The Square Root of Summer

by Harriet Reuter Hapgood

  Oblivious, Ned drops the book he’s holding onto a stalagmite, which promptly topples. He leaps across the falling books, offering his fist for Jason to bump.

  “Shiiit, mate,” Ned says, as they perform a complicated handshake. It seems to involve a lot of thumbs. “Is Niall going ballistic?”

  “The usual.” Jason reverts to slow motion as the handshake ends. He sighs. “You ready?”

  “Grots.” Ned’s practically out the door already as he turns to me. “Swaps?”

  I concentrate on assembling another box, fumbling over the corners. “What’s the swap?”

  “I forgot, we’ve got a Fingerband meeting. Look, do the books? Get them in the car, and I promise I’ll take care of the rest of it.” When I look at him, he adds softly, “His clothes.”

  “Seriously?” I can’t decide if Ned’s trying to get out of packing the books or shield me from everything else. Grey’s shoes. The photographs. The Wurst.

  I steel myself to look up at the painting on the wall. My final art exam from last year. It’s hard, being the straight one in a house with Dumbledore and Peter Pan and Axl Rose, being friends with bangle-wearing glittered artists. So I’d tried, and I’d painted the canal. At the school exhibition, Papa had taken one look at it—a giant blue sausage—and christened it The Wurst. Ned had laughed himself silly. I’d pretended I didn’t mind, and laughed too.

  “Gots, dude.” Grey had clamped my shoulder in one giant hand, holding me steady. “You tried something different. You think your brother would attempt anything he wasn’t already good at?” We contemplated the sausage for a minute, then he said, “Your mum liked blue.”

  I tear my eyes away from The Wurst and see Ned is hovering in the doorway, waiting for me to make up my mind.

  “Deal,” I say.

  “Cheers, Grots!” he yells, disappearing across the sitting room. “Jase, I’ll grab my gear, see you outside in five.”

  Then I’m alone with Jason for the first time since the day Grey died.

  Soft as a sunset, he smiles. And says, “Margot.”

  The way it ended between us, a text message from a hundred miles away, I never had the chance to let him go. Instead, I stuffed all my heartbreak in a box like the one I’m packing now, and waited. When he says my name, it floods the room.

  I could melt into him. But instead I grin, teeth and terror, try to speak, and—

  Jason finally breaks the awkward to murmur, “How’s. It. Going?”

  “Okay!” I answer too loud and too fast. Then, squeakily: “How is…”

  Shit. My brain blanks on where he’s been. We talked every day last summer, I Internet-stalked him for weeks in the autumn, but I can’t remember where he went to college.

  “Nottingham Trent,” he fills in with a slouchy shrug, his eyes not leaving mine. “It’s all right.”

  There’s no air in the room, no air in my lungs, as Jason peels himself off the doorway and approaches me. For a second, I let myself hope he’ll slide his arms around my waist, help me forget about this whole horrible year by giving me someone to belong to. Then he flops backwards next to the half-empty box, onto Grey’s bed. I wince.

  It’s too much: the combination of Grey’s room and Jason, so close to me. Last October, alone in this empty house and after weeks of trying to work out what we were to each other, I’d asked him. And he’d texted, I think I can only manage friends for now. For now. I bet my heart on that caveat, and now here he is.

  I grip the side of the box, trying to breathe. Concentrate on stacking Grey’s diaries inside the box. Don’t look at The Wurst. Don’t remember how Jason had laughed at it too, a bit.

  “Hey, daydreamer.” He reaches out and touches my arm. “What about you? Had a good year?”

  And as he says it, everything inside the box blinks out. It’s no longer a box of books, but a box of nothingness. TV fuzz. Like in detention this afternoon.

  Not like detention.

  This time, the fuzz is tuning in, forming a picture, swirling, more like, more like—smoke. I can even smell a bonfire. And there’s a flicker of light. My fingers tremble. This can’t be happening, not with Jason here. I lean closer, to check if he dropped a cigarette or something, and I swear I can see the tartan check of our picnic blanket. Our dandelion-strewn lawn. Hear music. I reach my hand out, I can almost touch it—

  “Margot? Gottie?” Jason says. “You seem…”

  His voice is far away, and I feel a sudden tug as though I’m being

  I close my eyes as the universe contracts and expands.

  * * *

  “Hey, daydreamer. Brewski?” Jason asks, handing me a can of beer.

  I take it, even though I don’t want another drink. Sof has been sneaking vodka all night, but one sip left me woozy—floaty. And parties aren’t my thing. When Grey wants to celebrate the existence of trees, or the migration of birds, or his annual Last Day of Summer hootenanny, I hover at the edges. Tonight, it’s Midsummer’s Eve, and I’ve hidden myself under the apple tree, where I can see everyone, and everyone can’t entirely see me. Except, apparently, Jason.

  He’s already opened it—the “brewski.” Fingerband has started doing this stupid dude-backwards-baseball-cap in-joke. Everything’s brewski and broseph and fist bumps. It’s idiotic.

  “This way, we don’t have to keep getting up and down,” Jason adds, plonking a six-pack in front of us, then flopping onto the blanket. Next to me. Um. Okay?

  “Cool thinking, bro,” I say in a deep voice, then take a sip of the beer—it’s warm.

  He laughs. “You know we’re being ironic?” He twists to look at me, and I look back. In the dark, his eyes are practically navy. “You can’t be called Fingerband and go full metal.”

  “Full metal?” I take another sip, wishing the beer were cold. It’s a hot night, but Grey has insisted on a huge bonfire. Earlier he was leaping across it, yelling about Vikings. I smile in the dark.

  “KISS makeup, safety pins in our noses, shouting about Satan.” Jason attempts devil horns, but it’s tricky when you’re resting on your elbows.

  “Isn’t that punk?” I ask.

  Jason laughs, a low rumble as though we’re in on a joke together, but I’m not trying to be funny. I don’t have a clue. Ned’s the musical encyclopedia. I listen to whatever’s on the radio—which Grey tunes to static. I’m not sure why Jason’s even over here, talking to me about music. The most he’s ever said to me in ten years of knowing Ned is, “How’s it hanging, oddball?”

  “The point is, it’s cooler if we play metal but act dorky.” He cracks open another can. The clunk-sploosh is as loud as a firework in the dark garden, but no one looks over at us as he edges closer and murmurs, “Margot. How come you never come to see us rehearse?”

  Because you’ve never asked. Because I’d rather watch paint dry. Because Sof worships Ned and if I tell her you’ve invited me, she’ll make us go—and Fingerband sounds like a goat in a lawnmower.

  Across the garden, Sof’s on a blanket with this week’s girlfriend, both of them laughing at Ned’s air guitar. I mentally add Jason’s invitation to the tally of secrets I’m keeping from her.

  “You should come along,” he says again. “School’s over, huh?”

  “Yeah. I finished my last exam on Friday.” My elbows are getting fuzzy; pins and needles. Is that why he’s talking to me? School’s out, and I’m rolling with the cool kids now?

  Across the garden, Ned hollers something and jogs off inside, into the house. When he’s out of sight, Jason leans over my shoulder, nudging me with his chin. “Give me a taste.”

  I turn to him, to say he can have the beer, it’s gross, and he all of a sudden plants his mouth on mine. I squeak with surprise, into his tongue, but he doesn’t laugh. His lips are firm against mine, a question. I kiss him back, but I don’t know what to do. I’ve never kissed anyone before. It’s warm and beery, and it’s Jason! Why is he kissing me? And then it’s … I’m … We’re … I float away, closing my eyes.


  * * *

  When I open them, I’m still standing in Grey’s bedroom. Only now it’s dark, and Jason’s gone—and we just had our first kiss.

  That’s what it seems like, anyway. A memory so vivid, there were sights and sounds and smells and touches. I could sense the scratch of the blanket we were lying on, smell the wood smoke in the air. The taste of beer on his tongue, the roughness of his face against mine. The first of a summer of secret kisses, something that belonged to just me.

  And the loss of him is suddenly so real and so raw, I want to cry.

  I take a big, juddering gulp of air, trying to fill my lungs, which are pinched and small. I’m so overwhelmed by how much it hurts—missing Jason, seeing Jason—it takes me a moment or two before I catch up with what just happened and think: WTF?

  I unpack the thought I pushed down after detention today. How a daydream shouldn’t last more than an hour. How it shouldn’t leave me standing alone in the dark. Why can’t I remember Jason leaving, saying goodbye? And what was that, inside the box? It felt like I was looking the wrong way through a telescope, to another time. A time when Grey was alive.

  A vortex. A one-way metric. But that would mean—

  I stumble towards the door, switch on the light, turn around.

  Everything’s packed. All the books are gone, the boxes too. There are little dust outlines on the shelves. Book ghosts. And the room seems smaller, now that it’s empty. The ceiling is lower and the walls are closing in.

  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.