, it is.”

“I suppose,” I say, curling onto the desk with my cheek on my arm, “I don’t like Wednesdays because it’s the middle day. You feel like you’ve been at school for ages, but it’s still ages until the weekend. It’s the most . . . disappointing day.”

As he takes this in, something else kind of weird crosses his expression. Almost like panic, or something. He coughs. “Can we, er, talk somewhere quieter?”

I really do not want to have to get up.

But he persists. “Please? I’ve got some news.”

As we’re walking, I stare into the back of his head. In fact, I just stare at his whole body. I’ve always thought of Michael Holden as this kind of entity, this sparkling orb of wonder, and yet now, looking at him walking along in his average school uniform, hair kind of soft and messy compared to how he had it gelled when I first met him, I find myself thinking about the fact that he’s just a normal guy. That he gets up and goes to bed, that he listens to music and watches TV, that he revises for exams and probably does homework, that he sits down to dinner, that he showers and brushes his teeth. Normal stuff.

What am I talking about?

He takes me to the school library. It’s not as quiet as he’d hoped. There are lower-school girls swarming around the desks in exactly the same way that the Sixth Formers do in the common room except with much more enthusiasm. There are not many books; it’s actually more of a large room with a few bookshelves than a library. The atmosphere is quite strange. I’m almost glad that it’s so bright and happy in here. It’s an odd feeling, because I never like bright and happy things.

We sit down in the middle of the nonfiction row. He’s looking at me, but I don’t want to look back anymore. Looking at his face makes me feel funny.

“You were hiding yesterday!” he says, trying to make it sound like a cute joke. As if we’re six years old.

For a second I wonder if he knows about my special beautiful place on the art conservatory roof, but that’s impossible.

“How’s your arm?” he asks.

“It’s fine,” I say. “Didn’t you have something to tell me?”

And the pause he leaves then—it’s like he has everything he wants to tell me, and nothing.

“Are you al—” he begins, then changes his mind. “Your hands are cold.”

I stare blankly at my hands, still avoiding his eyes. Had he been holding my hand on the way here? I curl my palms into fists and sigh. Fine. Small talk it is. “I watched all three Lord of the Rings last night, and V for Vendetta. Oh, and I had a dream. I think it was about Winona Ryder.”

And I can feel the sadness pouring out of him all of a sudden, and it makes me want to get up and run away and keep running.

“I also found out that approximately one hundred billion people have died since the world began. Did you know that? One hundred billion. It’s a big number, but it still doesn’t seem like quite enough.”

There’s a long silence. A few of the lower-school groups are looking at us and giggling, thinking we’re having some kind of deep, romantic conversation.

Finally, he says something productive: “I guess neither of us has been sleeping much.”

I decide to look at him then.

It shocks me a little.

Because there’s none of the usual Michael in that calm smile.

And I think of the time at the ice rink when he’d been so angry

but it’s different from that.

And I think of the sadness that’s been in Lucas’s eyes since the day I met him

but it’s different from that too.

Split between the green and the blue, there is an indefinable beauty that people call humanity.

“You don’t have to do this anymore.” I’m whispering, not because I don’t want people to hear, but I seem to have forgotten how to increase the volume in my voice. “You don’t have to be my friend. I don’t want people to feel sorry for me. I’m literally one hundred and ten percent fine. Really. I understand what you’ve been trying to do, and you are a very nice person, you’re the perfect person actually, but it’s okay, you don’t have to pretend anymore. I’m fine. I don’t need you to help me. I’ll do something about all this and then I’ll be all right and it’ll all go back to normal.”

His face doesn’t change. He reaches toward me with his hand and brushes what must be a tear from my face—not in a romantic way, but as if I had a malaria-carrying mosquito perched on my cheek. He looks at the tear, somewhat confused, and then holds his hand up to me. I hadn’t realized I was crying. I don’t really feel sad. I don’t really feel anything.

“I’m not a perfect person,” he says. His smile is still there, but it’s not a happy smile. “And I don’t have any friends except for you. In case you hadn’t heard, most people know that I’m the king of freaks; I mean, yeah, sometimes I come across as charming and eccentric, but eventually people realize that I’m just trying too hard. I’m sure Lucas Ryan and Nick Nelson can tell you all kinds of wonderful stories about me.”

He leans back. He looks annoyed, to be honest.

“If you don’t want to be friends with me, I completely understand. You don’t have to make some excuse about it. I know that I’m the one who always comes to find you. I’m the one who always starts our conversations. Sometimes you don’t say anything for ages. But that doesn’t mean that our friendship is all about me trying to make you feel better. You know me better than that.”

Maybe I don’t want to be friends with Michael Holden. Maybe that’s better.

We sit together for a while. I randomly select a book from the shelf behind me. It’s called The Encyclopaedia of Life, and it can only be about fifty pages long. Michael reaches out his hand toward me but doesn’t, as I anticipate, take my own hand. Instead, he takes hold of a strand of my hair, which, I guess, had sort of been in my face, and he tucks it carefully behind my left ear.

“Did you know,” I say at some point, for some inexplicable reason, “that most suicides happen in the springtime?” Then I look at him. “Didn’t you say you had news?”

And that’s when he gets up and walks away from me and out of the library door and out of my life, and I am 100 percent sure that Michael Holden deserves better friends than the pessimist introvert psychopath Tori Spring.