Solitaire, Part 3 of 3 (12 page)

“You wanted the school to burn.”

He chuckles again and rubs his eyes. “You do know me.”

And he’s right. I do know him. Just because someone smiles doesn’t mean that they’re happy.

“I’ve never been good enough,” he says. “I get so stressed out, I don’t make friends –
God
, I can’t make friends.” His eyes glaze over. “Sometimes I just wish I were a normal human being. But I can’t. I’m not. No matter how hard I try. And then the school was burning and I thought … something told me it might be a way out of all this. I thought it would make me feel better, and you feel better.”

He swivels into a sitting position, legs dangling over the edge mere centimetres from my head.

“I was wrong,” he says.

I look back out to the edge of the building. No one is happy. What is there in the future?

“Some people aren’t meant for school,” says Michael. “That doesn’t mean they aren’t meant for life.”

“I can’t,” I say. The edge is so close. “I can’t.”

“Let me help you.”

“Why would you do that?”

He jumps down to the roof I’m standing on and looks at me. Really looks. I’m reminded of the time I first saw myself in his oversized glasses.

The Tori looking back at me now seems different somehow.

“One person can change everything,” he says. “And you have changed everything for me.”

Behind him, a small fireball erupts out of a roof. It temporarily lights the tips of Michael’s hair, but he doesn’t even blink.

“You are my best friend,” he says.

A flush of red passes over him and it makes me embarrassed to see him embarrassed. He awkwardly flattens his hair with one hand and wipes his eyes. “We’re all going to die. One day. So I want to get it right first time, you know? I don’t
want
to make any more mistakes. And I know that this is not a mistake.” He smiles. “You are not a mistake.”

He turns abruptly and gazes towards the burning school.

“Maybe we would have been able to stop it,” he says. “Maybe … maybe if, if I hadn’t—” His voice catches in his throat and he brings a hand up to his mouth, his eyes filling with tears again.

This is a new feeling. Or a very old one.

I do something that I don’t expect. I reach out. My arm lifts up and moves forward through the air towards him. I just want to make sure he’s there. To make sure I haven’t made him up.

My hand touches his sleeve.

“You shouldn’t hate yourself,” I say, because I know that he doesn’t just hate himself for letting the school burn. He hates himself for a whole lot of other reasons too. But he shouldn’t hate himself. He
can’t
. He makes me believe that there are good people in this world. I don’t know how this has happened, but what I do know is that this feeling has been there from the very start. When I met Michael Holden, I knew, deep down, that he was the best person you could possibly hope to be – so perfect that he was unreal. And it made me sort of hate him. However, rather than slowly learning more and more good things about him, I have come across flaw after flaw after flaw. And you know what? That’s what makes me like him now. That’s why he is a
real
perfect person. Because he is a real person.

I tell him all of this.

“Anyway,” I say, unsure how to end this, but knowing that I must make my conclusion, “I’ll never hate you. Maybe I can help you to understand why I will never hate you.”

A pause, the sound of burning, the smell of smoke. He looks at me like I’ve shot him.

And then we kiss.

Neither of us are really sure whether it’s an appropriate moment, me having almost accidentally killed myself and all, and Michael hating himself so much, but it happens anyway, everything finally making sense, knowing that it would be apocalyptic for me
not
to be here with him, because right then – at that moment – it’s like … it’s like – actually – I really would die if I don’t … if I don’t
hold him
.

“I think I’ve loved you since I met you,” he says as we draw apart. “I just mistook it for curiosity.”

“Not only is that hideously untrue,” I say, feeling like I’m about to pass out, “but that is also the
dumbest
romcom line I’ve
ever
had to endure. And I’ve endured many. What with me being such a fabulous guy magnet.”

He blinks. A grin creeps across his face and he laughs, throwing his head back.

“Oh my God, there you are, Tori,” he says, laughing hard, pulling me into another hug and practically lifting me off the ground. “Oh my
God
.”

I feel myself smile. I hold him and I smile.

Without warning, he retreats back and points outwards and says, “What in the name of Guy Fawkes is going on?”

I turn, puzzled, towards the field.

The white is mostly gone. There are no longer only four dots, but at least a hundred. Dozens and dozens of teenagers. We hadn’t heard them I guess because of the wind and the fire, but now that they’ve seen us turn round, they’ve begun to wave and shout. I cannot see the faces clearly, but each person is a whole person. A whole person with a whole life, who gets out of bed in the morning and goes to school and talks to friends and eats food and
lives
. They’re chanting our names and I don’t know most of them and most of them don’t know me I don’t even know why they’re here, but still … still …

In the middle, I can see Charlie being given a piggyback by Nick and Becky by Lucas. They’re waving and shouting.

“I don’t,” I say, my voice cracking, “understand …”

Michael retrieves his phone from his pocket and loads up the Solitaire blog. There’s nothing new there. Then he loads up Facebook and scrolls down the feed.

“Well,” he says, and I look over his shoulder at the phone.

Lucas Ryan

Solitaire is burning down Higgs     
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“Maybe …” says Michael. “Maybe he thought … the school burning … it was too amazing to let it go to waste.”

I look at him, and he looks at me.

“Don’t you think it’s kind of magnificent?” he says.

And in a way it is, I guess. The school is burning. This doesn’t happen in real life.

“Lucas Ryan, you damn miraculous hipster,” says Michael, gazing down at the crowd. “You really did accidentally start something beautiful.”

Something inside my heart makes me smile. A real smile.

And then things go blurry again, and I sort of start to laugh and cry at the same time and I am unsure whether I’m happy or entirely deranged. Because I’m sort of curled into myself, Michael has to lean over my head to properly hold me while I’m shaking, but he does it anyway. Snow falls. Behind us, the school crumbles and I can hear the fire engines making their way through the town.

“So,” he says, slyly raising his eyebrows with typical Michael suavity. “You hate yourself. I hate myself. Common interests. We should get together.”

I don’t know why, but I start to feel quite delirious. The sight of all those people down there. Some of them are jumping up and down and waving. Some of them are only there because they tagged along for an adventure, but for once I don’t think that any of them are conceited, or faking it. They’re all just being people.

I mean, I’m still not one hundred per cent sure that I really want to wake up tomorrow. I’m not fixed, just because Michael’s here. I still want to get into bed and lie there all day because it’s a very easy thing to do. But right now all I can see are all these kids prancing about in the snow and smiling and waving like they haven’t got exams and parents and university choices and career options and all the other stressful things to worry about. There’s a guy sitting next to me who noticed it all too. A guy that maybe I can help out, like he helped me out.

I can’t say that I feel
happy
. I’m not even sure if I would know if I
was
. But all those people down there look so funny and it makes me want to laugh and cry and dance and sing and
not
take a flying, dramatic, spectacular leap off this building. Really. It’s funny because it’s true.

Garden State
(2004)

SO I SUPPOSE
, even after going through all this very carefully, I still don’t really know how this happened. I’m not traumatised. It’s not anything dramatic like that. Nothing has been tearing me apart. I can’t focus any of it around one particular day, one particular event, one particular person. All I know is that once it started it became very easy to let it carry on. And I suppose that’s how I ended up here.

Michael reckons he’s going to get questioned by the police. Probably me too. And Lucas and Becky, I suppose. We were all there. I hope that we don’t get arrested. I don’t think Lucas would tell what really happened. Then again, I don’t really know much about Lucas Ryan any more.

Nick, with surprising practicality, said that the best thing to do was get my parents to meet us at the hospital, so all six of us are now crammed in his car. Me, Michael, Lucas, Becky, Nick and Charlie. Becky’s sitting on Lucas’s lap because Nick’s car is a tiny Fiat. I think Lucas is genuinely starting to like Becky, I really do. Because she stopped Quiff theoretically shooting him, or whatever. He keeps looking up at her with this hilarious expression on his face and it sort of makes me feel a little bit less sad. She doesn’t notice of course.

Becky is a good person in her heart. Despite what she sometimes does. I guess I’ve always known that.

I’m in the middle seat. I’m finding it very difficult to concentrate on anything as I think I’m half-asleep. Snow is falling. All of the snowflakes are exactly the same. The song playing on the car stereo is some Radiohead song. Everything outside is dark blue.

Charlie calls our parents from the front passenger seat. I do not listen to their conversation. After a while, he hangs up and sits silently for a minute, gazing emptily at his phone. Then he raises his head and stares out into the morning sky.

“Victoria,” he says, and I listen. He says many things – things that you would expect people to say in this sort of situation, about love and understanding, and support, and being there, things that are supposedly not said enough, things that usually do not need to be said. I don’t listen very hard to any of that, because I knew all of it already. Nobody speaks while he speaks; we all just watch the shops drift past the car windows, listening to the hum of the car and the sound of his voice. When he’s finished, he turns to face me and says something else.

“I noticed,” he says. “But I didn’t do anything. I didn’t do anything.”

I have begun to cry.

“I love you anyway,” I say, my voice hardly my own. I can’t remember if I’ve ever said those words before in my whole life, not even when I was a child. I start to wonder what I was really like then, and whether I’ve been imagining myself as someone different this entire time. He smiles a beautiful, sad smile and says, “I love you too, Tori.”

Michael decides to pick up my hand and cup it in his.

“Do you want to know what Dad said?” says Charlie, turning back to face the front. He’s not saying it directly to me, but to the whole car. “He said that this is probably because he read
The Catcher in the Rye
too many times when he was our age, and that it got absorbed into his gene pool.”

Becky sighs. “Jesus. Can’t any teenager be sad and, like,
not
be compared to that book?”

Lucas smiles at her.

“I mean, has anyone here even
read
it?” asks Becky.

There is a unanimous chorus of “nope”. Not even Lucas has read it. Funny that.

We listen to the Radiohead song.

I have this real urge to leap out of the car. I think Michael can tell that I want to do this. Maybe Lucas too. Charlie keeps glancing in the rear-view mirror.

After a little while, Nick murmurs, “Where are you going to go to sixth form, Charlie?” I have never heard Nick speak so quietly.

Charlie answers him by holding Nick’s hand, which is clutching the gear stick so hard that his knuckles are turning white, and saying, “Truham. I’ll just stay at Truham. I’ll be with you, yeah? And I guess … I guess lots of us will be going to Truham now.” And Nick nods.

Becky sleepily leans her head on Lucas’s shoulder.

“I don’t want to go to the hospital,” I whisper into Michael’s ear. This is a half-lie.

He looks at me and he’s more than pained. “I know.” He rests his head on the top of mine. “I know.”

Lucas shifts in the seat next to me. He is looking out of the window, at the trees zipping past, the blur of dark and green.

“This is supposed to be the best time of our lives,” he says.

Becky snorts into Lucas’s shoulder. “If this is the best time of my life, I might as well end it immediately.”

The car revs to get up the slope to the bridge and then we’re sailing over the frozen river. The earth spins a few hundred metres and the sun creeps a little closer towards our horizon, preparing to spread its dull winter light over what’s left of this wasteland. Behind us, a channel of smoke has leaked into the clear sky, blocking out the few remaining stars that had tried to make an impression.

Becky continues to mumble, as if speaking through a dream.

“I get it though. All they wanted was to make us feel like we belonged to something
important
. Making an impression in the world. Because, like, we’re all waiting for something to change. Patience
can
kill you.” Her voice quietens to a near-whisper. “Waiting … waiting for so long …”