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