by Melissa Keil
‘Josh, unless you are shoring up your house against a vampire attack, I’m gonna need a little more information.’
I take a deep breath. I know exactly how big a git I’m being, and exactly how douchey I’m going to sound. But I stare at my notepad and open my mouth, and my plan, unwittingly, pours out.
I run out of breath, tapering into a silence that’s echoed on Sam’s end. It’s practically filled with the clunking sounds of his brain.
I stare at my watch. The silence lasts for what feels like an epoch.
And then laughter echoes through my phone, so loud I have to hold it away from my ear.
‘Lights. Gotcha. You’re going to have to give me some time.’
‘So you’ll help me?’
I can hear Sam struggling to can the laughter. ‘Josh,’ he chokes. ‘There is no way in hell I am missing out on this. You are, objectively, insane. This sounds like the worst plan in the history of everything. Worse than the time Adrian tried to ask Annie Curtis out by sending his mum over to her house with a pot roast.’
‘That’s not what this is about –’
‘Yeah, whatever. Dude, I need to see this. Yes, I will help you.’
I leap up, boosted by a sudden surge of adrenaline and gratefulness. ‘Sam – thank you. Um, I’m gonna call Amy too, but I think I might need a few more hands –’
‘Guess you’re lucky our crew is full of hopeless romantics,’ he says dryly. ‘I’ll make some calls. But hey, Joshua?’
‘Yes?’
He bursts out laughing again. ‘Dude, you are so gonna end up as a character in one of my movies.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The limits of the observable universe
I’d almost forgotten how comforting Elsie’s home is, with her dogs and cats and too-loud brothers, most of whom don’t live here anymore but who nevertheless are always here. I wave at Ryan and Raj, who are in the midst of raiding the fridge, and who greet me casually, like I haven’t been missing at all. Colin is in the lounge, feet up on the sofa, phone pressed to his ear while he shuttles handfuls of peanuts into his mouth. He winks at me without a pause in his conversation, lilting Hindi following me up the stairs. And when I’m curled up on Elsie’s messy bedroom floor, the setting sun casting oranges and pinks through her window, it’s like I can breathe properly again.
Elsie sits in front of me with her no-nonsense face on and methodically assails me with questions. I do my best to answer, laying out facts as succinctly as I can. But I’m fairly certain that, in this case, the facts only illuminate some of the story. Elsie wants me to talk about my feelings. And, like that floundering boy in so many of her romance movies, I stumble and choke on my words, not at all sure what I’m supposed to be communicating.
We exhaust every permutation of the Joshua conundrum, till I beg for a change of subject. Just saying his name is making my heart falter. It is as disconcerting as it ever was, but I have long since given up trying to quash it.
Now Elsie is stretched out on her bed watching An Affair to Remember on her laptop while I, having abandoned any hope of gleaning usable information from her movies, am reading an article on Maryam Mirzakhani and her Fields Medal on my phone. Half my brain is on the symmetry of curved surfaces, the other half on … other things.
It’s late. The only light in the room is from our screens and the string of butterfly lights above Elsie’s bed. I’m yawning, waiting for my brother to give me a ride home, when my phone pings with a message. Like my errant thoughts have conjured him from the ether, Joshua’s name appears on the screen. My hands start to tingle.
The message reads:
Sophia. I think I have made an important discovery. And I think you might be the only one who understands it. I know it’s late, but can you meet me at school?
I don’t know what Elsie has seen on my face, but she pauses her movie. She sits up and clicks on her lamp, swinging her legs over the side of the bed. Wordlessly, I hold my phone out to her. She grabs it from my hand and looks at the screen.
She stares at it, and then at me, for an absurdly long moment. And then she leaps to her feet and flings open the door. ‘Rajesh!’ she yells down the stairs. A moment later, a flustered Raj appears in her doorway, Sunil Gavaskar wheezing behind him.
‘You need to drive us to school,’ she barks.
‘What, now?’ he says, waving a hand at his Mr Men pyjamas.
Elsie grabs her denim jacket with one hand and my sleeve with the other. ‘Yes, now, dumb arse! It’s an emergency.’
I swallow, my eyes fixed on my phone. ‘Elsie –’
Elsie stops fluttering. She walks over to me, stopping a handspan in front. ‘Rey,’ she says gently. ‘What do you want?’
I glance at my phone as it pings again, twice in quick succession. The first message is from Toby, letting me know that he is waiting out the front.
The second message is from Joshua.
If you’re coming, head towards the East Lawn.
I gather my thoughts. They’re still half circling through Mirzakhani’s moduli spaces, and also, for some reason, the fact that the collective noun for a group of cats is a clowder. My phone feels hot in my hand.
‘All right,’ I say decisively. ‘Let’s go.’
Toby pulls up in front of St Augustine’s and kills the engine, thankfully no longer protesting or demanding explanations. Elsie and Raj lean forward from the back seat. The four of us stare, silently, at the hulking buildings and shadowy lawns.
I turn around. I don’t know what Elsie is pondering as her eyes roam over our school. I think what I’m seeing in her face is something like sadness.
‘You know, Sophia,’ she says quietly. ‘Did you ever wonder if all of this isn’t just some giant, pointless waste of time?’
I follow her eyes. ‘Pointless. Which part, specifically?’
Elsie waves a hand at St Augustine’s. ‘All of it, specifically. Like, so far, we’ve spent most of our years in buildings like this, and for what? What are we supposed to be equipped for when we’re spat out the other end?’
Toby drums his fingers on the wheel. ‘I remember a heap of guff that’ll only ever be useful for pub trivia – if I ever got invited to pub trivia, which I don’t, because oh hey, my only friend is a weird Finnish guy who I’m pretty sure is stealing my clothes –’ He takes off his glasses and rubs hastily at them.
I swivel in my seat and consider my brother. He looks like the same Toby; crisp shirt and clean-shaven face. But there’s something bubbling to the surface under his skin; it’s like watching liquid on a Bunsen burner just before it boils. This unmoored version of Toby fits no part of my paradigm. It’s alarming, and yet oddly comforting.
Raj leans through the gap in the seats and punches Toby in the shoulder. They’ve never really gotten along; I think Raj is too loud, and Toby too grim, for them to be friends. I don’t think Toby knows how to interpret the punch. He stares, frowning, at the spot on his arm that Rajesh has smacked.
‘So then maybe Pinky has the right idea,’ Raj says. ‘Lock yourself away in a lab or something. Stick to what you know. It worked for – I dunno, who was that guy who discovered oxygen? I read about him in History of Econ?’
Elsie wraps her hands around my headrest with a snort. ‘You mean Carl Scheele? You know he also liked to lick his experiments? This guy was supposedly a genius, but he couldn’t figure out that sticking your tongue in a test tube of cyanide is probably not a great idea.’
‘He ended up dying of mercury poisoning,’ I add. ‘I don’t think he’s the role model any of us should be trying to emulate.’
Toby snorts. The windows of the Corolla have fogged up, the glow from the street light above us barely breaking through. It should be claustrophobic. But sitting here in the dark beside my friends and my brother – who, by all accounts, has been saving all his words since the beginning of time to unleash upon me these past few weeks – I’m filled with an inexplicable sense of calm. I’ve only experienced
it a few times in my life. With my head inside an equation. Whenever I’m in Elsie’s presence. And, most recently, cocooned inside Joshua’s tiny bedroom. I ignore the sharp squeeze in my chest at this last thought, and unbuckle my seatbelt.
‘Guys, I’m the last person in the universe who’d have any useful advice.’ I run my palm over the windscreen, clearing a space in the fog. The school looms in the distance. ‘Yes, some of this has sucked balls. But, you know, not all of it has been that bad.’ I jab my brother in the arm, and then let my hand linger experimentally on his shoulder in a way that I hope might be reassuring.
Toby glances at the dead weight of my hand. He rolls his eyes, grinning faintly as I hastily pull my hand away and crank open the passenger door.
‘Anyway,’ says Elsie, ‘I suppose the alternatives are pretty bleak. If it’s a choice between this or some kind of Hunger Games scenario, that is. Though how much simpler would it be if our only goal was to not die horribly?’
‘Elsie, unless your dystopian scenario involves a race to solve a quadratic equation, or, like, a battle of the spreadsheets, all of us would be cannon fodder,’ I say. ‘I’m not sure the not-dying-horribly thing would be simpler for any of us.’
I swing my legs out of the car and slam the door shut behind me. Three faces peer thoughtfully out at me.
Toby winds down the window. ‘So, what? You’re saying we should just accept our limitations.’
I shake my head. ‘No. I don’t think I believe that. I think – well, say, take the Doctor. He has all of time and space at hand, and he still can’t anticipate every outcome.’ I ponder this for a moment. ‘I suppose if you knew for sure which battles weren’t winnable? You might as well just lie down and let the Daleks shoot you in the face.’
Toby laughs again, that thin chuckle that makes him seem both wiser and younger. He smiles at me, and I think – no, I know – that he means it.
Elsie casts one more glance at the school. ‘You sure you don’t want me to come?’
I lean in through the open window. ‘I’ll be fine. I’ll call you if I need you, okay?’
I turn around and walk away before I can change my mind.
As I suspected, the gates to the school driveway are padlocked shut. I look around, noticing that a small side gate has been left ajar.
There are no stars out tonight. I slip through the gate, pulling it closed behind me, and as I move into the school grounds, the light pollution from the street quickly disappears. The sole park bench on the wide strip of lawn sits abandoned under the blank, dark sky. For some reason, it makes me feel infinitely sad.
I hug my jacket close as I walk, St Augustine’s looming all around me. I recognise the pathways and the water fountains as I round the main building, following the path to the East Lawn. I pass the circle of benches that the year tens have claimed, and, just beyond them, I can make out the kitchen garden, the year-sevens’ guinea pigs peering suspiciously through the wire grate of their hutch. The science labs look particularly shabby in the dark – the squat bunker seems less a centre of wisdom and scholarship, and more a grey prison dormitory from a Siberian gulag. I recognise it all, in theory, but I can’t seem to regain my equilibrium; there’s an alienness to this place that daylight-me has mapped from memory. Odd what a little variation in light can do to something so familiar.
I walk beneath the covered walkways behind the main building. It’s even darker here, with the maples towering overhead. I suppose some people would label my current predicament – wandering through an empty school in the middle of the night, with the wind whipping a sole salt-and-vinegar chip packet around me – as maybe a bit creepy. Luckily I’m not foolish enough to be freaked out by a little darkness.
I pause at the edge of the path, the wide plain of the East Lawn stretching in front of me. The dark is so thick here that my depth of field is all off. I know it’s just a trick of the night, but the lawn seems larger than normal – and yet there, in the distance, at the very edge of the grounds, it remains. A blot on the landscape, framed by a backdrop of identical, featureless trees. The double-storey brick monstrosity that is the bane of my existence. The St Augustine’s Visual and Performing Arts Centre, the building that is either representative of everything dysfunctional and impossible in my life, or just a repurposed convent with leaky toilets and the pervasive smell of wet dog.
It actually looks kind of small in the dark.
‘What the hell am I doing here?’ I whisper into the empty air.
Come on, Sophia, my brain supplies helpfully. Stop ignoring the obvious. You know why you’re here.
‘Fine,’ I hiss out loud as my feet take me forward. ‘But if this ends with Joshua from the future coming to tell me I’m about to get hit by a bus, I am going to be so pissed off.’ Strange how I fail to hear the conviction in my voice.
I know this is hopeless. Between the two of us we barely make one functioning human; forget about being two halves of a whole or any of that nonsense. Together, I think we might be more akin to a gene splice experiment gone awry; the abominable creation of a mad scientist, with three left arms, and testicles where its ears should be.
But I can’t deny that there is something that draws us together. Let’s face it, if I can do nothing else, I can quantify data and weigh up evidence –
Fact is: I miss him.
This is hopeless. I have zero chance of being able to match someone whose heart is so open. I’m not that sort of girl. I will never cry in movies, and, even after a year of practice, I still cannot laugh on cue. Nothing about us makes any sense. And yet.
And yet and yet and yet.
‘There, I said it,’ I say out loud. ‘Are you happy now, brain?’
But the night air doesn’t answer me, so I walk on, feeling like a dipshit for talking to myself.
I have no idea where I am supposed to go, but instinct propels me towards the Arts building. I’m partway across the lawn when I catch a glimpse of something over to my right, in the middle of the overgrown grass, flapping gently in the breeze like a beacon.
A single red flag, shiny and bright, standing right in the centre of the decommissioned amphitheatre.
I step into the long grass and head towards it.
I think the last time I ventured out here was in year seven at that infamous production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, watching Sanjay Khan and half a dozen teachers trying desperately to untangle his pharaoh wig from the mechanised stage gears. Three shallow circles of steps lead to the round stage, a few weeds, black in the night, growing through the boards. The metal box that houses the controls is locked tight with a rusted padlock. It looks exactly like what it is – a useless, broken amateur stage with an incongruous red flag on a pole jammed into a cracked board in the centre.
I walk down the steps and up to the flag, searching for a clue.
It’s made, not surprisingly, of a familiar red paper, thick and shiny. I examine it closely, but there’s no writing or instructions of any kind, just a blank pennant taped to what I now see is a broom handle. The amphitheatre sits parallel to the Visual and Performing Arts Centre, the shadowy building directly in the distance behind the flag.
Something crackles in the atmosphere. I pivot in place, the red flag fluttering behind me.
A sharp screech echoes through the yard.
And then music, grand and pompous, fills the air. It’s all crashing cymbals and horns and brass. I frantically scan the East Lawn, but I can’t see anyone. I turn back to the Arts building, bracing a hand unconsciously on the flagpole, and I’m immediately blinded by what feels like the blaze of a thousand supernovas.
I reel backwards as the East Lawn is flooded with light. I throw up a hand to shield my face, the grandiose music increasing in tempo. In the distance, I can just about make out the Arts building, lit inexplicably from the outside.
I can’t be sure – what with the eye trauma and the mild panic that at any moment a crowd is going to lunge out at me like some der
anged surprise party – but I could swear the ground beneath me seems to roll just a fraction.
I close my eyes and grip the flagpole, heart hammering and eyes on fire.
And then, just as quickly as it began, the lights and the music die.
Spots dance beneath my eyelids. My ears are ringing in the now-resolute quiet.
I open my eyes again, still clutching at the flagpole. In front of me is the wide expanse of lawn, a row of identical pine trees standing peacefully along the fence.
A soft ring of lights, like the landing circle for an alien spacecraft, flickers to life. Slowly, the light intensifies, way out in front of me.
And the St Augustine’s Visual and Performing Arts Centre is gone.
I blink, and blink again.
I rub my eyes. I must look like one of those cartoon characters, eyes popping out of my head, doing a comically exaggerated head-clearing shake.
I clock the row of trees, still, ostensibly, on the edge of the grounds. I see the overgrown grass, gently moving in the breeze, and the tall fence that marks our school boundary.
But the Arts building persists in its absence.
I take a single step forward, but that almost imperceptible rumble shifts beneath me again. I feel kind of dizzy.
There is a crackle and hiss, and the music resumes. The empty circle of light intensifies, till that blinding glow floods the East Lawn again. Despite my best efforts, I can’t keep my eyes open. I squeeze them closed as a spotlight hits me directly in the eyeball.
And all of a sudden, it is dark behind my eyelids again; only flickering entopic remnants remain. I open my eyes. The lights have gone. The music has stopped.
And the Arts building is standing exactly where it should be.
My feet carry me backwards until the backs of my knees hit the lowest edge of the amphitheatre steps. I sit down heavily.
The grass on the stage floor is slightly trampled. The flagpole is a tad askew. The ringing in my ears from the music muffles any other sounds. I look, dazedly, around me, but, though I have the strangest instinct that I am not alone, there is no-one here that I can see.