Solitaire, Part 2 of 3
Read Solitaire, Part 2 of 3 Online
Authors: Alice Oseman
Part 2
ALICE OSEMAN
Table of Contents
EIGHT
I’M SPRAWLED ON
the computer desks in the common room at 8.21am on Monday with Becky raving on about how cute Ben Hope was at Lauren’s (that was six days ago, for God’s sake) when someone bellows with extreme resonance from the door: “HAS ANYONE SEEN TORI SPRING!?”
I wake from the dead. “Oh Christ.”
Becky roars my location across the air and before I have time to hide under the desk, Zelda Okoro is standing in front of me. I flatten my hair, hoping it will shield me from her dictatorial intervention. Zelda wears full make-up to school every day, including lipstick and eyeshadow, and I think she might be certifiably insane.
“Tori. I’m nominating you for Operation Inconspicuous.”
It takes several seconds for this information to register.
“No, you are not,” I say. “No.
No
.”
“Yes. You haven’t got a say. The Deputy Heads voted on who they wanted in Year 12.”
“What?” I slump back on to the desk. “What for?”
Zelda puts her hands on her hips and tilts her head. “We’re facing a crisis, Tori.” She speaks way too fast and in extremely short sentences. I don’t like it. “Higgs is facing a crisis. A team of eight prefects just isn’t going to cover it. We’re upping the stake-out ops team to fifteen. Operation Inconspicuous is a go. Tomorrow. 0700.”
“I’m sorry –
what
did you just say?”
“We’ve come to the conclusion that most of the sabotage must be happening during the early hours. So we’re staking out tomorrow morning. 0700. You’d better be there.”
“I hate you,” I say.
“Don’t blame me,” she says. “Blame Solitaire.” She clip-clops off.
Becky, Evelyn, Lauren and Rita are all around me. Lucas too. I think he’s one of Our Lot now.
“Well, you’re obviously in the teachers’ good books,” says Becky. “Next thing you know, they’ll be making you an actual prefect.”
I shoot her a look of severe distress.
“Yeah, but if you were a prefect, you could skip the lunch queue,” says Lauren. “Fast food, man. And you could give Year 7s detentions whenever they’re being too cheerful.”
“What did you even do to make the teachers like you?” asks Becky. “You don’t exactly do much.”
I shrug at her. She’s right. I don’t do much at all.
Later in the day, I pass Michael in the corridor. I say ‘pass’, but what actually happens is he shouts “TORI” so loudly that I manage to drop my English folder on the floor. He lets out this deafening laugh, his eyes scrunching up behind his glasses, and he actually stops and stands still in the middle of the corridor, causing three Year 8s to bump into him. I look at him, pick up my folder and walk right past.
I’m in English now. Reading
Pride and Prejudice
. Now that I’ve reached Chapter 6, I have established that I hate this book with a profound passion. It’s boring and clichéd, and I constantly feel the urge to hold it over a lit match. The women only care about the men and the men don’t seem to care about anything at all. Except Darcy maybe. He’s not so bad. Lucas is the only person I can see who is reading the book properly, with his calm and quiet expression, but every so often he checks his phone. I scroll through a few blogs on my own phone under the desk, but there really isn’t anything interesting on there.
Becky is in the seat next to me and she’s talking to Ben Hope. Unfortunately, I can’t avoid them without moving to a different seat or leaving the class or dying. They are playing Dots and Boxes in Ben’s school planner. Becky keeps losing.
“You’re
cheating
!” she exclaims and attempts to grab Ben’s pen. Ben laughs a very attractive laugh. They have a small wrestling match over the pen. I try not to throw up or dive under the table from sheer cringe.
In the common room at lunch, Becky tells Evelyn all about Ben. At some point, I interrupt their conversation.
“What happened to Jack?” I ask her.
“Jack who?” she says. I blink at her, and she turns back to Evelyn.
DAD GETS ME
to school at 6.55am the next day. I am in a trance. In the car, he says: “Maybe if you catch them in the act, you’ll get a community award.”
I don’t know what a community award is, but I feel that I’m probably the least likely person in the world to get one.
Zelda, her prefects, the nominated helpers and even old Kent are in the hall and I’m the only one there who came in school uniform. It’s basically night-time outside. The school heating hasn’t started up yet. I praise myself for putting on two pairs of tights this morning.
Zelda, in leggings and running shoes and an oversized Superdry hoodie, takes charge.
“Okay, Team Ops. Today’s the day we’re catching them, yeah? Everyone’s got a separate area of the school. Patrol that area and call me if you find anything. Nothing’s been done to the school since Friday so there’s a chance they won’t turn up today. But we’re going to do this until we feel that the school is safe, whether we end up catching anyone or not. Meet back in the hall at eight.”
Why did I even come here?
The prefects begin to chat among themselves, and Zelda speaks to each person individually before sending them off into the unlit, unheated depths of the school.
When she gets to me, she presents me with a piece of paper and says, “Tori, you’re patrolling the IT suites. Here’s my number.”
I nod at her and go to walk off.
“Er, Tori?”
“Yeah?”
“You look a bit …” She doesn’t finish her sentence.
It’s 7am. She can piss off.
I walk away, throwing the piece of paper in a bin as I pass it. I come to a halt upon finding Kent standing ominously by the hall entrance.
“Why me?” I ask him, but he just raises his eyebrows and smiles at me, so I roll my eyes and walk away.
Wandering around the school like this is peculiar. Everything’s so still. Serene. No air circulation. I’m walking through a freeze-frame.
The IT suite is in C Block, on the first floor. There are six computer rooms: C11, C12, C13, C14, C15 and C16. The usual whir of the suite is absent. The computers are all dead. I open up C11, switch on the lights and repeat this for C12, C13 and C14 before giving up and taking a seat on a swivel chair inside C14. What does Kent even think he’s doing involving me in this? As if I’m going to do any kind of ‘patrolling’. I kick the floor and spin. The world hurricanes around me.
I don’t know how long I do this, but, when I stop to read the time, the clock waves in front of my eyes. When it calms down, it reads 7.16am. I wonder for at least the sixteenth time what I am doing here.
It is then that I hear a distant sound of the Windows booting-up jingle.
I get off my chair and step into the corridor. I look one way. I look the other. The corridor dissolves into darkness both ways, but out of the open door of C13 glares a hazy blue glow. I creep down the corridor and go inside.
The interactive whiteboard is on, the projector whirring happily, the Windows desktop on display. I stand before the board, staring into it. The desktop wallpaper is a sloped green field beneath a blue sky. The harder I stare, the wider the board seems to spread, wider and wider, until the fake pixelated world invades my own. The computer that is linked to the screen hums.
The door to the room shuts by itself, like I’m in
Scooby-Doo
. I run and grab the handle, but it’s locked and for a second I just stare at myself in the door window.
Someone’s locked me in an IT room, for God’s sake.
Stepping backwards, I see the board change in the blank monitors’ reflections. I spin on the spot. The green field has gone. In its place is a blank page of Microsoft Word with the cursor flashing on and off. I try smashing at the keyboard of the computer that’s hooked up to the board and wildly swishing the mouse across the table. Nothing happens.
I’m starting to sweat. My brain isn’t accepting this situation. I come up with two possibilities.
One: this is a sick joke by someone I know.
Two: Solitaire.
And that’s when text rolls across the white screenscape.
Attention
Team Ops
,
Please refrain from panic and alarm.
Pause.
What?
SOLITAIRE is a friendly, neighbourhood-watch organisation, dedicated to aiding the adolescent population by targeting the most common cause of teenage anxiety. We are on your side. You should not be afraid of any action we will/will not take.
We hope that you will support SOLITAIRE’s future actions and come to feel that school need not be a place of solemnity, stress and isolation.
Someone is trying to deliberately freak the prefects out. As I’m not a prefect, I am choosing not to freak out. I don’t know what I feel about this, but it definitely isn’t freaked out.
We leave you with a video that we hope will enlighten your morning.
SOLITAIRE
Patience Kills
The page of text remains on screen for several seconds before Windows Media Player pops up in front of it. The cursor zooms to the play button and the video begins.
The footage is kind of blurry, but you can make out two figures on a stage, one at a piano, one with a violin in her hands. The violinist holds her instrument up to her chin, raises her bow and together the two begin to play.
Only after the first eight bars, and after the camera has zoomed in, do I realise that the musicians can be no more than eight years old.
I don’t know what the piece of music is. It doesn’t matter. Because sometimes I hear a piece of music and I can’t do anything but sit there. Sometimes in the morning, the radio turns on and a song is playing and it’s so beautiful that I just have to lie there until it’s over. Sometimes I’m watching a film, and it’s not even a sad scene, but the music is so sad that I can’t help but cry.
This is one of those times.
Eventually, the video ends and I just stand there.
I guess Solitaire think they’re being intellectual and deep. Making us watch that video and writing with such eloquence, like people who think that they’re hilarious for using the word ‘thus’ in school essays. It half makes me laugh and half makes me want to shoot them.
The fact remains that C13’s door is still locked and I’m still trapped here. I want to cry out, but I don’t. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do.
I threw away Zelda’s number, like the idiot I am. I don’t know anyone else here.
I can’t call Becky. She wouldn’t come. Dad’s at work. Mum’s in her PJs. Charlie won’t get to school for another forty-five minutes.
There is only one person who would help me.
There is only one person who is going to believe me.
I pull my phone out of my blazer pocket.
“Hello?”
“Before I say anything else, I have a question.”
“Tori!? Oh my God, you
actually
called me!”
“Are you a real person?”
I’ve been considering the possibility that Michael Holden is a figment of my imagination. This is probably because I fail to understand how someone with a personality like his could survive in this shitty world and also because I fail to understand why someone with a personality like his would take any interest in a misanthropic, pessimistic asshole like myself.