Solitaire

THE SONG REPEATING itself over the loudspeaker throughout Thursday is “The Final Countdown” by Europe. Most people enjoy this for the first hour, but by second period, no one is screaming “IT’S THE FINAL COUNTDOWWWWWN” in the hallways anymore, much to my delight (if that’s possible for me). Zelda and her entourage are once again strutting through the hallways, tearing posters from the walls, and today these include pictures of Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, Abraham Lincoln, Emmeline Pankhurst, Winston Churchill, and oddly enough, Christmas chart-toppers Rage Against the Machine. Perhaps Solitaire is attempting to offer us some sort of positive encouragement.

It has been snowing violently since I woke up. This, of course, sparks mass hysteria and insanity in everyone in the lower school, and a kind of collective depression in everyone in the upper school. Most of the students have gone home by break, and lessons are officially canceled. I could easily walk home. But I don’t.

Tomorrow is the day.

At the start of what would have been Period 3, I exit the school building and head toward the art conservatory. I sit down, leaning against the little grass slope that leads up to the room’s concrete wall, and the roof above me overhangs a little so I’m not really getting snowed on. It’s cold, though. Like, numbingly cold. On my way outside, I picked up a large heater from the music block and plugged it in via a classroom window a few meters away. I’ve got it nestled into the snow next to me, blasting clouds of warmth around my body. I have three shirts on, both of my school jumpers, four pairs of tights, boots, blazer, coat, hat, scarf, and gloves, and shorts under my skirt.

If I don’t find out what’s happening tomorrow before tomorrow, then I’ll have to come to school and find out on the day. Solitaire is going to do something to Higgs. It’s what it’s been doing all the way up until now, isn’t it?

I feel strangely excited. It’s probably because I haven’t slept for quite a long time.

Last night I watched a film called Garden State. Not all of it, but most of it. It really surprised me that I hadn’t seen it before, because I thought it was absolutely excellent in every possible way, and I mean that—I gave it a spot in my Top Films list. It’s about this guy Andrew, and you’re never quite sure whether Andrew’s life is truly depressing or not. It seems like he has no decent friends or family, but then he meets this girl (typically happy-go-lucky, quirky, and beautiful Manic-Pixie-Dream-Girl Natalie Portman, of course) who teaches him how to live properly again.

You know, now that I think about it, I’m not so sure that I liked the film so much after all. It was very cliché. To be honest, I may have just got myself caught up in the artistic effects. It was good at the beginning, especially when Andrew dreamt that he was in a plane crash. And the shot where he wears a shirt that matches the wallpaper print behind him so he sort of fades away. I liked those bits a lot.

It’s very obvious that Zach Braff (who wrote, directed, acted, and compiled the soundtrack) created this film about himself. Maybe that’s what made it so real to me.

I keep typing Michael’s number into my phone and then deleting it. After about ten minutes of this, I realize that I know his number by heart. I curse myself for acting like such a dumb teenage girl. Then I accidentally press the green call button.

I swear resignedly at myself.

But I don’t hang up.

I bring the phone up to my ear.

I hear the little click of the call being answered, but he doesn’t say hello or anything. He listens. I think I hear him breathing, but it might just be the wind.

“Hello, Michael,” I finally say.

Nothing.

“I’m going to talk, so you can’t hang up.”

Nothing.

“Sometimes,” I say, “I can’t tell whether people are real or not. Lots of people pretend to be nice to me, so I’m never sure.”

Nothing.

“I’m just—”

“I’m fairly angry at you, Tori, to be honest.”

He speaks. The words circle around my head, and I want to roll over and throw up.

“You don’t see me as a person at all, do you?” he says. “I’m just some tool who’s always turning up to stop you hating yourself so much.”

“That’s wrong,” I say. “That’s completely wrong.”

“Prove it.”

I try to speak, but nothing comes out. My proof is shrouded by something like snow, and I can’t get it out. I can’t explain that yes, he stops me hating myself so much, but no, that isn’t why I want to be his friend more than I’ve ever wanted anything.

He laughs weakly. “You’re pretty hopeless, aren’t you? You’re as bad as I am at feelings.”

I try to think about when Michael might have expressed his feelings, but the only time I can think of is at the ice rink, that anger, so crazy that he might explode.

“Can we meet up?” I ask. I need to talk to him. In the real world.

“Why?”

“Because . . .” Once again my voice is trapped in my throat. “Because . . . I like . . . being . . . with you.”

There’s a long pause. For a brief moment I wonder if he hung up. Then he sighs.

“Where are you right now?” he asks. “Have you gone home?”

“On the field. By the art conservatory.”

“But it’s literally Hoth out there.”

A Star Wars reference. It takes me so by surprise that I once again fail to say anything in reply.

“I’ll see you in a minute,” he says.

I hang up.

He’s here in almost exactly a minute, which is impressive. He’s not wearing a coat or a scarf or anything over his uniform. I think that he may secretly be a radiator.

Several meters away, he absorbs the situation. I suppose it’s funny and that’s why he laughs.

“You took a heater outside?”

I look at the heater. “I am freezing.”

He thinks I’m insane. He’s not wrong.

“That is genius. I don’t even think I would do that.”

He sits next to me, leaning against the art conservatory’s outer wall. We stare over the field. It’s uncertain really where the field stops and the sheet-like snowflakes begin. The snow is falling slowly and vertically. I would say that there is total peace on earth, except that every now and then a solitary snowflake flies into my face.

At some point, he glances down at my left arm, which is resting on the snow between us. He doesn’t say anything about it.

“You had news to tell me,” I say. It’s pretty amazing that I even remember this. “But you didn’t tell me.”

His head turns to me, his smile absent. “Er, yeah. Well, it’s not too important.”

That means that it is important.

“I just wanted to tell you that I have another race in a few weeks,” he says, a little embarrassed. “I’m going to the World Junior Speed Skating Championships.” He shrugs and smiles. “I mean, the British never win, but if I get a good enough time score there, I might qualify for the Youth Winter Olympics.”

I spring forward from the wall. “Holy shit.”

He shrugs again. “I mucked up Nationals a couple of weeks ago, but . . . I’ve gotten better times than that before, so they decided to let me go.”

“Michael,” I say, “you’re literally extraordinary.”

He laughs. “Extraordinary is only an extension of ordinary,” he says.

He’s wrong, though. He is extraordinary, extraordinary as in magnificent, as in miraculous.

“So would you like to?” he asks.

“Like to what?” I ask.

“Would you like to come? To watch? I’m allowed to take someone, and usually it’s a parent, but, you know. . . .”

And without thinking, without wondering whether my parents would say yes, without even worrying about Charlie—

“Yeah,” I say. “Okay.”

He grins at me, and then I see a new expression that makes my chest hurt—a kind of raw gratitude, as if me going with him was the only thing that mattered.

I open my mouth to begin a serious conversation, but he sees it coming and holds up a finger to stop me.

“We are severely wasting this snow,” he says. I can see myself in his glasses.

“Wasting?”

He jumps onto two feet and walks into the blizzard. “Snow shouldn’t be just to look at, should it?” he says, rolling a snowball in his hands and tossing it from one to the other.

I say nothing, because I think that’s exactly what snow should be for.

“Come on.” He’s smiling, gawking at me. “Throw a snowball at me.”

I frown. “Why?”

“For no reason!”

“There’s no point.”

“The point is that there’s no point.”

I sigh. I am not going to win this argument. Begrudgingly, I stand up, step out into the Arctic and, with little enthusiasm, collect a ball of snow in my hands. Luckily, I’m right-handed, so my injured arm doesn’t really put me at a disadvantage. I throw it toward Michael, where it lands about three meters to his right. He looks at it and gives me a solemn thumbs-up acceptingly. “You tried.”

There’s something about the way he says it, not even patronizing, just simply disappointed, that makes me squint at him, pick up another snowball, and try again, this time landing bang on target in the center of his chest. A false sense of achievement blossoms in my stomach.

Raising his arms in the air, he cries, “You’re alive!”

I throw another snowball. Then he throws one at me and runs away. Before I even have time to realize what I’m doing, the whole thing erupts into a chase around the field. I fall over more than once, but I manage to stuff snow down the back of his shirt two times and he gets me right in the back of the head so my hair is now soaked, but I don’t feel so cold because we’re running around face-first into the swirling snow like there is nothing else in the world but the two of us and snow and more snow and more snow, no ground, no sky, no nothing. I begin to wonder how Michael can so easily make something wonderful out of something cold, and then I begin to wonder whether lots of people are like this, and I begin to wonder whether, if I wasn’t so busy thinking about other things, I would be like this.

Michael Holden is sprinting toward me. He’s got a massive pile of snow in his arms and this psychotic grin, so I charge back across the field and into school. There’s no one anywhere and the emptiness is somehow wonderful. I run into the Sixth Form block and into the common room, which is entirely deserted, but I’m much too slow. Just as I open the common room doors he lets the slush tumble onto the top of my head. I scream and laugh. Laugh? Laugh.

I lie faceup, panting, on a computer desk, moving the keyboard onto my stomach to make room. He collapses into a swivel chair, shaking his hair like a wet dog. The chair rolls backward several inches, and it sparks an idea in his head.

“Here’s the next game,” he says. “You have to get from here”—he gestures to the Computer Corner—“to there”—the door on the opposite side, past the maze of tables and chairs—“standing on a computer chair.”

“I’d rather not break my neck.”

“Stop being boring. You’re banned from saying no.”

“But that’s my catchphrase.”

“Make a new one.”

With a long sigh, I step up onto a swivel chair. This is a lot more difficult than it looks, because not only are swivel chairs very wobbly but they also spin around, hence the name swivel chair. I gain my balance, stand tall, and point at Michael, who has stood up on his own chair with his arms warily outstretched. “When I fall and die, I am coming back to haunt you.”

He shrugs at me. “That wouldn’t be so bad.”

We race all the way around the tables, grasping at the plastic chairs to haul ourselves along. At one point, Michael’s chair tips up, but he spectacularly manages to step forward over the back of the seat, landing before me in a sort of kneeling position. His face, wide-eyed, rests in a fairly stunned expression for several seconds before he beams up at me, throwing open his arms and crying, “Marry me, my darling!”

It’s so funny I nearly die. He comes over to me and starts spinning around the chair I’m standing on, not fast, but fast enough, and then he lets go. I’m standing up, twirling around and around on this chair with my arms in the air, the windows of snow merging with the unlit room in a slushy vortex of white and yellow. I keep thinking as I’m spinning how everything looks so sad, but if this day were to go down in history, everyone would talk about what a beautiful day it was.

We’ve pushed all the spare desks together to form one enormous table, and we’re laid out in the middle on our backs just under the skylight so that we can see the snow falling on top of us. Michael rests his hands on his stomach, locked together, and I lay mine out beside me. I have no idea what we’re doing or why. I think he thinks that’s the point. To be honest, this could all be imaginary and I wouldn’t even know.

“Thought for the day,” says Michael. He lifts one hand and touches the bandage on my arm, fiddling with the frayed edges at my wrist. “Do you think that if we were happy for our entire lives, we would die feeling like we’d missed out on something?”

I do not say anything for some time.

Then:

“They were from you?” Those blog messages, those messages that I’d assumed . . . “You send me those messages?”

He smiles, keeping his eyes on the ceiling. “What can I say? Your blog is more interesting than you think it is, chronic-pessimist.”

My blog URL. Normally, I’d feel like dying if someone found my blog. If Becky, or Lauren, or Evelyn, or Rita, or any of those people—if they found the place where I say stupid stuff about myself, pretending that I’m some unfortunate and tortured teenage soul, begging for sympathy from people who I’ve never even seen in the flesh . . .

I roll my head toward him.

He looks at me. “What?”

I almost say something then. I almost say something.

But I don’t.

And then he says, “I wish I were more like you.”

And the snow falls and I close my eyes and we fall asleep together.

I wake up and he’s gone and I’m in the dark. Alone. No—not alone. There’s someone here. Someone. Here?

As my senses come back to me, I begin to decipher hushed voices coming from the common room door. If I had any energy, I would sit up and look. But I don’t. I lie still and listen.

“No,” says Michael. “You’ve been acting like a little shit. You can’t fuck around with someone like that. Do you understand how she’s feeling at the moment? Do you understand what you’ve done?”

“Yeah, but—”

“You give the full explanation, or you say nothing. You be honest, or you shut the fuck up. Dropping little hints and then hiding is literally the worst thing you could do.”

“I haven’t been dropping little hints.”

“What have you said to her? Because she knows, Lucas. She knows there’s something going on.”

“I’ve tried to explain—”

“No, you haven’t. So you’re going to go and tell her everything you’ve just told me. You owe that to her. She’s a real person, not some childhood dream. She has real feelings.” There’s a long pause. “Jesus fucking Christ. This is a fucking revelation.”

I haven’t heard Michael swear so much all in one conversation.

I haven’t heard Michael and Lucas talk to each other since Pizza Express.

I don’t think I want to know what they’re talking about.

I sit up, still on the table, and swivel round to face the two boys.

They’re standing in front of the door, Michael holding it by one hand. Lucas sees me first. Then Michael. Michael looks a little like he’s going to be sick. He takes Lucas firmly by the shoulder and shoves him toward me.

“If you are going to do anything about anything,” he says, addressing me, pointing viciously at Lucas, “you need to talk to him.”

Lucas is terrified. I half expect him to scream like a girl.

Michael triumphantly raises his fist in the air in a Judd Nelson–like fashion.

“CLOSURE!” he bellows. And then he leaves the room.

It is just Lucas and me now. My former best friend, the boy who cried every day, and Tori Spring. Standing beside my table island, wrapped in a kind of parka over his uniform, he’s wearing one of those hats with the really long plaits hanging down at the front and looks absolutely hysterical.

I cross my legs like you do in primary school.

There is no time for being awkward now. No time for being shy, or being scared what other people would say. It’s time to start saying the things that are in our heads. Everything that would cause us to hold back—it’s gone. And we are only people. And this is the truth.

“Your new bestie is crazy,” says Lucas with noticeable resentment.

I shrug. Michael at Truham. Michael with no friends. “Apparently everyone already knew that.” Michael the freak. “To be honest, I think it’s just a defense mechanism.”

This seems to surprise Lucas. I snort a little and lie back onto the tables.

“So you owe me an explanation?” I say in a dramatic voice, but it’s too funny, and I start to laugh.

He chuckles, takes his hat off and puts it in his pocket, and folds his arms. “To be honest, Victoria, I can’t believe you haven’t guessed.”

“Well then, I must be some kind of idiot.”

“Yeah.”

Silence. We’re both totally still.

“You do know,” he says, taking another step closer. “You need to think carefully. You need to think about all the things that have happened.”

I get to my feet and step backward. There is nothing inside my head except fog now.

Lucas clambers onto the table island and walks a little way across toward me, nervously, as if he’s scared they’re just going to collapse under his weight. He tries to explain again.

“Do you . . . do you remember ever coming to my house when we were kids?”

I really want to laugh, but I can’t anymore. He looks down a little and sees the bandage on my arm, and it almost seems to make him shudder.

“We were best friends, yeah?” he says, but that means nothing. Becky was my “best friend.” Best friend. What does that indicate?

“What?” I shake my head. “What are you talking about?”

“You do remember,” he says, his voice barely above a whisper. “If I remember, then you remember. Tell me about when you came round my house all those times. Tell me what you saw there.”

He’s right. I do remember. I wish I didn’t. It was summer, we were eleven, and it was nearing the end of Year 6. I went round his house what felt like a hundred times. We played chess. We sat in the garden. We ate ice lollies. We ran all around his house—it was a big house. Three floors, with an abundance of hiding places. Everything was kind of beige. They had a lot of paintings.

A lot of paintings.

They had a lot of paintings.

And there is one that I remember.

I asked Lucas, when I was eleven, “Is that a painting of the high street?”

“Yep,” he said. He was smaller than me back then, his hair white-blond. “The cobbled high street in the rain.”

“I like the red umbrellas,” I said. “I think it must be summer rain.”

“I think so too.”

The painting of the wet cobbled street with red umbrellas and warm café windows, the painting that Doctor Who girl was staring at so intensely at the Solitaire party; it is inside Lucas’s house.

I begin to breathe very fast.

“That painting,” I say.

He says nothing.

“But the Solitaire party . . . that wasn’t your house. You don’t live in this town.”

“No,” he says. “My parents are in real estate. They own several empty houses. That house was one of them. They put those paintings in there to brighten it up for viewers.”

Everything suddenly clicks into place.

“You’re part of Solitaire,” I say.

He nods slowly. “I made it,” says Lucas. “I made Solitaire.”

I step back.

“No,” I say. “No, you didn’t.”

“I made that blog. I organized the pranks.”

Star Wars. Violins. Cats, Madonna. Ben Hope and Charlie. Fire. Bubbles. The fireworks at the Clay and the burning and the distorted voice? Surely I would have recognized his voice.

I step back.

“You’re lying.”

“I’m not.”

I step back, but there isn’t any table to step back onto, and my foot falls onto air and I topple backward into nothingness, only to be caught under my arms by Michael Holden, who has been standing by us since God knows when. He lifts me a little and settles me on the ground. His hands feel strange on my arms.

“Can—” I can’t speak. I’m choking; my throat is closing. “You—you’re a sadistic—”

“I know, I’m sorry; it all got a bit out of hand.”

“Got a bit out of hand?” I shriek with laughter. “People could have died.”

Michael’s arms are around me. I throw him off, climb back onto the tables, and march toward Lucas, who cowers a little as I face him.

“All the pranks were related to me, weren’t they?” I say this more to myself than him. Michael had realized this right from the start. Because he’s clever. He’s so clever. And I, being me, didn’t bother to listen to anyone except myself.

Lucas nods.

“Why did you make Solitaire?” I say.

He can’t breathe. His mouth turns in and he swallows.

“I’m in love with you,” he says.

At that moment, I consider many options. One is to punch him in the face. Another is to jump out of the window. The option that I go with is to run. So now I’m running.

You don’t pull pranks on a school because you’re in love with someone. You don’t get a whole party to attack someone because you’re in love with someone.

I’m running through our school, into and out of classrooms I’ve never entered, through dark and empty corridors I never pass through anymore. All the while Lucas is in pursuit, crying out that he wants to explain properly, as if there’s more to explain. There isn’t more to explain. He’s a psycho. Like everyone. He doesn’t care that people get hurt. Like everyone.

I find myself at a dead end in the art department. It’s the room that I stood on top of only two days ago—the art conservatory. I dart around the room, desperately looking for somewhere to go, as Lucas stands breathing heavily at the door. The windows are too small to jump out of.

“Sorry,” he says, still panting, hands on his knees. “Sorry, that was kind of sudden. That didn’t make any sense.”

I practically screech with laughter. “Uh, you think?”

“Am I allowed to explain properly?”

I look at him. “Is this the final explanation?”

He stands up straight. “Yes, yes it is.”

I sit down on a stool. He sits on the stool next to mine. I edge away but don’t say anything. He begins his story.

“I never forgot anything about you. Every time we drove down your road I would look at your house, pretty much praying that you’d step out of your door at just the right moment. I used to come up with all these scenarios where I would contact you and we would be friends again. Like, we’d find each other on Facebook and start chatting and decide to meet up. Or we’d meet randomly somewhere—in the high street, at a party, I don’t know. When I grew older, you became, like, that one girl. You know? The one girl who I would end up having that great romance with. We start as childhood friends. We’d meet again, older, and that would be it. Happily ever after. Like a film.

“But you’re not the Victoria I had in my head. I don’t know. You’re someone else. Someone I don’t know, I guess. I don’t know what I was thinking. Look, I’m not a stalker or anything. I came for a tour of Higgs last term to see if I liked it, you know. Michael showed me round. He took me all over the school and the last place I visited was . . . the common room. And, er, that’s where I saw you. Sitting literally right in front of me.

“I thought I was going to have a heart attack. You were on a computer, but you had your back to me. You were sitting there at the computer, playing solitaire.

“And you looked so—you had one hand on your head and the other just clicking and clicking the mouse, and you looked so dead. You looked tired and dead. And under your breath you kept saying over and over, ‘I hate myself, I hate myself, I hate myself.’ Not loud enough for anyone to hear except me.”

I don’t remember this happening. I don’t remember this day at all.

“It seems dumb now. I bet you were just stressed about coursework or something. But I couldn’t stop thinking about it. And then, I started to get all these ideas. I thought that maybe you really did hate yourself. And I hated the school for doing that to you.

“I literally went into rages thinking about it. And that’s when I came up with Solitaire. I talked to a guy I knew from Truham who’d joined Higgs, and we decided to start pulling pranks. I had this crazy, crazy idea that just a few small acts of hilarity might bring something bright into your life. And into everyone’s lives.

“So, yeah, I organized the Ben Hope thing. I was so angry about what had happened to Charlie. Ben deserved that. But then . . . then the thing at the Clay happened. People got injured. You got injured. It got out of control. So after that I quit. I haven’t done anything since Sunday. But there’s so many followers now. We made them all take it so seriously, thinking they were anarchists or something, with the posters and the fireworks and the stupid slogans. I don’t know. I don’t know.

“Michael found me about half an hour ago. I know you’re going to hate me now. But . . . yeah. He’s right. It’s worse for you if you don’t know.”

Tears start to drift down his face, and I don’t know what to do. Like when we were little. Always silent tears.

“I am the worst type of human being,” Lucas says, and he puts his elbows on the table and looks away from me.

“Well, you’re not getting any sympathy from me,” I say.

Because he gave up. Lucas gave up. He let these stupid, imaginary feelings control his life, and he made bad things happen. Very bad things. Which caused other bad things to happen. This is the way the world works. This is why you never let your feelings control your behavior.

I’m angry.

I’m angry that Lucas didn’t fight against his feelings.

But that’s the way the world works.

Lucas stands up and I flinch away.

“Stay away from me,” I find myself saying, like he’s a rabid animal.

I can’t believe it took until now for me to realize the truth.

He’s not Lucas Ryan to me anymore.

“Victoria, I saw you that day and thought that the person who I’d been in love with for six years was going to kill herself.”

“Don’t touch me. Stay away from me.”

Nobody is honest; nobody is real. You can’t trust anyone or anything. Emotions are humanity’s fatal disease. And we’re all dying.

“Look, I’m not part of Solitaire anymore—”

“You were so innocent and awkward.” I’m talking in rushed, maniacal strings of thought. I don’t know why I’m saying any of this. It’s not really Lucas I’m angry at. “I suppose you thought you were romantic, with your books and your fucking hipster clothes. Why shouldn’t I be in love with you? All this time you were plotting and faking.”

Why am I surprised? This is what everyone does.

And then I know exactly what to do.

“What,” I ask, “is Solitaire going to do tomorrow?”

I have the chance to do something. To finally, wonderfully, put an end to all the pain.

He says nothing, so I shout.

“Tell me! Tell me what’s happening tomorrow!”

“I don’t know exactly,” says Lucas, but I think he’s lying. “All I know is that they’re meeting inside at six a.m.”

So that’s where I’ll be. Tomorrow at six. I’ll undo everything.

“Why didn’t you tell me that before?” I whisper. “Why didn’t you tell anyone?”

There is no answer. He cannot answer.

The sadness is coming, like a storm.

And I start to laugh like a serial killer.

I laugh and run. Run out of the school. Run through this dead town. Run, and I think, Maybe the pain will stop; but it keeps burning inside, burning down.