The Square Root of Summer (5 page)

Perhaps that's my panic. I don't remember doing this. I sit on the floor because my legs have forgotten how to do “upright,” and I try to think.

I touched the television fuzz, and I was with Jason, last summer. An optical illusion? A daydream?
C'mon, Gottie—are you seriously saying it was a wormhole?

The boxes are packed. The room is empty. I must have done that. My pocket beeps and when I fumble for my phone, there's a text from Jason:
Nice to see you again …
Nothing about me getting sucked into a box, but maybe that's not the kind of thing you put in a text. A text that trails off into three dots, like there's more to come.

Is there such a thing as a split-screen vortex? Last summer on one side, this room on another. And you can only tune in to one viewpoint at a time.

It makes total sense. Except for the part where I'm completely crazy!

There's one box still on the bed, and I clamber to my feet to dig through it, fingers fumbling, hoping to find something to explain what I thought I saw. To tell me I'm not going nuts.

There's nothing but odds and ends. A framed photo of my mum where she's a few months older than I am now, and we look so alike it hurts. And a stack of Grey's diaries. He used to note everything down: a new recipe for spaghetti with apricots (really), a bird's nest on the lawn, when the village shop briefly stopped selling Marmite. He's the only one of us who ate it.

When my scrabbling fingertips hit cardboard, I admit defeat and tell myself I imagined the whole thing. I've lost a few hours, that's all. Slept on my feet, like a horse in a stable, and dreamed about Jason. Hitting the light switch with my chin, I carry the box outside, to Grey's crappy old VW Beetle.

The car is parked on a hump of grass, skewed at an angle into the hedge, sitting so low that Papa will barely be able to get it over the speed bumps to the Book Barn tomorrow. I have to stand sideways on the small slope to reach the latch, balancing the box on my knee, and as the trunk springs up, the box slides off, bursting open on the grass in a scatter of coins and pages.

“Scheisse!”
I kneel in the half-dark to pick everything up, chucking the half-open diaries clumsily back in the box.

ROAST CHICKEN AND POTATO SALAD IN THE GARDEN.

Grey's scrawling handwriting catches my eye in the light spilling from the kitchen.
Beech leaves on the fire. I dream of being a Viking.

Potato salad. He meant
Kartoffelsalat
, the German sort served warm with mustard and vinegar, not mayonnaise (i.e., not totally disgusting). The entry is from Midsummer's Eve last year: the night of my first kiss with Jason. My first real kiss, ever.

It's a thump to the heart. But it's also an explanation: I spent the afternoon studying spacetime, and I was reading the diaries while I packed. That's why I remembered it so vividly. Ned's home, I hung out with Sof, Jason's back and smiling at me … This is why my mind's on last summer. I didn't lie on a blanket in the grass or smell the bonfire. I'm imagining things.

Because otherwise I'd have to admit that there is such a thing as a wormhole, and that I've seen two today. But Thomas is arriving tomorrow, and that's about as much as I can deal with.

I reach forward and slam the diary shut.

 

Tuesday 6 July

[Minus three hundred and eight]

After I text Jason back—a breezy
You too!:)
that takes two hours to compose—me and Umlaut stay up all night, reading Grey's diaries and breaking our hearts. I couldn't quite bring myself to put them in the car. And a small part of me is hoping that the wormholes are real, and I'll be blasted back to when he was alive.

The entries are all semi-cryptic, but this one makes me laugh, because I remember the day he means:

GOTTIE ON A FRUIT AND VEGETABLE BOYCOTT AFTER LEARNING BIRDS AND BEES.

SOMETHING ABOUT A CONDOM ON A BANANA.

(BUY VITAMIN PILLS?)

CONSIDER DUNGEON. SHE LOOKS SO MUCH LIKE CARO.

Caro—my mum. Grey was pretty accepting that his only daughter got pregnant at nineteen by a tiny blond German exchange student—but he was also clear history wasn't going to repeat itself. That day, I'd hurtled home from sex education at school, convinced Grey would say “Make love in the sea, Gottie! Tangle among the waves! Let Neptune protect your vital eggs!”

But instead he thundered, “I don't know if I believe in all the things I'm doing, dude, or if I half believe them and it's cosmic insurance. But you can get pregnant upside down, the first time, in the sea, on the grass, under a full moon—most especially under a full moon; all that romance and you forget your own name, let alone the rubber in your wallet. So take the pill, for God's sake. Take all the pills. Use a condom, get a diaphragm.”

It's dawn by the time I stop reading, the sun coming up as bright as a magnesium flame. No freak rainstorms have shut down the airports. Which means Thomas is arriving in T-minus eight hours.

Let the
Sturm und Drang
begin.

First, though, I have to make it through this end-of-year assembly. We've barely finished our year, and already they're hustling us out the door—every week there's a talk about college applications, personal statements, student loans, next year's exams …

“This Is Your Last-Chance Summer,” Mr. Carlton, the college advisor, is stage-whispering. “Entrance Exams Start In September, People—Do Not Waste Your Summer Vacation.”

In the row ahead of me, Jake rests his head on Nick's shoulder, unconcerned with the doom-mongering. The girl next to me is on her phone, tweeting about the
unfairness
of having summer homework. Across the room I can see Sof, head-to-toe in pink and frantically writing a million notes as Mr. Carlton starts whispering about the Process For Art School. I should text her and say not to bother—Ned went through all that a year ago.

But I'm too busy freaking out.

And not just about what happened last night: the memory-wormhole-whatever. Losing a huge chunk of time.
Jason
. But also: Thomas being halfway over the Atlantic by now. Ned retuning the kitchen radio to static, which was how Grey used to listen to it. (“Cosmic noise, man, you can't beat it! It's the sound of the universe expanding.”) And Papa, ballooning around the bookshop—he drifts in and out of the house, replenishing cereal supplies and springing surprise kittens and summer visitors, but he's not
there
.

All of that, and then there's Mr. Carlton striding around, telling me I need to decide what to do with the rest of my life, and for the next four years, and where to do it. Right Now!

You can practically hear the exclamation marks as he talks. That I'm expected to be excited about it. Everybody else is. Happy to escape our sleepy seaside villages, embroidered along the coast, where we've been our whole lives and nothing ever happens.

But I like sleepy. I
like
nothing-ever-happens. I buy the same chocolate bar from the same shop every day, next to our village pond with its minimalist duck population of three, and then I check the Holksea village newsletter with no news in it. It's comforting. I can wrap my whole life up in a blanket.

I don't want to “Think About The Future,” as Mr. Carlton keeps proselytizing. It's hard enough living in this present.

While he keeps finding new and terrifying ways to hiss about The Rest Of Our Lives, I tune out and start making notes on my notebook. I might not be able to stop the inexorable forward motion of applying for college, Ned's
What Would Grey Do?
summer agenda, or Thomas's plane, but there is one thing I can control.

I can work out what really happened last night.

*   *   *

By the end of the assembly, I've got a notebook full of equations to justify my split-screen-meets-telescope hypothesis. As everyone scrapes their chairs back, Sof half waves at me across the room to join her in the escape-gaggle at the doors. I shake my head, pointing to my physics teacher, and she gives me a closed-lip smile.

Ms. Adewunmi's lingering in her seat, frowning at a timetable, but I'm hoping she'll welcome such out-of-the-blue questions as—

“How does spacetime work?” I blurt.

She looks up sternly. “I
knew
you weren't paying attention yesterday.”

“No, I mean—I was. I did the quiz, in detention. In class, sorry…”

My apologies trail off, and she laughs: “Kidding! What is it you want to know, exactly?”

“I wanted to ask—vortexes. Wormholes. What do they actually look like?”

“Is this a curriculum question, or do I need to worry about Norfolk getting sucked into the fourth dimension?” Ms. Adewunmi asks.

“It's hypothetical. I mean, theoretical! I'm interested in the math behind it,” I assure her. “I know you can't create a wormhole without dark matter, or travel through one. But could you see through it? Like a long-distance TV?”

My teacher considers me, then darts a glance from left to right. There are still stragglers at the doors, and she watches them leave before leaning forward to whisper urgently, “What's the thousandth prime number?”

“Um?” I don't understand, compute it anyway. “7,919.”

She jerks her head to the doors. “Follow me.”

Ms. Adewunmi doesn't say anything the whole way along the corridors. Every time I try to ask a question, she gives a tiny head shake. I start to wonder if I'm in trouble. When we get to her office, she sits behind the desk, then pushes the other chair out with her foot, wordlessly asking me to sit. It's completely badass.

I scramble into the chair. Is she going to give me detention again? Normally she's all smiles, even when covering boring stuff like topology, but she's watching at me seriously. Then she finally speaks.

“Welcome,” she says, fixing me with a stare, “to the Parallel Universe Club.”

I stare back, heart thumping.

“God!
Kidding
, again!” She cackles loudly. “You kids are so gullible.” She wipes her eyes, still laughing. Hilarious.

“Gottie, every year one of my students acts like wormholes are real. And c'mon, this is the first peep I've heard from you all year. You've got to let me have my fun. All right, then. Theoretically—who knows what you'd see? Maybe the vortex would be so curved the event horizon would prevent you from seeing round the corner. And if we imagine you
could
see through a wormhole, the gravity inside might be so strong it would distort the light waves—like a fish-eye lens.”

In English: you'd see nothing, or fun house mirrors. But Jason's kiss last night was a live-action, Smell-O-Vision, Technicolor, 3D, IMAX replay. With popcorn.

“Okay, but,” I push, “mathematically. In theory. Say with the Gödel metric, the past still exists, because spacetime is curved. If you
could
see the past, like through a—” I mumble the next bit, aware of my supreme ridiculousness. “TV-wormhole-telescope, and it wasn't distorted. Would watching the past make time work, um, differently? From the viewpoint. Affect it, somehow?”

“You mean, the way a clock on a speeding train runs slower than one in the station?”

“Yes!” I beam. The clock thing is both true and
amazing
. “I was thinking … if you watched twenty minutes' worth of the past through the wormhole, you'd lose a couple of hours of real time.”

“Could do.” Ms. A contemplates me for a moment. Then she reaches for a pen and starts to write. “If you're interested in pursuing quantum mechanical theory at college, you'll want to read these. You should also”—she points her pen at my notebook, which is open to a doodle of Jason's name—“concentrate on your applications.”

I nod, putting my hand out for the list. She doesn't give it to me.

“Have you thought about a branch—pure mathematics or theoretical physics?” she asks, holding the paper just beyond my reach. “We don't want to lose you to the biologists. Ha-ha!”

“I'm not sure yet…” The thought of committing to a subject for life gives me the dry heaves. I can barely commit to an emotion for five minutes.

“Don't take too long to decide—I'll need time for your recommendation. In fact…” She waves the paper. “I'll let you have this if you write it up for me. Your take on wormholes.”

“Homework?” I grimace, though I suppose a summer in the library is one way to avoid Thomas.

“Think of it as your personal statement. I want the math behind it too. You give me a kickass essay on this telescope-time theory, I'll write you the kind of recommendation that will take you a million light-years from Holksea—scholarships, grants, the works.”

She dangles the paper at me. I don't want to be a million light-years from here. I don't know where I want to be. But I do want to know what's going on. So I take it.