Solitaire, Part 3 of 3 (7 page)

I bring up the Solitaire blog on my phone. The countdown timer is at the top of the screen. I find myself checking it continually. 02:11:23:26. Two days, eleven hours, twenty-three minutes, twenty-six seconds until Thursday turns into Friday. Solitaire antics today have been focused around the number 2: hundreds of posters, on Post-its on every surface, written on all whiteboards, popping up on the computers. From here I can see that the number 2 is painted in red directly on to the snow of the field. It looks a bit like blood.

A little way away from the number 2 on the field is a large wooden object. I stand up and step backwards. I realise that it’s Kent’s lectern, from which he leads our school assemblies. A small congregation of students have gathered outside, staring, like me, clearly waiting for something exciting to happen. At the front of the crowd, Quiff Guy is standing with a camera in his hands.

I fold my arms. My blazer flaps out behind me in the wind. I suppose I look very dramatic, standing here on the roof.

Painted on the front of the lectern is Solitaire’s Anarchy symbol.

Its front, the side which Kent would stand at when speaking, is directed away from us, staring wistfully out over the snowy field and down into the town and river beyond. Music, Ludovico Einaudi
,
begins to play out of the outside tannoy, blending into the sigh of a steady breeze. A piece of paper, one of Kent’s past assemblies clipped on to the lectern, somehow lifts up and flickers as the wind encircles as if it’s gesturing ‘come here’ to the town and the river.

Then the lectern catches fire.

It’s over in less than thirty seconds, but it feels longer. A spark from its base sends the entire wooden body into flames and they double the size of the lectern, magnifying it, expanding it. It’s sort of beautiful. The reddish orange of the spectacle sends a dim glow across the snow so that the entire field is slightly alight, wavering up and down. The wind is so strong that the fire begins to vortex round the wood, shooting shards of blackened charcoal outwards in every direction, a tunnel of smoke coughing upwards. Slowly, the darkness creeps across the pale wood. It cracks. The lectern takes its last lingering look out at what freedom might have been. Then, all at once, the entire frame crumbles into a destroyed heap and the once blazing fire subsides. What is left is little more than a pile of soot and ash.

I am paralysed. The scattering of students on the field are shrieking and screaming, but not with fear. One small girl steps out and retrieves a broken piece of the lectern, bringing it back to her friends. Teachers begin to show, barking reprimands and shooing people away, and I watch as the girl drops the piece of lectern on the snow.

Once the field is clear, I tear down the stairs and run across the snow to rescue it. I study the piece of burnt wood. I then stare back towards the pile of remains, then the greyish snow, then the long and omnipresent river, and then I think about the sea of anonymous students who had been so excited to watch this. It reminds me of the people who watched the beating-up of Ben Hope, jeering, laughing at pain. The crowd that had jumped up and down like children at the fireworks at The Clay, while the injured ran, terrified, burning.

I close my fist. The piece of wood dissolves into black dust.

WHEN I GET
to school on Wednesday, I watch out for Michael Holden in the common-room crowds. I wonder whether seeing him will make me feel better or worse. It could go either way. I know I’m dragging him down. Seeing me cannot make Michael Holden feel better. He deserves to have a friend who loves life and laughter, who loves having fun and adventures, someone to drink tea with and argue about a book and stargaze and ice skate and dance with. Someone who isn’t me.

Becky, Lauren, Evelyn and Rita are sitting in our spot in the corner. No Ben, no Lucas. Like the beginning of the year all over again. I stand at the door to the common room, kind of staring at them. Evelyn is the only one who sees me. She catches my eye, then quickly looks away. Even if I could quietly overlook her exceedingly irritating hair and clothing choices like a decent and accepting human being should, Evelyn has always done many things that I don’t approve of, such as thinking she’s better than people, and pretending to know more than she does. I wonder whether she dislikes me as much as I dislike her.

I take a seat in a swivel chair, away from Our Lot, thinking about all my personal attributes. Pessimist. Mood-killer. Unbearably awkward and probably paranoid. Deluded. Nasty. Borderline insane, manically-depressed psychopa—

“Tori.”

I spin round on the chair. Michael Holden’s found me.

I look up at him. He’s smiling, but it looks weird. Fake. Or am I imagining that?

“It’s Wednesday today,” I say instantly, unwilling to build up our conversation with small talk, but doing it anyway.

He blinks, but doesn’t act too taken aback. “Yes. Yes, it is.”

“I suppose,” I say, curling on to the desk with my head on my arm, “I don’t like Wednesdays because it’s the middle day. You feel like you’ve been at school for ages, but it’s still ages until the weekend. It’s the most … disappointing day.”

As he takes this in, something else kind of weird crosses his expression. Almost like panic or something. He coughs. “Can we, er, talk somewhere quieter?”

I really do not want to have to get up.

But he persists. “Please? I’ve got some news.”

As we’re walking, I stare into the back of his head. In fact, I just stare at his whole body. I’ve always thought of Michael Holden as this kind of entity, this sparkling orb of wonder, and yet now, looking at him walking along in his average school uniform, hair kind of soft and messy compared to how he had it gelled when I first met him, I find myself thinking about the fact that he’s just a normal guy. That he gets up and goes to bed, that he listens to music and watches TV, that he revises for exams and probably does homework, that he sits down to dinner, that he showers and brushes his teeth. Normal stuff.

What am I talking about?

He takes me to the school library. It’s not as quiet as he’d hoped. There are lower-school girls swarming round the desks in exactly the same way that the sixth-formers do in the common room except with much more enthusiasm. There are not many books; it’s actually more of a large room with a few bookshelves than a library. The atmosphere is quite strange. I’m almost glad that it’s so bright and happy in here. It’s an odd feeling because I never like bright and happy things.

We sit down in the middle of the non-fiction row. He’s looking at me, but I don’t want to look back any more. Looking at his face makes me feel funny.

“You were hiding yesterday!” he says, trying to make it sound like a cute joke. As if we’re six years old.

For a second, I wonder if he knows about my special beautiful place on the art conservatory roof, but that’s impossible.

“How’s your arm?” he asks.

“It’s fine,” I say. “Didn’t you have something to tell me?”

And the pause he leaves then – it’s like he has everything he wants to tell me, and nothing.

“Are you al—” he begins, then changes his mind. “Your hands are cold.”

I stare blankly at my hands, still avoiding his eyes. Had he been holding my hand on the way here? I curl my palms into fists and sigh. Fine. Small talk it is. “I watched all three
Lord of the Rings
last night and
V for Vendetta
. Oh, and I had a dream. I think it was about Winona Ryder.”

And I can feel the sadness pouring out of him all of a sudden, and it makes me want to get up and run away and keep running.

“I also found out that approximately one hundred billion people have died since the world began. Did you know that? One hundred billion. It’s a big number, but it still doesn’t seem like quite enough.”

There’s a long silence. A few of the lower-school groups are looking at us and giggling, thinking we’re having some kind of deep, romantic conversation.

Finally, he says something productive: “I guess neither of us have been sleeping much.”

I decide to look at him then.

It shocks me a little.

Because there’s none of the usual Michael in that calm smile.

And I think of the time at the ice rink when he’d been so angry,

but it’s different to that.

And I think of the sadness that’s been in Lucas’s eyes since the day I met him,

but it’s different to that too.

Split between the green and the blue, there is an indefinable beauty that people call humanity.

“You don’t have to do this any more.” I’m whispering, not because I don’t want people to hear, but I seem to have forgotten how to increase the volume in my voice. “You don’t have to be my friend. I don’t want people to feel sorry for me. I’m literally one hundred and ten per cent fine. Really. I understand what you’ve been trying to do, and you are a very nice person, you’re the perfect person actually, but it’s okay, you don’t have to pretend any more. I’m fine. I don’t need you to help me. I’ll do something about all this and then I’ll be all right and it’ll all go back to normal.”

His face doesn’t change. He reaches towards me with his hand and brushes what must be a tear from my face – not in a romantic way, but as if I had a malaria-carrying mosquito perched on my cheek. He looks at the tear, somewhat confused, and then holds his hand up to me. I hadn’t realised I was crying. I don’t really feel sad. I don’t really feel anything.

“I’m not a perfect person,” he says. His smile is still there, but it’s not a happy smile. “And I don’t have any friends except for you. In case you hadn’t heard, most people know that I’m the king of freaks; I mean, yeah, sometimes I come across as charming and eccentric, but eventually people realise that I’m just trying too hard. I’m sure Lucas Ryan and Nick Nelson can tell you all kinds of wonderful stories about me.”

He leans back. He looks annoyed, to be honest.

“If
you
don’t want to be friends with
me
, I completely understand. You don’t have to make some excuse about it. I know that I’m the one who always comes to find you. I’m the one who always starts our conversations. Sometimes you don’t say anything for ages. But that doesn’t mean that our friendship is all about
me
trying to make
you
feel better. You know me better than that.”

Maybe I don’t want to be friends with Michael Holden. Maybe that’s better.

We sit together for a while. I randomly select a book from the shelf behind me. It’s called
The Encyclopaedia of Life
and it can only be about fifty pages long. Michael reaches out his hand towards me, but doesn’t, as I anticipate, take my own hand. Instead, he takes hold of a strand of my hair, which, I guess, had sort of been in my face, and he tucks it carefully behind my left ear.

“Did you know,” I say at some point, for some inexplicable reason, “that most suicides happen in the springtime?” Then I look at him. “Didn’t you say you had news?”

And that’s when he gets up and walks away from me and out of the library door and out of my life, and I am one hundred per cent sure that Michael Holden deserves better friends than the pessimist, introvert psychopath Tori Spring.

THE SONG REPEATING
itself over the tannoy 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 COUNTDOWWWWN” in the hallways any more, 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, former 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 cancelled. 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 towards 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 metres 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 they’ve been doing so far, 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 that much after all. It was very clichéd. 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.