Solitaire, Part 3 of 3 (11 page)

Lucas is standing next to me and he turns. His eyes are big and blue and dog-like. “Why did you come here, Victoria?”

“Those two would have hurt you,” I point out, but we both know this isn’t true.

“Why did you come?”

Everything’s so blurry.

Lucas sighs. “Well, it’s finally over. Becky kind of saved us all.”

Becky seems to be having a kind of stunned breakdown, slumped on the floor against the corridor wall with her Superman-logoed legs sprawled out in front of her. She holds the lighter gun up to her face, flicking it on and off in front of her eyes, and I can just about hear her muttering, “This is the most pretentious novelty lighter I’ve ever seen … this is so
pretentious
…”

“Am I forgiven?” asks Lucas.

Maybe I’m going to pass out.

I shrug. “You’re not actually in love with me, are you?”

He blinks and he’s not looking at me. “Er, no. It wasn’t love really. It was … I just thought I needed you … for some reason …” He shakes his head. “I actually think that Becky’s rather lovely.”

I try not to throw up or stab myself with my house keys. I stretch my face into a grin like a toy clown. “Ha ha ha! You and the rest of the solar system!”

Lucas’s expression changes, like he finally gets who I am.

“Could you not call me Victoria any more?” I ask.

He steps away from me. “Yeah, sure. Tori.”

I start to feel hot. “Were they going to do what I think they were going to do?”

Lucas’s eyes keep moving around. Not looking at me.

“They were going to burn the school down,” he says.

It seems almost funny. Another childhood dream. If we were ten, perhaps we’d rejoice in the idea of the school on fire, because that would mean no more school, wouldn’t it? But it just seems violent and pointless now. As violent and pointless as all the other things that Solitaire have done.

And then I realise something.

I turn round.

“Where are you going?” asks Lucas.

I walk down the corridor, back to Kent’s classroom, getting hotter and hotter the closer I get.

“What are you doing?”

I gaze into the classroom. And I wonder if I’ve lost it entirely.

“Tori?”

I turn to Lucas and look at him standing at the other end of the corridor. Really, properly look at him.

“Get out,” I say, maybe too quietly.

“What?”

“Take Becky and get out.”

“Wait, what are you—”

And then he sees the orange glow lighting up one side of my body.

The orange glow coming from the fire that is raging through Kent’s classroom.

“Holy shit,” says Lucas, and then I’m racing down the corridor towards the nearest fire extinguisher, tugging at it, but it won’t come off the wall.

There’s a horrific crack. The door to the classroom has split and is burning happily.

Lucas has joined me at the extinguisher, but, however hard we tug, we can’t get it off the wall. The fire creeps out of the room and spreads to the wall displays, the ceiling filling steadily with smoke.

“We need to get out!” Lucas shouts over the roaring flames. “We can’t do anything!”

“Yes, we
can.
” We have to. We have to do something. I have to do something. I abandon the extinguisher and head further into the school. There’ll be another one in the next corridor. In the science corridor.

Becky has leapt up from the floor. She goes to run after me, as does Lucas, but a giant wall display suddenly flops off the wall in a fiery wreck of paper and pins, blocking the corridor. I can’t see them. The carpet catches light and the flames begin to advance towards me—

“TORI!” someone screams. I don’t know who. I don’t care. I locate the fire extinguisher and this one easily detaches from the wall. It says ‘WATER’ on it, but also ‘FOR USE ON FIRES INVOLVING WOOD, PAPER, FABRIC, NOT ELECTRICAL FIRES. The fire edges down the corridor, on the walls, the ceiling, the floor, pushing me backwards. There’s lights, plug sockets everywhere—

“TORI!” This time the voice comes from behind me. Two hands place themselves on my shoulders and I leap around as if it’s Death itself.

But it’s not.

It’s him, in his T-shirt and jeans, glasses, hair, arms, legs, eyes, everything—

It’s Michael Holden.

He wrenches the extinguisher from my arms—

And he hurls it out of the nearest window.

I AM FORCED
down the corridor and thrown out of the nearest fire exit. How Michael knew we were here, I don’t know. What he’s doing, I don’t know. But I need to stop that fire. I need to be in there. If I can’t do anything, then it will have been for nothing. My whole life. Everything. Nothing.

He tries to grab me, but I’m practically a torpedo. I race back through the fire exit and down the next corridor, away from the oncoming flames, searching for another fire extinguisher. I’m sort of hyperventilating and I can’t see anything and I’m running so fast that I have no idea where this corridor is in the school and I start tearing up again.

But Michael can run like he skates. He grabs me round the waist, just as I tug the fire extinguisher off the wall, just as the fire bypasses the fire exit and closes in on us—

“TORI! WE NEED TO GET OUT, NOW.”

The fire draws Michael’s face out of the dark. I flail around in his grip and burst forward, but he closes his fist round my forearm and squeezes it and starts to drag me, and before I know what I’m doing I’m yanking my arm so hard that my skin starts to burn. I’m screaming at him and pushing and I swing my leg around and actually kick him in the stomach. I must kick him hard because he tumbles backwards and clutches his body. I instantly realise what I’ve done and freeze, looking at him in the orange light. We meet each other’s eyes and he seems to
realise
something, and I want to laugh, because yeah, he’s finally realised, just like Lucas did eventually, and I hold my arms out to him—

And then I see the fire.

The inferno in the science lab to our right. The science lab that’s connected to that English classroom by one single doorway, which the flames must have stormed straight through.

I leap forward into Michael and push him away—

And the classroom explodes outwards: crumpled tables, chairs, flying fireballs of books. I’m on the ground, several metres away, miraculously alive, and I open my eyes, but can see nothing. Michael is lost somewhere around me in the smoke. I scramble backwards as a chair leg soars past my cheek, and scream his name, no way of knowing if he’s alive or—

I get up and run.

Crying? Shouting things. A name? His name?

Solitaire’s eternal idea. That childhood dream.

Is he dead? No. I see a shape rise vaguely from the smoke, flailing around before disappearing further into the school. At one point, I think I hear him calling me, but I might just be imagining it.

I scream his name and I’m running again, out of the smoke cloud, away from the science corridor. Around the corner, flames have reached an art classroom and the artwork, hours and hours of it, is melting into globules of fried acrylic and dripping on to the floor. It’s so sad that I want to cry, but the smoke has already started that. I start to panic too. Not because of the fire.

Not even because I’m losing and Solitaire is winning.

Because Michael is in here.

Another corridor. Another. Where am I? Nothing is the same in the dark and the burning. Epileptic lights flash around me like sirens, like I’m passing out. Diamonds sparkling. I’m screaming again.
Michael Holden
. The fire growls and a hurricane of hot air careers through the school’s tunnels.

I call out for him. I’m calling him over and over again, I’m shaking so hard, the artwork and the handwritten essays on the walls are disintegrating around me and I cannot breathe.

“I failed.” I say these words right as I’m thinking them. It’s funny – this never happens. “I failed. I failed.” It’s not the school I’ve failed. It’s not even myself. It’s Michael. I’ve failed him. I failed to stop being sad. He tried so hard, he tried so hard to be nice, to be my friend, and I’ve failed him. I stop screaming. There is nothing now. Michael, dead, the school, dying, and me. There is nothing now.

And then a voice.

My name in the smoke.

I spin on the spot, but there are only flames that way. What building am I in? There must be a window, a fire exit, something, but everything is burning, the smoke slowly starting to suffocate the air and eventually me, so before I know what I’m doing I’m tearing up a flight of stairs on to the first floor, smoke and flames at my heels.

I turn left, left again, right, into a classroom. The door slams behind me. I grab a chair, not thinking about anything except fire and smoke and dying, and smash the thin window. I close my eyes as a sprinkling of glass dust showers over my hair.

I climb out into the morning and on to the top of what seems to be a concrete roof and finally,
finally
, I remember where I am.

The beautiful place.

The small concrete roof of the art conservatory. The field of snow and the river. The black morning sky. Cold air.

Infinite space.

A thousand thoughts at once. Michael Holden is nine hundred of them. The rest are self-hatred.

I failed to do anything.

I look at the smashed window. What does that lead to? Only pain. I look at the metal stairs to my right. What do they lead to? Only myself, failing, time and time again, to do anything right, or say anything right.

I’m at the edge and I look down. It’s far. It’s calling me.

A hope of something better. A third option.

It’s so hot. I take my coat and gloves off.

It hits me then.

I haven’t ever known what I wanted out of life. Until now.

I sort of want to be dead.

MY FEET DRIFT
absently closer to the edge. I think about Michael Holden. Mainly about how he’s secretly angry all the time. I think that a lot of people are secretly angry all the time.

I think about Lucas Ryan and that makes me feel sadder. There is another tragedy in which I am not the rescuer.

I think about my ex-best friend, Becky Allen. I don’t think I know who she is. I think I knew before – before we grew up – but after that, she changed and I didn’t.

I think about my brother, Charlie Spring, and Nick Nelson. Sometimes paradise isn’t what people think it should be.

I think about Ben Hope.

Sometimes people hate themselves.

And, while I think, Harvey Greene Grammar School dissolves. My feet peep slightly over the concrete roof. If I fall accidentally, the universe will be there to catch me.

And then—

Then there he is.

Charlie Spring.

A lone dot in orange-tinted white.

He’s waving and screaming up.

“DON’T!”

Don’t
, he says.

And there’s another figure running along. Taller, stouter. He clutches Charlie’s hand. Nick Nelson.

Then another. And another. Why? What’s wrong with people? Why do they never give you any peace?

There’s Lucas and Becky. Becky puts her hands to her mouth. Lucas puts his hands on his head. Charlie’s screaming in a battle with the wind and flames. Screaming, whirling, burning.

“Stop!”

This voice is closer and comes from above. I decide that it’s probably God, because I think that this is probably how God works. He waits until your final moments and
then
he’ll step in and take you seriously. It’s like when you’re four years old and you tell your parents that you’re going to run away. And they say: “Okay, go right ahead.” Like they don’t care. And they only start caring when you actually walk out the door and down the road with your teddy bear under your arm and a packet of biscuits in your rucksack.

“Tori!”

I turn round and look up.

At the top of the school building, above the window that I smashed, is Michael Holden, lying on his front over the roof so that only his head and shoulders are visible from below.

He holds out an arm to me. “Please!”

The mere sight of him makes me want to die even more. “The school’s burning down,” I say, turning back the other way. “You need to leave.”

“Turn round, Tori. Turn round, you absolute twat.”

Something wrenches me round. I take out my torch, wondering briefly why I haven’t used it until now, and I shine it upwards. I see him then properly. Hair all messed up and dusty. Patches of soot smothering his face. A burn mark on his outstretched arm.

“Do you want to kill yourself?” he asks, and the question sounds unreal because you never hear anyone ever asking that question in real life.

“I don’t want you to do that,” he says. “I can’t let you do that. You can’t leave me here alone.”

His voice breaks.

“You need to be here,” he says.

And then he does that thing that I do. His mouth sort of sucks itself in and turns down and his eyes and nose crinkle up and one tear creeps out of the corner of his blue eye and he raises his hands to cover up his face.

“I’m sorry,” I say, because his face, all scrunched up and melting, physically hurts me. I start to cry too. Against my will, I step away from the edge and closer to him and I hope that this makes him understand. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry.”

“Shut
up
!” He’s smiling while crying, madly, throwing his hands from his face and raising both arms up. Then he punches the ground. “God, I’m stupid. I can’t believe I didn’t realise this any sooner. I can’t believe it.”

I’m pretty much directly under his face. His glasses begin to slide off his nose and he swiftly pushes them back on.

“You know, the worst thing is that when I threw away that fire extinguisher you were holding, I wasn’t just thinking about saving you.” He chuckles sadly. “We all need saving really.”

“Then why—” I pause. Suddenly understanding everything. This boy. This person. How has it taken me this long to understand? He needed me as much as I needed him, because he was
angry
, and he has always been angry.