Solitaire

by Alice Oseman

  “I know,” I say. “But I’m going to have to tell Mum and Dad.”

  “I know.”

  “I’ll come back and check on you in a bit.”

  “Okay.”

  I stand there. After a while, he says, “Are . . . you okay?”

  An odd question, in my opinion. He is the one who just . . . “I’m completely fine.”

  I turn out the light and go downstairs and call Dad. He stays calm. Too calm. I don’t like it. I want him to freak out and shout and panic, but he doesn’t. He tells me that they’ll come home right away. I put the phone down, pour a glass of diet lemonade, and sit in the living room for a while. It’s the middle of the night. The curtains are all open.

  You do not find many people like Charlie Spring in the world. I suppose I have implied this already. You especially do not find many people like Charlie Spring at all-boys schools. If you want my opinion, all-boys schools sound like hell. Maybe it’s because I don’t know many boys. Maybe it’s because I get a pretty bad impression of the guys I see coming out of the Truham gates, pouring fizzy drinks into one another’s hair, calling one another gay, and bullying gingers. I don’t know.

  I don’t know anything about Charlie’s life at that school.

  I head back upstairs and peer into Charlie’s room. He and Nick are now both fast asleep in Charlie’s bed, Charlie curled into Nick’s chest. I shut the door.

  I go to my room. I start shaking again, and I look at myself in the mirror for a long time and begin to wonder if I really am Wednesday Addams. I remember finding Charlie in the bathroom that time. There was a lot more blood then. It’s very dark in my room, but my open laptop screen acts as a dim blue lamp. I pace around in circles; around and around until my feet hurt. I put on some Bon Iver and then some Muse and then some Noah and the Whale, you know, really dumb angsty stuff. I cry and then I don’t. There’s a text on my phone, but I don’t read it. I listen to the dark. They’re all coming to get you. Your heartbeats are footsteps. Your brother is psychotic. You don’t have any friends. Nobody feels bad for you. Beauty and the Beast isn’t real. It’s funny because it’s true. Don’t be sad anymore. Don’t be sad anymore.

  FOURTEEN

  02:02 p.m.

  Michael Holden Calling

  “Hello?”

  “I didn’t wake you up, did I?”

  “Michael? No.”

  “Good. Sleep is important.”

  “How did you get my number?”

  “You called me, remember? Back in the IT room? I saved your number.”

  “That’s very sneaky of you.”

  “I’d call it resourceful.”

  “Did you call about Charlie?”

  “I called about you.”

  “. . .”

  “Is Charlie okay?”

  “My parents took him to the hospital today. For tests and stuff.”

  “Where are you?”

  “In bed.”

  “At two in the afternoon?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Could I . . .”

  “What?”

  “Could I come over?”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t like the thought of you there on your own. You remind me of an old person who lives alone, like, with cats and daytime television.”

  “Oh really?”

  “And I am a friendly young chap who would like to pop over so you can reminisce about the war and share some tea and biscuits.”

  “I don’t like tea.”

  “But you like biscuits. Everyone likes biscuits.”

  “I’m not in a biscuit mood today.”

  “Well, I’m still coming over, Tori.”

  “You don’t have to come over. I’m completely fine.”

  “Don’t lie.”

  He is coming over. I don’t bother changing out of my pajamas or brushing my hair or seeing if my face actually looks human. I don’t care. I don’t get out of bed even though I’m hungry, accepting the fact that my unwillingness to get up will probably result in my death from starvation. Then I realize that I can’t possibly let my parents have two children who knowingly starve themselves. Oh God, dilemma. Even lying in bed is stressful.

  The doorbell rings and makes my decision for me.

  I stand on the porch with one hand on the open door. He stands on the top step, looking much too preppy and much too tall with his hair side-parted and his glasses stupidly large. His bike is chained to our fence. I hadn’t noticed last night that it actually has a basket on it. It’s minus a billion degrees, but he’s just in a T-shirt and jeans again.

  He looks at me up and down. “Oh dear.”

  I go to shut the door on him, but he holds it open with one hand. I can’t stop him after that. He just grabs me. His arms wrap around me. His chin rests on my head. My arms are trapped at my sides and my cheek is sort of squashed into his chest. The wind twirls around us but I’m not cold.

  He makes me a cup of tea. I hate tea, for God’s sake. We drink out of faded mugs at the kitchen table.

  He asks me, “What do you normally do on Saturdays? Do you go out?”

  “Not if I can help it,” I say. “What do you do?”

  “I don’t really know.”

  I take a sip of the dirty water. “You don’t know?”

  He leans back. “Time passes. I do stuff. Some of it matters. Some of it doesn’t.”

  “I thought you were an optimist.”

  He grins. “Just because something doesn’t matter doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing.” The light in our kitchen is off. It is very dark. “So where shall we go today?”

  I shake my head. “I can’t go out; Oliver’s here.”

  He blinks at me. “Oliver?”

  I wait for him to remember, but he doesn’t. “My seven-year-old brother. I did tell you I had two brothers.”

  He blinks again. “Oh, yeah. Yeah. You did.” He’s really quite excited. “Is he like you? Can I meet him?”

  “Um, sure . . .”

  I call Oliver, and he comes downstairs after a minute or so with a tractor in one hand, still with his pajamas and dressing gown on. The dressing gown has tiger ears on the hood. He stands on the stairs, leans over the banister, and stares into the kitchen.

  Michael introduces himself, of course, with a wave and a blinding smile. “Hello! I’m Michael!”

  Oliver introduces himself too, with equal vigor.

  “My name’s Oliver Jonathan Spring!” he says, waving his tractor around. “And this is Tractor Tom.” He holds Tractor Tom to his ear and listens before continuing. “Tractor Tom does not think that you’re dangerous, so you’re allowed to go into the living-room tractor if you want.”

  “I would be absolutely delighted to visit the living-room tractor,” says Michael. I think he’s a little surprised. Oliver is nothing like me whatsoever.

  Oliver studies him with judging eyes. After a moment’s contemplation, he holds a hand up to his mouth and whispers loudly to me, “Is he your boyfriend?”

  This actually makes me laugh. Out loud. A real laugh. Michael laughs too, and then stops, and looks at me while I continue smiling. I don’t think he’s seen me laugh before. Has he seen me smile properly before? He doesn’t say anything. He just looks.

  And that is how the rest of my Saturday comes to be spent with Michael Holden.

  I didn’t bother changing. Michael invades our kitchen cupboards and teaches me how to make chocolate cake, and then we eat chocolate cake for the rest of the day. Michael cuts the cake into cubes, not slices, and when I query him on this, he simply replies, “I don’t like to conform to typical cake-cutting convention.”

  Oliver keeps running up- and downstairs, showing Michael his large and varied collection of tractors, in which Michael takes a politely enthusiastic interest. I have a nap in my room between 4:00 p.m. and 5:00 p.m. while Michael lies on the floor and reads Metamorphosis. When I wake up, he tells me why the main character isn’t really the main character or something like that
and also how he didn’t like the ending because the supposed main character dies. Then he apologizes for spoiling the ending for me. I remind him I don’t read.

  After that, the three of us clamber inside the living-room tractor and play this old board game called Game of Life that Michael found under my bed. You receive all this money, sort of like Monopoly, and then the object of the game appears to be to have the most successful life—the best job, the highest income, the biggest house, the most insurance. It’s a very odd game. Anyway, that takes up about two hours, and after another round of cake, we play Sonic Heroes on the PS2. Oliver triumphantly beats us both, and I have to give him a piggyback for the rest of the evening as a result. Once I put him to bed, I make Michael watch The Royal Tenenbaums with me. He cries when Luke Wilson slits his wrists. We both cry when Luke Wilson and Gwyneth Paltrow decide they have to keep their love a secret.

  It is ten o’clock when Mum, Dad, and Charlie get home. Charlie goes straight upstairs to bed without saying anything to me. Michael and I are on the sofa in the living room, and he’s playing me some music on my laptop. He got it hooked up to the stereo. Piano music. Or something. It’s making us both doze off, and I’m leaning on him but not in a romantic way or anything. Mum and Dad sort of stop in the doorway and just stay there, blinking, paralyzed.

  “Hello,” says Michael. He jumps up and holds out a hand to Dad. “I’m Michael Holden. I’m Tori’s new friend.”

  Dad shakes it. “Michael Holden. Right. Nice to meet you, Michael.”

  Michael shakes Mum’s hand as well, which I think is a bit weird. I don’t know. I’m no expert on social etiquette.

  “Right,” says Mum. “Of course. Tori’s friend.”

  “I hope it’s all right that I came round,” says Michael. “I met Tori a couple of weeks ago. I thought she might be a bit lonely.”

  “Not at all,” says Dad, nodding. “That’s very kind of you, Michael.”

  This conversation is so boring and cliché that I’m almost tempted to fall asleep. But I don’t.

  Michael turns back to Dad. “I read Metamorphosis while I was here. Tori told me you lent it to her. I thought it was brilliant.”

  “You did?” The light of literature dawns in Dad’s eyes. “What did you make of it?”

  They carry on talking about literature while I am lying on the sofa. I see my mum stealing glances at me, as if trying to stare the truth out of me. No, I telepathically tell her. No, Michael is not my boyfriend. He cries at Beauty and the Beast. He taught me how to make chocolate cake. He stalked me when I went to a restaurant and pretended to forget why.

  FIFTEEN

  WHEN I WAKE up, I can’t remember who I am, because I’d been having some crazy dream. Soon, however, I wake up properly to find that Sunday is here. I’m still on the sofa. My phone is in my dressing-gown pocket, and I look at it to check the time. 7:42 a.m.

  I immediately head upstairs and peer into Charlie’s room. He’s still asleep, obviously, and he looks so peaceful. It would be nice if he always looked like that.

  Yesterday, Michael Holden told me a lot of things, and one of those things was where he lives. Therefore—and I’m still not quite sure how or why this happens—something on this desolate Sunday makes me get up off the sofa and journey to his house on the Dying Sun.

  The Dying Sun is a cliff top overlooking the river. It is the only cliff in the county. I don’t know why there is a cliff over a river, because there are never normally cliffs over rivers except in films and abstract documentaries about places you will never go to. But the Dying Sun is so dramatically named because if you stand facing out on the farthest point of the cliff, you are exactly opposite the sun as it sets. A couple of years back, I decided to take a walk around our town, and I remember the long brown house that sat mere meters away from the cliff edge, like it was ready to take a leap.

  Maybe it is the fact that I can actually remember all this that causes me to wander up the long country lane and halt outside the brown house on the Dying Sun at nine o’clock in the morning.

  Michael’s house has a wooden gate and a wooden door and a sign on its front wall reading JANE’S COTTAGE. It’s somewhere you’d expect either a farmer or a lonely old person to live. I stand there, just outside the gate. Coming here was a mistake. An utter mistake. It’s, like, nine in the morning. No one is up at nine in the morning on a Sunday. I can’t just knock at someone’s house. That’s what you did in primary school, for God’s sake.

  I head back down the lane.

  I’ve taken twenty steps when I hear the sound of his front door opening.

  “Tori?”

  I stop in the road. I shouldn’t have come here. I should not have come here.

  “Tori? That is you, isn’t it?”

  Very slowly, I turn around. Michael has shut the gate and is jogging down the road toward me. He stops before me and grins his dazzling grin.

  For a moment I don’t actually believe it’s him. He is positively disheveled. His hair, usually gelled into a side part, flies around in wavy tufts, and he is wearing a truly admirable amount of clothes, including a woolly jumper and woolly socks. His glasses are slipping off his nose. He doesn’t look awake and his voice, normally so wispy, is a little hoarse.

  “Tori!” he says, and clears his throat. “It’s Tori Spring!”

  Why did I come here? What was I thinking? Why am I an idiot?

  “You came to my house,” he says, shaking his head back and forth in what can only be described as pure amazement. “I mean, I thought you might, but I didn’t at the same time . . . you know?”

  I glance to one side. “Sorry.”

  “No, no, I’m really glad that you did. Really.”

  “I can go home; I didn’t mean to—”

  “No.”

  He laughs, and it’s a nice laugh. He runs a hand through his hair. I’ve never seen him do that before.

  I find myself smiling back. I’m not quite sure how that happens either.

  A car rolls up behind us, and we quickly move to the side of the road to let it pass. The sky is still a little orange, and in every other direction except the town, all you can see are fields, many abandoned and wild, their long grass flowing like sea waves. I start to feel like I’m actually in the Pride and Prejudice film, you know, that bit at the end where they go out to that field in the mist and the sun is rising.

  “Would you like to . . . go out?” I say, then quickly add, “Today?”

  He is literally awestruck. Why. Am I. An idiot.

  “Y-yes. Definitely. Wow, yes. Yes.”

  Why.

  I look back to the house.

  “You have a nice house,” I say. I wonder what it’s like inside. I wonder who his parents are. I wonder how he’s decorated his bedroom. Posters? Lights? Maybe he painted something. Maybe he has old board games stacked up on shelves. Maybe he has a beanbag. Maybe he has figurines. Maybe he has Aztec-patterned bedsheets and black walls, and teddies in a box, and a diary under his pillow.

  He looks at the house, his expression suddenly downcast.

  “Yeah,” he says, “I guess.” Then he turns back to me. “But we should go out somewhere.”

  He quickly runs back to the gate and locks it. His hair is just hilarious. But kind of nice. I can’t stop looking at it. He walks back and passes me, and then turns and holds out his hand. His jumper, much too big for him, flutters around his body.

  “Coming?”

  I step toward him. And then I do something, like, really pathetic.

  “Your hair,” I say, lifting my hand and taking hold of a dark strand that covers his blue eye. “It’s . . . free.” I move the strand to one side.

  I then realize what I’m doing, jump backward, and cringe. I sort of wish I could disapparate, Harry Potter–style.

  For what feels like an ice age, he doesn’t stop looking at me with this frozen expression, and after that I swear he goes a little red. He’s still holding out his hand, so I take it, but that almost
makes him jump.

  “Your hand is so cold,” he says. “Do you have any blood?”

  “No,” I say. “I’m a ghost. Remember?”

  SIXTEEN

  SOMETHING IS DIFFERENT in the air as we stroll down the road. We are hand in hand but definitely not in a romantic way. Michael’s face spins around and around in my mind, and I come to the conclusion that I do not know the boy walking next to me. I do not know him at all.

  Michael takes me to a café in the town named Café Rivière. It is next to the river, hence the unoriginal name, and I have been here many times before. We are the only people there apart from the elderly French owner sweeping the floor, and we sit at a table with a gingham tablecloth and a vase of flowers by a window. Michael drinks tea. I eat a croissant.

  Dying, though I don’t know why, to make conversation, I start with “So why’d you change schools?”

  The immediate look on his face tells me that this was not the casual question that I had intended it to be.

  I cringe. “Oh, sorry. Sorry. That was nosy. You don’t have to answer.”

  For several long moments he continues to drink his tea. Then he puts down the cup and stares into the flowers between us.

  “No, it’s fine. It’s not too important.” He chuckles to himself, as if remembering something. “I, er, didn’t get on too well with the people there. Not teachers, not students . . . I thought a change of scene might do me some good. I thought maybe I’d get along better with girls or something stupid like that.” He shrugs and laughs, but it’s not a funny laugh; it’s a different sort of laugh. “Nope. Obviously my personality is far too fantastic for both girls and boys to handle.”

  I don’t know why, but I start to feel quite sad. It’s not my normal type of sad, you know, the unnecessary and self-inflicted pity-party sort of sad, but it’s a sad that’s kind of projected outward.

  “You should be on Waterloo Road or Skins or something,” I say.

  He laughs again. “Why’s that?”

  “Because you’re . . .” I finish my sentence with a shrug. He replies with a smile.