The Square Root of Summer (22 page)

“Thomas!” I blurt.

He turns to me, holding down his hair against the wind, a smile as wide as the sky. I wish I could tell him:
I don't want to time-travel anymore. I want to stay here, and discover the universe with you.
But I can't make the words come out of my mouth.

“You okay?” he asks.

I nod and rescue a chip from his ketchup overkill. All day, our
us
has stalled—replaced by stutters, long pauses, and then both of us speaking at the same time. No, you go, no, you say. I know what's wrong with me: I'm waiting for a wormhole to drag me away. I'm not sure what Thomas's problem is; he's been antsy since leaving my room on Sunday. We eat in silence till a gust of wind sends hot vinegar straight up my nose, and I start spluttering. I catch Thomas's eye.

“All right, clever clogs,” he says, standing up. “Wait here.”

He scrunches the empty Styrofoam container, dripping vinegar all over the blanket, then runs off with it through the dunes.

“Where are you going?” I call after him, leaning over to see him jog down to the path that leads to the beach.

“It's a surprise,” I hear. Just before he rounds the corner and disappears out of sight, he slam-dunks the carton into the bin, with a little heel-click in the air and a “Yessssss!”

While I sit and wait, I watch the sea. Or rather, its absence—over the top of our hollow, there's nothing but flat, wet sands, stretching into the distance. Somewhere, invisible beyond it, is the North Sea. When I was little, the tide going this far out made me sad. I'd want to run for miles, right into the horizon, until I was invisible too. If I ran and ran and ran into the emptiness now, would I leave all this behind? Grey. Wormholes. Myself.

Then Thomas pops into sight, walking backwards across the flats and waving his arms in the air. It makes me want to stay right where I am. When he sees I've noticed him, he puts his hands to his mouth and shouts something.

“What? I can't hear you,” I yell.

He shrugs dramatically, then he's off, jogging farther on, not stopping till he's about fifty yards away. I sit with knees up to my chin, arms around my legs, watching as he drags his foot through the wet sand. After a few seconds, I work out what he's writing. I grin and grab our bags and blanket, running down the dune to join him. By the time I reach him, breathless, he's written the best equation I've ever seen:

X2

It's what Grey said about us when we were little. “Uh-oh,” when I walked into a room. Then, if Thomas was following me, “Uh-oh, trouble times two.” After a while we said it ourselves, a little chant when we were up to no good. Water is already pooling inside the letters. Thomas still has one foot in the tail of the
2
—his jeans are soaked up the knees, his hair is crazy-curly from the salt and humidity, his glasses sea-flecked.

I stumble through the wet sand to him, but he shrinks back—barely perceptibly—shoving his hands in his pockets so his shoulders hunch.

“Very mature,” I settle for saying, pointing at the letters. “Thank you.”

“You're so welcome,” he says with exaggerated formality.

“There's seaweed on your foot,” I tell him.

He flicks his trainer and the samphire jumps into the air—he catches it, then stares at his hand, amazed. “Let's pretend I'm truly that dexterous on purpose,” he says, and reaches over to tie it to my bag strap. “There. Now you're a mermaid.”

There's a pause. I'm missing something.

“What do you—” I start, and at the same time Thomas says, “Listen. Hey, we keep doing that, don't we?”

“You go.”

“Before I say this…” he begins. Then circles his foot in the air, gesturing to the
X2
. “We've always been friends, right? And I promise this time, we always will be. I won't let that go. I don't go silent on you, you don't go silent on me. Deal?”

“Um, okay.” I prod the sand with my trainer, squelching it underfoot. Obviously, I've misunderstood something about Thomas and me, about tonight.

“Ned made me say that bit. It's true. But I can't believe he did the whole ‘protective big brother' thing.” Thomas does his air quotes extra jazzily to make me laugh, but I don't. For all the hot chips I've eaten, there's still an ice block in my stomach.

“What do you mean? What about Ned?” My voice sounds small and thin.

“He found out … Look … There's something I didn't mention, about this summer. Ned found out a few days ago, and when he caught me coming out of your room the other morning, he said I had to tell you, before anything happened.”

“What?”

“I'm not staying in Holksea. When my mom moves back to England, we're not going to be next door.”

“Where are you going to be? Brancaster?” It's a stupid question. Thomas wouldn't be acting this squirrelly if he was moving ten minutes up the road.

“Manchester.” He shoves his hands in his pockets and looks at me. Between us, the
X2
is melting back into wet sand. Soon, the marks will disappear, as though they were never there at all. “You know, it's not so far. We could get the train.”

“It's five hours,” I guess. Manchester's the other side of the country, and Holksea's not exactly well connected. It takes a bike ride and a bus and a train just to get to London.

“Four and a half,” he says. “Three changes. I checked.”

“You were checking train times, but you weren't going to tell me?” I don't understand. “Is that why your mum keeps calling? To let you know the plan had changed?”

“Shit.” Thomas hunches his shoulders, blows air up through his curls. “Shit. Look, that was never my plan, okay? Mom got a job at the university in Manchester, it was all arranged for her to get there in September. Then I got your email and thought maybe I could come here first. This—” He gestures round to encompass everything, the moon, the sea, the sand. Me and my airless lungs. “This was only ever the summer.”

“You lied to me?” I take the little voice in my head that's reminding me I've lied to him, and I squish it down. That was a misunderstanding, a one-off. It's not the same thing. “All those times I said about starting school, or you being back next door? You didn't think to mention it?”

“Also not my plan.” He shuffles in the sand. “Look, I'm not proud of myself, okay? But things were so awkward between us when I arrived, and I knew if I told you I wasn't here for long, you'd never talk to me. We wouldn't have the chance to become friends again.”

He thinks this is friendship? This is five years ago, all over again.

“When?” I ask.

“When what?”

“When everything. When were you going to tell me? When do you go to Manchester?”

“Three weeks.”

Stars swim in front of my eyes. All this time, all this time I've spent trying to understand the past, and it goes and repeats itself. Thomas is
leaving
. And he never even said.

I want to scream the clouds away, punch the moon back out into the sky. I can't
do
this. Time is moving too fast. I turned around and it was winter, closed my eyes and it was spring. Summer hot on its heels and it's already half over, and Thomas is leaving,
again
, everybody leaves, Mum, Grey, Ned, Jason, Thomas. Grey, Grey, Grey. I'm on my knees and I can't breathe, I need a wormhole,
now
—

“Gottie.” Thomas's voice is soft. “G. I honestly thought, for the first couple of weeks, that you knew.”

I stay on my knees and shake my head miserably: no.

“I guess I thought your dad would've explained. My mom called him, when I was on the plane. I'd left her a note. She told him the plan. He's talked to me about it.” He sounds confused, frustrated. I don't turn around. “Then I figured out you had no idea, and I just … I didn't know what to do. It took weeks to get you to be my friend again. You were so sad about Grey … I don't get why he didn't tell you.”

“So it's my fault for supposedly sending you an email,” I say, hunching up my shoulders, staring at the water pooling by my feet. “And Papa's fault for expecting you to tell me yourself. Who else should we blame? Ned? Sof?
Umlaut
?”

“I think you needed me to be here this summer,” he says. “And I am. Doesn't that count for anything?”

“Nope.” It comes out in two sulky syllables, my throat tight. I know I'm not being fair, and I don't care. If I say another word, I'll cry. Next to me, I can see Thomas's feet shuffle forward. He stoops and grabs a stone, skimming it across a tidal pool.

“We can visit each other. Take trains. I'll buy a car. Get another bakery job and meet you halfway across the country with home-baked iced buns.” His voice is cajoling, and I'm not in the mood to be cajoled. Just for once, I want things to go my way. I stand up, and I kick my way through his stupid equation, stomping all over the
X
.

“I hate iced buns…” I turn to tell him, viciously, and the words disappear in my mouth when I see what I've done.

The sand I sent flying through the air is hanging there. It won't ever fall. The white foam waves hover over the dark sea, forever cresting and not crashing down. Everything is still. Everything is silent. And Thomas is frozen, midplea.

The geometry of spacetime is a manifestation of gravity. And the geometry of heartbreak is a manifestation of a stopped clock. Time stands still.

*   *   *

I speed-cycle the three miles home through the gathering dusk, and it never gets dark. The world is as broken as my smashed watch. The sun isn't setting. It stays right where I left it at the beach, hovering just under the horizon, as the moon fails to climb the sky. It's beautiful and awesome, in the old-fashioned sense. Daunting.

Pedaling fast, I take the shortcut through the field and straight through the nettle patch, not caring. I need my books, I need to figure out what's going on—mathematically speaking. It may not make a difference. But for all that the universe is in charge, I want to at least try to take control.

I ditch my bike in the driveway, out of breath, and jog-walk-wheeze into the garden. And stop dead. Ned and his bandmates are—were?—having a bonfire. A prelude to the party, which I realize with a jolt is this Saturday. Where did the summer go? In nineteen days, my grandfather will be dead forever. No more diaries. And I've spent this whole time chasing myself down wormholes, without ever thinking I could be finding my way back to Grey.

The flames are frozen, sparks painted on the air. Ned stands near the Buddha, mid-beer-chug, while Sof is a tableau of worry-tinged admiration as she watches him. It's a momentary glimpse of her private face.

I'm an interloper. I tiptoe past, trying not to look, Edmund creeping through the White Witch's lair. Then I think,
screw it
, and double back to tie Jason's shoelaces together. His lucky lighter's in his hand and I pocket it, planning to drop it down a drain later or something.

The trees are as still and silent as gravestones. It's spectacular and eerie—I'm already writing equations in my head to describe it all, the frozen antigravity. This is what I've wanted all year, isn't it? To stop the inexorable forward motion.

As I pass under the apple tree, I see Umlaut. He's midprowl along a branch, towards a moth he'll never catch. I fetch Thomas's email from my room, along with my A-level physics textbook, then I climb the tree and grab Umlaut onto my lap. If I can restart the clock, I don't want him falling off the branch in surprise. He's warm, which is reassuring, and taxidermy-stiff, which isn't.

“Okay, Umlaut,” I say. I don't think he can hear me, but talking helps me swallow the incipient panic. This is Halloween levels of creepy. “How do we fix this?”

The Friedmann equations describe the Big Bang. Maybe time could be jump-started like our crappy old car in winter. I know what Grey would do: read them aloud as if from a spell book, the origins of the universe. Perhaps he's right. Perhaps I should enact them, create a Little Bang—heat from Jason's lighter and a vacuum inside the time capsule. Tweak the math and make it smaller. It's a start.

I get comfortable, flipping the time capsule shut so I can stretch my legs out.

The lid is blank.

When Thomas and I climbed up here to open it, the day of the frog, our names were on the lid. He's disappearing.
Himmeldonnerwetter!
Time hasn't just stopped. The branches are unraveling. We're reverting to a world where Thomas isn't here. For all that he's lied, I don't want that.

I want the forward motion.

I want to see summer dwindle into autumn. For school to start, university applications, mock exams, and A-level results. I want to kiss Thomas again, and kill him for not telling me he was leaving. Tell him about Jason, everything, and all about the day Grey died—a truth I don't even admit myself. I want to see what happens with him and me, even after he leaves. Even if it all goes wrong.

Because I want the chance to cry when it hurts.

Faced with a choice between this—stopping time, making my world so small I can wrap my life up in a blanket—and smashing my heart to pieces, well. Pass me the hammer.

*   *   *

I scrawl the first equation underneath the lid of the tin, then crumple up some pages from my physics textbook, put them inside, flick Jason's lighter—thankfully, it wasn't lit when time stopped, and it catches flame—and drop it in. Then I shut the tin and write
THOMAS & GOTTIE
on top.

I cross my fingers. The inside of the time capsule was black and sooty when we opened it, clean just now. I'm lighting the fire we found a few weeks ago. Actions have consequences—it just so happens that I do mine the wrong way round.