Solitaire. Alice Oseman

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СКАЧАТЬ what is that?”

      “An answer.”

      I raise my eyebrows. He gazes at me through his glasses. The blue eye is so pale it’s almost white. It’s got an entire personality of its own.

      “Aren’t mysteries fun?” he says. “Don’t you wonder?”

      It’s then that I realise that I probably don’t. I realise that I could walk out of here and literally not give a crap about solitaire.co.uk or this annoying, loud-mouthed guy ever again.

      But because I want him to stop being so goddamn patronising, I swiftly remove my phone from my blazer pocket, type solitaire.co.uk into the Internet address bar and open up the web page.

      What appears almost makes me laugh – it’s an empty blog. A troll blog, I guess.

      What a pointless, pointless day this is.

      I thrust the phone into his face. “Mystery solved, Sherlock.”

      At first, he keeps on grinning, like I’m joking, but soon his eyes focus downwards on to the phone screen and, in a kind of stunned disbelief, he removes the phone from my hand.

      “It’s … an empty blog …” he says, not to me but to himself, and suddenly (and I don’t know how this happens) I feel deeply, deeply sorry for him. Because he looks so bloody sad. He shakes his head and hands my phone back to me. I don’t really know what to do. He literally looks like someone’s just died.

      “Well, er …” I shuffle my feet. “I’m going to form now.”

      “No, no, wait!” He jumps up so we’re facing each other.

      There is a significantly awkward pause.

      He studies me, squinting, then studies the photograph, then back to me, then back to the photo. “You cut your hair!”

      I bite my lip, holding back the sarcasm. “Yes,” I say sincerely. “Yes, I cut my hair.”

      “It was so long.”

      “Yes, it was.”

      “Why did you cut it?”

      I had gone shopping by myself at the end of the summer holidays because there was so much crap I needed for sixth form and Mum and Dad were busy with all of the Charlie stuff that was going on and I just wanted it out of the way. What I’d failed to remember was that I am awful at shopping. My old school bag was ripped and dirty so I trailed through nice places – River Island and Zara and Urban Outfitters and Mango and Accessorize. But all the nice bags there were, like, fifty pounds, so that wasn’t happening. Then I tried the cheaper places – New Look and Primark and H&M – but all the bags there were just tacky. I ended up going round all the shops selling bags a billion bloody times before having a slight breakdown on a bench by Costa Coffee in the middle of the shopping centre. I thought about starting Year 12 and all the things that I needed to do and all the new people that I might have to meet and all the people I would have to talk to and I caught a reflection of myself in a Waterstones window and I realised then that most of my face was covered up and who in the name of God would want to talk to me like that and I started to feel all of this hair on my forehead and my cheeks and how it plastered my shoulders and back and I felt it creeping around me like worms, choking me to death. I began to breathe very fast, so I went straight into the nearest hairdresser’s and had it all cut to my shoulders and out of my face. The hairdresser didn’t want to do it, but I was very insistent. I spent my school bag money on a haircut.

      “I just wanted it shorter,” I say.

      He steps closer. I shuffle backwards.

      “You,” he says, “do not say anything you mean, do you?”

      I laugh again. It’s a pathetic sort of expulsion of air, but for me that qualifies as a laugh. “Who are you?”

      He freezes, leans back, opens out his arms as if he’s the Second Coming of Christ and announces in a deep and echoing voice: “My name is Michael Holden.”

      Michael Holden.

      “And who are you, Victoria Spring?”

      I can’t think of anything to say because that is what my answer would be really. Nothing. I am a vacuum. I am a void. I am nothing.

      Mr Kent’s voice blares abruptly from the tannoy. I turn round and look up at the speaker as his voice resonates down.

      “All sixth-formers should make their way to the common room for a short sixth-form meeting.”

      When I turn back round, the room is empty. I’m glued to the carpet. I open my hand and find the SOLITAIRE.CO.UK Post-it inside it. I don’t know at what point the Post-it made its way from Michael Holden’s hand to my own, but there it is.

      And this, I suppose, is it.

      This is probably how it starts.

       TWO

      THE LARGE MAJORITY of teenagers who attend Higgs are soulless, conformist idiots. I have successfully integrated myself into a small group of girls who I consider to be ‘good people’, but sometimes I still feel that I might be the only person with a consciousness, like a video-game protagonist, and the rest are computer-generated extras who have only a select few actions, such as ‘initiate meaningless conversation’ and ‘hug’.

      The other thing about Higgs teenagers, and maybe most teenagers, is that they put very little effort into ninety per cent of everything. I don’t think that this is a bad thing because there’ll be lots of time for ‘effort’ later in our lives, and trying too hard at this point is a waste of energy which might otherwise be spent on lovely things such as sleeping and eating and illegally downloading music. I don’t really try hard to do anything. Neither do many other people. Walking into the common room and being greeted by a hundred teenagers slumped over chairs, desks and the floor is not an unusual occurrence. It’s like everyone’s been gassed.

      Kent hasn’t arrived yet. I head over to Becky and Our Lot in the computer corner; they seem to be having a conversation about whether Michael Cera is actually attractive or not.

      “Tori. Tori. Tori.” Becky taps me repeatedly on the arm. “You can back me up on this. You’ve seen Juno, yeah? You think he’s cute, right?” She slaps her hands against her cheeks and her eyes kind of roll backwards. “Awkward boys are the hottest, aren’t they?”

      I place my hands on her shoulders. “Stay calm, Rebecca. Not everyone loves the Cera like you do.”

      She starts to babble on about Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, but I’m not really listening. Michael Cera is not the Michael I’m thinking about.

      I somehow excuse myself from this discussion and begin to patrol the common room.

      Yes. That’s right. I’m looking for Michael Holden.

      At this point, I’m not really sure why I am looking for him. As I’ve probably СКАЧАТЬ