First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2014

HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd,

HarperCollins Publishers

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Copyright © Alice Oseman 2014

Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2018

Pride and Prejudice courtesy of Universal Studios Licensing LLC

Donnie Darko – The Director’s Cut courtesy of Richard Kelly

‘GARDEN STATE’ © 2004 written by Zach Braff. Twentieth Century Fox. All rights reserved.

Alice Oseman asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007559220

Ebook Edition © 2014 ISBN: 9780007559237

Version: 2018-03-20

For Emily Moore,

who stuck by me from the beginning.

“And your defect is a propensity to hate everybody.”

“And yours,” he replied with a smile, “is wilfully to misunderstand them.”

Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Part 1

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Part 2

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

After

Chapter Seventeen

Keep Reading …

About the Author

Books by Alice Oseman

About the Publisher

PART 1

Elizabeth Bennet: Do you dance, Mr Darcy?

Mr Darcy: Not if I can help it.

Pride and Prejudice (2005)

ONE

I AM AWARE as I step into the common room that the majority of people here are almost dead, including me. I have been reliably informed that post-Christmas blues are entirely normal and that we should expect to feel somewhat numb after the ‘happiest’ time of the year, but I don’t feel so different now to how I felt on Christmas Eve, or on Christmas Day, or on any other day since the Christmas holidays started. I’m back now and it’s another year. Nothing is going to happen.

I stand there. Becky and I look at each other.

“Tori,” says Becky, “you look a little bit like you want to kill yourself.”

She and the rest of Our Lot have sprawled themselves over a collection of revolving chairs around the common-room computer desks. As it’s the first day back, there has been a widespread hair-and-make-up effort across the entire sixth form and I immediately feel inadequate.

I deflate into a chair and nod philosophically. “It’s funny because it’s true.”

She looks at me some more, but doesn’t really look, and we laugh at something that wasn’t funny. Becky then realises that I am in no mood to do anything so she moves away. I lean into my arms and fall half asleep.

My name is Victoria Spring. I think you should know that I make up a lot of stuff in my head and then get sad about it. I like to sleep and I like to blog. I am going to die someday.

Rebecca Allen is probably my only real friend at the moment. She is also probably my best friend. I am as yet unsure whether these two facts are related. In any case, Becky Allen is very pretty and has very long purple hair. It has come to my attention that, if you have purple hair, people often look at you. If you are pretty with purple hair, people often stay looking at you, thus resulting in you becoming a widely recognised and outstandingly popular figure in adolescent society; the sort of figure that everyone claims to know yet probably hasn’t even spoken to. She has 2,098 friends on Facebook.

Right now, Becky’s talking to this other girl from Our Lot, Evelyn Foley. Evelyn is considered ‘retro’ because she has messy hair and wears a necklace with a triangle on it.

“The real question though,” says Evelyn, “is whether there’s sexual tension between Harry and Malfoy.”

I’m not sure whether Becky genuinely likes Evelyn. Sometimes I think people only pretend to like each other.

“Only in fan fictions, Evelyn,” says Becky. “Please keep your fantasies between yourself and your blog.”

Evelyn laughs. “I’m just saying. Malfoy helps Harry in the end, right? He’s a nice guy deep down, yeah? So why does he bully Harry for seven years? Enormous. Closet. Homosexual.” With each word, she claps her hands together. It really doesn’t emphasise her point. “It’s a well-established fact that people tease people they fancy. The psychology here is unarguable.”

“Evelyn,” says Becky. “Firstly, I resent the fangirl idea that Draco Malfoy is some kind of beautifully tortured soul who is searching for redemption and understanding. Secondly, the only non-canon couple that is even worth discussion is Snily.”

“Snily?”

“Snape and Lily.”

Evelyn appears to be deeply offended. “I can’t believe you don’t support Drarry when you ship Snape and Lily. I mean, at least Drarry is a realistic possibility.” She slowly shakes her head. “Like, obviously, Lily went for someone hot and hilarious like James Potter.”

“James Potter was a resplendent twat. Especially to Lily. J.K. made that quite clear. And dude – if you don’t like Snape by the end of the series, then you miss the entire concept of Harry Potter.”

“If Snily had been a thing, there would have been no Harry Potter.”

“Without a Harry, Voldemort might not have, like, committed mass genocide.”

Becky turns to me, and so does Evelyn. I deduce that I am under pressure to contribute something.

I sit up. “You’re saying that because it’s Harry’s fault that all these muggles and wizards died, it would have been better if there’d been no Harry Potter at all and no books or films or anything?”

I get the impression that I’ve ruined this conversation so I mumble an excuse and lift myself off my chair and hurry out of the common-room door. Sometimes I hate people. This is probably very bad for my mental health.

*

There are two grammar schools in our town: Harvey Greene Grammar School for Girls, or ‘Higgs’ as it is popularly known, and Truham Grammar School for Boys. Both schools, however, accept males and females in Years 12 and 13, the two final years of school known countrywide as the sixth form. So, now that I am in Year 12, I have had to face a sudden influx of the male species. Boys at Higgs are on a par with mythical creatures and having an actual real boyfriend puts you at the head of the social hierarchy, but personally, thinking or talking too much about ‘boy issues’ makes me want to shoot myself in the face.

Even if I did care about that stuff, it’s not like we get to show off, thanks to our stunning school uniform. Usually, sixth-formers don’t have to wear school uniform; however, Higgs sixth form are forced to wear a hideous one. Grey is the theme, which is fitting for such a dull place.

I arrive at my locker to find a pink Post-it note on its door. On that, someone has drawn a left-pointing arrow, suggesting that I should, perhaps, look in that direction. Irritated, I turn my head to the left. There’s another Post-it note a few lockers along. And, on the wall at the end of the corridor, another. People are walking past them, totally oblivious. What can I say? People aren’t observant. People don’t question stuff like this. They never think twice about déjà vu when there could be a glitch in the Matrix. They walk past tramps in the street without even glancing at their misfortune. They don’t psychoanalyse the creators of slasher-horrors when they’re probably all psychopaths.

I pluck the Post-it from my locker and wander to the next.

Sometimes I like to fill my days with little things that other people don’t care about. It makes me feel like I’m doing something important, mainly because no one else is doing it.

This is one of those times.

The Post-its start popping up all over the place. Like I said, everyone is ignoring them; instead, they are going on with their day and talking about boys and clothes and pointless stuff. Year 9s and 10s strut around in their rolled-up skirts and thigh-high socks over their tights. Year 9s and 10s always seem to be happy. It makes me hate them a bit. Then again, I hate quite a lot of things.

The penultimate Post-it I find depicts an arrow pointing upwards, or forwards, and is situated on the door of a closed computer room on the first floor. Black fabric covers the door window. This particular computer room, C16, was closed last year for refurbishment, but it doesn’t look like anyone’s bothered getting started. It sort of makes me feel sad, to tell you the truth, but I open C16’s door anyway, enter and close it behind me.

There’s one long window stretching the length of the far wall, and the computers in here are bricks. Solid cubes. Apparently, I’ve time-travelled to the 1990s.

I find the final Post-it note on the back wall, bearing a URL:

SOLITAIRE.CO.UK

In case you live under a rock or are home-schooled or are just an idiot, Solitaire is a card game you play by yourself. It’s what I used to spend my IT lessons doing and it probably did a lot more for my intelligence than actually paying attention.

It’s then that someone opens the door.

“Dear God, the age of the computers in here must be a criminal offence.”

I turn slowly around.

A boy stands before the closed door.

“I can hear the haunting symphony of dial-up connection,” he says, eyes drifting, and, after several long seconds, he finally notices that he’s not the only person in the room.

He’s a very ordinary-looking, not ugly but not hot, miscellaneous boy. His most noticeable feature is a pair of large, thick-framed square glasses, the sort similar to those 3D cinema glasses that twelve-year-olds pop the lenses out of and wear because they think it makes them look ‘rad’. God, I hate it when people wear glasses like that. He’s tall and has a side parting. In one hand, he holds a mug; in the other a piece of paper and his school planner.

As he absorbs my face, his eyes flare up and I swear to God they double in size. He leaps towards me like a pouncing lion, fiercely enough that I stumble backwards in fear that he might crush me completely. He leans forward so that his face is centimetres from my own. Through my reflection in his ridiculously oversized spectacles, I notice that he has one blue eye and one green eye. Heterochromia.

He grins violently.

“Victoria Spring!” he cries, raising his arms into the air.

I say and do nothing. I have a headache.

“You are Victoria Spring,” he says. He holds the piece of paper up to my face. It’s a photograph. Of me. Underneath, in tiny letters: Victoria Spring, 11A. It has been on display near the staffroom – in Year 11, I was a form leader, mostly because no one else wanted to do it so I got volunteered. All the form leaders had their pictures taken. Mine is awful. It’s before I cut my hair so I sort of look like the girl from The Ring. It’s like I don’t even have a face.

I look into the blue eye. “Did you tear that right off the display?”

He steps back a little, retreating from his invasion of my personal space. He’s got this insane smile on his face. “I said I’d help someone look for you.” He taps his chin with his planner. “Blond guy … skinny trousers … walking around like he didn’t really know where he was …”

I do not know any guys and certainly not any blond guys who wear skinny trousers.

I shrug. “How did you know I was in here?”

He shrugs too. “I didn’t. I came in because of the arrow on the door. I thought it looked quite mysterious. And here you are! What a hilarious twist of fate!”

He takes a sip of his drink. I start to wonder if this boy has mental problems.

“I’ve seen you before,” he says, still smiling.

I find myself squinting at his face. Surely I must have seen him at some point in the corridors. Surely I would remember those hideous glasses. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you before.”

“That’s not surprising,” he says. “I’m in Year 13, so you wouldn’t see me much. And I only joined your school last September. I did my Year 12 at Truham.”

That explains it. Four months isn’t enough time for me to commit a face to memory.

“So,” he says, tapping his mug. “What’s going on here?”

I step aside and point unenthusiastically to the Post-it on the back wall. He reaches up and peels it off.

“Solitaire.co.uk. Interesting. Okay. I’d say we could boot up one of these computers and check it out, but we’d probably both expire before Internet Explorer loaded. I bet you any money they all use Windows 95.”

He sits down on one of the swivel chairs and stares out of the window at the suburban landscape. Everything is lit up like it’s on fire. You can see right over the town and into the countryside. He notices me looking too.

“It’s like it’s pulling you out, isn’t it?” he says. He sighs to himself. Like a girl. “I saw this old man on my way in this morning. He was sitting at a bus stop listening to an iPod, tapping his hands on his knees, looking at the sky. How often do you see that? An old man listening to an iPod. I wonder what he was listening to. You’d think it would be classical, but it could have been anything. I wonder if it was sad music.” He lifts up his feet and crosses them on top of a table. “I hope it wasn’t.”

“Sad music is okay,” I say, “in moderation.”

He swivels round to me and straightens his tie.

“You are definitely Victoria Spring, aren’t you.” This should be a question, but he says it like he’s already known for a long time.

“Tori,” I say, intentionally monotone. “My name is Tori.”

He laughs at me. It’s a very loud, forced laugh. “Like Tori Amos?”

“No.” Pause. “No, not like Tori Amos.”

He puts his hands in his blazer pockets. I fold my arms.

“Have you been in here before?” he asks.

“No.”

He nods. “Interesting.”

I widen my eyes and shake my head at him. “What?”

“What what?”

“What’s interesting?” I don’t think I could sound less interested.

“We both came looking for the same thing.”

“And 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 already implied, I do not get interested in very many things, particularly not people, but it irritates me when someone thinks that they can start a conversation and then just get up and leave.

It’s rude, you know?

I pass all the common-room cliques. Cliques are a very High School Musical concept, but the reason they are so clichéd is because they really do exist. In a predominantly all-girls’ school, you can pretty much expect each year to be divided into three main categories:

1 Loud, experienced girls who use fake IDs to get into clubs, wear a lot of things that they see on blogging sites, frequently pretend to starve themselves, enjoy a good bit of orange tan, socially or addictively smoke, are open to drugs, know a lot about the world. I very much disapprove of these people.

2 Strange girls who appear to have no real concept of dressing well or controlling their freakish behaviour, examples being drawing on each other with whiteboard pens and being physically unable to wash their hair; girls who somehow end up with boyfriends who are just as terrifying as they are; girls who on average have a mental age at least three years younger than their physical age. These girls sadden me greatly because often I feel that they could be very normal if they put in some effort.

3 So-called ‘normal’ girls. Approximately half of these have steady, average boyfriends. Are aware of fashion trends and popular culture. Usually pleasant, some quiet, some loud, enjoy being with friends, enjoy a good party, enjoy shopping and movies, enjoy life.

I’m not saying that everyone fits into one of these groups. I love that there are exceptions because I hate that these groups exist. I mean, I don’t know where I’d go. I suppose I’d be group 3 because that’s definitely what Our Lot are. Then again, I don’t feel very similar to anyone from Our Lot. I don’t feel very similar to anyone at all.

I circle the room three or four times before concluding that he’s not here. Whatever. Maybe I just imagined Michael Holden. It’s not like I care anyway. I go back to Our Lot’s corner, slump on to the floor at Becky’s feet and close my eyes.

*

The common-room door swings open as Mr Kent, Deputy Head, strides into the crowd, followed by his usual posse: Miss Strasser, who is too young and too pretty to be any kind of teacher, and our Head Girl, Zelda Okoro (I’m not even joking – her name really is that fantastic). Kent is a sharply-angled sort of man most often noted for his startling resemblance to Alan Rickman, and is probably the only teacher in this school to hold true intelligence. He is also my English teacher, and has been for over five years, so we actually know each other fairly well. That’s probably a bit weird. We do have a Headmistress, Mrs Lemaire, who is widely rumoured to be a member of the French government, explaining why she never appears to be present in her own school.

“I want some quiet,” says Kent, standing in front of an interactive whiteboard, which hangs on the wall just below our school motto: Confortamini in Domino et in potentia virtutis eius. The sea of grey uniforms turns to face him. For a few moments, Kent says nothing. He does this a lot.

Becky and I grin at each other and start counting the seconds. This is a game we play. I can’t remember when it started, but every single time we’re in assembly or a sixth-form meeting or whatever, we count the length of his silences. Our record is seventy-nine seconds. No joke.

When we hit twelve and Kent opens his mouth to speak—

Music begins to play out of the tannoy.

It’s the Darth Vader theme from Star Wars.

An instant uneasiness soars over the sixth form. People turn their heads wildly from side to side, whispering, wondering why Kent would play music through the tannoy, and why Star Wars. Perhaps he’s going to start lecturing us on communicating with clarity, or persistence, or empathy and understanding, or skills of interdependence, which are what most of the sixth-form meetings are about. Perhaps he’s trying to make a point about the importance of leadership. Only when the pictures begin to appear on the screen behind him do we realise what is, in fact, going on.

First, it’s Kent’s face Photoshopped into Yoda’s. Then it’s Kent as Jabba the Hutt.

Then it’s Princess Kent in a golden bikini.

The entire sixth form bursts into uncontrollable laughter.

The real Kent, stern-faced but keeping his cool, marches out of the room. As soon as Strasser similarly disappears, people begin to tear from group to group, reliving the look in Kent’s eyes when his face appeared on Natalie Portman’s, complete with white Photoshop face paint and an extravagant hairdo. I have to admit, it’s kind of funny.

After Kent/Darth Maul leaves the screen, and as the orchestral masterpiece reaches its climax through the speakers above our heads, the interactive whiteboard displays the following words:

SOLITAIRE.CO.UK

Becky brings the site up on a computer and Our Lot cluster round to have a good look. The troll blog has one post now, uploaded two minutes ago – a photo of Kent staring in passive anger at the board.

We all start talking. Well, everyone else does. I just sit there.

“Some kids probably thought it was clever,” snorts Becky. “They probably came up with it on their blogs and thought they’d take pictures and prove to their hipster friends how hilarious and rebellious they are.”

“Well, yeah, it is clever,” says Evelyn, her long-established superiority complex making its regular appearance. “It’s sticking it to the man.”

I shake my head, because nothing is clever about it apart from the skill of the person who managed to morph Kent’s face into Yoda’s. That is Photoshop Talent.

Lauren is grinning widely. Lauren Romilly is a social smoker and has a mouth slightly too large for her face. “I can see the Facebook statuses already. This has probably broken my Twitter feed.”

“I need a photo of this on my blog,” continues Evelyn. “I could do with a couple of thousand more followers.”

“Go away, Evelyn,” snorts Lauren. “You’re already Internet famous.”

This makes me laugh. “Just post another photo of your legs, Evelyn,” I say quietly. “They already get reblogged, like, twenty thousand times.”

Only Becky hears me. She grins at me, and I grin back, which is sort of nice because I rarely think of funny things to say.

And that’s it. That’s pretty much all we say about it.

Ten minutes and it’s forgotten.

To tell you the truth though, this prank has made me feel kind of weird. The fact of the matter is that Star Wars was actually a major obsession of mine when I was a kid. I guess I haven’t watched any of the films for a few years now, but hearing that music brings back something. I don’t know what. Some feeling in my chest.

Ugh, I’m getting sentimental.

I bet whoever did this is really pleased with themselves. It kind of makes me hate them.

Five minutes later, I’ve just about dozed off, my head on the computer desk and my arms barricading my face from all forms of social interaction, when somebody pats me on the shoulder.

I jerk upwards and gaze blearily in the direction of the pat. Becky’s looking at me oddly, purple strands cascading around her. She blinks.

“What?” I ask.

She points behind her, so I look.

A guy is standing there. Nervous. Face in a sort of grinning grimace. I realise what’s going on, but my brain doesn’t quite accept that this is possible, so I open my mouth and close it three times before coming up with:

“Jesus Christ.”

The guy steps towards me.

“V-Victoria?”

Excluding my new acquaintance Michael Holden, only two people in my life have ever called me Victoria. One is Charlie. And the other is:

“Lucas Ryan,” I say.

I once knew a boy named Lucas Ryan. He cried a lot, but liked Pokémon just as much as I did so I guess that made us friends. He once told me he would like to live inside a giant bubble when he grew up because you could fly everywhere and see everything, and I told him that would make a terrible house because bubbles are always empty inside. He gave me a Batman keyring for my eighth birthday, a How to Draw Manga book for my ninth birthday, Pokémon cards for my tenth birthday and a T-shirt with a tiger on it for my eleventh.

I sort of have to do a double take because his face is now an entirely different shape. He’d always been smaller than me, but now he’s at least a whole head taller and his voice, obviously, has broken. I start to look for things that are the same as eleven-year-old Lucas Ryan, but all I’ve got to go on is his greyish hair, skinny limbs and awkward expression.

Also, he is the ‘blond guy in skinny trousers’.

“Jesus Christ,” I repeat. “Hi.”

He smiles and laughs. I remember the laugh. It’s all in the chest. A chest laugh.

“Hi!” he says and smiles some more. A nice smile. A calm smile.

I dramatically leap to my feet and look him up and down. It’s actually him.

“It’s actually you,” I say and have to physically restrain myself from reaching out and patting him on the shoulders. Just to check he’s really there and all.

He laughs. His eyes go all squinty. “It’s actually me!”

“Wh-ho-why?”

He starts to look kind of embarrassed. I remember him being like that. “I left Truham at the end of last term,” he says. “I knew you went here, so …” He fiddles with his collar. He used to do that too. “Erm … I thought I’d try to find you. Seeing as I don’t have any friends here. So, erm, yes. Hello.”

I think you should be aware that I have never been very good at making friends, and primary school was no different. I acquired only the one friend during those seven years of mortifying social rejection. Yet while my primary school days are not days which I would choose to relive, there was one good thing that probably kept me going, and that was the quiet friendship of Lucas Ryan.

“Wow.” Becky, unable to keep away from potential gossip, intervenes. “How do you two know each other?”

Now I am a fairly awkward person, but Lucas really takes the biscuit. He turns to Becky and goes red again and I almost feel embarrassed for him.

“Primary school,” I say. “We were best friends.”

Becky’s shaped eyebrows soar. “No waaay.” She looks at both of us once more, before focusing on Lucas. “Well, I guess I’m your replacement. I’m Becky.” She gestures around her. “Welcome to the Land of Oppression.”

Lucas, in a mouse voice, manages: “I’m Lucas.”

He turns back to me. “We should catch up,” he says.

Is this what friendship reborn feels like?

“Yes …” I say. The shock is draining my vocabulary. “Yes.”

People have started to give up on the sixth-form meeting as it’s the start of Period 1 and no teachers have returned.

Lucas nods at me. “Erm, I don’t really want to be late to my first lesson or anything – this whole day is going to be kind of embarrassing as it is – but I’ll talk to you some time soon, yeah? I’ll find you on Facebook.”

Becky stares in relatively severe disbelief as Lucas wanders away, and grabs me firmly by the shoulder. “Tori just talked to a boy. No – Tori just held a conversation by herself. I think I’m going to cry.”

“There, there.” I pat her on the shoulder. “Be strong. You’ll get through this.”

“I’m extremely proud of you. I feel like a proud mum.”

I snort. “I can hold conversations by myself. What do you call this?”

“I am the only exception. With everyone else, you’re about as sociable as a cardboard box.”

“Maybe I am a cardboard box.”

We both laugh.

“It’s funny … because it’s true,” I say and I laugh again, on the outside at least. Ha ha ha.

THREE

THE FIRST THING I do when I get home from school is collapse on to my bed and turn on my laptop. This happens every single day. If I’m not at school, you can guarantee that my laptop will be somewhere within a two-metre radius of my heart. My laptop is my soulmate.

Over the past few months, I’ve come to realise that I’m far more of a blog than an actual person. I don’t know when this blogging thing started, and I don’t know when or why I signed up to this website, but I can’t seem to remember what I did before and I don’t know what I’d do if I deleted it. I severely regret starting this blog, I really do. It’s pretty embarrassing. But it’s the only place where I ever find people who are sort of like me. People talk about themselves here in ways that people don’t in real life.

If I delete it, I think I’ll probably be completely alone.

I don’t blog to get more followers or whatever. I’m not Evelyn. It’s just that it’s not socially acceptable to say depressing stuff out loud in the real world because people think that you’re attention-seeking. I hate that. So what I’m saying is that it’s nice to be able to say whatever I want. Even if it is only on the Internet.

After waiting a hundred billion years for my Internet to load, I spend a good while on my blog. There are a couple of cheesy, anonymous messages – a few of my followers get all worked up about some of the pathetic stuff I post. Then I check Facebook. Two notifications – Lucas and Michael have sent friend requests. I accept both. Then I check my email. No emails.

And then I check the Solitaire blog again.

It’s still got the photo of Kent looking hilariously passive, but apart from that the only addition to the blog is the title. It now reads:

Solitaire: Patience Kills.

I don’t know what these Solitaire people are trying to do, but ‘Patience Kills’ is the stupidest imitation of some James Bond film title that I have ever heard. It sounds like an online betting website.

I take the SOLITAIRE.CO.UK Post-it out of my pocket and place it precisely in the centre of the only empty wall in my room.

I think about what happened today with Lucas Ryan and, for a brief moment, I feel kind of hopeful again. I don’t know. Whatever. I don’t know why I bothered with this. I don’t even know why I followed those Post-its into that computer room. I don’t know why I do anything, for God’s sake.

Eventually, I find the will to get up and plod downstairs to get a drink. Mum’s in the kitchen on the computer. She’s very much like me, if you think about it. She’s in love with Microsoft Excel the way I’m in love with Google Chrome. She asks me how my day was, but I just shrug and say that it was fine, because I’m fairly sure that she doesn’t care what my answer is.

It’s because we’re so similar that we stopped talking to each other so much. When we do talk, we either struggle to find things to say or we just get angry, so apparently we’ve reached a mutual agreement that there’s really no point trying any more. I’m not too bothered. My dad’s quite chatty, even if everything he says is extraordinarily irrelevant to my life, and I’ve still got Charlie.

The house phone rings.

“Get that, would you?” says Mum.

I hate the phone. It’s the worst invention in the history of the world because, if you don’t talk, nothing happens. You can’t get by with simply listening and nodding your head in all the right places. You have to talk. You have no option. It takes away my freedom of non-speech.

I pick it up anyway, because I’m not a horrible daughter.

“Hello?” I say.

“Tori. It’s me.” It’s Becky. “Why the hell are you answering the phone?”

“I decided to rethink my attitude towards life and become an entirely different person.”

“Say again?”

“Why are you calling me? You never call me.”

“Dude, this is absolutely too important to text.”

There’s a pause. I expect her to continue, but she seems to be waiting for me to speak.

“Okay—”

“It’s Jack.”

Ah.

Becky has called about her almost-boyfriend, Jack.

She does this to me very often. Not call me, I mean. Ramble at me about her various almost-boyfriends.

While Becky is talking, I put Mms and Yeahs and Oh my Gods where they need to be. Her voice fades a little as I drift away and picture myself as her. As a lovely, happy, hilarious girl who gets invited to at least two parties a week and can start up a conversation within two seconds. I picture myself entering a party. Throbbing music, everyone with a bottle in their hand – somehow, there’s a crowd around me. I’m laughing, I’m the centre of attention. Eyes light up in admiration as I tell another of my hysterically embarrassing stories, perhaps a drunk story, or an ex-boyfriend story, or simply a time that I did something remarkable, and everyone wonders how I manage to have such an eccentric, adventurous, carefree adolescence. Everyone hugs me. Everyone wants to know what I’ve been up to. When I dance, people dance; when I sit down, ready to tell secrets, people form a circle; when I leave, the party fades away and dies, like a forgotten dream.

“—you can guess what I’m talking about,” she says.

I really can’t.

“A few weeks ago – God, I should have told you this – we had sex.”

I sort of freeze up because this takes me by surprise. Then I realise that this has been coming for a long time. I’d always kind of respected Becky for being a virgin, which is kind of pretentious, if you think about it. I mean, we’re all at least sixteen now, and Becky’s nearly seventeen, and it’s fine if you want to have sex, I don’t care, it’s not a crime. But the fact that we were both virgins – I don’t know. I guess it made us equal, in a twisted way. And now here I am. Second place in something else.

“Well—” There is literally nothing I can say about this. “—okay.”

“You’re judging me. You think I’m a slut.”

“I don’t!”

“I can tell. You’re using your judgementy voice.”

“I’m not!”

There’s a pause. What do you say to something like that? Well done? Good job?

She starts explaining how Jack has this friend who would supposedly be ‘perfect’ for me. I think that is unlikely unless he’s entirely mute, blind or deaf. Or all three.

Once I get off the phone, I sort of stand there in the kitchen. Mum’s still clicking away at the computer and I start to feel, again, like this whole day has been pointless. An image of Michael Holden appears in my head and then an image of Lucas Ryan and then an image of the Solitaire blog. I decide that I need to talk to my brother. I pour myself some diet lemonade and leave the kitchen.

My brother, Charles Spring, is fifteen years old and a Year 11 at Truham Grammar. In my opinion, he is the nicest person in the history of the universe and I know that ‘nice’ is kind of a meaningless word, but that’s what makes it so powerful. It’s very hard to simply be a ‘nice’ person because there are a lot of things that can get in the way. When he was little, he refused to throw out any of his possessions because to him they were all special. Every baby book. Every outgrown T-shirt. Every useless board game. He kept them all in sky-high piles in his room because everything supposedly had some kind of meaning. When I asked about a particular item, he’d tell me how he found it at the beach, or how it was a hand-me-down from our nan, or how he bought it when he was six at London Zoo.

Mum and Dad got rid of most of that rubbish when he got ill last year – I guess he sort of got obsessed with it, and he got obsessed with a whole load of other things too (mainly food and collecting things), and it really started to tear him apart – but that’s all over now. He’s better, but he’s still the same kid who thinks everything is special. That’s the sort of guy Charlie is.

In the living room, it is extremely unclear what Charlie, his boyfriend Nick and my other brother Oliver are doing. They’ve got these cardboard boxes, and I mean there’s, like, fifty of them, piled up all over the room. Oliver, who is seven years old, appears to be directing the operation as Nick and Charlie build up the boxes to make some kind of shed-sized sculpture. The piles of boxes reach the ceiling. Oliver has to stand on the sofa to be able to oversee the entire structure.

Eventually, Charlie walks round the small cardboard building and notices me staring in from the doorway. “Victoria!”

I blink at him. “Shall I bother asking?”

He gives me this look as if I should know exactly what is going on. “We’re building a tractor for Oliver.”

I nod. “Of course. Yes. That’s very clear.”

Nick appears. Nicholas Nelson, a Year 12 like me, is one of those laddish lads who actually is into all those stereotypical things like rugby and beer and swearing and all that, but he also has the most successful combination of name and surname I have ever heard, which makes it impossible for me to dislike him. I can’t really remember when Nick and Charlie became Nick-and-Charlie, but Nick is the only one who visited Charlie when he was ill so, in my book, he’s definitely all right.

“Tori.” He nods at me very seriously indeed. “Good. We need more free labour.”

“Tori, can you get the Sellotape?” Oliver calls down, except he says “thellotape” instead of “Sellotape” because he recently lost two front teeth.

I pass Oliver the thellotape, then point towards the boxes and ask Charlie: “Where did you get all of these?”

Charlie just shrugs and walks away saying, “They’re Oliver’s, not mine.”

So that’s how I end up building a cardboard tractor in our living room.

When we’re finished, Charlie, Nick and I sit inside it to admire our work. Oliver goes round the tractor with a marker pen, drawing on the wheels the mud stains and the machine guns “in case the cows join the Dark Side”. It’s sort of peaceful, to be honest. Every box has a big black arrow printed on it pointing upwards.

Charlie is telling me about his day. He loves telling me about his day.

“Saunders asked us who our favourite musicians were and I said Muse and three people asked me if I liked them because of Twilight. Apparently, no one believes that it is possible to have an original interest.”

I frown. “I would like to meet a boy who has actually seen Twilight. Do you not both live in the realm of the FA Cup and Family Guy?”

Nick sighs. “Tori, you’re generalising again.”

Charlie rolls his head through the air towards him. “Nicholas, you mainly watch the FA Cup and Family Guy. Let’s be honest.”

“Sometimes I watch the Six Nations.”

We all chuckle, and then there’s a short, un-awkward silence, in which I lie down and look up at the cardboard ceiling.

I start to tell them about today’s prank. And that leads me to thinking about Lucas and Michael Holden.

“I met Lucas Ryan again today,” I say. I don’t mind telling this sort of stuff to Nick and Charlie. “He joined our school.”

Nick and Charlie blink at the same time.

“Lucas Ryan … as in primary-school Lucas Ryan?” frowns Charlie.

“Lucas Ryan left Truham?” frowns Nick. “Balls. I was going to copy off him in our psychology mock.”

I nod to both of them. “It was nice to see him. You know. Because we can be friends again. I guess. He was always so nice to me.”

They both nod back. It’s a knowing sort of nod.

“I also met some guy called Michael Holden.”

Nick, who had been in the middle of taking a sip of tea, chokes into his cup. Charlie grins, widely, and starts to giggle.

“What? Do you know him?”

Nick recovers enough to speak, though still coughs every few words. “Michael fucking Holden. Shit. He’ll go down in Truham legend.”

Charlie lowers his head, but keeps his eyes on me. “Don’t become friends with him. He’s probably insane. Everyone avoided him at Truham because he’s mentally disturbed.”

Patting Charlie on the knee, Nick says, “Then again, I made friends with a mental person and that turned out pretty spectacular.”

Charlie snorts and slaps away Nick’s hand.

“Do you remember when he tried to get everyone to do a flash mob for the Year 11 prank?” says Nick. “And in the end he just did it by himself on the lunch tables?”

“What about when he gave a speech on the injustice of authority for his Year 12 prefect speech?” says Charlie. “Just because he got detention for having that argument with Mr Yates during his mock exams!” Both he and Nick laugh heartily.

This confirms my suspicion that Michael Holden is not the sort of person with whom I would like to be friends. Ever.

Charlie looks up at Nick. “He’s gay, isn’t he? I heard he’s gay.”

Nick shrugs. “Well, I heard that he figure skates, so it’s not entirely impossible.”

“Hm.” Charlie frowns. “I thought we knew all the Truham gays.”

They pause and both look at me.

“Look,” says Nick, gesturing sincerely to me with one hand, “Lucas Ryan’s a cool guy. But there’s something wrong with Michael Holden. I mean, it wouldn’t surprise me if he was behind that prank.”

The thing is, I don’t think that Nick is right. I don’t have any evidence to support this. I’m not even sure why I think this. Maybe it was something about the way Michael Holden spoke – like he believed everything he said. Maybe it was how sad he was when I showed him the empty Solitaire blog. Or maybe it was something else, something that doesn’t make sense, like the colours of his eyes, or his ridiculous side parting, or how he managed to get that Post-it note into my hand when I can’t even remember our skin touching. Maybe it’s just because he’s too wrong.

As I’m thinking this, Oliver enters the tractor and sits down in my lap. I pat him affectionately on the head and give him what’s left of my diet lemonade because Mum doesn’t let him drink it.

“I don’t know,” I say. “To be honest, I bet it was just some twat with a blog.”

FOUR

I’M LATE BECAUSE Mum thought I said eight. I said seven thirty. How can you confuse eight with seven thirty?

“Whose birthday is it?” she asks while we’re in the car.

“No one’s. We’re just meeting up.”

“Do you have enough money? I can sub you.”

“I’ve got fifteen pounds.”

“Will Becky be there?”

“Yep.”

“And Lauren and Evelyn?”

“Probably.”

When I speak to my parents, I don’t actually sound very grumpy. I’m usually quite cheerful-sounding when I talk. I’m good at that.

It’s Tuesday. Evelyn organised some ‘start of term’ thing at Pizza Express. I don’t really want to go, but I think it’s important to make the effort. Social convention and all.

I say hello to the people who notice my entrance and sit at the end of the table. I nearly die when I realise that Lucas is here. I know, already, that I’m going to find it difficult to think of things to say to him. I successfully avoided him for the rest of yesterday and all of today for this exact reason. Obviously, Evelyn, Lauren and Becky took the opportunity to make him the ‘boy’ of our group. Having a boy in your social group is the equivalent of having a house with a pool, or a designer shirt with the logo on it, or a Ferrari. It just makes you more important.

A waiter hurries over to me so I order a diet lemonade and stare down the long table. All the people are chatting and laughing and smiling and it sort of makes me feel a bit sad, like I’m watching them through a dirty window.

“Yeah, but most of the girls who move to Truham only move because they want to be around boys all the time.” Becky, seated next to me, is talking at Lucas who is seated across from us. “So many attention whores.”

“To be fair,” he says, “Truham girls are basically worshipped.”

Lucas catches my eye and smiles his awkward smile. He’s got this hilarious Hawaiian shirt on: the tight-fit kind with the collar done right up and the sleeves slightly rolled. He doesn’t look as embarrassed as yesterday – in fact, he looks fashionable. I didn’t think he would be that sort of guy. The sort of guy who wears Hawaiian shirts. A hipster sort of guy. I make the deduction that he definitely has a blog.

“Only because boys at all-boys’ schools are sexually deprived,” says Evelyn, who is next to Lucas, waving her arms around to emphasise her point. “I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Single-sex schools damage humanity. The number of girls in our school that are socially clueless because they haven’t spoken to any boys …”

“… It’s way out of control, man,” concludes Lauren, who is on the other side of Evelyn.

“I love the Truham girls’ uniform,” sighs Becky. “They all look so good in that tie.” She gestures abstractly to her neck. “Like, thin stripes look way nicer than thick stripes.”

“It’s not real life,” says Lucas, nodding earnestly. “In real life, there are boys and there are girls. Not just one or the other.”

“But that tie,” says Becky. “I mean, I can’t even.”

They all nod and then start talking about something else. I continue to do what I do best. Watch.

There’s a boy sitting next to Lauren, talking to the girls at the opposite end of the table. His name is Ben Hope. Ben Hope is the guy at Higgs. And, by the guy, I mean that one boy in the sixth form that every single girl in the entire school has a crush on. There’s always one. Tall and slim-built. Skinny trousers and tight shirts. He usually straightens his dark brown hair and, I swear to God, it defies gravity because it swishes in a kind of organised vortex, but, when he doesn’t straighten it, it’s all curly and he just looks so cute you want to die. He always appears to be serene. He skateboards.

I, personally, do not ‘fancy’ him. I’m just trying to express his perfection. I actually think that a lot of people are very beautiful, and maybe even more beautiful when they’re not aware of it themselves. In the end, though, being beautiful doesn’t do much for you as a person apart from raise your ego and give you an increased sense of vanity.

Ben Hope notices me staring. I need to control my staring.

Lucas is talking at me. I think that he’s trying to involve me in this conversation, which is kind of nice, but also irritating and unnecessary. “Tori, do you like Bruno Mars?”

“What?”

He hesitates, so Becky steps in. “Tori. Bruno Mars. Come on. He’s fabulous, right?”

“What?”

“The. Song. That. Is. Playing. Do. You. Like. It?”

I hadn’t even registered that music was playing in this restaurant. It’s ‘Grenade’ by Bruno Mars.

I quickly analyse the song.

“I think … it’s unlikely anyone would want to catch a grenade for anyone else. Or jump in front of a train for someone else. That’s very counter-productive.” Then, quieter, so no one hears: “If you wanted to do either of those things, it would be for yourself.”

Lauren smacks her hand on the table. “Exactly what I said.”

Becky laughs at me and says, “You just don’t like it because it’s Top 40.”

Evelyn steps up. Dissing anything mainstream is her personal area of expertise. “Chart music,” she says, “is filled with auto-tuned girls who only get famous because they wear tight shorts and bandeau tops, and rappers who can’t do anything except talk quickly.”

If I’m completely honest, I don’t even like music that much. I just like individual songs. I find one song that I really love and then I listen to it about twenty billion times until I hate it and have ruined it for myself. At the moment, it’s ‘Message in a Bottle’ by the Police, and by Sunday I will never want to listen to it again. I’m an idiot.

“If it’s so crap, then why does it make it into the charts?” asks Becky.

Evelyn runs a hand through her hair. “Because we live in a commercialised world where everyone buys music just because someone else has.”

It’s right after she finishes saying this that I realise silence has swept over our table. I turn round and experience minor heart failure.

Michael Holden has swooped into the restaurant.

I know immediately that he is coming for me. He’s grinning like a maniac, eyes locked on this end of the table. All heads turn as he pulls over a chair and makes himself comfortable at the head of the table between me and Lucas.

Everyone sort of stares, then murmurs, then shrugs and then gets on with eating, assuming that he must have been invited by someone else. Everyone except me, Becky, Lucas, Lauren and Evelyn.

“I need to tell you something,” he says to me, eyes on fire. “I absolutely need to tell you something.”

Lauren speaks up. “You go to our school!”

Michael actually holds out a hand for Lauren to shake. I find myself genuinely unable to tell whether he’s being sarcastic or not. “Michael Holden, Year 13. Nice to meet you …?”

“Lauren Romilly. Year 12.” Lauren, bemused, takes the hand and shakes it. “Er – nice to meet you too.”

“No offence,” says Evelyn, “but, like, why are you here?”

Michael stares at her intensely until she realises that she needs to introduce herself.

“I’m … Evelyn Foley?” she says.

Michael shrugs. “Are you? You sound uncertain.”

Evelyn does not like to be teased.

He winks at her. “I needed to talk to Tori.”

There is a long and grating silence before Becky says, “And … er … how do you know Tori?”

“Tori and I happened to meet in the midst of our Solitaire investigations.”

Her head tilts to one side. She looks at me. “You’ve been investigating?”

“Erm, no,” I say.

“Then …?”

“I just followed this trail of Post-it notes.”

“What?”

“I followed a trail of Post-it notes. They led to the Solitaire blog.”

“Ah … that’s cool …”

I love Becky, but sometimes she acts like such a bimbo. It really pisses me off because she got into grammar school for Christ’s sake. She got ten A grades at GCSE.

Meanwhile, Michael is helping himself to our leftover starters. With his free hand, he points ambiguously towards Becky. “Are you Becky Allen?”

Becky slowly turns to Michael. “Are you psychic?”

“Just a fairly capable Facebook stalker. You’re all lucky I’m not a serial killer.” His finger, still flexed, gravitates towards Lucas. “And Lucas Ryan. We’ve met already.” He smiles at him so forcefully that it comes across as patronising. “I should thank you. You’re the one who led me to this girl.”

Lucas nods.

“I like your shirt,” says Michael, eyes glazing slightly.

“Thanks,” says Lucas, definitely not meaning it.

I start to wonder whether Lucas knew Michael at Truham. Judging by Nick and Charlie’s reaction, he probably did. Maybe he doesn’t really want to associate with Michael Holden. It’s almost making me feel sorry for Michael Holden. For the second time.

Michael looks past Becky. “And what’s your name?”

For a moment, I don’t quite realise who he’s talking to. Then I see Rita. She pokes her head round from Becky’s other side.

“Er, Rita. Rita Sengupta.” She laughs. I’m not sure why she laughs, but she does anyway. Rita is probably the only other girl with whom I am civil, besides Becky and Lauren and Evelyn. She hangs around with Lauren, but you tend not to notice her. She’s the only girl I know who can pull off a pixie crop.

Michael lights up like it’s Christmas morning. “Rita! That is a fantastic name. Lovely Rita!”

By the time I realise that he’s referring to the Beatles’ song, the conversation has already moved on. It’s surprising I even recognise it. I hate the Beatles.

“So, you and Tori just … met? And started talking?” asks Becky. “That seems sort of unlikely.”

It’s funny because it’s true.

“Yes,” says Michael. “Unlikely, yes. But that is what happened.”

Once again, he looks into my face, casually blanking the entire group. I cannot articulate how uncomfortable I feel right now. This is worse than drama GCSE.

“Anyway, Tori, there’s something I want to tell you.”

I blink, sitting on my hands.

Lauren and Becky and Evelyn and Lucas and Rita are listening intently. Michael glances at each face over his large glasses.

“But … I, erm, can’t remember what it was.”

Lucas sneers. “You tracked her all the way down to this restaurant to tell her something and now you can’t even remember what it is?”

This time Michael picks up on Lucas’s tone. “Excuse me for having a memory like a sieve. I feel I deserve credit for making the effort to come here.”

“Why couldn’t you just send her a message on Facebook?”

“Facebook is for trivialities such as what takeaways people are having and how many ‘lols’ they had the night before with their ‘gals’.”

Lucas shakes his head. “I just don’t get why you’d actually come down here and then forget. You wouldn’t forget if it was something important.”

“On the contrary, you’d probably be more likely to forget the most important things of all.”

Becky interjects: “So are you and Tori friends now?”

Michael continues to contemplate Lucas before addressing Becky. “That is a fantastic question.” Then he faces me. “What do you think? Are we friends now?”

I genuinely can’t think of an answer, because the answer, in my opinion, is definitely not yes, but it’s definitely not no either.

“How can we be friends if you don’t know anything about me?” I say.

He taps his chin thoughtfully. “Let’s see. I know that your name is Victoria Spring. You’re in Year 12. Your Facebook indicates that you were born on April 5th. You are an introvert with a pessimist complex. You’re wearing pretty plain clothes – jumper, jeans – you don’t like embellishments and fuss. You don’t care about dressing up for people. You’ll have ordered a margherita pizza – you’re a picky eater. You rarely update your Facebook – you don’t care for social activities. But you followed the Post-it trail yesterday, just like I did. You’re curious.” He leans in. “You like to act as if you care about nothing and if you carry on like that then you’re going to drown in the abyss you have imagined for yourself.”

He stops. His smile vanishes, leaving only its ghost.

“Jesus, mate, you are a stalker!” Lauren attempts a laugh, but no one else joins in.

“No,” Michael says. “I just pay attention.”

“It’s like you’re in love with her or something,” says Evelyn.

Michael smiles a knowing smile. “I suppose it is a bit like that.”

“You’re gay though, aren’t you?” says Lauren, forever unafraid to say what other people are thinking. “Like, I heard that you’re gay.”

“Oooh, you’ve heard about me?” He leans in. “Intriguing.”

“Are you though?” asks Lucas, trying unsuccessfully to sound casual.

Michael waves a hand about. “Some people say that.” Then he grins and points a finger at him. “You never know, it might be you I’m in love with.”

Lucas immediately colours.

“You’re gay!” squeaks Becky. “Tori has a gay best friend! I. Am. Jealous.”

Sometimes I’m embarrassed to be friends with Becky.

“I need to pee,” I say, even though I don’t, and I leave the table and find myself in the restaurant bathroom staring at myself in the mirror while P!nk is telling me to “raise my glass”. I stay there for too long. Older ladies shoot me discerning looks as they waddle in and out of cubicles. I don’t know what I’m doing really. I just keep thinking about what Michael said. Drowning in my abyss. I don’t know. Why does that matter? Why does that bother me?

Jesus Christ, why did I bother coming out tonight?

I continue to stare at myself in this mirror and I imagine a voice reminding me to be funny and chatty and happy, like normal people. As the voice reminds me, I start to feel a bit more positive about stuff, even though any residual enthusiasm for seeing Lucas again has drained away. I think it’s because of that Hawaiian shirt. I go back into the restaurant.

FIVE

“THAT WAS ONE hell of a pee,” says Michael as I sit down. He’s still here. Part of me was hoping he wouldn’t be.

“You sound impressed,” I say.

“I am actually.”

Becky, Evelyn and Lauren are now talking across the table to some other girls from our year who I don’t really know. Lucas smiles briefly at me. Rita’s laughing and smiling, mainly at Lauren. They’re discussing a girl we used to know who moved to Truham for sixth form because she said that she “preferred boys to girls” and now she’s organising parties where everyone takes acid and rolls around on the floor.

“So you’re gay?” I ask.

He blinks. “Wow. This is quite a big deal to you guys.”

It’s not a big deal. I don’t really care at all.

“Do you find boys attractive?” I ask, with a shrug. “Or girls? That’s one way to check. If you’re not sure.”

He raises his eyebrows. “You think I’m not sure?”

I shrug again. I don’t care. I do not care.

“Everyone’s attractive, to be honest,” he continues. “Even if it’s just something small, like some people have really beautiful hands. I don’t know. I’m a little bit in love with everyone I meet, but I think that’s normal.”

“So you’re bisexual.”

He smiles and leans forward. “You love all these words, don’t you? Gay, bisexual, attractive, unattractive—”

“No,” I interrupt. “No, I hate them.”

“Then why label people?”

I tilt my head. “Because that’s life. Without organisation, we descend into chaos.”

Staring amusedly, he stretches back again into the chair. I can’t believe I just used the word ‘descend’.

“Well, if you care so much, what are you?” he asks.

“What?”

“What are you? Gay, straight, all-around horny, what?”

“Er, straight?”

“And are you sure that you’re straight? Have you liked a boy before?”

I actually haven’t. Ever. This is because I have a very low opinion of most people.

I look down. “All right then. I’ll let you know if I fall in love with a girl any time soon.”

Michael’s eyes twinkle, but he doesn’t comment. I hope I haven’t come across as a homophobe.

“Are you going to remember what you came to tell me?” I ask.

He strokes his sharply parted hair. “Maybe. Maybe tomorrow. We’ll see.”

Soon after that everyone declares that they’re leaving. I accidentally spent £16, so Lucas insists on giving me the extra pound, which I guess is pretty nice of him. Once we’re all standing outside the restaurant, he starts chatting earnestly with Evelyn. Most of the people here are heading to Lauren’s house for a big sleepover thing or whatever. They’re all going to get drunk and stuff even though it’s a Tuesday. Becky explains that she didn’t invite me because she knew that I definitely wouldn’t want to come (it’s funny because it’s true), and Ben Hope overhears her and gives me this kind of pitying look. Becky smiles at him, the pair momentarily united in feeling sorry for me. I decide that I’m going to walk home. Michael decides that he’s coming with me and I don’t really know how to stop him so I guess this is happening.

We have been moving in silence through the high street. It’s all Victorian and brown and the cobblestone road is sort of curved like we’re in the bottom of a trench. A man in a suit hurries past, and he’s asking someone on the phone, “Do you feel anything yet?”

I ask Michael why he’s walking home with me.

“Because I live this way. The world does not revolve around you, Victoria Spring.” He’s being sarcastic, but I still feel kind of put out.

“Victoria.” I shudder.

“Huh?”

“Please don’t call me Victoria.”

“Why’s that?”

“It makes me think of Queen Victoria. The one who wore black all her life because her husband died. And ‘Victoria Spring’ sounds like a brand of bottled water.”

Wind is picking up around us.

“I don’t like my name either,” he says.

I instantly think of all the people I dislike named Michael. Michael Bublé, Michael McIntyre, Michael Jackson.

“Michael means ‘who resembles God’,” he says, “and I think that if God could choose to resemble any human being …”

He stops then, right in the street, looking at me, just looking, through the pane of his glasses, through the blue and green, through depths and expanses, bleeding one billion incomprehensible thoughts.

“… he wouldn’t choose me.”

We continue to walk.

Imagine if I had been given some Biblical name like Abigail or Charity or, I don’t know, Eve, for God’s sake. I’m very critical of religion and it probably means that I’m going to hell, if it even exists, which, let’s be honest, it probably doesn’t. That doesn’t bother me very much because whatever happens in hell can’t be much worse than what happens here.

“Well,” I say, “I support the Labour Party, but people call me Tori. Like the Tories. If that makes you feel any better.”

He doesn’t say anything, but I’m too busy looking at the pale brown cobblestones to see if he’s looking at me. After a few moments: “You support the Labour Party?”

I realise then that I’m freezing. I’d forgotten it was the middle of winter and raining and all I’ve got is this shirt and jumper and thin jeans. I regret not calling Mum, but I hate bothering her because she always does this sighing thing where she’s all like “no, no, it’s perfectly fine, I’m not bothered”, but I can tell that she is most definitely bothered.

Silence and a faint smell of Indian takeaway continue all the way up the high street and then we take a right on to the main town road where the three-storey houses are. My house is one of these. Two girls walk past in gargantuan heels and dresses so tight that their skin is spilling out, and one of them says to the other, “Wait, who the fuck is Lewis Carroll?” and in my imagination I pull a gun out of my pocket, shoot them both and then shoot myself.

I stop when I get to my house. It’s darker than the others because the lamp post closest to it is not working.

“This is where I live,” I say and start to walk off.

“Wait, wait, wait,” he says. I turn back round. “Can I ask you something?”

I cannot resist a sarcastic comment. “You just did, but please continue.”

“Can we really not be friends?”

He sounds like an eight-year-old girl trying to win back her best friend after she accidentally insulted her new school shoes and got herself disinvited from her birthday party.

He’s wearing only a T-shirt and jeans too.

“How are you not freezing?” I say.

“Please, Tori. Why don’t you want to be friends with me?” It’s like he’s desperate.

“Why do you want to be friends with me?” I shake my head. “We’re not in the same year. We’re not similar in any way whatsoever. I literally do not understand why you even care about—” I stop then, because I was about to say “me”, but I realised midway through that that would be a truly horrific sentence.

He looks down. “I don’t think that … I understand … either …”

I’m just standing there, staring.

“You know, it’s said that extreme communism and extreme capitalism are actually very similar,” he says.

“Are you high?” I say.

He shakes his head and laughs. “I remember what I was going to tell you, you know,” he says.

“You do?”

“I remembered it the whole time. I just didn’t want everyone to hear it because it’s not their business.”

“Then why did you come and find me at a busy restaurant? Why not just find me at school?”

For a second, he genuinely seems to be offended. “Don’t you think I’ve tried?” He laughs. “You’re like a ghost!”

It takes a lot of willpower not to just turn round and leave.

“I just wanted to tell you that I’d seen you before.”

Jesus Christ. He already told me that.

“You told me that yesterd—”

“No, not at Higgs. I saw you when you came to look round Truham. Last year. It was me who took you round the school.”

The revelation blossoms. I remember exactly now. Michael Holden had shown me attentively round Truham when I was deciding whether to go there for sixth form. He’d asked me what A levels I wanted to do, and whether I liked Higgs very much, and whether I had any hobbies, and whether I cared much about sports. In fact, everything he’d said had been utterly unremarkable.

“But …” It’s impossible. “But you were so … normal.”

He shrugs and smiles and the raindrops on his face almost make him seem as if he’s crying. “There’s a time and a place for being normal. For most people, normal is their default setting. But for some, like you and me, normal is something we have to bring out, like putting on a suit for a posh dinner.”

What, now he’s being profound?

“Why did you need to tell me this? Why did you need to track me down? Why was it that important?”

He shrugs again. “It wasn’t, I guess. But I wanted you to know. And when I want to do something I usually do it.”

I stare at him. Nick and Charlie were right. He’s absolutely insane.

He holds up a hand and sends me a slight wave.

“See you soon, Tori Spring.”

And then he wanders away. I’m left standing under the broken lamp post in my black jumper and the rain, wondering whether I’m feeling anything yet and realising that it’s all very funny because it’s all very true.

SIX

I HEAD INSIDE, go into the dining room and say hello to my family. They’re still at dinner, as usual. Well, except Oliver. Since dinner’s kind of a two to three-hour job in our house, Oliver’s always allowed to leave the table once he’s done and I can hear him playing Mario Kart in the living room. I decide to join him. If I could swap bodies with someone for a day, I would choose Oliver.

“Toriiii!” As soon as I enter, he rolls over on the futon and stretches his arm towards me like a zombie rising out of the grave. He must have got yoghurt all down his school jumper today. And he has paint on his face. “I can’t win on Rainbow Road! Help me!”

I sigh, sit down on the futon next to him and pick up the spare Wii remote. “This track is impossible, bro.”

“No!” he whines. “Nothing’s impossible. I think the game’s cheating.”

“The game can’t cheat.”

“It is. It’s cheating on purpose.”

“It’s not cheating you, Ollie.”

“Charlie can win. It just doesn’t like me.”

I produce a large and exaggerated gasp, springing up from the futon. “Are you suggesting that Charlie is better at Mario Kart than moi?” I start to shake my head. “Nope. Nuh-uh. I’m the Mario Kart Empress.”

Oliver laughs, his fluffy hair waving around atop his head. I fall back on to the futon, lift him up and sit him on my lap.

“All right,” I say. “Rainbow Road is going down.”

I don’t keep track of how long we’re playing for, but it must be quite a while because, when Mum comes in, she’s pretty irritated. And that’s extreme, for her. She’s a very emotionless person.

“Tori,” says Mum. “Oliver should have been in bed an hour ago.”

Oliver doesn’t seem to hear her. I glance up from the race.

“That’s not really my job,” I say.

Mum looks at me, expressionless.

“Oliver, it’s bedtime,” she says, still looking at me.

Oliver quits the game and trots off, high-fiving me on the way. Even when he’s gone, Mum doesn’t stop looking at me.

“Do you have something to say?” I ask.

Apparently, she doesn’t. She turns round and leaves. I get in a quick round of Luigi Circuit before heading to my own room. I don’t think my mum likes me very much. That doesn’t really matter, because I don’t really like her either.

I put the radio on and blog until the early hours. The radio is playing all this dubstep crap, but I’ve got it on quietly so I don’t care too much. I can’t be bothered to leave my bed except to make at least five trips downstairs for more diet lemonade. I check the Solitaire blog, but there’s nothing new. So I spend ages scrolling down all my favourite blogs, reblogging screencaps of Donnie Darko and Submarine and The Simpsons taken out of context. I write a couple of whiney posts about I don’t even know what and I almost change my display picture, but can’t find anything where I look normal, so I fiddle around with my blog theme’s HTML for a bit to see if I can remove the gaps between each post. I stalk Michael’s Facebook, but he seems to use it even less than I do. I watch a bit of QI, but I don’t really find it interesting or funny any more, so instead I watch Little Miss Sunshine, which I didn’t finish yesterday. I never seem to be able to finish watching a film on the same day I start it because I can’t bear the thought of the film ending.

After a while, I put my laptop by my side and lie down. I think about all the other people who were at the restaurant who are probably now pissed and getting off with each other on Lauren’s parents’ sofas. At some point I fall asleep, but I can hear all these creaky noises coming from outside and something in my brain decides that there is definitely some kind of giant and/or demon stomping around in the road so I get up and close the window just to make sure that whatever it is cannot get inside.

When I get back into bed, every single thing that you could possibly think about in one day decides to come to me all at once and suddenly there’s a small lightning storm inside my head. I think about Solitaire, and then I think about Michael Holden and why he said we should be friends and what he was really like when he was at Truham. Then I remember Lucas and how embarrassed he was, and I wonder why he made all that effort trying to find me. Then I remember his Hawaiian shirt which still enormously irritates me because I hate to think that he’s become some indie band wannabe. So I open my eyes and wander around the Internet to take my mind off it all, and, once I feel relatively okay again, I fall asleep with the glare of my blog home page warming my face and the hum of my laptop soothing my mind like crickets at a campsite.

SEVEN

WE DIDN’T EXPECT anything more from Solitaire. We thought the one prank would be the end of it.

We were quite a way off.

On Wednesday, all the clocks magically vanished and were replaced by pieces of paper reading ‘Tempus Fugit’. It was funny at first, but after a few hours when you’re midway through a lesson and you can’t check your phone and you have no way of finding out what the time is – well, it pretty much makes you want to scratch out your eyeballs.

On the same day, there was hysteria in school assembly when the tannoy started playing Justin Timberlake’s ‘SexyBack’, the most well-received song of the Year 8 Higgs-Truham disco, as Kent walked up the hall stage stairs and the word ‘SWAG’ appeared on the projector screen.

On Thursday, we turned up to find that two cats had been let loose within the school. Apparently, the caretakers managed to get one of them out, but the other cat – an underfed, ginger thing with massive eyes – evaded capture all day, strolling in and out of lessons and through corridors. I quite like cats, and I saw it for the first time at lunch in the cafeteria. I almost felt like I’d made a new friend, the way it hopped on to a chair and sat with Our Lot as if it wanted to join in our gossip and offer its views about celebrity Twitter rows and the current political climate. I noted to myself that I should probably start collecting cats, seeing as they are very likely to be my sole companions in ten years’ time.

“My spirit animal would so be a cat,” said Becky.

Lauren nodded. “Cats are Britain’s national animal.”

“My boyfriend has a cat called Steve,” said Evelyn. “Isn’t that an excellent name for a cat? Steve.”

Becky rolled her eyes. “Evelyn. Dude. When are you going to tell us who your boyfriend is?”

But Evelyn just smiled and pretended to be embarrassed.

I peered into the dark eyes of the cat. It met my gaze thoughtfully. “Do you remember when some lady got caught on camera dumping a cat into a brown bin and it made national news?”

Every single prank so far has been photographed and displayed on the Solitaire blog.

Anyway.

Today is Friday. People are beginning to find it less funny as Madonna’s ‘Material Girl’ has been stuck on repeat all day over the tannoy. I used to have a small obsession with this song, and I am coming extremely close to slitting my wrists with my scissors and it’s only 10.45am. I’m still not quite sure how Solitaire is managing to do all this as Zelda and her prefects have been patrolling the school ever since Wednesday’s clocks fiasco.

I’m sitting at a table playing chess on my phone during a free period, iPod blasting some Radiohead song into my ears to block out the vomit-inducing music. The common room has only a scattering of people, mostly Year 13s revising for January retakes. Miss Strasser is overseeing the room because, during lesson times, the common room is reserved for people revising and silence is mandatory. This is why I like this room. Except today. Strasser’s hung a spare school jumper over the tannoy speaker, but it’s not doing much.

In the corner of the common room, Becky and Ben are sitting together. They are not doing any work, and they are both smiling. Becky keeps tucking her hair behind her ears. Ben takes Becky’s hand and starts to draw on it. I look away. So long, Jack.

Someone taps me on the shoulder, so suddenly that I have a miniature spasm. I take my headphones out of my ears and swivel round.

Lucas stands before me. Every time we passed in the corridors this week, he gave me these weird little waves. Or smiles. I don’t know, the sort of smiles where you scrunch up your face and in any other context people would wonder whether there was something wrong with you. Anyway, right now, he has his bag slung over one shoulder and in his other arm he has a pile of at least seven books.

“Hi,” he says, just above a whisper.

“Hi,” I say. There’s a short pause, before I follow up with: “Er, do you want to sit here?”

Embarrassment pours over his face, but he quickly replies, “Yeah, thanks.” He pulls out the chair next to me, dumps his bag and books on the desk and sits down.

I’ve still got my phone in my hand and I’m just kind of staring at him.

He sticks a hand into his bag and withdraws a Sprite can. He places it in front of me, like a cat would place a half-chewed mouse in front of its owner.

“I was at the shop at break,” he says, without looking me in the eye. “Is lemonade still your favourite?”

“Er …” I look down at the Sprite can, not quite sure what to make of it. I do not point out that Sprite is not real lemonade or diet. “Erm, yeah, it is. Thanks, that’s, er, really nice of you.”

Lucas nods and turns away. I open the Sprite, take a sip, replace my headphones and return to my game. After only three more moves, I have to remove my headphones again.

“You’re playing chess?” he asks. I hate questions that need not be asked.

“Erm, yes.”

“Do you remember chess club?”

Lucas and I were members of our primary-school chess club. We played each other every time and not once could I beat him. I always threw a tantrum whenever I lost. God, I used to be a twat.

“No,” I say. I lie a lot for no reason. “No, I don’t.”

He pauses and for a moment I think he sees through me, but he’s too embarrassed to push it.

“You have a lot of books,” I say. As if he wasn’t aware of this.

He nods, smiling awkwardly. “I like to read. And I’ve just been in the library.”

I recognise all the titles, but of course I haven’t read any of them. T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, John Fowles’ The Collector and Jane Austen’s Emma.

“So what are you reading now?” I ask. The books at least provide a topic of conversation.

“The Great Gatsby,” he says. “F. Scott Fitzgerald.”

“What’s that about?”

“It’s about …” He pauses to think. “It’s about someone who’s in love with a dream.”

I nod as if I understand. I don’t. I don’t know a single thing about literature, despite studying it for A level.

I pick up Emma. “Does this mean you actually like Jane Austen?” We’re still studying Pride and Prejudice in class. It’s soul-destroying and not in a good way. Do not read it.

He tilts his head as if it’s a deeply serious question. “You sound surprised.”

“I am. Pride and Prejudice is dreadful. I can barely get past the first chapter.”

“Why’s that?”

“It’s the literary equivalent of a poorly cast romcom.”

Someone gets up and tries to walk past us, so we both have to tuck in our chairs a little.

Lucas is looking at me very carefully. I don’t like it.

“You’re so different,” he says, shaking his head and squinting at me.

“I may have grown a few centimetres since I was eleven.”

“No, it’s—” He stops himself.

I put down my phone. “What? It’s what?”

“You’re more serious.”

I don’t ever remember not being serious. As far as I’m concerned, I came out of the womb spouting cynicism and wishing for rain.

I’m not really sure how to reply. “I’m, well, I am possibly the least funny person since Margaret Thatcher.”

“No, but you were always dreaming up all these imaginary games. Like our Pokémon battles. Or the secret base you made out of the cornered-off section of the playground.”

“Would you like to have a Pokémon battle?” I fold my arms. “Or am I too unimaginative for that?”

“No.” He’s digging himself into a hole and it’s actually quite funny to watch. “I … oh, I don’t know.”

I raise my eyebrows. “Quit while you’re ahead. I’m boring now. I’m a lost cause.”

I instantly wish I’d just shut up. I always do this thing where I accidentally say self-deprecating stuff that makes other people feel really awkward, especially when it’s true. I start to wish I’d never offered to let him sit with me. He quickly returns to the work he’d got out of his bag.

‘Material Girl’ is still playing over and over. Apparently, the caretakers are trying to fix it, but at the moment the only solution appears to be cutting the electrics of the entire school, which, according to Kent, would classify as “giving in”. He’s got that World War II Churchill attitude, old Mr Kent. I take a quick glance out of the windows behind the computers. I know I should be doing some homework too, but I’d much rather play chess and admire the windy greyness outside. That’s my major problem with school. I really don’t do anything unless I actually want to. And most of the time I don’t want to do anything at all.

“You’ve had quite a good first week,” I say, my eyes still focused on the sky.

“Best week of my entire life,” he says. Seems like an exaggeration to me, but each to their own.

Lucas is such an innocent guy. Awkward and innocent. In fact, he’s so awkward that it’s almost as if he’s putting it on. I know he’s probably not, but that’s still the way it comes across. I mean, awkward is very in fashion at the moment. It’s frustrating. I have experienced my fair share of awkward, and awkward is not cute, awkward does not make you more attractive and awkward certainly should not be fashionable. It just makes you look like an idiot.

“Why did we stop being friends?” he asks, not looking at me.

I pause. “People grow up and move on. That’s life.”

I regret saying this, however true it might be. I see a kind of sadness fizzle into his eyes, but it quickly disappears.

“Well,” he says and turns to me, “we’re not grown up yet.”

He takes out his phone and starts to read something on it. I watch as his face melts into something confusing. The pips that signal the end of break somehow manage to sound over the music and he puts the phone away and starts to gather his stuff.

“Got a lesson?” I ask and then realise that this is one of those pointless questions which I hate.

“History. I’ll see you later.”

He walks several paces before turning as if he has something else to say. But he just stands there. I give him a strange sort of smile, which he returns and then walks away. I watch as he meets a boy with a large quiff at the door and they start up a conversation as they exit the common room.

Finally at peace, I return to my music. My iPod has shuffled on to Aimee Mann – just one of my many depressing nineties artists that nobody has heard of. I get to wondering where Michael Holden might be. I haven’t seen him since Tuesday. I don’t have his phone number or anything. Even if I did, it’s not like I would text him. I don’t text anyone.

I don’t really do much for the next hour. To tell you the truth, I’m not even sure if I’m supposed to be in a lesson, but I really can’t find the will to move. I briefly wonder again who Solitaire might be, but I conclude for the billionth time that I just don’t care. I set an alarm on my phone to remind me to take Charlie to counselling tonight because Nick is busy, and then I sit very still with my head on one arm and doze off.

I wake up just before the pips go again. I swear to God I’m a freak. I mean it. One day I’m going to forget how to wake up.

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.

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 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.

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