Solitaire, Part 3 of 3 (6 page)

He doesn’t frown, or smile, or anything.

“Why wouldn’t I be interested?” I ask. “
You’re
interested. You’re the one who said that Solitaire was targeting me.”

“I just thought you weren’t,” he says, his voice a little wobbly. “It’s not like you to … I just didn’t think … you didn’t care that much, you know, originally.”

That may be true.

“
You’re
still interested … right?” I ask, scared of the answer.

Michael looks at me for a long time. “I’d like to know who’s behind it all,” he says, “and I know what happened to Ben Hope was pretty nasty, and then last night … I mean, that was just downright idiotic. It’s a miracle nobody died. Did you see the article on BBC News? The Clay Festival are passing it off as if it were their final act gone wrong or something. Solitaire didn’t even get a mention. I guess the organisers didn’t want anyone to know they’d been hijacked. And who’s going to listen to a bunch of kids going on about some blog that organised it?”

Michael’s staring at me as if he’s scared of me. I must have a very strange expression on my face. He tilts his head.

“When was the last time you slept?”

I don’t bother to answer. We sit silent for a moment before he tries again.

“You know, this is a very generic thing to say, but …” He pauses. “If you want to, er, like, talk about anything, like … you know … people always need people to talk to … You don’t talk much. I’m always here … like … to talk. You do know that, don’t you?”

The sentence is so broken up that I don’t really grasp its concept, so I just nod enthusiastically. Judging by his slightly relieved smile, that seems to satisfy him. At least until he goes on to ask: “Are you going to tell me why you’ve changed your mind? Why you’re being obsessive?”

It hasn’t struck me that I’m obsessing. I don’t think that’s the word I’d use. “Someone has to.”

“Why?”

“It’s important. No one cares about the important things any more.” I drift off. “We’re so used to disaster that we accept it. We think we deserve it.”

His smile, fleeting, fades. “I don’t think anyone deserves disaster. I think a lot of people wish for disaster because it’s the only thing left with the power to turn heads.”

“Attention-seekers?”

“Some people don’t get any attention,” he says, and here again is the boy from the ice rink: serious, genuine, morose, old and silently
angry
. “Some people get
no
attention. You can understand why they’d go seeking it. If they’re waiting forever for something that might never come.”

I feel suddenly like I’m blind, or perhaps deaf, losing track of the conversation.

He starts fishing for something in his bag and after a few moments withdraws a can, holding it out to me. It’s a really obscure brand of diet lemonade. One of my favourites. He smiles, but it’s forced. “I was at the shop and thought of you.”

I look at the can, feeling something very strange in my stomach. “Thanks.”

Another long pause.

“You know,” I say, “when that firework was about to go off, I actually thought I was going to die. I thought … I was going to burn and die.”

He gazes at me. “But you didn’t.”

He really is a good person. Far too good to be hanging around someone like me.

I almost laugh at myself for thinking something so clichéd. I think I’ve said before how things are clichéd because they’re true. Well, there’s one thing that I know is true, and that is that Michael Holden is too good for me.

Later, 7pm, dinner. Mum and Dad are out somewhere. Nick and Charlie are at opposite ends of the table. I am next to Oliver. We’re eating pasta with some meat in it. I’m not sure what the meat is. I cannot concentrate.

“Tori, what’s the matter?” Charlie waves his fork at me. “What’s going on? Something’s going on.”

“
Solitaire
is going on,” I say, “yet no one cares. Everyone is sitting around talking about things that do not matter and pretending that it’s still some big hilarious joke.”

Nick and Charlie look at me like I’m crazy. Well, I am.

“It’s pretty weird that Solitaire hasn’t been reported on, I guess,” says Nick. “Like, even with that stuff at The Clay. Solitaire didn’t even come into it. People don’t seem to be taking Solitaire seriously—”

Charlie sighs, cutting him off. “Whether Solitaire do or do not pull off something spectacular, there’s no reason for Tori or anyone else to get involved. It’s not our problem, is it? Shouldn’t the teachers or, like, the police be doing something about it? It’s their own fault for not bothering to do anything.”

And that’s when I know I’ve lost him as well.

“I thought that you two were … better than all this.”

“All what?” Charlie raises his eyebrows.

“All this stuff that people spend their time bothering with.” I scrunch up my hands, placing them on my head. “It’s all fake. Everyone is faking. Why does no one
care
about
anything
?”

“Tori, seriously, are you all r—”

“YES,” I probably scream. “YES, I’M ALL RIGHT, THANKS. HOW. ABOUT. YOU?”

And then I get myself out of there just before I start to cry.

Obviously, Charlie told Mum and Dad. When they get home, I’m not sure what time, they knock on my door. When I don’t answer, they come in.

“What?” I say. I’m sitting upright on my bed and have been trying to choose a film to watch for the last thirty-seven minutes. On the television, some news guy is talking about the suicide of a Cambridge student, and my laptop is on my legs, like a sleeping cat, my blog homepage emitting its dim blue glow.

Mum and Dad take a long look at my back wall. You can’t see any parts of the paint any more. It’s just a patchwork sheet of Solitaire printouts, hundreds of them.

“What’s the matter, Tori?” asks Dad, averting his eyes from the display.

“I do not know.”

“Did you have a bad day?”

“Yes. Always.”

“Come on now, there’s no need to be so melodramatic.” Mum sighs, apparently disappointed in something. “Cheer up. Smile.”

I make a fake hurling sound. “Dear God.”

Mum sighs again. Dad imitates her.

“Well, we’ll leave you to your misery then,” he says, “if you’re going to be sarcastic.”

“Ha. Ha. Sarcastic.”

They roll their eyes and leave. I start to feel sick. I think it’s my bed. I don’t know. I don’t even know. So my ingenious solution to this is to pathetically flop off the bed and on to the floor, propping myself sluggishly up against my Solitaire wall. My room is half-dark.

Friday. Friday. Friday Friday Friday Friday Friday Friday Friday Friday Friday Friday Friday Friday Friday Friday Friday Friday Friday Friday.

“MUM,” I SAY
. It’s Tuesday, 7.45am, and I have no skirt. This is one of those situations where talking to my mum is unavoidable. “Mum, can you iron my school skirt?”

Mum doesn’t say anything because she’s on the kitchen computer in her dressing gown. You’d think she was ignoring me deliberately, but she really is that engrossed in whatever dumb email she’s writing.

“Mum,” I say again. “Mum. Mum. Mum. Mum. Mum. Mu—”

“
What?
”

“Can you iron my school skirt?”

“Can’t you wear your other one?”

“It’s too small. It’s been too small since we bought it.”

“Well, I’m not ironing your school skirt. You iron it.”

“I have never ironed anything in my life and I have to leave in fifteen minutes.”

“That’s annoying.”

“Yes, it is, Mum.” She doesn’t answer me. Jesus Christ. “So I guess I’m going to school with no skirt.”

“I guess you are.”

I grate my teeth together. I have to catch a bus in fifteen minutes and I’m still in my pyjamas.

“Do you care?” I ask. “Do you care that I have no skirt?”

“At the moment, Tori,
no
. It’s in the airing cupboard. It’s just a bit crinkled.”

“Yeah, I found it. It’s supposed to be a pleated skirt, Mum. Currently, there are no pleats.”

“Tori. I’m really busy.”

“But I don’t have a skirt to wear to school.”

“Wear your other skirt then, for Christ’s sake!”

“I literally just told you, it’s too sma—”

“Tori! I really don’t care!”

I stop talking. I look at her.

I wonder if I’ll end up like her. Not caring whether my daughter has a skirt to wear to school.

And then I realise something.

“You know what, Mum?” I say, starting to actually laugh at myself. “I don’t even think I care either.”

So I go upstairs and put on my grey school skirt that is too small, and put my old PE shorts on over my tights so you can’t see anything, and then I attempt to sort out my hair, but oh, guess what, I don’t care about that either, and then I go to put some make-up on but no, wait, I also don’t care what my face looks like, so I go back downstairs and pick up my school bag and leave the house with Charlie, basking in the light and glory that comes from not giving a damn about anything in the entire universe.

I’m feeling kind of like a ghost today. I sit on a swivel chair in the common room, fiddling with the bandage on my arm, and watch, out of the window, some Year 7s chucking snowballs at each other. They’re all smiling.

“Tori,” calls Becky from a little way across the room. “I need to talk to you.”

Begrudgingly, I rise from the chair and weave through the sixth-form crowd to get to her. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to walk through people?

“How’s your arm?” she asks. She’s acting super-awkward. I’m past that now – I’m past awkward. Why should I care what anyone thinks any more? Why should I care about anything any more?

“It’s fine,” I say. An obligatory answer to an obligatory question.

“Look, I’m not going to apologise, yeah? I wasn’t in the wrong.” She talks as if she’s blaming me for being angry at her. “I’m just going to come out and say what we’ve
both
been thinking.” She stares me straight in the eye. “We haven’t been acting like friends recently, have we?”

I say nothing.

“And I’m not just talking about after what happened at … what happened. It’s been going on for months. It’s like you – it’s like you don’t really want to be friends with me. It’s like you don’t like me.”

“It’s not that I don’t like you,” I say, but I don’t know how to continue. I don’t know what it is.

“If we’re … if we can’t act like friends, then there’s no real point us carrying on being friends.”

As she’s saying this, her eyes get a little watery. I can’t think of anything to say. I met Becky on the first day of Year 7. We sat next to each other in form and in science. We passed notes and we played MASH and I helped her decorate her locker with pictures of Orlando Bloom. She leant me money for cookies at breaktime. She always spoke to me, even though I was one of the quiet ones. Five and a half years later, here we are.

“I don’t think that we’re compatible,” she says. “I don’t think that it’s possible for us to be friends any more. You’ve changed. I might have changed too, but you definitely have. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s true.”

“So is it my fault we’re not friends any more?”

Becky doesn’t react. “I’m not sure that you need me any more.”

“Why is that?”

“You don’t like being around me, do you?”

I laugh, exasperated, and I forget everything else except her and Ben, her and Ben, her and the guy that beat up my brother.

“Are you trying to gain sympathy here? Are you breaking up with me? This isn’t a romcom, Becky. We are not in a lesbian drama.”

She frowns, disappointed. “You’re not taking me seriously. Stop with all this crap,” she says. “Just stop, yeah?
Cheer up
. I know you’re a pessimist, I’ve known you for five years, but this is getting out of hand. Go and hang around with Michael some more.”

“What,” I scoff, “so he can
fix me
? So he can teach me how to stop being me?” I laugh loudly. “He shouldn’t be hanging around with someone like me.”

She stands up. “You should try and find people who are more like you. They’ll be better for you.”

“There is no one like me.”

“I think you’re breaking down.”

I cough loudly. “I’m not a
car
.”

And she is furious, like, Jesus, actual rage is steaming from her face. It takes all her effort not to shout her last word: “
Fine.
”

Becky thunders over to a crowd who I used to consider myself part of. I should feel like I’ve lost something, but instead I feel nothing. I start listening to my iPod, some sad album, something really self-pitying, and I roll over facts in my head: the top post on the Solitaire blog today is a screencap from
Fight Club
. You have a one in twenty-thousand chance of being murdered. Charlie couldn’t eat this morning – he cried when I tried to make him so I gave up. It was probably my fault for being angry at him yesterday. I have three unread texts from Michael Holden and twenty-six unread messages on my blog.

It’s later. I’ve come back to C16 – the decaying computer room on the first floor where I found that Post-it note. I can tell that nobody has been in here. The sun lights up the dust floating in the air.

As I’m looking out of the window, my face pressed against the glass, I notice that there’s a tall metal staircase just outside to my left, its top step parallel to the window I’m staring through. It leads on to the concrete roof of the art conservatory – a newly built classroom that juts out from the ground floor – and spirals all the way down to the ground. I don’t think I’ve ever seen this staircase before.

I exit C16, trot down to the ground floor, go outside and scale the metal staircase all the way to the top.

Even though I’m not on the roof of the school itself, standing on the roof of the art conservatory is fairly dangerous, being at first-floor level. I sneak a look on to the grass below. It slopes down slightly towards the field.

I look out. The slushy field opens out into the distance. The river slowly tumbles on.

I sit down so that my legs are hanging off the edge. No one can see or find me here. It’s Period 4 on Tuesday, nearly lunchtime and I’m skipping music for the hundredth time. It doesn’t matter.