by Alice Oseman
“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 toward 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 midair, 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 meters wide. “Sweet merciful FUCK, it is 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 shirtsleeves 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, farther 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 in 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 drunk!?”
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 meters away. “I’m just going out!” he calls in a singsong voice. “I may be some time!” Then: “Mother of God, I literally am going to freeze to death.”
I am 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 is raining flyers. They’re hailing down into the crowd from the large fans set up onstage, 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 colors, 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 but 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.
TEN
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 am not looking forward to that.
It sort of reminds me about Solitaire every time I look at it. It reminds me what this group is 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 my knowledge that I am going to find out who Solitaire is and what it is planning for Friday, and I am going to stop it.
By break time, I have counted sixty-six Solitaire posters in the school reading FRIDAY: JUSTICE IS COMING. Kent, Zelda, and the prefects are in an 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 projection 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 it seriously injured a bunch of people, all for the purpose of putting on a good show. And everybody in the town is absolutely in love with it.
It is clear to me now that if I do not stop Solitaire, nobody else will.
At lunch I sense that I am 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 second 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 around 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 voice mails? 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 voice mails. I remember Nick shouting at me for being an idiot, and Charlie sitting next to me in the back 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.
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 was their final show gone wrong, or something. Solitaire didn’t even get a mention. I guess the Clay Festival organizers 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 organized 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 am 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 anymore.” 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 favorites. 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 cliché. I think I’ve said before how things are cliché because they are true. Well, there’s one thing that I know is true, and that is that Michael Holden is too good for me.
Later, 7:00 p.m., dinner. Mum and Dad are out somewhere. Nick and Charlie are at opposite ends of the table; I am next to Oliver. We are 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 does or does 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 am 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 home page 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 anymore. It’s just a patchwork sheet of Soli
taire 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 for this is for me to pathetically flop off my bed and onto 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.
ELEVEN
“MUM,” I SAY. It’s Tuesday, 7:45 a.m., 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 pajamas.