The bell rings, too early. I think it’s a fire drill, till I see everyone around me holding worksheets in the air. The whiteboard is covered in notations, none of them about fractals. The clock suddenly says midday. And, one by one, Ms. Adewunmi is plucking paper from hands, adding them to her growing pile.
Panicked, I look in front of me. There’s a worksheet there, but I haven’t written on it. I don’t even remember being given it.
Next to me, Jake Halpern hands in his worksheet and slouches away, his bag knocking against me as he slides off the stool. Ms. Adewunmi snaps her fingers.
“I…” I stare at her, then back at my blank paper. “I ran out of time,” I say, lamely.
“All right, then,” she says, with a small frown. “Detention.”
* * *
I’ve never had detention before. When I check in after my final lesson, a teacher I don’t recognize stamps my slip, then waves a bored hand. “Find a seat and read. Do some homework,” he says, turning back to his grading.
I make my way through the hot, half-empty room to a seat by the window. Inside my binder is the college application packet I got in homeroom this morning. I shove it to the bottom of my book bag, to be dealt with never, and pull out Ms. Adewunmi’s worksheet instead. For lack of anything better to do, I start writing.
THE GREAT SPACETIME QUIZ!
Name three features of special relativity.
(1) The speed of light NEVER changes. (2) Nothing can travel faster than light. Which means (3) depending on the observer, time runs at different speeds. Clocks are a way of measuring time as it exists on Earth. If the world turned faster, we’d need a new type of minute.
What is general relativity?
It explains gravity in the context of time and space. An object—Newton’s apple tree, perhaps—forces spacetime to curve around it because of gravity. It’s why we get black holes.
Describe the Gödel metric.
It’s a solution to the E = MC2 equation that “proves” the past still exists. Because if spacetime is curved, you could cross it to get there.
What is a key characteristic of a Möbius strip?
It’s infinite. To make one, you half twist a length of paper and Scotch tape the ends together. An ant could walk along the entire surface, without ever crossing the edge.
What is an event horizon?
A spacetime boundary—the point of no return. If you observe a black hole, you can’t see inside. Beyond the event horizon, you can see the universe’s secrets—but you can’t get out of the hole.
Bonus point: write the equation for the Weltschmerzian Exception.
?!
Even after I stare at the final question for several centuries before giving up, it’s still only 4:16 p.m. Forty-four minutes till I can escape.
Resisting the urge to nap, I start doodling. The Milky Way, constellations of question marks. Geometry jokes, spaceships, Jason’s name written then scribbled out, over and over and over. Then Thomas’s, same thing.
When I look down at the worksheet again, it’s a total mess.
4:21 p.m. I yawn and open my notebook, planning to copy my answers onto a clean page.
E = MC2, I begin.
And the second I write the 2, the whole equation starts to shimmer.
Um … I yawn and blink, but there it is: my handwriting is definitely shimmering. All it needs is a pair of platforms and a disco ball.
I flip the notebook shut. It’s a standard college-ruled pad. Heart fluttering, I fumble a couple of times opening it back to the right page. Those ruled lines are now rippling like sound waves across the paper.
Once, I read that lack of sleep can make you hallucinate if you stay awake long enough. But I thought it meant migraine aura-type black spots in front of your eyes, not cartoon-animated notebooks. As if to prove me wrong, the equation begins to spin. Distantly, I’m aware I should probably be panicking. But it’s like trying to wake up from a dream—you give yourself the instruction, and nothing happens.
Instead, I yawn and look away, out the window, and begin counting backwards from a thousand in prime numbers: 997, 991 … My curiosity gets the better of me around ninety-seven, and I glance back at the notebook. It’s not moving. There’s my pen scrawl on lined paper, nothing more.
All right, then, as Ms. Adewunmi would say. It’s the summer flu, or the temperature in here, or the being-awake-since-yesterday. I shake my shoulders back, pick up my pen.
I’m writing Jason’s name again when the notebook disappears.
Seriously.
My pen is hovering in the air where the page should be and suddenly now isn’t. It’s so ludicrous, I can’t help it: I laugh.
“It’s not giggle time, Miss Oppenheimer,” warns the teacher.
Ms., I correct in my head. And then, “Giggle time”? What, are we, seven? I’ve had sex! I’ve made irreversible decisions, awful ones, huge ones. I’m old enough to DRIVE.
He frowns at me—I’m grinning like a loon, so I pretend to write on an invisible notebook until, satisfied, he turns away.
I look back at the absence-of-notebook and swallow another cackle. Because I’m wrong: it’s not invisible. If it were, I’d be able to see the desk underneath. But instead, there’s a rectangle of nothing. An absence. It looks sort of like the black-and-white fuzz of an old TV that won’t tune in, or how I imagine the indescribable gloop beyond the boundaries of the universe, the stuff the Big Bang is expanding into.
Am I going bananas?
I bend down, peering underneath the desk. Lumps of gum, a Fingerband sticker, and graffiti on solid wood.
But when I sit upright again, there’s still that rectangle of television fuzz.
It’s not growing, or changing, or moving. I slump in my seat and stare at it, hypnotized. Drifting back to five years ago. When there was a boy.
An attic.
And a first kiss that wasn’t.
* * *
“Bawk, bawk, bawk,” Thomas says from the other side of the attic. “Chicken. Bet there’s not even arteries in your hands.”
“Mmmm.” I don’t look up from the anatomy encyclopedia. Like everything else in Grey’s bookshop, it’s secondhand, and there’s graffiti on the pictures. “Let me check.”
He’s wrong, you do have arteries in your hands, but I’m planning to do the blood pact anyway. I just want to look at this book first. The pages with boy parts especially. I turn it on its side, tilt my head. How does that even…?
“G, what are you doing?” Thomas peers over my shoulder.
I slam the book shut.
“Nothing! You’re right. No arteries,” I lie, my face bright red. “Let’s do it.”
“Gimme your hand,” he says, waving the knife. “Oops.”
The knife flies through the air. When Thomas turns to get it, he topples over a stack of books.
“What are you kids doing up there?” Grey bellows from the floor below.
I yell down the stairs, “Nothing. Thomas is just reshelving. We thought we’d use this wacky new system called the al-pha-bet.”
There’s a muffled curse and a giant rumble of laughter. I turn back to Thomas, who’s retrieved the knife and is carving our initials into a bookcase. He won’t be here tomorrow. We’ll never see each other again. On what stupid planet is that even possible?
And it means there’s about four hours left to do something I’ve been thinking about for weeks.
“Thomas. No one is ever going to kiss you,” I announce. He looks up, blinking owlishly behind his glasses. “And, no one’s ever going to kiss me either.”
“OK,” he says, and takes a huge inhaler puff. “We should probably do that, then.”
We stand up, which is a problem. I grew ninety-three feet this summer. The eaves are low and I hunch, but I’m still six inches taller than him. Thomas clambers onto a stack of books, then we’re the right mouth height. He leans forward, and I suck peanut butter off my braces. Here we go …
“Ow!”
“It’s raining,” I pretend to whine. It’s the seaside; I don’t mind getting wet, but I want to hear what he’ll say—
“You’re a twelve-year-old girl, not the Wicked Witch of the West,” Grey booms, slamming the door behind us as I giggle.
Outside, Thomas and I teeter on the porch, the air soggy. He looks at me, his glasses smeared, his hair curly with humidity. His hand forms a fist. Little finger pointed straight out at me.
A salute, a signal, a promise.
“Your house?” he asks. I don’t know whether he means for a kiss or the blood pact. Or both.
“I don’t know how to be, without you,” I say.
“Me either,” he says.
I lift up my hand, and curl my finger into his. Then we jump off the step. Into the rain.
* * *
A paint-stained finger taps on the fuzz in front of me, and instantly, it’s a notebook again. I blink, looking around me, dazed.
“What are you doing?” Sof is standing in front of the desk. Silhouetted against the windows, she’s just an outline—pointy hair, triangle dress, stalk legs, light blazing all around her. An avenging angel, come to rescue me from detention!
I’m confused, sleepy. Sof and I have barely been on corridor nodding terms all year, yet here she is, throwing her portfolio on the ground and her body into the chair next to mine.
After blinking the sun out of my eyes, I blink again when I see her curly hair done up like fro-yo, red lipstick, rhinestone glasses. Sometime between now and whenever I stopped noticing, my erstwhile best friend has remade herself into a fifties musical.
“Uh, hi,” I whisper, unsure whether we’re allowed to talk. Not because it’s detention, but because we don’t hang out the way we did at our old school.
She leans over to peer at my notebook.
“Huh,” she says, tapping my doodles, where I’ve scribbled out both Jason’s and Thomas’s names so they’re illegible. I suppose this explains my dream. “Is this your artistic comeback?”
It’s a pointed remark. Back in ninth grade, Sof opted for art, geography, German. I went with her choices to save making my own, which sums up our entire friendship. I never told her I had different plans, once we switched schools right before junior year—it was easier to wait for her to notice I wasn’t at the next easel.
“Physics quiz,” I explain.
“Whatcha do to get thrown in the gulag?” she croaks. For a white-witch-tiger-balm-super-hippie, she sounds like she gargles cigarettes for breakfast.
“Daydreaming.” I fiddle with my pen. “What about you?”
“Nothing,” she says. “It’s time to spring you.”
When I look up at the clock, she’s right. The teacher’s gone. The room’s empty. Detention ended an hour ago. Huh. It doesn’t feel like I’ve slept for that long.
“They lock the bike sheds at five.” She stands up, fiddling with the strap on her portfolio. “Do you want to catch the bus with me?”
“Okay…” I say, only half paying attention. I stare at the notebook: it’s only paper, but I shove it right to the bottom of my book bag like it’s to blame for what just happened.
Was I really asleep? Is that where the last hour went? I think back to Saturday, a whole afternoon lost before I found myself under the apple tree.
Perhaps I am insane. I take that thought, and shove it as far down as it will go too.
Sof’s waiting for me at the door. The silence that rides between us all the way home is so heavy, it deserves its own bus ticket.
Monday 5 July (Evening)
[Minus three hundred and seven]
Schere. Stein. Papier.
It’s after dinner, and we’ve been standing outside Grey’s bedroom door playing rock-paper-scissors for twenty minutes. Food was eaten in silent disbelief after Papa suggested Ned and I might want to clear out Grey’s room.
“Dare you,” says Ned. Stein beats Schere.
“You first,” I say. Papier beats Stein.
“Best out of, uh, fifty?”
I’ve only been in there once all year. It was right after the funeral. Ned was leaving for art school in London and Papa was falling apart and pretending he wasn’t by hiding at the bookshop, so I did it. Not looking left or right, I took a garbage bag and I swept in everything I needed to—deodorant sticks, beer bottles, dirty plates, half-read newspapers. (Grey’s cleaning philosophy: “Here be dragons!”)
Then I went through the house, picking out the things I couldn’t bear to look at—the enormous orange casserole dish and the Japanese lucky cat; his favorite tartan blanket and a lumpy clay ashtray I made; dozens of tiny Buddha statues tucked into shelves and corners—and I put it all in the shed. I did the same with his car. Papa didn’t notice, or didn’t say anything, not even when I rearranged the furniture to hide the spectrum of crayon marks on the wall, marking our heights as we grew up—Mum, Ned, me. Even Thomas, occasionally.
Then I shut Grey’s bedroom door, and it hasn’t been opened until now.
Paper beats rock, again. I win.
“Whatever.” Ned shrugs, no big deal. But I notice his hand rests on the doorknob for a full minute before he turns it. His nails are pink. When he finally pushes the door open, it creaks. I hold my breath, but no swarm of locusts emerges. There are no earthquakes. It’s exactly as I left it.
Which is bad, because there are books everywhere. Double-shelved from wonky floor to sloping ceiling. Piled up against the walls. Stacked under the bed. Word stalagmites.
Ned clambers past me and yanks open the curtains. I watch from the doorway as the evening sunlight pours in, illuminating approximately eleventy million more books and sending up dust tornadoes.
“Whoa,” says Ned, turning around, taking it all in. “Papa told me you cleaned it.”
“I did!” God. I lurk in the doorway, afraid to go in any farther. “Do you see any moldy coffee mugs?”
“Yeah, but…” He turns away and starts fiddling with cupboard doors and pulling things open. There are more books inside a chest of drawers. After Ned opens the wardrobe, he lets out a long, low whistle.
He doesn’t say anything, just stands there staring as if he’s seen something … odd. As in disappearing-notebook-hole-in-the-universe odd.
“Have you found Narnia in there or something?”
“Grots.”
“What is it?” I take a step into the room, keeping my eyes on Ned and not the rest of it—the photographs of our mum everywhere. The huge painting on the wall above the bed.
“Grots,” Ned says again, not looking up, talking to the wardrobe. “Fuck. Gottie. His shoes are still in here.”
Oh. There’s that swarm of locusts.
“I know.”
“Couldn’t face it, huh?” Ned gives me a sympathetic look, then turns to sit on the piano stool. When Grey was steamed on homemade wine, he’d leave his door open and tunelessly pound out music hall hits. “It’s not the melody that counts, it’s the volume,” he’d boom, not listening to our many declarations otherwise.
Ned runs his hands up and down the keys. The notes emerge in a series of muffled plinks, but I recognize the song.
Papa’s left a stack of flattened cardboard boxes on the bed. I walk round to the other side so I don’t have to see the painting, and start assembling them. I’m careful not to touch the bed itself, even though it’s covered in a dust sheet. This is where Grey slept. In twenty-four hours, Thomas is going to erase his dreams.
“Man, this is going to take forever!” Ned exclaims, even though he hasn’t done anything yet. After a final ten-finger kerplink on the piano, he spins round idly on the stool. “You shouldn’t have to be in here, doing this. It’s Papa’s grand plan.”<
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“Do you want to tell him that, or shall I?”
“Ha.” He bounds past me to a book stack and starts shuffling through it—not so much organizing as rearranging. Fiddling. Flicking through and reading bits of things. He glances up at me. “Grotbag. What do you think Thomas did?”
“What do you mean?” I frown at the box in front of me. I’m trying to line up the books perfectly perpendicular, but one of them has warped pages from being dropped in the sea, and it’s wonkifying everything.
“You know,” says Ned. “To get sent back here. Banished to Holksea.”
“Banished?”
“C’mon, there’s no way this settle-in-for-the-summer story holds up,” Ned continues, juggling a book. “It’s so last-minute—the flight must have cost a fortune. Nah, it’s punishment for something—or getting him away from whatever he’s done. I bet he’s pulled a Mr. Tuttle.”
Mr. Tuttle was Thomas’s hamster. A furball who escaped at bedtime seventeen nights in a row, until his dad worked out what was going on and bought a padlock. “Oh dear,” Thomas would sorrowfully declare, having opened the cage not five minutes before. “Mr. Tuttle has got out again. I’ll sleep over at G’s in case he’s there.” His bag would already be packed.
“C’mon,” insists Ned. “You know what Thomas was like.”
Huh. It hasn’t occurred to me to wonder why he’s been sent home so quickly.
A hammering on the bedroom door breaks my thoughts wide open.
“Yo, Oppenheimer! Answer your phone much? I’ve been looking all over, have you seen the time—” Jason stops when he sees me. There’s a pause as he literally shifts and readjusts: stepping back and leaning against a bookshelf by the door, arranging himself just so, before he smiles lazily and amends, “Oppenheimers.”
My throat plays rock-paper-scissors and settles on rock.
“Gottie.” He meets my gaze this time, blue eyes searching mine before he weighs out his words, one by one. “Again. All. Right?”
I have a book in one hand, the other opening and closing on empty air, trying to hold on as we look at each other.
The Square Root of Summer Page 2