The Square Root of Summer (15 page)

“Jason, when you came by the house the other week—when we were in Grey's room, packing his things. What happened?”

His sugar cubes tumble down onto the table. This is it. This is where he tells me I disappeared.

“Ouch. Hot,” he says after a slurp of coffee. “Yeah, it was awkward, wasn't it? It's been a while. We're out of practice.”

He smiles at me, and I try to smile back.

“But,” I persist, “I was, um. I was there?”

“Yeah, I see what you mean.” He frowns. “You were a bit daydreamy.”

I fumble for a neat way of asking,
I didn't disappear like a magic trick?
There isn't one. Jason's rearranging the sugar, unconcerned. He'd mention it, if I'd vanished. But I have to ask.

“Sorry, so, what was awkward?” I imagine watching me sucked into a cardboard box would fall into that category.

“Oh, I was trying to tell you about college—how busy it is, all the work. How it wasn't fair to you, me being distracted. Then Ned interrupted us talking, and like I said—we're out of practice. You need to work on your subterfuge.” He winks.

I should be relieved. I'm not disappearing. I'm right about the split screen—my brain wanders off down memory lane, but at the same time, I'm still walking and talking in this reality.

But all I can think about is how last time we were here, he said,
Margot. Forget the chips. Let's go to my house.
That was the day we had sex for the first time.

“But we're cool, right? We're friends,” Jason assures me now. He reminds me of Sof, telling me what my opinion should be.

“Tuna melt! Coffee!” Counter-man interrupts. “Sorry, folks, I'm going to close up. If this is the lunchtime rush, I'm going home.”

Our chairs scrape the floor as we stand up. In the doorway, I hesitate, my fingers tightening round the greasy sandwich bags.

“Have a good swim,” Jason says, nodding at the rain. “Shit—you were going to tell me something about Ned's party.”

“You want to come to the bookshop? Papa's upstairs, but it's warm. You can share my sandwich…”

I will him one last time to follow me outside, across the grass, onto my spaceship. Fly away through the rain, kiss me like it's last summer. But he just crumples his coffee cup and throws it in the trash.

“Can't. Sorry. This is like a whatdyacallit?” He snaps his hands into a finger gun, an echo of Fingerband's fratty vibe, when he finds the word he wants: “Halfway. It's halfway. I can catch the bus from here—my girlfriend lives in Brancaster. You know Meg.”

He keeps talking but my ears are roaring with that word—
girlfriend, girlfriend, girlfriend
—and of course it's Meg, perfect pretty Meg. I was a secret but not her, and I'm running out the door: outside, across the grass, through the rain, the storm roaring too. The Book Barn door has blown open but inside it's not the bookshop, it's not my spaceship. It's nothing, it's television fuzz, it's a wormhole, it's a rip in the fucking spacetime continuum.

And this time, I choose to run right into it.

*   *   *

… we tumble into the kitchen, laughing and kissing. I don't even care if someone sees us. But Jason lets go of my hand.

There's a note on the blackboard. It's in Papa's handwriting, but it doesn't make sense. The words swim in front of my eyes, I have to spell the letters out one by one and even then it can't be right because they spell

G-R-E-Y-'-S-I-N-H-O-S-P-I-T-A-L

I can't deal. I want to be back in the field with Jason, sun on his skin. I try to grab his hand, to show him.

“Shit,” he says, running both hands through his hair. “Shit.”

I look at him, wanting him to get it, to say: let's pretend we didn't read this, let's pretend it's not true, let's have a few more hours. We never came into the kitchen. We're still in the fort in the field, in the sunshine.

But he doesn't read my mind. He says, “Dude, you should go. You need to—shit. My mum could give you a lift. Or if you bike to Brancaster, you can get the bus to the hospital.”

He keeps talking but I can't hear him, like I couldn't read the note: the sea is rushing in my ears, there's not enough gravity in the room. Where did all the oxygen go?

“Gottie? You go. I'll text Ned and say you're on your way.”

Finally, I find my voice: “You're not coming with me?”

“I can't, I've got work.” Jason works at the pub. Sometimes I sit out back behind the kitchens, and he sneaks me crisps.

“But—” I point to the note on the blackboard again. Maybe he doesn't understand it either. “Grey's in the hospital.”

“Yeah, shit. I know. But it'll be fine—they wouldn't have left a note unless it was fine.” He's steering me out of the kitchen, shutting the door behind us, holding my hand, leading me to my bike. It's on its side on the grass where I'd left it. For some reason, I look across to the hole in the hedge and think of Thomas Althorpe. Who put me in this same hospital, long ago.

It takes me two goes to climb on the bike. I want to be back in the field.

I want to call Sof and tell her everything: me and Jason!

I want to hold hands under a blanket, and talk in whispers.

I want to go back in time. Just ten minutes. If we'd gone straight to my room instead of the kitchen, we wouldn't have found the note. Grey wouldn't be in the hospital, and I'd be naked with Jason.

These are the wrong thoughts to be having. I'm a bad person.

“Text me later, okay?” Jason says, squinting at me. I can't see the blue of his blue, blue eyes. And then the world is folding in on itself, blinding white pain, I'm being squeezed, my heart hurts—

*   *   *

—
and then I'm doubled over on the kitchen doorstep, spitting bile in the grass between my feet. It's night, and raining. A hand is rubbing small circles on my back. Thomas's voice murmuring, asking if I'm okay. The wormhole ache hasn't even worn off when the truth hits me like a meteor: Jason never loved me. There's no universe where he wasn't going to break my heart.

I can solve
f (x)
=
∫
∞
_-∞
in my head, so it's easy enough to calculate the time I've wasted on him since 9 October last year: 293 days, 7,032 hours, 421,920 minutes.

This boy, who wouldn't even hold my hand at the funeral!

Enough. That's enough.

“Thomas.” I straighten up. His hand stays on my back, his face half-lit from the kitchen behind us, as he searches mine to find what's wrong. “Do you want to open the time capsule?”

 

{3}

FRACTALS

Fractals are never-ending, repetitive patterns found in nature—rivers, lightning, galaxies, blood vessels. Mistakes.

A tree trunk splits three ways. Each way splits into three branches. Each branch carries three twigs. And so on to infinity.

Simplicity leads to complexity.

 

Complexity leads to chaos.

 

Wednesday 30 July

[Minus three hundred and thirty-two]

It rains for the next four days. Thomas skips off his Book Barn shifts, and by wordless agreement, we hole up in my room, playing Connect Four and eating wonky
Schneeballs
. I unroll my Marie Curie poster and stick it back on the wall. Dust my telescope. Think about wormholes, flip through Grey's diaries, ignore Sof's texts. Thomas reads comics, graffitis notes on cookbooks, and drops his socks all over my floor like he lives here. Which, I'm getting used to the idea that he does.

It's as if he never left. And, ever since that hug in the churchyard, there's something else, too. An occasional, unspoken wondering …

When it finally stops raining, we emerge and go looking for the time capsule. It's only three weeks since the apple-twisting incident, but it could be years: the ivy is out of control, there's a wasp orgy over the rotting fruit on the ground, and the grass is beyond “needs cutting” and into “Ned's hair” territory.

Grey would murder us. He liked the garden untrammeled, so there's no distinction between “grass” and “flowerbed” and “tree.” Most years, it's impossible to lie straight on the lawn because he plants yellow tulip bulbs willy-nilly. But this is neglected. It's a mess. As though without him, we don't give a shit.

“I missed this,” Thomas beams, taking off his Windbreaker. “That after-rain smell. I swear it smells different in Canada.”

Bentley's paradox says that all matter is pulled to a single point by gravity. Apparently for me and Thomas, that single point is this tree. He stretches up, up, up, revealing a sliver of stomach, as he flings the coat onto a high branch, showering us in rain.

“Oops,” says Thomas, twisting back around towards me. “There's something about this tree, isn't there?”

We're both rain-damp now, silver droplets lacing our hair like dew. He watches me as I dry my face with the edge of my sleeve.

“Petrichor,” I blurt.

“Is that Klingon?”

“The after-rain smell. That's the name for it. It's wet bacteria.”

Congratulations, Gottie. Last time you were under this tree with Thomas, the stars went out. Now you're talking about
wet bacteria
.

“Petrichor, really,” says Thomas. “Sounds like one of Sof's bands. Or your dad when he talks German.”

“That reminds me—Papa said I had to tell you to phone your mum back, and stop wiping her messages off the blackboard and pretending you've called.” I prod at the wet earth with my shoe. “Whatever you've done, you have to talk to her sometime. Like, when you're back next door in a month?”

“Right,” says Thomas. He leans back against the tree trunk. “Next door.”

There's a pause. I know he and his dad don't get along—and actually, none of the messages on the blackboard have been from him. But should I not have mentioned his mum either?

Then he smiles, wickedly. “Why do you assume
I've
done something?”

“Instinct.” The word flies out of my mouth automatically, and Thomas cracks up. “Prior experience. Fundamental knowledge of you. History. That time with the pigs. Mr. Tuttle. A big, doomy sense of foreboding.”

As I list our past, my mind jumps to the future—Thomas next door, clambering through the hedge, biking to school, eating cereal together, hanging out at the Book Barn. He's home, and it will be a year so different from the one I've just had.

Thomas smiles, pushing himself off the tree trunk.

“Race you,” he says, his leg already swinging onto a low branch. Next thing I know, he's a few feet above me—I can see the bottom of his Adidas. “It's still here!”

“
What's
here?” I thought we were going to dig up the time capsule?

“Come up and I'll show you!” He pokes his head through the leaves, offering me his hand.

When I'm sitting on a nice, sturdy branch next to him, I open my mouth, but he puts a finger to his lips, then points. Tucked inside the tree is a rusty metal tin, one of those beige petty-cash ones, with a handle on top and a loop to use for a padlock. Our names are written in marker pen on the lid, and sitting on top of it is a frog.

“Oh,” I say, not recognizing it. The box, I mean, not the frog. Though I'm pretty sure I haven't seen that before either. “This is the time capsule? We didn't bury it?”

Thomas shakes his head. “We found it.”

I turn my head to look at him, his face leaf-dappled in the sunshine. We used to climb up here all the time, but now we're both too big for the tree, crammed into the branches.

“Oh. You really don't remember this?” he asks.

I have to hold on to his shoulder with one hand, so I can show him my left without losing my balance.

“All I know is we talked about the blood pact at the Book Barn,” I say, waving my palm, “then waking up in the hospital with this.”

“Right. That makes sense. Hold on.” Carefully, he leans forward and lifts the frog onto his finger, then stands up on the wonky branch and reaches over to put it on a cluster of leaves.

I'd swoon right out of the tree if it wasn't a totally Isaac Newtonian thing to do. Then Thomas does it for me.

“Whoa!” As he turns to sit back down, his foot slips on the wet branch. Without anything to hold on to, he windmills his arms for a second, one foot hanging off the edge. I freeze, already watching a future where he falls in slow motion.

Time speeds up when he regains his balance with a “Phew” and grins at me. “Think I just won Canada the gymnastics gold for that, eh?”

“Graceful,” I say to cover my panic, grabbing his arm at the elbow to steady him as he sits down. It's not entirely necessary—his center of gravity seems fine. But then he grabs my arm back, in a strict violation of the Spaghetti Arms Principle.

“Thank you.” He settles next to me. We're still holding arms. Not hands.
Arms
. I'm holding elbows with Thomas Althorpe, and it's ridiculous.

And I don't want to let go.

“Ready?” He looks at me. His eyes aren't muddy—they're hazel.

I chew on my lip, considering. I like holding elbows with Thomas, eating cake and joking about
The Wurst
. Against all odds and expectations, I like him bouncing into my room uninvited, lounging on my bed and tickling Umlaut's ears. I like re-becoming friends—and the something else there is between us, building like electricity in the air.