by Alice Oseman
“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 realize 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 gray 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 makeup on but no, wait, I also do not 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 with 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 the window, some Year 7s chucking snowballs at one another. 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 anymore? Why should I care about anything anymore?
“It’s fine,” I say. An obligatory answer to an obligatory question.
“Look, I’m not going to apologize, 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 in 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 lent me money for cookies at break time. 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 are compatible,” she says. “I don’t think that it is possible for us to be friends anymore. You have changed. I might have changed too, but you have definitely changed. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s true.”
“So is it my fault we’re not friends anymore?”
Becky doesn’t react. “I’m not sure that you need me anymore.”
“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 who beat up my brother.
“Are you trying to gain sympathy here? Are you breaking up with me? This isn’t a rom-com, 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 have lost something, but the feeling inside my blood retains the same density of 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. 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 second 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 is a tall metal staircase just outside to my left, its top step parallel to the window I’m staring through. It leads onto 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 second-floor level. I sneak a look down onto the grass below. The grass slopes down slightly from the room onto 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, nearly lunchtime, and I’m skipping music for the hundredth time. It doesn’t matter.
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. 02:12:23:26. Two days, twelve 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 onto 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 backward. I realize that it’s Kent’s lectern, from which he leads our school assemblies. A small congregation of students has 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 face, the side that 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 loudspeaker, blending into the sigh of a steady breeze. A piece of paper, one of Kent’s past assemblies clipped onto the lectern somehow, lift
s up and flickers as the wind encircles it as if it is 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 the flames 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 around the wood, shooting shards of blackened charcoal outward in every direction, a tunnel of smoke coughing upward. 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 paralyzed. 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 upon 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 toward the pile of remains, then the grayish 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.
TWELVE
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 having 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 have not approved of, such as thinking she is better than other 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 around 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 onto the desk with my cheek 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 around 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 nonfiction row. He’s looking at me, but I don’t want to look back anymore. 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 has 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 from that.
And I think of the sadness that’s been in Lucas’s eyes since the day I met him
but it’s different from 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 anymore.” 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 percent 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 anymore. 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 toward 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 realized I was crying. I don’t re
ally 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 realize 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 toward 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 100 percent sure that Michael Holden deserves better friends than the pessimist introvert psychopath Tori Spring.
THIRTEEN
THE SONG REPEATING itself over the loudspeaker 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 COUNTDOWWWWWN” in the hallways anymore, 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, Christmas chart-toppers Rage Against the Machine. Perhaps Solitaire is attempting to offer us some sort of positive encouragement.
