Solitaire, Part 2 of 3 (11 page)

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 criticise 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.

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’s an old rowing boat 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’s 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 the people who go to them. I have no justification. I’m just ridiculous.

We walk past the smokers and through the open door.

It’s about 10pm. Music pounds. Clearly, no one lives in this house – it’s entirely bare of furniture save for a couple of deckchairs set up in the living room and on the garden patio, and I’m aware of a kind of neutral colour 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 colourful 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 recognise 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 recognise. 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 party, 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 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 pointing 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.”

Rita nods understandingly. “Ah, okay. Well, I’m glad he’s not hurt too badly.”

After that, Michael and I end up caught inside a circle of Year 13s in the kitchen. Michael claims that he’s never spoken to any of them.

“No one knows, like, no one knows who made it,” one girl says. She has a very tight skirt on and a lot of unattractive red lipstick. “There are rumours it’s some dealer from the estate or, like, a teacher who got sacked and wants revenge.”

“Stick around,” interrupts a guy wearing a snapback bearing the word ‘JOCK’. “Like, keep checking the blog, innit. I’ve heard things are gonna get well good when they put up the next post later.”

There’s a pause. I look down at the newspapered floor. There’s a headline reading ‘27 DEAD’ and a picture of a burning building.

“Why?” says Michael. “Why’s that?”

But the guy just blinks, like a fish, and asks, “Why aren’t you drinking?”

I decide to be a normal person and find something proper to drink. Michael disappears for a long time so I pick up this big old bottle from somewhere and sit alone outside on a deckchair, feeling like a middle-aged, alcoholic husband. It’s gone eleven and everyone’s drunk. Whoever’s DJ’ing relocates to the garden, and after a while it’s unclear whether I’m in some small-town garden or at Reading Festival. I spot Nick and Charlie through the living-room window, kissing in a corner like it’s their last day on earth, despite Charlie’s bruised face. I guess they look romantic. Like they really are in love.

I get up and go inside to look for Michael, but whatever this stuff is that’s in the bottle, it’s kind of strong, so next thing I know I’ve lost all sense of time, space and reality, and I have no idea what I’m doing. I find myself in the hallway again, in front of that painting of the wet cobbled street with red umbrellas and warm café windows. I can’t stop looking at it. I force myself to turn round and spot Lucas at the other end of the corridor. I’m not sure whether he sees me or not, but he quickly disappears into another room. I wander away and get lost in the house. Red umbrellas. Warm café windows.

Michael grabs me out of nowhere. He pulls me away from wherever the hell I was – the kitchen maybe, lost in a sea of Boy London hats and chinos – and we start to walk through the house. I don’t know where we’re going. But I don’t try to stop him. I’m not sure why.

As we’re walking, I keep looking at his hand wrapped round my wrist. Maybe it’s because I’ve had stuff to drink, or maybe it’s because I’m really cold, or maybe it’s because I’d sort of
missed
him while he’d been gone, but whatever it is – I keep thinking how nice it feels to have his hand round my wrist. Not in some weird perverted way. His hand is just so big compared to mine, and so warm, and the way his fingers are curled round my wrist, it’s like they were always supposed to do that, like they’re matching pieces in a jigsaw. I don’t know. What am I talking about?

Eventually, when we’re outside and in the crowd of manic dancers, he slows and does a spin in the mud. It’s sort of weird when he gazes at me. Again, I blame the drink. But it’s different. He looks so nice standing there. His hair kind of swishing in the wrong direction and the firelight reflecting in his glasses.

I think he can tell I’ve had a bit to drink.

“Will you dance with me?” he shouts over the screams.

I inexplicably start to cough. He rolls his eyes at me and chuckles. I start thinking about proms and weddings and, for a few seconds, I actually forget that we’re just in some garden where the ground looks like shit and the people are all dressed in near-identical outfits.

He removes his hand from my wrist and uses it to flatten his hair, and then he stares at me for what feels like a whole year. I wonder what he sees. Without warning, he grabs both of my wrists and literally kneels at my feet.

“Please dance with me,” he says. “I know that dancing is awkward and outdated, and I know that you don’t like doing stuff like that and, if I’m honest, neither do I, and I know that the night isn’t going to last very long and soon everyone will just go home back to their laptops and their empty beds, and we’ll probably be alone tomorrow, and we all have to go to school on Monday – but I just think that if you tried it, you know,
dancing
, you might feel for a few minutes that all of this, all of these
people …
none of it is really too bad.”

I look down and meet his eyes.

I start to laugh before kneeling down too.

And then I do something really weird.

Once I’m on my knees – I really can’t help it – I kind of fall forward into him and fling my arms round him.

“Yes,” I say into his ear.

So he puts his arms round my waist, lifts us both to our feet and resumes pulling me through the adolescent expanses.

We reach the centre of the crowd clustered round the DJ.

He puts his hands on my shoulders. Our faces are centimetres apart. It’s so loud he has to scream.

“
Yes
, Tori! They’re playing the Smiths! They’re playing the beautiful Smiths, Tori!”

The Smiths are the band of the Internet – more specifically, and unfortunately, a band that many people listen to simply because Morrissey has that vintage, self-deprecating coolness that everyone seems to crave. If the Internet were an actual country, ‘There is a Light That Never Goes Out’
would be its national anthem.

I feel myself slightly step backwards.

“Do you … do you have … a
blog
?”

For a second, he’s confused, but then he just smiles and shakes his head. “Jesus, Tori! Do I have to have a blog to like the Smiths? Is that the rule now?”

And this is the moment, I guess, when I decide that I couldn’t care less about anything else tonight, I couldn’t care less about blogs or the Internet or films or what people are wearing, and yes, yes, I am going to have fun, I am going to have a good time, I am going to be with my one and only friend Michael Holden, and we are going to dance until we can’t even breathe and we have to go home and face our empty beds. So when we start jumping up and down, smiling so ridiculously, looking at each other and at the sky and not really at anything, Morrissey singing something about shyness, I really don’t think things could be so bad after all.

AT 12.16AM, I
go inside because if I don’t pee I think my bladder will erupt. Everyone is waiting for Solitaire’s blog post, which, according to recent rumour, will be published at 12.30am. People are sitting, phones in their hands. I find the bathroom and, when I leave it, I see Lucas, alone in a corner, texting. He sees me staring and jumps up, but rather than walking towards me, he quickly exits. Like he’s trying to avoid me.

I follow him into the living room, intending to apologise for forgetting about hanging out with him today, but he doesn’t see me. I watch as he wanders up to Evelyn. She is wearing these hooped earrings, chunky heels, leggings with upside-down crosses on them and a faux-fur coat. Her messy hair is piled up on the top of her head. Lucas, similarly, is in tonight’s hipster get-up – a loose Joy Division T-shirt with the sleeves rolled, too-tight jeans and desert boots. Lucas says something to her and she nods back at him. That’s it, I’ve decided. Despite what Lucas said, they are definitely a couple.