The Square Root of Summer

by Harriet Reuter Hapgood

  “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.

  That’s twice now I’ve found Jason at the end of a wormhole—and with him, the girl I used to be.

  That’s the world trying to tell me something.

  I grab a pen and write on the wall above my bed, in big, black, marker-pen letters:

  The Minkowski spacetime equation. It’s an “I dare you” to the universe. I wait for a screenwipe, like in the kitchen yesterday, or a wormhole. Anything to take me away from this crappy reality.

&
nbsp; Nothing happens.

  Friday 9 July

  [Minus three hundred and eleven]

  On Friday night, we eat fish and chips in the garden, straight from the paper, drinking ein prost! to Thomas’s arrival with mugs of tea.

  I pick at scraps of batter, barely speaking except to say, “Please pass the ketchup,” until Papa drops the bookshop bomb on Thomas that he’ll be working Tuesdays and Thursdays. “Until your mother arrives. Oh, Ned,” he adds, “Gottie’s suggestion is you do Wednesdays and Fridays.”

  Ned glares at me, and I say innocently, “I volunteered for Saturdays.”

  I’m half hoping Ned will laugh and threaten some childish revenge, but our sibling simpatico is out of sync.

  “Hmmm,” he says, before peppering Thomas with questions about the music scene in Toronto, naming nine thousand Canadian metal bands, and asking if Thomas has seen them play. The theme of the responses is no, and I get the sense Thomas isn’t half the scenester his T-shirts paint him as. Ned doesn’t mention the party.

  Finally he runs off to Fingerband’s rehearsal in a cloud of hair spray. Papa floats off inside with a vague “Don’t stay up too late” and a reminder for Thomas to phone his mum.

  Then it’s just me and him. It’s the first time we’ve been alone together since the squabble in the kitchen, two days ago. I refuse to apologize.

  Twilight’s just gloaming and the bats are here, swooping in and out of the trees. Searching for bugs that haven’t yet arrived.

  I scooch my knees up to my chin, wrap my arms round my legs, feeling gangly. After all of Ned’s chatter, the silence is palpable. When Thomas and I were little, we could not-talk over entire afternoons, side by side and fingers linked in a tree house or a pillow fort or a den, days that stretched on forever. Sort of the opposite of how me and Sof were. And we never had to check what the other was thinking, because we were telepathic.

  I peek at Thomas, who’s holding scraps of fish in the air to make Umlaut play jumpy-jumpy. This is a terrible silence. He’s bored and wishes he were back in Toronto and hanging out with a girl who actually speaks. Someone cool. His insanely beautiful Canadian girlfriend, who he wants to call and tell all about his bizarro childhood pal.

  The mosquitoes are beginning to bite when Thomas sneezes. And again. And again. “G,” he sniffles eventually, after an inhaler puff. “Evening pollen. Can we hang out inside?”

  “Um, okay.” I stand up, attack of the fifty-foot woman while Thomas is still on the grass. Today’s cardigan is fuzzy and moss green. Then he unfolds himself too, a flash of flat stomach above his jeans. He turns towards the trees, not the house. Oh. He means hang out in my room.

  “I’ve been wondering about this,” he says as we walk through the garden. “I wanted to ask all week—since when do you live in the annex?”

  “Five years ago?” I say, as if it’s a question, holding back a bramble, thinking how the years he’s missed are the ones that matter. I got my first period and my first bra. I left school and had sex. I’ve been in love. I’ve made bad choices.

  I’ve been to a funeral.

  “About six months after you disappeared,” I explain, pointedly, “Ned was going through a farting stage. So Sof—my friend Sofía Petrakis, she moved to Holksea right after you left—made me march on the kitchen, waving a picket sign and demanding my rights. A-room-of-one’s-own, type thing.”

  At the apple tree—which is now, thankfully, underwear-free—Thomas pauses, trying to twist early, unripe fruit from its gnarly branch. I lean against the trunk opposite him, the air between us fuzzy with gnats.

  “Oh wow,” he says, peering up into the branches. “It’s there—”

  Thomas yelps in surprise as the nascent apple finally comes away in his hand. The branch springs back, ricocheting us with flecks of ancient, lichen-sticky bark, and sending him staggering towards me. “Oops.”

  He stuffs the apple in his cardigan pocket, then looks up at me and laughs. His face is spattered with gross tree grot. Mine must be too.

  “Sorry,” he says, not sounding it. “I’ve given you bark freckles.”

  Thomas’s real freckles, beneath the bark ones, are faint and translucent, like stars on a foggy night. He yanks his cardigan sleeve over his hand and lifts it to my cheek. I hold my breath. What happened under this tree five years ago, to make him go silent on me?

  All the stars in the sky flicker out.

  Literally. The only light in the garden is from the kitchen. There’s no moon, no stars, no reality.

  Thomas doesn’t notice. It’s as if we’re in two separate universes: for him, everything is normal. For me, the sky has gone blank. It’s a supersized screenwipe.

  When he drops his hand, stepping away, all the stars ripple back. The whole thing only lasted for a moment—a fluorescent light on the fritz, spluttering in and out.

  “There you go.” Thomas stares at me, confused. Maybe he did notice how the world just got a Ctrl+Alt+Del reboot. But all he says is, “You know, I was expecting you to have short hair.”

  Whatever just happened, it definitely only happened to me. Or it happened to us both, but I’m the only one who saw it—we’re at opposite sides of the event horizon. The point of no return. I don’t want to think about which side I’m on.

  * * *

  “Whoa,” says Thomas, once we’re inside my room. “This is, as Grey would say, a trip.”

  I scuttle to the bed. I’d forgotten about the emptiness. Thomas peers at what’s on my chest of drawers—hairbrush, deodorant, telescope. That’s it.

  “Minimalist,” he says, prowling around.

  It wasn’t always a monastery. When I moved in, Grey painted the floorboards, assembled a bed, and gave me a flashlight and the advice to never wear shoes when I cross the garden—“Feel the earth between your toes, Gottie, let it guide you.” (I always wore sneakers.) Papa gave me a twenty, which Sof commandeered to play interior decorator. I couldn’t stop her from buying cushions and Christmas lights, or putting stickers on my wardrobe.

  When I cleared out the house last autumn, I got rid of almost everything in my room too. Made it negative space. It had felt cathartic. Now, seeing it through Thomas’s eyes and nothing on my corkboard but a handwritten school schedule, it just seems sad. There’s nothing to show that I’m here, that I exist. That this is where I live, breathe, don’t sleep.

  “Where are the stars?” Thomas is turning in circles, looking at my ceiling, while I’m looking at him, and the way all the parts of him fit together. Arms and shoulders and chest.

  “What?” I say, once I work out a response is required.

  “On the ceiling.” He twists to look at me. “You always had stick-on stars. They glowed in the dark. Like magic.”

  “Like zinc sulphide,” I correct.

  “That was what I meant by the stars. You got all the references, right? In my email?”

  This is the second mention of an email—and the second occasion it’s made time go flooey. I don’t get it. And even if he had my address, I don’t. I deleted everything, after Jason. And why would Thomas send me an email now, after five years? A warning of his surprise arrival? That means I should forgive him. But I’m committed to resentment.

  I can’t screenwipe my brain into a new emotion.

  Now Thomas is sitting on the bed, still gazing around as he shucks off his shoes. I’m a little weirded out by how at ease he is in my room. He picks up my clock from the windowsill and starts fiddling with it.

  “What’s that?” he asks suddenly, pointing the clock at the equation on the wall.

  “It’s math,” I explain. Then, duh, because it’s obviously math, I add, winningly, “An equation.”

  “Huh.” Thomas drops the clock on the duvet and brushes past me as he shuffles on his knees to get a closer look. There’s a hole in his sock and I can see his skin. I was naked with Jason a dozen times, we even skinny-dipped, and this is just a toe, but it’s surprisingly intimate. “And this is on your wall, why?”


  I reset my clock and nudge it back into place on the windowsill as Thomas flops around on the pillow end of the bed, getting settled.

  “It’s homework.” That’s all I have to say—I don’t feel like explaining Ms. Adewunmi’s offer, I’m not even sure I want to take her up on it—but Thomas just impassively waits for more. “I’m supposed to come up with my own mathematical theory. I’m working on this idea that the time it takes to travel back and forth through a wormhole is less than the time an observer would spend waiting for you. You’d emerge late.”

  “Reverse Narnia.” Thomas nods—the same conclusion I’d come to. Telepathy. “Okay. You were always Ms. Astronaut Science Girl Genius.” He nods at the telescope across the room, then looks around at the nothing else. “But what happened to your stuff?”

  “I have stuff.” I’m instantly on the defensive. I point to Grey’s diaries, still stacked on my desk, and—ha!—“Look, see, there’s a cereal bowl on my chair.”

  “Ooh, a bowl.” He waves his hands. “You need THINGS. My room’s like a monkey cage—plates, mugs. A Maple Leafs poster, cookbooks, Connect Four … I have postcards—all the places I haven’t been. Felt-tips, comics. You could walk in and immediately know, okay, this guy draws, he wants to travel, he likes Marvel more than DC, which tells you a lot.”

  I gaze around my room, thinking, No, it doesn’t. It doesn’t tell me if you’ve ever been in love, or if you still don’t like tomatoes, or when you switched from sweatshirts to cardigans. It doesn’t tell me what happened when you left, or why you’re back. Then again, all I have are Grey’s diaries. Sof’s stickers. Other people’s things. Martians would be baffled.

  “My room is a time capsule of me—” Thomas widens his eyes dramatically, stressing the words, as though I’m supposed to think, Oh, of course, a time capsule. Like the one he mentioned in the kitchen earlier this week.