Solitaire

“VICTORIA? TORI? ARE you there?”

Somebody is talking to me on the phone.

“Where are you? Are you all right?”

I am alone on the outskirts of the crowd. The music is gone. Everyone is waiting for the next band, and more and more people begin to join the crush, and it only takes a minute or two for me to be once again trapped in the heaving masses of bodies. The ground is covered in those flyers, and people have started to pick them up. Everything is happening very fast.

“I’m fine,” I say at last. “Charlie, I’m fine. I’m just on the field.”

“Okay. Good. Nick and I are heading back to the car now. You need to come too.”

There’s a rustling as Nick takes the phone from Charlie.

“Tori. Listen to me. You need to get back to the car right now.”

But I can barely hear Nick.

I can barely hear Nick because something else is happening.

There is a huge LED screen on the stage. Up until this point, it has been displaying decorative moving shapes, and occasionally the names of the songs being played.

Now it’s gone black, leaving only the dots of the glow sticks spread across the dark crowd. I begin to be jostled closer to the screen, the figures around me irresistibly drawn toward it. I turn away, intending to start to push out of the crowd, and that’s when I see it—there’s a figure, a boy figure, staring blankly from across the river. Is that Nick? I can’t tell.

“Something’s . . . something’s happening . . . ,” I say into the phone, twisting back toward the screen.

“Tori, you NEED to get back to the car. It’s going to get INSANE out there.”

The LED screen changes. It shines pure white, then bloodred, then back to black.

“Tori? Hello? Can you hear me?”

There’s a tiny red dot in the center of the screen.

“TORI!?”

It magnifies and takes shape.

It’s the upside-down heart.

The crowd screams as if Beyoncé has just graced the stage.

I press the red button on my phone.

And then a distorted, genderless voice begins.

“GOOD EVENING, SOLITAIRIANS.”

Everyone puts their arms in the air and shrieks—with glee, with fear, I don’t know anymore, but they’re loving it. Bodies edge forward, crushing against one another, everyone sweating, and soon I’m struggling even to breathe.

“ARE WE HAVING A GOOD TIME?”

The ground vibrates as the voices screech across the air. The flyer I picked up is in my hand. I can’t see Lucas, or Becky, or anyone I know. I need to get out. I throw my elbows outward and turn 180 degrees and begin to barge my way through the howling crowd—

“WE’VE POPPED IN TO TELL YOU ABOUT A SPECIAL EVENT WE’RE PLANNING.”

I push against the bodies, but I don’t seem to be moving. They’re staring upward at the screen as if hypnotized, shouting indiscernible strings of words—

And then I see him again. I peek through the gaps in the heads of the crowd. There, across the river. The boy.

“WE WANT IT TO BE A BIG SURPRISE. THIS COMING FRIDAY. IF YOU ATTEND HARVEY GREENE GRAMMAR SCHOOL, HIGGS SCHOOL, YOU HAD BETTER BE ON YOUR GUARD.”

I squint, but it’s so dark, and the crowd is so loud and so happy and so terrifying, and I can’t see who it is. I swivel my body back to the LED screen, elbows and knees digging into me at every angle, and there’s a countdown timer now showing, with the days, hours, minutes, and seconds—the crowd has started to fist-pump—04:01:26:52, 04:01:26:48, 04:01:26:45.

“IT’S GOING TO BE SOLITAIRE’S BIGGEST OPERATION YET.”

And with that, all at once, at least twenty fireworks go off within the crowd, shooting upward from the bodies like meteors and raining sparks down onto the heads, one of which is only five meters away from me. Those closest release petrified screams, jumping backward and away from harm, but most of the screams are still screams of happiness, screams of excitement. The crowd begins to sway and shake and I’m buffeted in every direction, my heart pounding so hard I think I might be dying, yes, I’m dying, I’m going to die—until eventually I burst out the edge of the crowd and find myself right on the riverbank.

I gaze in horror at the crowd. Fireworks of all shapes and colors are continuously exploding among the bodies. At the edge, I see several people fleeing, one or two on fire. A few feet away a girl collapses and has to be dragged away by her wailing friends.

Most of them seem to be enjoying themselves, though. Entranced by the rainbow lights.

“Tori Spring!”

For a moment, I think it’s the Solitaire voice speaking, speaking to me, and my heart stops completely. But it’s not. It’s him. I hear him scream it. I turn around. He’s across the river, which is narrow here, his face lit up by his phone like he’s about to tell a scary story, out of breath, in just a T-shirt and jeans. He begins to wave at me. I swear to God he must have an internal central heating system.

I stare across at Michael.

He’s got a flask of something in one hand.

“Is that . . . is that tea!?” I shout.

He raises the flask and studies it, as if he’d forgotten all about it. He looks back at me and his eyes sparkle and he bellows into the night, “Tea is the elixir of life!”

A fresh wave of screams ripples through the group near me, and I spin around, only to find people backing away, squealing and pointing at a small light on the ground only two steps away from me. A small light slowly fizzling toward a cylinder, dug into the ground.

“WE WOULD ESPECIALLY LIKE TO THANK THE CLAY FESTIVAL COMMITTEE, WHO DEFINITELY DID NOT ALLOW US TO BE HERE.”

It takes me precisely two seconds to realize that if I do not move, a firework is going to go off in my face.

“TORI.” Michael’s voice is all around me. I seem to be incapable of movement. “TORI, JUMP INTO THE RIVER RIGHT NOW.”

I turn my head toward him. It’s almost tempting to just accept my fate and be done with it.

His face is locked in an expression of pure terror. He pauses, and then he jumps into the river.

It is zero degrees out here.

“Holy,” I say before I can stop myself, “shit.”

“KEEP AN EYE ON THE BLOG. AND KEEP AN EYE ON EACH OTHER. YOU ARE ALL IMPORTANT. PATIENCE KILLS.”

The light is nearing the cylinder. I have perhaps five seconds. Four.

“TORI, JUMP INTO THE RIVER!”

The screen cuts to black, and the shrieking reaches its highest point. Michael is wading toward me, one hand outstretched, one holding his flask over his head. My only option.

“TORI!!!”

I leap from the bank into the river.

Everything seems to slow. Behind me, the firework explodes. As I’m in midair, I see its reflection in the water, yellows and blues and greens and purples dancing across the waves, and it’s almost beautiful, but only almost. I land with a splash so cold that my legs nearly give way.

And then I feel the pain on my left arm.

I look at it. I take in the flames creeping up my sleeve. I hear Michael scream something, but I don’t know what. And I plunge my arm into the icy water.

“Oh my God.” Michael is wading out, holding his flask over his head. The river is at least ten meters wide. “Sweet merciful FUCK, it is freezing!”

“AND REMEMBER, SOLITAIRIANS: JUSTICE IS EVERYTHING.”

The voice cuts out. Across the river, the crowds are hurrying through town to their cars.

“Are you all right?” shouts Michael.

I hesitantly lift my arm from the water. My coat sleeve is entirely burned away, and my jumper and shirtsleeves are in tatters. The skin peeking through is bright red. I press on it with my other hand. It hurts. A lot.

“Holy fucking shit.” Michael tries to wade faster, but I can see him physically shaking.

I step forward, farther into the river, my body vibrating uncontrollably, maybe from the cold or maybe from the fact that I just escaped death or maybe from the searing pain in my arm. I start to mumble deliriously, “We’ll kill ourselves. We’re both killing ourselves.”

He cracks a grin. He’s about halfway. The water is up to his chest. “Well, hurry up, then. I don’t feel like dying of hypothermia today.”

The water has risen to my knees, or maybe I’ve stepped forward again. “Are you drunk!?”

He raises his arms above his head and screams, “I AM THE SOBEREST INDIVIDUAL ON THIS WHOLE PLANET!”

The water’s at my waist. Am I walking forward?

He’s two meters away. “I’m just going out!” he calls in a singsong voice. “I may be some time!” Then: “Mother of God, I literally am going to freeze to death.”

I am thinking exactly the same thing.

“What’s wrong with you?” he asks. No need to shout now. “You just—you just stood there.”

“I nearly died,” I say, not really hearing him properly. I think I might be going into shock. “The firework.”

“It’s okay. You’re okay now.” He lifts my arm and takes a look at it. He swallows and tries not to swear. “Okay. You’re okay.”

“There are people—there are lots of hurt people—”

“Hey.” He finds my other hand in the water and bends a little so our eyes are parallel. “It’s okay. Everyone’s going to be okay. We’ll go to the hospital.”

“Friday,” I say. “Solitaire is . . . on Friday.”

We look back and the sight is magnificent. It is raining flyers. They’re hailing down into the crowd from the large fans set up onstage, and the fireworks are still erupting across the field, each one eliciting a wave of shrieks from the festival goers. It’s a storm, an honest-to-God storm. The sort of storm you go outside in just for the thrill of the risk of death.

“I’ve been looking for you,” I say. I cannot feel most of my body.

For some reason he puts his hands on either side of my face and leans forward and says:

“Tori Spring, I have been looking for you forever.”

The fireworks keep going, never ending, and Michael’s face keeps flashing in rainbow colors, and the light gleams from his glasses and several flyers swirl around us like we’re trapped in a hurricane, and the black water strangles us and we’re so close and there are people shouting at us and pointing but I really couldn’t give a crap and the cold has dissolved into some kind of numb ache but it barely registers and I think the tears freeze on my cheeks and I don’t really know what happens but through some kind of planetary force I find myself holding him like I don’t know what else to do and he’s holding me like I’m sinking and I think he kisses the top of my head but it might just be a snowflake but he definitely whispers “Nobody cries alone” or it might have been “Nobody dies alone” and I feel that as long as I stay here then there might be some kind of tiny chance that there is something remotely good in this world and the last thing I remember thinking before I pass out from the cold is that if I were to die, I would rather be a ghost than go to heaven.