Solitaire Read online

  “Maybe he’s concussed,” says Nick.

  “I don’t want to go to the hospital,” says Charlie firmly. His eyes have focused.

  I look around. Becky appears to have vanished and Ben is struggling to his feet and Lucas doesn’t seem to know what to do with himself.

  Charlie stands up surprisingly quickly. He wipes away a smear of blood. He’ll have bruises, but at least his nose is still straight. He looks at Ben. Ben looks back, and that’s when I see it in Ben’s eyes.

  Fear.

  “I’m not going to tell,” says Charlie, “because I’m not a dick like you.” Ben snorts, but Charlie ignores it. “But I think that you should at least try and be honest with yourself, even if you can’t be honest with everyone else. It’s just sad, you know?”

  “Get away from me,” Ben snarls, but his voice wobbles, sort of like he’s on the verge of tears. “Just fuck off with your boyfriend, for fuck’s sake.”

  Nick very nearly lunges for the second time, but I see him fight to stop himself.

  Ben catches my eye as we leave. I stare at him, and his expression changes from hatred to what I hope might be regret. I doubt it. I want to be sick. I try to think of something to say to him, but nothing summarizes it. I hope I’m making him want to die.

  Someone places a hand around my arm and I turn my head.

  “Come on, Tori,” says Lucas.

  So I do.

  On our way out, Lucas with a hand on my back, Nick and Michael supporting Charlie, who is still a bit wobbly, we pass Becky, who has for some reason pushed herself to the end of another locker row. We lock eyes. I know she’s going to break up with Ben. She has to break up with Ben. She must have heard everything. She’s my best friend. Charlie is my brother.

  I don’t understand what has happened.

  “Should we feel sorry for Ben?” someone asks, maybe Michael.

  “Why are there no happy people?” someone else asks, maybe me.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  SOMEONE CALLS ME on my mobile at 9:04 a.m., but I am in bed and my phone is more than an arm’s length away, so I just let it ring on. At 9:15 a.m. someone rings the house phone and Charlie comes into my room, but I keep my eyes closed and pretend I’m still asleep and Charlie goes away. My bed whispers at me to stay. My curtains bar out daytime.

  At 2:34 p.m., Dad throws my door open and huffs and mutters and I suddenly feel sick, so after another five minutes I go downstairs and sit on the sofa in the living room.

  Mum comes in to get some washing.

  “Are you going to get dressed?” she asks.

  “No, Mum. I’m never going to get dressed ever again. I’m going to live in my pajamas until my death.”

  She doesn’t say anything else. She leaves.

  Dad comes into the living room. “Alive, then?”

  I say nothing, because I do not feel alive.

  Dad sits next to me. “Are you going to tell me what’s wrong?”

  No, I am not.

  “You know, if you want to be happier, you have to try. You have to put in the effort. Your problem is that you don’t try.”

  I do try. I have tried. I have tried for sixteen years.

  “Where’s Charlie?” I ask.

  “Round Nick’s.” Dad shakes his head. “Still can’t believe Charlie got himself hit in the face with a cricket bat. That kid really does attract misfortune.”

  I do not say anything.

  “Are you going to go out today?”

  “No.”

  “Why not? What about Michael? You could spend the day with him again.”

  I don’t really reply, and Dad looks at me.

  “What about Becky? I haven’t seen her round here for quite a while.”

  I don’t reply again.

  He sighs and rolls his eyes. “Teenagers,” he says, as if the mere state of being a teenager explains every single thing about me.

  And then he leaves, huffing and puffing and sighing.

  I sit under my duvet on my bed, a diet lemonade in one hand and my phone in the other. I find Michael’s number in my contacts and press the green button. I don’t know why I’m calling him. I think it might be Dad’s fault.

  It goes straight to voice mail.

  I drop the phone on the bed and roll over so I am completely buried by the covers.

  Of course I can’t expect him to just show up any old time. He has a life, after all. He has a family and coursework and stuff. His entire existence doesn’t revolve around mine.

  I am a narcissist.

  I rummage around the sheets and eventually locate my laptop. I flip it up. If ever in doubt about anything, my first port of call is always Google.

  And I am certainly in doubt. About everything.

  I type “Michael Holden” into the search bar and press enter.

  Michael Holden isn’t an overly uncommon name. Lots of other Michael Holdens show up, particularly MySpace pages. Since when was MySpace still a thing? Lots of Twitters also show up, but I can’t find my Michael Holden’s Twitter. He doesn’t seem to be the sort of guy who would have Twitter. I sigh and close my laptop. At least I tried.

  And then, as if I’d summoned him with the closing of my laptop, my phone begins to ring. I pick it up. Michael Holden’s name glares on the screen. With a kind of enthusiasm entirely unknown to me, I press the green button.

  “Hello?”

  “Tori! What is up?”

  It seems to take me longer than necessary to say something in reply.

  “Erm . . . er, not a lot.”

  Behind Michael’s voice, the low chatter of a crowd can be heard.

  “Where are you?” I ask. “What’s happening?”

  This time it is he who pauses. “Oh, yeah, I didn’t tell you, did I? I’m at the rink.”

  “Oh. Do you have practice or something?”

  “Er, no. It’s, erm . . . I’ve got a sort of competition today.”

  “A competition?”

  “Yeah!”

  “What competition?”

  He pauses again. “It’s, er, it’s kind of . . . it’s the National Youth Speed Skating Semifinals.”

  My stomach gives up.

  “Look, I’ve got to go. I promise I’ll call you when it’s finished, yeah? And then I’ll see you tonight!”

  “. . . yeah.”

  “Okay, talk later!”

  He hangs up the phone. I remove it from my ear and stare at it.

  National Youth Speed Skating Semifinals.

  That’s not just some stupid local competition.

  That’s—

  That’s important.

  That’s what he was going to invite me to today, but I’d said no, I’d said I was hanging out with Lucas. And then I decided to avoid him anyway.

  Without any further hesitation, I leap out of bed.

  I park Charlie’s bike outside the rink. It’s 4:32 p.m. and dark. I’ve probably missed it. I don’t know why I even tried, but I did. How long are speed-skate races?

  Why didn’t Michael tell me about this before?

  I run, yes, actually run, through the empty foyer and the double doors into the stadium. A scattering of supporters fills the stadium seating around the rink, and to my right, psyched-up skaters sit on benches. Some of them could be sixteen, some could be twenty-five. I am not good at judging boys’ ages.

  I walk closer to the plastic casing of the rink and make my way around until I find the gate where the casing isn’t so high. I stare over.

  There is a race going on. For a moment I don’t know where I’m looking or who I’m looking for, because they all look exactly the same in these ridiculous suits that are like catsuits and rounded helmets. Eight guys blast past me, and the rush of air tears at my face and my hair that I definitely forgot to sort out before I left the house, and they lean round the corners of the rink, so close to the ice, brushing it with their fingertips. I don’t understand how they don’t just fall over.

  When they pass me the second tim
e, that’s when I see him; he turns his head, showing me his bulbous eyes behind large goggles and a ridiculously concrete expression. The eyes find me and his body turns, his hair swept backward, and his face, beyond surprised, stays parallel to mine. I know instantly that something has changed.

  He stares. At me, maybe. His whole face expands, it illuminates, and all else seems to fade into fog and I place a hand against the plastic casing and everything inside me rushes to my feet.

  I’m not sure if he really sees me. I don’t cheer. I just stand there.

  He pulls out in front. The crowd screams, but then some other blur of boy flies from the group, and he’s reached Michael, and he’s passed Michael, and I realize that the race is over and Michael has come second.

  I back away from the rink and shelter myself slightly behind the stands as the skaters make their way to the gate. Older men in tracksuits greet the boys, and one of them pats Michael on the back, but something is wrong, something is very wrong, something about Michael is wrong.

  He’s not “Michael Holden.”

  He’s removed his skates and goggles. He takes off his helmet and gloves and drops them onto the floor.

  His face contorts into a kind of scrunched-up snarl, his fists curl so his skin drains of color, and he storms past the man and tramps over to the benches. He reaches a row of lockers and looks into them, blankly, chest visibly expanding and contracting. With an almost terrifying malice, he throws a crazed punch at the lockers, wailing a subdued howl of rage. Turning, he hurls a kick at a pile of racing helmets, scattering them about the floor. He clutches his hair, as if trying to pull it out.

  I’ve never seen Michael like this.

  I know I shouldn’t be so surprised. I haven’t even known Michael for three weeks. But my perceptions of people rarely change, and when they do, it’s never this drastic. It’s weird how you see someone who smiles all the time and you assume that they are happy all the time. It’s weird how someone is nice to you and you assume that they’re a wholly “good person.” I did not think Michael could be so serious about something, or so angry. It’s like watching your dad cry.

  What scares me the most, though, is that absolutely no person in this entire swarm of human beings seems to notice.

  So I barge my way toward him. I’m furious. I hate all these people for not caring. I’m hurling them out of the way as I walk, Michael Holden never leaving my eyesight. I reach him, breaking out of the crowd, and watch as he begins to manically attack some piece of paper that he had in his pocket. For several seconds, I don’t really know what to do about it. But I then find myself saying:

  “Yes, Michael Holden. Tear that fucking paper.”

  He drops everything, spins around, and points directly at me.

  The anger softens into sadness.

  “Tori,” he says, but I don’t hear it; I only see his mouth form the words.

  He’s wearing a catsuit and he’s quite red and his hair is slick with sweat and his eyes are spinning in an electrified fury, but it’s him.

  Neither of us really knows what to say.

  “You came second,” I blurt eventually, pointlessly. “That’s amazing.”

  His expression, passive, sad, so odd, doesn’t change. He retrieves his glasses from his pocket and puts them on.

  “I didn’t win,” he says. “I didn’t qualify.”

  He looks away. I think he’s welling up a little.

  “I didn’t think you were actually here,” he says. “I thought I’d imagined you.” A pause. “That’s the first time you’ve called me Michael Holden.”

  His chest is still moving quickly up and down. He looks older, somehow, in the spandex suit, and taller. The suit is mostly red, with some orange and black areas. He has a whole life that I don’t know about in this suit—hundreds of hours on the ice, training, entering competitions, testing his stamina, trying to eat right. I don’t know about any of that. I want to know.

  I open my mouth and close it several times.

  “Do you get angry a lot?” I say.

  “I’m always angry,” he says.

  Pause.

  “Usually other things override it, but I’m always angry. And sometimes . . .” His eyes drift vaguely to the right. “Sometimes . . .”

  The crowd buzzes, and I hate them even more.

  “What happened to you and Lucas?” he asks.

  I think about the phone calls that I’d “been asleep” for. “Oh. Yeah. No. That’s not . . . no. I didn’t feel very well.”

  “Oh,” he says.

  “You know . . . I don’t actually like Lucas . . . like that,” I say.

  “Okay,” he says.

  We are silent for several long moments. Something in his face changes. It looks a bit like hope, but I can’t really tell.

  “Aren’t you going to criticize me?” he asks. “Tell me that it’s just a skating competition? That it doesn’t mean anything?”

  I ponder this. “No. It means something.”

  He smiles. I would say that he looks like the original Michael again, but he doesn’t. There’s something new in the smile.

  “Happiness,” he says, “is the price of profound thought.”

  “Who’s that a quote from?” I ask.

  He winks. “Me.”

  And I’m alone again in this crowd and I feel an odd feeling. It’s not happiness. I know that it’s brilliant that he came second in a national qualifier, but all I can think about is how Michael is just as good at lying as I am.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  WE FAIL TO find out whose house it is, but “the third house from the river bridge” really is right on the river. The broad garden slopes into the water, which laps persistently at the dirt. There is an old canoe tied to a tree that hasn’t been used for probably centuries, and over the river you can see right across the flat countryside. The fields, darkened under the night, blend into the horizon, as if unsure themselves quite where the earth stops and the sky begins.

  This “meet-up” is not a meet-up.

  It is a house party.

  What had I been expecting? I had been expecting chairs. Nibbles. A speaker. Perhaps a PowerPoint presentation.

  The evening is cold, and it keeps trying to snow. I desperately want to be in my bed, and my stomach is all tight and tense. I hate parties. I always have. I always will. It’s not even for the right reasons; I hate them and I hate people who go to them. I have no justification. I’m just ridiculous.

  We walk past the smokers and into the open door.

  It’s about 10:00 p.m. Music pounds. Clearly no one lives in this house—it’s entirely bare of furniture save for a couple of deck chairs set up in the living room and on the garden patio, and I’m aware of a kind of neutral color scheme. The only thing giving the house any life at all is the impressive collection of artwork on the walls. There isn’t any food, but there are bottles and colorful shot glasses everywhere. People are milling around in corridors and rooms, lots of them smoking cigarettes, lots of them smoking weed, very few of them sitting.

  Many of the girls I recognize from Higgs, though Michael does not suspect that any of these casual partygoers are the masterminds behind Solitaire. There are older kids I don’t recognize. Some must be twenty, if not older. It makes me feel sort of nervous, to tell you the truth.

  I don’t know why I’m here. I actually see the Year 11 girl from Becky’s, the one who had come as Doctor Who. She’s by herself, like last time, and she looks a little lost. She’s walking very slowly along the corridor, without a drink, peering sadly at this painting of a wet cobbled street with red umbrellas and warm café windows. I wonder what she’s thinking. I imagine that it’s somewhat similar to what I’m thinking. She doesn’t see me.

  The first people we find are Becky and Lauren. I should have guessed that they would come, seeing as they attend all the parties in this town, and I really should have guessed I’d find them smashed. Becky points at us with the hand that’s not clasping a bottle.

>   “Oh my God, it’s Tori and Michael, you guys!” She whacks Lauren repeatedly on the arm. “Lauren! Lauren! Lauren! It’s Sprolden!”

  Lauren frowns. “Mate! I thought we’d agreed on ‘Mori’! Or ‘Tichael’!” She sighs. “Man, your names just aren’t good enough, like, they don’t work, they don’t work like Klaine or Romione or Destiel or Merthur. . . .” They both giggle uncontrollably.

  I start to feel even more nervous. “I didn’t think you guys would be interested in Solitaire.”

  Becky waves the bottle, shrugging and rolling her eyes around. “Hey, a party’s a party’s a party . . . I dunno . . . some guy . . . but, like, it’s Solitaire, we’ve, like, infiltrated Solitaire. . . .” She brings her finger up to her mouth. “Shhhhhhhh.” She drinks from the bottle. “Listen, listen, do you know what song this is? We, like, cannot work it out.”

  “It’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit.’ Nirvana.”

  “Oh right, yeah, oh my God, I thought it was that. It, like, it does not say the song title in the lyrics.”

  I look at Lauren, who’s gazing around her in an awed wonder.

  “You all right, Lauren?”

  She comes back to earth and cackles at me. “Isn’t this party sick?” She raises her arms in an “I don’t know” gesture. “It’s snowing hot guys and the drinks are free!”

  “That’s great for you,” I say, the will to be a nice person slowly drifting away.

  She pretends not to hear me and they walk off, laughing at nothing.

  Michael and I circle the party.

  It’s not like in films, or Channel 4 teen dramas, where everything slows down and turns slow-mo, lights flashing, people jumping up and down with pointed hands raised. Nothing’s like that in real life. People are just standing around.

  Michael talks to a lot of people. He asks everyone about Solitaire. We run into Rita, hanging quietly with a group of girls from my year. She sees me and waves, which means that I have to say hello to her.

  “Hey,” she says as I walk over to her. “How’s Charlie? Heard there was a fight or something. Ben Hope, wasn’t it?” Not much stays private in a town like this, so it’s hardly surprising that everyone knows.

  “It wasn’t a fight,” I say very quickly, and then clear my throat. “Er, yeah, he’s all right. Bruised but all right.”