That reminds me of yesterday’s theory, right before I fell off my bike: that the strange occurrences are a manifestation of Grey, and guilt. And me.
I shouldn’t have taken his diaries. I shouldn’t be reading them. But it’s more than that. It’s this whole year, it’s how I was on the day he died—
Stop. I force my brain back to Thomas—by contrast, an easier mental topic. I make a clucking sound with my tongue until Umlaut jumps onto my bad leg. Why is he here? Thomas, I mean, not the kitten. Ned says banishment. But Thomas never did anything leave-the-country bad. Letting the pigs out at the summer fair—an annual cluster of raffles and homemade jam on the village green. Eating all the stripy Jell-O Grey made for my birthday party, then throwing up rainbows. But he’s not criminal.
My head hurts thinking about it. My head hurts, period.
“I’m going to go to the kitchen to get a glass of water,” I say out loud to a skeptical-looking Umlaut. “I’m extremely dehydrated.”
Not because I’m curious about Thomas. Not because I want to find out why he’s back, or why he never wrote to me. Not because the picture I have of him from yesterday—freckles against dark hair—is blurred by shooting stars. I want some water, that’s all.
* * *
It takes me ten minutes to limp through the garden, Umlaut trotting beside me, barely visible in the shaggy grass. When I get to the kitchen, Ned’s bedroom door is shut. There’s a message on the blackboard in Papa’s handwriting for Thomas to call his mum, and a wonky loaf of bread in the middle of the table. We’ve been mostly cereal people this year, eaten in handfuls out of the box. No me and Papa gathering for breakfast, two people at our huge table. The empty space where Grey always sat highlighting that Ned wasn’t here, that Mum should always have been.
It’s like Grey’s death left a hole bigger than even he was.
“Curiouser and curiouser,” I say to Umlaut as I sit down opposite the bread.
“What’s curious, Alice?”
I jump at Thomas’s voice behind me, my heart in my ears. Half of me freezes. Half of me swivels in my seat. Consequently, I almost fall off the chair as he walks into the room. Dark hair shower-wet, bare feet, a cardigan buttoned over a T-shirt. He looks clean. I run my tongue surreptitiously round my dry, post-vomit mouth.
Thomas gives this shy little wave and disappears behind the fridge door, which is now a Ned-orchestrated blur of photos and magnets, leaving me to compute the updates on the boy who left. He’d been half my height, round, and topped with thick-lensed glasses that boggled his eyes. This version is a hundred feet taller and has arms. Obviously he had arms before, but not like this. Not like you had to think about them in italics.
I’m leaning to one side and duck back in my seat as Thomas emerges from the fridge, his arms laden. He doesn’t say anything, giving me the tiniest smile as he piles butter and jars of jam and Marmite and peanut butter in front of me.
“Tea?” He smiles again, his hand hovering over the mugs that hang from the cabinet. One night and he’s completely at home. Duh, I remind myself: he practically used to live here. With Grey’s roars and Ned’s Nedness and Papa’s DIY approach to parenting—“Chocolate? Hmmm, take the whole bag”—Thomas and I spent most of our time on this side of the hedge. It was more interesting (not to mention his dad was a yeller).
As Thomas fills the kettle, silence builds in the air. There has to be The Conversation—you don’t come back after leaving and say “Tea?” Actually, Jason did. Ned did. That’s what boys do. They leave, and when they come back, act like it’s no big deal.
Thomas hacks the wonky bread into slices while he waits for the kettle to boil. I peek at him when he’s not looking, adding details to my mental file: Thomas has hairy toes! Thomas wears hipster glasses! Thomas is cool. From his vintage haircut—too short at the sides and tousling into curls on top as it dries—to his obscure-organic-coffee-brand T-shirt. And his cardigan. It’s a betrayal. How dare he grow up cool. How dare he grow up at all.
Finally he plonks a stack of toast and a mug in front of me and sits down opposite, nodding as if to say “Well, here we are.” As if to say five years is nothing.
He’s made my tea the perfect shade of brown. My toast is burnt the way I like it. It’s infuriating, that he’s got this right. I push the Marmite out of sight and scrape on hard curls of butter, then take a bite and let out an involuntary “Mmm.”
When I look up, Thomas is staring at me, puzzled.
“What?” I wipe my chin for crumbs, conscious of my sweaty hair, my grungy pajamas, my bralessness underneath them. The second I think this, my brain goes: breasts, breasts, breasts. My skin flushes.
“Nothing.” He shakes his head, then again. “Yesterday. At the Book Barn.” His voice is deeper than when he left, and not quite Canadian. Apparently my brain is on a roll with embarrassing thoughts, because it goes: his mouth must taste of maple syrup. Wie bitte?
“Your dad says that’s the first time you’d been there for a while? The bookshop?” Thomas is still talking, and I try to focus.
This must seem weird to him—the Book Barn was always our rainy-day refuge. An escape when his parents were fighting—especially then, when his dad would redirect ire to Thomas—or when Ned was refusing to play with us. We’d cycle out of the village towards the sea, and Grey would take us in until we got too noisy. I don’t know how to answer, so I cram a piece of toast into my mouth.
“Right. Sorry. How—” Thomas immediately holds up a wait-a-minute finger. After digging in his pocket, he emerges with an inhaler and takes two puffs before saying, “How are you feeling this morning?”
“Huh?” I’m distracted—I’d forgotten about his asthma. I add a mental wedge of Scotch tape to his glasses, and my memories start to shift and rearrange themselves. Past Thomas and this one, beginning to coalesce.
“Falling off your bike, remember?” prods Thomas. “Hang out with me—Ned said to tell you to pull a sick day; he’d fake a note for you.”
Ned said that?
“I’m fine,” I lie automatically, a year’s practice. It’s practically my catchphrase.
“Actually, you ralphed. You’d taken a couple of pills, morphine; you said there were shooting stars coming out of my head.” Thomas waves his hands around when he talks, grabbing invisible bats. He used to do that when he was excited, or freaked out, or nervous. I don’t know which one this is. I’m trying to get my brain to speed up: morphine?
“We got you in the car, your dad muttering in German the whole time, and WHOOSH. You hurled all over my pants. With the bloody leg, it was like the day I left. Remember? That day with the time capsule.”
Thomas pauses his insane monologue—he’s used more words in a minute than I have in ten months. And I can’t keep up, what time capsule?—and he looks at me. His eyes are muddy, with a flaw in the right iris like an inkblot. How had I forgotten that?
“You had short hair that day,” he says, like he’s planting a flag on the moon and declaring his knowledge of me.
But if an old haircut and a scar on my hand is everything he has—I was wrong. He doesn’t know me at all.
“G.” Thomas tilts his head at me. “Do you think that email—”
Screenwipe.
I don’t know how else to describe what happens. One minute, Thomas is tilting his head, holding his mug, mentioning an email. Then there’s this ripple across the air, for a few seconds. Cling wrap peels off across the room. Revealing what’s underneath: everything looks exactly the same, except the clock has jumped forward a minute, and Thomas is holding his toast and laughing, shoulders and curly hair shaking, as he says:
“—Okay, so what’s the plan this summer?”
It’s as though time skipped. Not for long, but like a jumpy DVD stuttering through a scene. I think I’m alone in noticing this glitch, which reinforces what I thought about yesterday’s space trip: that it’s to do with me. Me and Grey. Something I did has made time go all Eternal Sunshine.
“G,” he repeats, poking my good leg under the table. “This summer—what’s our plan?”
“Our plan?” I repeat, incredulity and annoyance helping me find my voice. “Are you kidding? You can’t drop off the face of the planet then come back wanting there to be a plan.”
“Canada,” he says mildly, sipping his tea.
“What about it?”
“It’s in the northern hemisphere. About three thousand miles west of here?”
“So?”
“It’s on this planet.”
If you didn’t know Thomas, you’d say he sounded calm. But there’s nothing I find more infuriating than someone refusing to have a fight when I’m picking one, and he knows that. And I hate that he knows that.
“Whatever. I’m going to have a bath.” I can’t quite storm off, but I swallow the pain as I limp out of the kitchen as fast as I can. When I get to the bathroom, I lock the door and crank the taps till they thunder. I sit on the edge of the bath and stare at the sink. Four toothbrushes in the mug, where all year it’s been two. Baking soda toothpaste. An explosion of Ned’s hair products and boy deodorant and joss sticks jostling for space. Above them, the mirror fogging up with steam, revealing a finger outline of Ned’s band logo.
As I watch, the steam pixelates. And even though it doesn’t tune in to anything yet, I know, when it does, where it will take me. It’s time to admit it.
Whatever I told Ms. Adewunmi—theoretical this, hypothetical that—the mirror, Jason’s kiss, yesterday’s galaxy in the sky, even Thomas and me in the Book Barn. They’re all wormholes. They’re all real tunnels to the past.
{2}
WORMHOLES
From a billion light-years away, a Schwarzschild black hole looks exactly like a wormhole. They’re the same thing.
Our universe could itself be inside a black hole, which exists inside another universe, inside another, like a set of nesting dolls.
Infinite worlds, infinite universes. Infinite possibilities.
Thursday 8 July
[Minus three hundred and ten]
When I emerge from my bath, Thomas is curled up in the sitting room, asleep. Umlaut too, tucked inside his cardigan. His glasses are folded on the sofa arm—without them, it’s even harder to connect this cheekboned troublemaker with the round-faced boy who left.
There’s a laptop on the table; I don’t suppose Papa warned him we’re the last house on Planet Earth not to have Wi-Fi. “Keep your swipe cards and hoverboards, dude,” Grey would tell me when I asked for a decent Internet connection. “Talk to me about the cosmos. What’s new in astrology?” “Astronomy,” I’d correct, and we’d be off, arguing over Pluto’s planetary status or Gaia versus Galileo.
A little part of me wants to wake Thomas up and ask him why he disappeared. Instead I limp-lurch past him to the kitchen, grab a box of cereal, and spend the rest of the day in my room.
But if I want to figure out the wormholes—and the screenwipe!—I can’t keep hermiting. The next morning, after covering my bruises in jeans and a long-sleeved flannel shirt, I ambush Papa early and ask him to drive me to school. On the way, I spring a plan on him: vacation shifts at the Book Barn.
“Good idea,” Papa says. “You’ll do the same days to Thomas?”
I nearly swallow my tongue. Thomas is going to help out at the bookshop? “Um, maybe we should work different shifts. That way, you get more help,” I suggest, then add, as an oh-so-casual-afterthought: “I’m sure Ned would want a shift too.”
Swaps. You put the photos of Mum all over the house; I make you work on Fridays.
To my delight, Papa agrees, and I generously offer to work out the schedule for everyone.
“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 ju
st 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.
The Square Root of Summer Page 5