by Alice Oseman
“You do remember,” he says, his voice barely above a whisper. “If I remember, then you remember. Tell me about when you came round my house all those times. Tell me what you saw there.”
He’s right. I do remember. I wish I didn’t. It was summer, we were eleven, and it was nearing the end of Year 6. I went round his house what felt like a hundred times. We played chess. We sat in the garden. We ate ice lollies. We ran all around his house—it was a big house. Three floors, with an abundance of hiding places. Everything was kind of beige. They had a lot of paintings.
A lot of paintings.
They had a lot of paintings.
And there is one that I remember.
I asked Lucas, when I was eleven, “Is that a painting of the high street?”
“Yep,” he said. He was smaller than me back then, his hair white-blond. “The cobbled high street in the rain.”
“I like the red umbrellas,” I said. “I think it must be summer rain.”
“I think so too.”
The painting of the wet cobbled street with red umbrellas and warm café windows, the painting that Doctor Who girl was staring at so intensely at the Solitaire party; it is inside Lucas’s house.
I begin to breathe very fast.
“That painting,” I say.
He says nothing.
“But the Solitaire party . . . that wasn’t your house. You don’t live in this town.”
“No,” he says. “My parents are in real estate. They own several empty houses. That house was one of them. They put those paintings in there to brighten it up for viewers.”
Everything suddenly clicks into place.
“You’re part of Solitaire,” I say.
He nods slowly. “I made it,” says Lucas. “I made Solitaire.”
I step back.
“No,” I say. “No, you didn’t.”
“I made that blog. I organized the pranks.”
Star Wars. Violins. Cats, Madonna. Ben Hope and Charlie. Fire. Bubbles. The fireworks at the Clay and the burning and the distorted voice? Surely I would have recognized his voice.
I step back.
“You’re lying.”
“I’m not.”
I step back, but there isn’t any table to step back onto, and my foot falls onto air and I topple backward into nothingness, only to be caught under my arms by Michael Holden, who has been standing by us since God knows when. He lifts me a little and settles me on the ground. His hands feel strange on my arms.
“Can—” I can’t speak. I’m choking; my throat is closing. “You—you’re a sadistic—”
“I know, I’m sorry; it all got a bit out of hand.”
“Got a bit out of hand?” I shriek with laughter. “People could have died.”
Michael’s arms are around me. I throw him off, climb back onto the tables, and march toward Lucas, who cowers a little as I face him.
“All the pranks were related to me, weren’t they?” I say this more to myself than him. Michael had realized this right from the start. Because he’s clever. He’s so clever. And I, being me, didn’t bother to listen to anyone except myself.
Lucas nods.
“Why did you make Solitaire?” I say.
He can’t breathe. His mouth turns in and he swallows.
“I’m in love with you,” he says.
At that moment, I consider many options. One is to punch him in the face. Another is to jump out of the window. The option that I go with is to run. So now I’m running.
You don’t pull pranks on a school because you’re in love with someone. You don’t get a whole party to attack someone because you’re in love with someone.
I’m running through our school, into and out of classrooms I’ve never entered, through dark and empty corridors I never pass through anymore. All the while Lucas is in pursuit, crying out that he wants to explain properly, as if there’s more to explain. There isn’t more to explain. He’s a psycho. Like everyone. He doesn’t care that people get hurt. Like everyone.
I find myself at a dead end in the art department. It’s the room that I stood on top of only two days ago—the art conservatory. I dart around the room, desperately looking for somewhere to go, as Lucas stands breathing heavily at the door. The windows are too small to jump out of.
“Sorry,” he says, still panting, hands on his knees. “Sorry, that was kind of sudden. That didn’t make any sense.”
I practically screech with laughter. “Uh, you think?”
“Am I allowed to explain properly?”
I look at him. “Is this the final explanation?”
He stands up straight. “Yes, yes it is.”
I sit down on a stool. He sits on the stool next to mine. I edge away but don’t say anything. He begins his story.
“I never forgot anything about you. Every time we drove down your road I would look at your house, pretty much praying that you’d step out of your door at just the right moment. I used to come up with all these scenarios where I would contact you and we would be friends again. Like, we’d find each other on Facebook and start chatting and decide to meet up. Or we’d meet randomly somewhere—in the high street, at a party, I don’t know. When I grew older, you became, like, that one girl. You know? The one girl who I would end up having that great romance with. We start as childhood friends. We’d meet again, older, and that would be it. Happily ever after. Like a film.
“But you’re not the Victoria I had in my head. I don’t know. You’re someone else. Someone I don’t know, I guess. I don’t know what I was thinking. Look, I’m not a stalker or anything. I came for a tour of Higgs last term to see if I liked it, you know. Michael showed me round. He took me all over the school and the last place I visited was . . . the common room. And, er, that’s where I saw you. Sitting literally right in front of me.
“I thought I was going to have a heart attack. You were on a computer, but you had your back to me. You were sitting there at the computer, playing solitaire.
“And you looked so—you had one hand on your head and the other just clicking and clicking the mouse, and you looked so dead. You looked tired and dead. And under your breath you kept saying over and over, ‘I hate myself, I hate myself, I hate myself.’ Not loud enough for anyone to hear except me.”
I don’t remember this happening. I don’t remember this day at all.
“It seems dumb now. I bet you were just stressed about coursework or something. But I couldn’t stop thinking about it. And then, I started to get all these ideas. I thought that maybe you really did hate yourself. And I hated the school for doing that to you.
“I literally went into rages thinking about it. And that’s when I came up with Solitaire. I talked to a guy I knew from Truham who’d joined Higgs, and we decided to start pulling pranks. I had this crazy, crazy idea that just a few small acts of hilarity might bring something bright into your life. And into everyone’s lives.
“So, yeah, I organized the Ben Hope thing. I was so angry about what had happened to Charlie. Ben deserved that. But then . . . then the thing at the Clay happened. People got injured. You got injured. It got out of control. So after that I quit. I haven’t done anything since Sunday. But there’s so many followers now. We made them all take it so seriously, thinking they were anarchists or something, with the posters and the fireworks and the stupid slogans. I don’t know. I don’t know.
“Michael found me about half an hour ago. I know you’re going to hate me now. But . . . yeah. He’s right. It’s worse for you if you don’t know.”
Tears start to drift down his face, and I don’t know what to do. Like when we were little. Always silent tears.
“I am the worst type of human being,” Lucas says, and he puts his elbows on the table and looks away from me.
“Well, you’re not getting any sympathy from me,” I say.
Because he gave up. Lucas gave up. He let these stupid, imaginary feelings control his life, and he made bad things happen. Very bad things. Which caused other bad things
to happen. This is the way the world works. This is why you never let your feelings control your behavior.
I’m angry.
I’m angry that Lucas didn’t fight against his feelings.
But that’s the way the world works.
Lucas stands up and I flinch away.
“Stay away from me,” I find myself saying, like he’s a rabid animal.
I can’t believe it took until now for me to realize the truth.
He’s not Lucas Ryan to me anymore.
“Victoria, I saw you that day and thought that the person who I’d been in love with for six years was going to kill herself.”
“Don’t touch me. Stay away from me.”
Nobody is honest; nobody is real. You can’t trust anyone or anything. Emotions are humanity’s fatal disease. And we’re all dying.
“Look, I’m not part of Solitaire anymore—”
“You were so innocent and awkward.” I’m talking in rushed, maniacal strings of thought. I don’t know why I’m saying any of this. It’s not really Lucas I’m angry at. “I suppose you thought you were romantic, with your books and your fucking hipster clothes. Why shouldn’t I be in love with you? All this time you were plotting and faking.”
Why am I surprised? This is what everyone does.
And then I know exactly what to do.
“What,” I ask, “is Solitaire going to do tomorrow?”
I have the chance to do something. To finally, wonderfully, put an end to all the pain.
He says nothing, so I shout.
“Tell me! Tell me what’s happening tomorrow!”
“I don’t know exactly,” says Lucas, but I think he’s lying. “All I know is that they’re meeting inside at six a.m.”
So that’s where I’ll be. Tomorrow at six. I’ll undo everything.
“Why didn’t you tell me that before?” I whisper. “Why didn’t you tell anyone?”
There is no answer. He cannot answer.
The sadness is coming, like a storm.
And I start to laugh like a serial killer.
I laugh and run. Run out of the school. Run through this dead town. Run, and I think, Maybe the pain will stop; but it keeps burning inside, burning down.
FOURTEEN
THE FOURTH OF February is a Friday. The UK experiences the heaviest snowfall since 1963. Approximately 360,000 people are born, and lightning strikes the Earth 518,400 times. 154,080 people die.
I escape my house at 5:24 a.m. I did not watch any films during the night. None of them seemed very interesting. Also, my room was kind of freaking me out because I pulled down all the Solitaire posts, so my carpet was now a meadow of paper and Blu Tack. I just kind of sat on my bed, not doing anything. Anyway, I’m wearing as many clothes as possible over my school uniform, and I’m armed with my phone and a torch and an unopened diet lemonade can, which I don’t think I’ll drink. I’m feeling slightly deranged because I haven’t slept for about a week, but it’s a good sort of deranged, an ecstatic deranged, an invincible, infinite deranged.
The Solitaire blog post appeared at 8:00 p.m. last night.
20:00 3 February
Solitairians.
Tomorrow morning, Solitaire’s greatest operation will take place at Harvey Greene Grammar School. You are most welcome to attend. Thank you for all your support this term.
Our former leader never truly explained the creation of Solitaire.
We hope that we’ve added something to what might have been a very boring January.
Patience Kills
I have a sudden urge to call Becky.
“. . . Hello?”
Becky sleeps with her phone on vibrate next to her head. I know this because she used to tell me how boys wake her up in the night by texting her.
“Becky. It’s Tori.”
“Oh my God. Tori.” She does not sound very alive. “Why . . . are you calling me . . . at five a.m. . . . ?”
“It’s twenty to six.”
“Well, that changes everything.”
“That’s a forty-minute difference. You can do a lot in forty minutes.”
“Just . . . why . . . are you calling . . . ?”
“To say I’m feeling a lot better.”
Pause. “Well . . . that’s good but—”
“Yeah I know. I feel really, really, really good.”
“Then . . . shouldn’t you be sleeping?”
“Yeah, yeah I will, once I’ve sorted things out for good. It’s happening this morning, Solitaire, you know.”
Second pause. “Wait.” She’s awake now. “Wait. What—where are you?”
I look around. I’m nearly there actually. “Heading to school. Why?”
“Oh my God!” There’s some scuffling of her sitting up in her bed. “Jesus Christ, dude, what the fuck are you doing!?”
“I already told you—”
“TORI! JUST GO HOME!”
“Go home.” I laugh. “And do what? Cry some more?”
“ARE YOU LITERALLY INSANE? IT’S FIVE A.M.! WHAT ARE YOU EVEN TRYING TO—”
I stop laughing and press the red button, because she is making me tear up.
My feet sink into the snow as I hurry through town. I’m pretty sure that at some point I’m going to take a step and my foot won’t stop; it’ll just keep sinking down through the snow until I’ve disappeared entirely. If it wasn’t for the streetlights, it would be pitch-black, but the lights are painting the white with a dull yellowish glow. The snow looks sick. Diseased.
Fifteen minutes later, I push my way through a hedge to get into school because the main gates are locked. I get a big old scratch on my face, and upon inspection using my phone screen, I decide I quite like it.
The car park is deserted. I trudge through the snow toward the main entrance, and as I draw closer, I see that the door is ajar. I head inside, immediately noticing the white burglar and fire alarm box on the wall, or what used to be a white box on the wall. It’s been torn away and is hanging from the plaster by only a couple of wires. The rest of the wires have all been cut. I stare at it for a few seconds before moving on down a corridor. They’re here.
I drift for a while, a Ghost of Christmas Past. I’m reminded of the last time I was here at a stupid hour of the day—weeks ago, with the prefects and Zelda, and the violin video. That seems like a long time ago. Everything seems colder now.
As I draw closer toward the end of the corridor, I begin to hear unintelligible whispers coming from the corner English classroom. Mr. Kent’s classroom. I flatten myself like a spy against the wall by the door. There’s a light glaring from its plastic window. Carefully and slowly, I peer into the room.
I expect to find a horde of Solitaire minions, but what I see instead are three figures huddled by a cluster of tables in the middle of the room, illuminated by an oversized torch shining upward from the table. The first is the guy with the large quiff who I’ve seen Lucas with a hundred times, in a very Lucas-ish hipster getup—skinnies, boat shoes, bomber jacket, and Ben Sherman polo.
The second person is Evelyn Foley.
Quiff has his arm around her. Oh. Evelyn’s secret boyfriend is Quiff. I think back to the Clay. Had the Solitaire voice been a girl’s? It’s too cold for me to remember anything, so I focus my attention on the third figure.
Lucas.
Quiff and Evelyn seem to be kind of ganging up on him. Lucas is whispering hurriedly at Quiff. He told me he wasn’t a part of Solitaire anymore, didn’t he? Maybe I should jump into the room and start shouting. Waving my phone. Threatening to call the police. Maybe—
“Oh my God.”
At the other end of the corridor, Becky Allen blinks into existence, and I almost collapse. She points at me with an accusatory finger and hisses, “I knew you wouldn’t go home!”
My eyes, wild and unfocused, spin crazily as she storms down the corridor. Soon, Becky is beside me, in Superman pajama bottoms tucked into at least three pairs of socks and furry boots, along with a hoodie an
d a coat and all other kinds of woolly clothing. She’s here. Becky came here. For me. She looks very strange with no makeup on and her purplish hair all scraped into a greasy sort of bulb and I don’t know why or how this happens, but I am actually relieved that she’s here.
“Oh my God, you’re insane,” she whispers. “You. Are. Psychotic.” And then she hugs me, and I let her, and for several seconds I really feel like we’re friends. She lets go, withdraws, and cringes. “Dude, what have you done to your face?” She lifts her sleeve and wipes it roughly against my cheek, and when she draws it away, it’s stained red. Then she smiles and shakes her head. I am reminded of the Becky I knew three years ago, before boys, before sex, before alcohol, before she started to move on while I stayed exactly where I was.
I point toward the door to the English room. “Look inside.”
She tiptoes past me and looks. And her face opens up in horror. “Evelyn? What th— And why is Lucas—” Her mouth hangs wide-open as the sudden realization arrives. “Is this—is this Solitaire?” She turns back to me and shakes her head. “This is too much mind-fuckery for this time of day. I’m not even sure I’m actually awake.”
“Shh.”
I’m trying to listen to what they’re saying. Becky dives past the door and we stand, hidden in the dark, on either side of it, and by both carefully peering round the frame, we spy on the gathering. Vaguely we begin to decipher a conversation. It is 6:04 a.m.
“Grow some balls, Lucas.” Evelyn. She’s wearing high-waisted denim shorts and tights and one of those jackets with tartan lining. “I’m not even joking. We’re terribly sorry to tear you away from your teddy bear and your electric blanket, but can’t you just grow some balls?”
Lucas’s face, dotted with shadows, grimaces. “Can I please remind you that I am the one who started Solitaire in the first place—therefore my balls are in no position to be questioned, thanks.”
“Yeah, you started it,” says Quiff. It’s the first time I get a proper look at him, and for someone with such a large head of hair, he really is tiny. By his side on the table is a Morrisons shopping bag. His voice is also far more sophisticated than I’d anticipated. “And you left just when we started to do stuff that’s actually worthwhile. We’re doing something great, and yet here you are saying that everything you have worked for has been, and I quote, ‘total and utter bullshit.’”
