Solitaire, Part 3 of 3 by Alice Oseman Read Free Book Online

on a good show. And everybody in the town is absolutely in love with them.
    It’s clear to me now that, if I do not stop Solitaire, nobody else will.
    At lunch, I sense that I’m being followed, but when I reach the IT department I reckon I’ve outsmarted them. I take a seat in C15, the room directly opposite C16, where I met Michael. There are three people with me in the room. Some Year 13 is scrolling down the University of Cambridge website and a pair of Year 7s are playing the Impossible Quiz with immense concentration. They don’t notice me.
    I boot up the computer and scroll up and down the Solitaire blog for forty-five minutes.
    At some point, my follower walks into C15. It’s Michael, obviously. Still feeling guilty for running away again, and unwilling to talk about it, I dive past him and out of the room, and begin to walk swiftly in no particular direction. He catches up to me. We’re walking very fast.
    “What are you doing?” I ask.
    “I’m walking,” says Michael.
    We turn a corner.
    “Maths,” he says. We’re in the maths corridor. “They make the displays so beautiful here because otherwise no one would like maths. Why would people think that maths is fun? All maths does is give you a false sense of achievement.”
    Kent exits a classroom a few paces ahead of us.
    “All right, Mr Kent!” says Michael. Kent gives him a vague nod and passes by us.
    “I definitely think he writes poetry,” Michael continues. “You can tell. In his eyes and the way he folds his arms all the time.”
    I come to a halt. We’ve made a full circle around Higgs’s first floor. We stay very still, sort of looking at each other. He has a mug of tea in his hand. There’s a weird moment where I think we both want to hug each other, but I quickly end it by turning round and walking back into C15.
    I sit at the computer I’d been staring at, and he takes the seat next to me.
    “You ran off again,” he says.
    I don’t look at him.
    “You didn’t reply to my texts last night after you ran off,” he says. “I had to Facebook message Charlie to find out what had happened to you.”
    I say nothing.
    “Did you get my texts? My voicemails? I was kind of worried you’d caught hypothermia or something. And your arm. I was really worried.”
    I don’t remember there being any texts. Or voicemails. I remember Nick shouting at me for being an idiot, and Charlie sitting next to me in the back of the car rather than next to Nick in the passenger seat. I remember arriving at A & E and waiting for hours. I remember Nick falling asleep on Charlie’s shoulder, and Charlie and I playing twenty questions, and him winning every time. I remember not sleeping last night. I remember telling Mum that I would be going to school and that was final.
    “What are you doing?” he asks.
    What am I doing. “I am …” I am thinking. I am looking at myself in the black computer monitor. “I’m … I’m doing something. About Solitaire.”
    “Since when are you interested in Solitaire?”
    “Since—” I go to answer him, but I don’t know the answer.
    He doesn’t frown, or smile, or anything.
    “Why wouldn’t I be interested?” I ask. “
You’re
interested. You’re the one who said that Solitaire was targeting me.”
    “I just thought you weren’t,” he says, his voice a little wobbly. “It’s not like you to … I just didn’t think … you didn’t care that much, you know, originally.”
    That may be true.
    “
You’re
still interested … right?” I ask, scared of the answer.
    Michael looks at me for a long time. “I’d like to know who’s behind it all,” he says, “and I know what happened to Ben Hope was pretty nasty, and then last night … I mean, that was just downright idiotic. It’s a miracle nobody died. Did you see the article on BBC News? The Clay Festival are passing it off as if it were their final act gone wrong or something. Solitaire didn’t even get a mention. I guess the organisers