Solitaire, Part 3 of 3 (5 page)

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

“ARE WE HAVING A GOOD TIME?”

The ground vibrates as 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 outwards and turn one-eighty 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. People are staring upwards at the screen as if hypnotised, 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 upwards from the bodies like meteors and raining sparks down on to their heads, one of which is only five metres away from me. Those closest release petrified screams, jumping backwards 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 colours are continuously exploding among the bodies. At the edge, I see several people fleeing, one or two on fire. A few metres 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 round. 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 round, 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 towards 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 realise 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 towards 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 towards 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 mid-air, 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 metres wide. “Sweet merciful FUCK, it’s 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 shirt sleeves 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, further 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 on 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 pissed!?”

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 metres away. “I’m just going outside!” he calls in a sing-song voice. “I may be some time!” Then: “Mother of God, I literally am going to freeze to death.”

I’m 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’s raining flyers. They’re hailing down into the crowd from the large fans set up on stage, 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 colours 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 and 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.

I THINK THAT
it might be Monday. Last night was a blur. I remember waking up on the riverbank in Michael’s arms, I remember the icy sting of the water and the smell of his T-shirt, and I remember running away. I think that I’m scared of something, but I can’t tell what it is. I don’t know what to say.

I went to A & E. Nick and Charlie made me. I’ve got a big bandage on my arm now, but it’s okay, it doesn’t really hurt much at the moment. I have to take it off this evening and put this cream stuff on it. I’m not looking forward to that.

It sort of reminds me about Solitaire every time I look at it. It reminds me what they’re capable of.

Everyone looks very happy today and I don’t like it. The sun is out on a murderous rampage and I had to wear sunglasses on my way to school because the sky, a great flat swimming pool, is trying to drown me. I sit in the common room and Rita asks me what happened to my arm, and I tell her that Solitaire did it. She asks if I’m all right. The question makes me tear up so I tell her that I’m fine and run away. I’m fine.

I get flashes of life around me. Some anon group of girls leaning back in their chairs. Some Year 12 looking out of the window while her friends laugh around her. A laminated picture of a mountain featuring the word ‘Ambition’. A blinking light. But I think what calms me down is the knowledge that I’m going to find out who Solitaire are and what they are planning for Friday, and I’m going to stop them.

By breaktime, I have counted sixty-six Solitaire posters in the school reading, ‘
FRIDAY: JUSTICE IS COMING
’. Kent, Zelda and the prefects are in uproar, and you can no longer pass through a corridor without being overtaken by one of them as they snatch posters from the walls, muttering angrily to themselves. Today, there are two new posts on the Solitaire blog: a photograph of last week’s assembly where a Solitaire poster popped up on the projector screen, and a picture of the Virgin Mary. I will print both of these out and stick them on my bedroom wall, where I have already stuck all of Solitaire’s previous posts. My wall is nearly completely covered.

First, Solitaire beat up a boy. And then they seriously injure a bunch of people, all for the purpose of putting on a good show. And everybody in the town is absolutely in love with them.

It’s clear to me now that, if I do not stop Solitaire, nobody else will.

At lunch, I sense that I’m being followed, but when I reach the IT department I reckon I’ve outsmarted them. I take a seat in C15, the room directly opposite C16, where I met Michael. There are three people with me in the room. Some Year 13 is scrolling down the University of Cambridge website and a pair of Year 7s are playing the Impossible Quiz with immense concentration. They don’t notice me.

I boot up the computer and scroll up and down the Solitaire blog for forty-five minutes.

At some point, my follower walks into C15. It’s Michael, obviously. Still feeling guilty for running away again, and unwilling to talk about it, I dive past him and out of the room, and begin to walk swiftly in no particular direction. He catches up to me. We’re walking very fast.

“What are you doing?” I ask.

“I’m walking,” says Michael.

We turn a corner.

“Maths,” he says. We’re in the maths corridor. “They make the displays so beautiful here because otherwise no one would like maths. Why would people think that maths is fun? All maths does is give you a false sense of achievement.”

Kent exits a classroom a few paces ahead of us.

“All right, Mr Kent!” says Michael. Kent gives him a vague nod and passes by us.

“I definitely think he writes poetry,” Michael continues. “You can tell. In his eyes and the way he folds his arms all the time.”

I come to a halt. We’ve made a full circle around Higgs’s first floor. We stay very still, sort of looking at each other. He has a mug of tea in his hand. There’s a weird moment where I think we both want to hug each other, but I quickly end it by turning round and walking back into C15.

I sit at the computer I’d been staring at, and he takes the seat next to me.

“You ran off again,” he says.

I don’t look at him.

“You didn’t reply to my texts last night after you ran off,” he says. “I had to Facebook message Charlie to find out what had happened to you.”

I say nothing.

“Did you get my texts? My voicemails? I was kind of worried you’d caught hypothermia or something. And your arm. I was really worried.”

I don’t remember there being any texts. Or voicemails. I remember Nick shouting at me for being an idiot, and Charlie sitting next to me in the back of the car rather than next to Nick in the passenger seat. I remember arriving at A & E and waiting for hours. I remember Nick falling asleep on Charlie’s shoulder, and Charlie and I playing twenty questions, and him winning every time. I remember not sleeping last night. I remember telling Mum that I would be going to school and that was final.

“What are you doing?” he asks.

What am I doing. “I am …” I am thinking. I am looking at myself in the black computer monitor. “I’m … I’m doing something. About Solitaire.”

“Since when are you interested in Solitaire?”

“Since—” I go to answer him, but I don’t know the answer.