The Square Root of Summer (8 page)

“Phone me when you need the lift home,” he says when he drops me off. It's only as he's driving away that I remember: my cell phone is broken.

After my math lesson, I collect the two books I reserved and spend lunch in the library, printing diagrams from the Internet and googling theorems to research. When my computer slot is up, I tuck the pages and myself away in a corner. Then I take Grey's diary out of my book bag, and look up the entry for Midsummer's Eve again.

I'm going to read about last summer. I'm going to blow my heart away. My sandwich leaves crumbs on the page—I wish I were eating
Kartoffelsalat
, not Cheddar on stale white sliced—and I brush them off, flipping ahead a day, a week, a fortnight later, to:

*R.

DRUNK ON PEONIES. CLOUDS OF THEM EXPLODING ALL OVER THE GARDEN.

GOTTIE IS IN LOVE.

I choke on my sandwich. Grey knew?

This time, I feel the wormhole before I see it, a tingling in the air. The sound of the universe expanding. Hauling myself up, I hold on to the shelves as I limp along the aisle, searching the spines. Latimer, Lee, L'Engle. When I pull
A Wrinkle in Time
from the shelf, I catch a glimpse of television fuzz and smell salt before I—

*   *   *

Jason is waiting when I come out of the sea.

It's sunny, and his eyes are the same blue as the sky. This bit of the beach is empty. Only locals come this far down the sands, and anyway, it's Monday.

“Yo, Margot,” he says when I sit down next to him. “You're welcome, by the way.”

“Huh?” I put my head on one side and try to shake the water from my ears.

“I watched your stuff for you,” he clarifies with a sweeping gesture. “I mean,
you
might not worry about thieves, but…”

My “stuff” is a biography of Margaret Hamilton (the scientist, not the witch). A towel. A pile of clothes. The key to my bike lock. It's sweet, though.

“It's Holksea,” I point out. “
I'm
the most dangerous person here.”

He laughs and says, “You are dangerous. That bikini is criminal.”

I don't know how to reply to that. It's the same one I've always worn, but the boobs in it are brand-new, arriving by overnight express a couple of months ago. Sof's been trying to educate me about the difference between a B cup and a balconette ever since.

The easiest response is to kiss him … The sun hot on my skin and the sea a distant sparkle as I close my eyes and we lean into each other. My lips are salty, my face wet and cold, our mouths warm. It makes me want to crawl all over him. But after a second, Jason pulls away.

“Listen,” he whispers, smoothing my wet hair back up into its topknot. “Maybe we shouldn't do this here … Someone might see.”

“Like who? Holksea's notorious criminal underworld?”

Jason smiles, then sighs, then stretches flat out on the sand. I'm never sure if I've done something wrong; his moods come and go like the tide.

“Hey.” I lean over him, put my face close to his, try to kiss him again.

“Ned would get all chaperoney,” he murmurs. “You're younger than me. He'd keep an eye on us at every party, make sure we're never alone.”

I'm pretty sure Sof would disapprove if I told her about me and Jason: he's two years older. He's in a band. I've never had a boyfriend, and Jason isn't exactly training wheels. She'd definitely disapprove if I told her about this conversation. Which is why I'm not going to.

Even though school's finished and our choices are narrowing—we've already had letters about college—strangely, oppositely, I can feel myself expanding. Changing. I want to stretch out like a tree towards the sun, the world at my fingertips. And Sof's friendship is beginning to feel like a cage. She wants me to stay exactly the same.

Jason curls his fingers under my bikini strap, his hand brushing against my skin just where my tan fades to pale. He's right about Ned. My brother's seventies fashion sense also translates to his gender politics, when it comes to me. And I like this bubble we're in. This club.

“Let's keep us a secret,” I say, and it sounds like my idea. “For a bit.”

I float home on the promise of us.

*   *   *

—then I'm not sitting on the library floor anymore or floating home from Jason and the beach. I'm walking across the school car park, directly towards Sof. Aargh.

My hand is raised in a wave as I stagger in surprise, then try to incorporate it into my limp. Time has passed in real life, exactly like detention and the wormhole in Grey's bedroom. The opposite of how things worked in Narnia.

Sof's sitting on the wall in a sundress, sipping something green and frothy. Hubble, bubble, toil and wheatgrass. Her hair is a cloud of curls that wobble as I approach. I'm unsure if it's a nod of welcome.

I shake my own head, trying to focus on the present, and perch next to her, sweating in my jeans. My mind is still wrapped up in Jason, remembering how I'd felt in those early days, like my heart was expanding at a million miles a minute with a hundred new senses, till I was ready to explode. It takes me a moment to think of something to say, and eventually I have to settle for, “Do you mind if I get the bus with you?”

“'Course not,” she says. She sounds both wary and pleased. After a few seconds, she glances at me and adds, “You're not biking?”

“I crashed my bike.”

“Oh, shit. You okay?” Sof turns towards me and I show her my ankle. “Eurgh. Put arnica cream on it.”

That's Sof. Offering advice where none was asked for. But it's meant kindly, and it's the sort of hippie remedy Grey would suggest, so when she asks what happened, I say, “Went round the Burnham corner too fast. It's not so bad.”

“You were at the Book Barn?” she asks lightly, no-big-deal, tearing a sheet of paper from her sketch pad and folding origami, fingers deft. She doesn't know I've not been there since September.

“Yeah.”

We lapse into silence, something that never used to happen with us. We used to talk all the time, nonstop, about everything: boys, girls, homework, the infinite possibilities of the universe, which flavor milk shake was best to dip your chips into, whether I should let Sof cut my hair into a bob.

I'm digging in my book bag for one of the books I checked out—H. G. Wells's
The Time Machine
—and noticing a cinnamon muffin has materialized in there since the wormhole, when Sof nudges me. She's flicking her origami open and shut—a fortune-teller.

“Why does your bag smell like Christmas?” she asks. “Never mind: pick a color.”

“Yellow.”

“Gotcha.” Sof counts it out and unfolds the square, then pulls an exaggerated would-you-believe-it? face. “Gottie will come to the beach on Sunday.”

Summer vacation starts this weekend, and we always spend Sundays at the beach. Rain or shine, whether Ned and his gang go or not. It's one of our friendship traditions, like making up stupid bands and songs to go with them, writing each other's names on the soles of our shoes, or watching the same film while texting incessantly. Not that we've done any of those things since last year. Sof's taking this bus ride as an olive branch.

“Okay,” I agree. Then I open my book bag again for the Mystery Muffin. It's slightly squashed, but I hold it out as a further peace offering. “Here. I think Ned made it.”

Sof hero-worships my brother, because he sings in front of people and she wants to, but is too shy. Half the bands she makes up are for his attention—when she coined “Fingerband,” Ned high-fived her and she didn't wash her hand for a week.

“You're eating white flour?”

I look up. Standing in front of us, wrinkling her perfect nose at the muffin, is Megumi Yamazaki. Of Thomas-put-a-jellyfish-in-her-lunch-box fame. Her family moved along the coast to Brancaster, so we went to different secondary schools, but I've seen her around this year. If Sof's from the fifties, Megumi's the sixties, one of those weird, arty French films: striped T-shirt, short hair—and shorter shorts.

“Meg, you remember Gottie? Actually, weren't you at kindergarten together? And now”—Sof indicates the switch with her hands, ignoring the muffin—“we're in art and drama. I do the sets, Meg does the stardom.”

They beam at each other. Sof's new crush? It seems to be reciprocated. And I don't have the right to be hurt by her not telling me. Then Meg says, “I keep trying to get her to perform, but would you believe she has stage fright?”

Um, yes? She's only ever done bedroom karaoke in front of me.

The bus arrives. It trundles slowly to a stop, but Sof still leaps up anxiously to flag it down anyway. Grey used to tease her: “Are you definitely a hippie, Sofía? You need to relax.”

I limp on after Meg and Sof, who are already curled up next to each other, feet tucked up on the seats, by the time I flop down opposite. Meg fishes out her iPod and I hope she's going to plug in and ignore us, but instead she pops one headphone in her ear and another in Sof's.

“Sorry,” Sof says to me. “Bus tradition.”

I nod and try to give them privacy while they whisper to each other. I break off a piece of muffin: it tastes like autumn, even though the sun is high in the sky.

“Sof, are we on for Fingerband tomorrow?” Meg murmurs.

“Ned's Gottie's brother,” Sof reminds her, with a glance at me. I hadn't known the band was playing.

“Oh, yeah.” Meg leans over Sof, running her eyes over my outfit, presumably confused how I'm related to Ned. He thinks leopard print is a neutral. “Are you going to be at rehearsal? This end-of-summer party sounds like a kick, doesn't it? Did Ned's grandpa honestly sacrifice a goat one year?”

Her words pop-pop-pop in my ears. Grey threw a bacchanalia in the garden every August. Last year, he wore his hair in bunches, asking Ned to push the piano outside so he could sit in the rhododendron pounding out “Chopsticks.” How can Ned think having this party is okay?

“You know Jason, then?” Meg speaks in questions, and doesn't wait for answers. I want to ask how
she
knows Jason, when they spoke, why isn't she sure I know him, has he not talked about me, are we still a secret? “Is it true some boy is moving into Ned's house?”

Shit. Thomas's mysterious return isn't the same for Sof—she moved here the year he left—but she's aware of who he is. I spent the first six months of our friendship complaining about his bizarre disappearance. It's unclear yet if she and I are friends again or what, but as she owl-neck-twists to stare at me, it's pretty obvious: she thinks I should have told her this already.

Too late and blushing furiously, I tell her: “Uh, Thomas Althorpe moved back. Yesterday.”

Meg wrinkles her nose, oblivious, as she texts and talks and drops bombs, all at the same time: “Thomas from kindergarten? Is he really living in Ned's grandpa's room?”

I
definitely
should have mentioned the part where he's in Grey's bedroom.

Sof doesn't speak for a minute, then turns pointedly to Meg and says, “Dramatical Grammatical.”

Meg doesn't look up. She's texting rapidly, her rings flashing in the sunlight.

“All-female hip-hop collective,” Sof tries again, nudging her. “We'll rap about romantic dramas and punctuation.”

The way it used to go, I'd come up with lyrics, or a supporting act. But that's obviously not what Sof wants. Playing our game with Meg and not me—she's making a point.

Meg frowns, somehow graceful as she slides her phone into her ridiculously tight short-shorts pocket. “What are you talking about?”

Sof's still not looking at me, but I can
feel
her bristling. The bus is practically vibrating. When I can't bear the tension anymore, I address the seat in front of me.

“Cheating on me is impermissible. Gonna leave her dangling like a participle.”

Silence. Then: “Never mind,” Sof rasps to Meg, who flicks her eyes back and forth between us, confused.
Sof was my friend first
, I want to yell, like I'm five years old.
Only I'm allowed to know she has stage fright! She tells everyone else she has adenoids!

Grey would say I'm a dog in the manger.

I go back to staring out the window as the countryside blurs by, green and gold. A few minutes later, the colors reassemble into trees and fields as we pull up at the Brancaster stop.

“This is me,” says Meg, standing up. “Nice to see you again, Gottie. We're going to the beach on Sunday. You're welcome to come.”

It's an invitation—to something I'm already part of—but it makes me feel left out.

Meg saunters off down the aisle. Sof stands up too, gesturing after her. “I … we … art project,” she mumbles, dropping something in my lap. “For you.”

She darts off. Through the window, I see her catch up to Meg, polka dots flying. As the bus trundles on, I look at what she gave me: the paper fortune-teller. Under every single fold, she's written:
remember when we used to be friends?

When I get home, Thomas and Ned are playing a very Grey version of Scrabble in the garden—minus the board, half the words are lost in the daisies. I think I can see D-E-S-T-I-N-Y, but it could equally be D-E-N-S-I-T-Y.

Thomas smiles up at me.

“G,” he says, “want to—”

“Nope.” I stomp past them, leg throbbing. I'm suddenly, irrationally, furious. I want to turn back the clock. I want a do-over on this whole year. Because I'm pretty sure I fucked it up.