Solitaire. Alice Oseman

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

       NINE

      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 СКАЧАТЬ