Solitaire, Part 2 of 3 Read Online Free Page B

I can smell it. I look at myself in the mirror. My eyeliner has smudged so I sort it out. Then I tear up and ruin it again and try not to start crying. I wash my hands three times and take the plaits out of my hair because they look idiotic.
    Someone’s banging on the door of the bathroom. I’ve been in here for ages just staring at myself in the mirror, watching my eyes tear up and dry and tear up and dry. I open the door ready to punch them in the face and find myself directly opposite Michael goddamn Holden.
    “Oh, thank Christ.” He races inside and, without bothering to let me leave or shut the door, he lifts the toilet seat and starts to pee. “Thank. Christ. I thought I was going to have to piss in the flower bed, for Christ’s sake.”
    “All right, just pee with a lady present,” I say.
    He waves his hand casually.
    I get out of there.
    As I exit through the front door, Michael catches me up. He’s dressed as Sherlock Holmes. Even the hat.
    “Where are you going?” he asks.
    I shrug. “It’s too hot in there.”
    “It’s too cold out here.”
    “Since when did you acquire a body temperature?”
    “Will you ever be able to talk to me without making a sarcastic comment?”
    I turn and start walking further away, but he’s still in pursuit.
    “Why are you following me?”
    “Because I don’t know anyone else here.”
    “Don’t you have any Year 13 friends?”
    “I – er …”
    I stop on the pavement outside Becky’s drive.
    “I think I’m going home,” I say.
    “Why?” he asks. “Becky’s your friend. It’s her birthday.”
    “She won’t mind,” I say. She won’t notice.
    “What are you going to do at home?” he asks.
    Blog. Sleep. Blog. “Nothing.”
    “Why don’t we crash in a room upstairs and watch a film?”
    Coming from any other person’s mouth, it would sound like he’s asking me to go into a room and have sex with him, but because it’s Michael who says this I know that he’s being completely serious.
    I notice that the diet lemonade in my cup has gone. I can’t remember when I drank it. I want to go home, but I don’t because I know I won’t sleep. I’ll just lie there in my room. Michael’s hat looks really stupid. He probably borrowed that tweed jacket from a dead body.
    “Fine.” I say.

TWELVE
    THERE IS A line that you cross when forming relationships with people. Crossing this line occurs when you transfer from knowing someone to knowing
about
someone, and Michael and I cross that line at Becky’s seventeenth birthday party.
    We go upstairs into Becky’s room. He, of course, begins to investigate, while I drop and roll on to the bed. He passes the poster of Edward Cullen and Bella No-Expression Swan, raising a sceptical eyebrow at it. He trails along the shelf of dancing show photographs and medals and the shelf of pre-teen books that have lain untouched for years, and he steps over the piles and piles of crumpled dresses and shorts and T-shirts and knickers and bras and schoolbooks and bags and miscellaneous pieces of paper until, finally, he opens a wardrobe, bypasses the shelves of folded-up clothes and locates a small row of DVDs.
    He pulls out
Moulin Rouge
,
but, seeing the look on my face, quickly replaces it. A similar thing happens when he retrieves
It’s a Boy Girl Thing.
After a moment more, he gasps and grabs a third DVD, leaps across the room to the flat-screen and switches it on.
    “We’re watching
Beauty and the Beast
,” he says.
    “No, we are not,” I say.
    “I think you’ll find that we are,” he says.
    “Please,” I say. “No. What about
The Matrix
?
Lost in Translation
?
Lord of the Rings
?” I don’t know why I’m saying this. Becky owns none of these films.
    “I’m doing this for your own good.” He inserts the DVD. “I believe that your psychological development has substantially suffered due to lack of Disney charm.”
    I don’t bother asking what he’s talking about. He clambers on to the bed next to me