The Square Root of Summer

by Harriet Reuter Hapgood

  “He was actually six hamsters. My dad vetoed the endless resurrection last year. I think he was worried he’d get custody.”

  We’ve reached the gate. Thomas turns around so quickly it makes me wobble. I end up standing way too close to him. But even though we’re inches apart, he’s in the blazing sunshine, and I’m in the shade.

  “G. I wanted to say—back then. I haven’t told you, I really am sorry. About Grey.”

  And he hugs me. At first, I don’t know what to do with my arms. It’s the first time someone’s hugged me since Oma and Opa, at Christmas. I stand there, made out of elbows, while he bear-tackles me. But after a moment, I wrap myself around him. It’s a hug like warm cinnamon cake, and I sink into it.

  And as I do, I sense that something deep inside me—something I didn’t even know existed anymore, after Jason—has woken up.

  Saturday 26 July

  [Minus three hundred and twenty eight]

  A week later, it starts to rain.

  It’s biblical, thrumming on the roof at the Book Barn, sending the shelves shaking. Exactly like the day Thomas left. Midmorning, I climb up to the attic, where Papa is a sprite on a camping stool, tapping his red sneakers to the radio and deliberately misalphabetizing poetry. Maintaining his shrine to Grey. He and Ned are in cahoots.

  He waves a copy of The Waste Land at me.

  “Hallo. No customers?”

  “I turned the sign off,” I tell him, drifting over to the skylight. The rain is horizontal, not tourist-browsing weather or even determined-to-buy-an-obscure-first-edition weather. When I peer outside, the whole world is bruised. Across the fens, the sea shows up in frosted waves. It’s 11 a.m., but it looks midnight—all the lamps are on inside. Tucked inside the heart of the bookshop, light in the darkness, is like being on a spaceship.

  And I want to take off. The last time I was here was with Grey, in a wormhole.

  I still have no concrete clue about what’s happening. I thought I was clear on the wormholes—they’re just high-definition memories—but then I came back from one with the photo of Mum.

  There’s this principle called Occam’s razor that says when you have lots of different theories and no facts, the simplest explanation—which requires the fewest leaps of faith to believe—is right. And the simplest explanation for all this is 1) I was reading a diary and the picture was tucked in the pages. Which means 2) I’m making the wormholes up, mad-crazy with grief.

  Is that it? I’m nuts?

  It’s not a thought I want to pursue. Even if it’s all inside my head, even if I’m making it all up—I want it to be real. Every vortex I fall into, I kiss Jason. I see Grey. I find me.

  “You think should I shelve Ted and Sylvia together?” Papa asks.

  “If you want Sof to organize a protest,” I say, turning away from the window.

  “It’s romantic, nein?” He lines them up next to each other on the shelf, making a note on his list, then looks at me. “Like you and Thomas coming back. You know, I was a bit older than you when I met your mami?”

  I blink at him in astonishment.

  “You know there’s a book for you on the desk?” he adds. “I think it’s maybe from Grey.”

  “Oh.” I linger in the doorway, waiting for him to elaborate. Talk more about Mami, about Grey. When he doesn’t say anything, I add, “I’m meeting a friend for lunch at the café. Want me to bring you back a sandwich?”

  “Ja.” He half waves me off. I bet he won’t look up for hours—if I don’t put a sandwich in front of him, he won’t remember to eat. I grieve in wormholes. He grieves inside his head—always has. Would things be different if Mum were alive? Ned and I might not have even grown up here, with Grey.

  Back downstairs, I rummage through the desk chaos and unearth a biography of Cecilia Payne-Gaposchki, the PhD student who discovered what the universe was made of. The sun, the stars, everything—it’s all hydrogen.

  FOR GOTTIE, it’s inscribed, in Grey’s handwriting. MAY YOU ALSO DISCOVER THE UNIVERSE.

  It was my seventeenth birthday the October after he died. This was my present? A book? Grey never gave books. He said it was lazy. Ned, Sof, Papa—they gave me things like T-shirts, lavender nail polish, gift vouchers. Grey gave me a telescope. Bugs preserved in resin. Goggles for chemistry lab with my initials monogrammed on the lanyard. A subscription to New Scientist. Silver square root stud earrings.

  I don’t know what to think about a book.

  When my phone beeps, I want-assume-hope it’s Jason—but it’s Thomas. Against all odds, he and Sof and Meg have bonded over comics and are on a trip to London. They’ve gone to a signing at Forbidden Planet, and he’s texted me a picture of The West Coast Avengers: Lost in Space-Time. I recognise Sof’s paint-stained fingers holding it up to the camera. And there’s a message: I assume you’re the one in the green spandex?

  There’s a text from Sof, too. I ignore both messages and flip back to the inscription Grey left for me in the book. Picking up a pen, I write inside the cover: The Gottie H. Oppenheimer Principle, v 3.0.

  Most everything in the universe is made of hydrogen—what 5 percent we can see, anyway. The rest is dark energy, and dark matter. The stuff we haven’t figured out yet.

  What if it’s all the other possibilities?

  More than just two timelines. Schrödinger the shagger says every time an atom decays—or doesn’t—every decision we make, it splits the universe. Starting from the Big Bang onwards, until the world spreads out like the branches of a tree. And that’s what we mean by infinity.

  I label the branches:

  A world where I never kissed Jason

  or a world where we weren’t a secret

  A world where it’s still last summer

  A world where wormholes are real

  A world where they’re not

  The question is, which is the right one?

  The ancient computer whirs loudly when I switch it on. Three minutes after the Internet connects, I have a new email address: gottie.h.oppenheimer@gmail.com.

  I glance down at my notes, typing rapidly about timelines, and I send it to Ms. Adewunmi. I’m not saying I’m taking her deal—writing the essay in exchange for university help. Let’s just call it … a possibility.

  It’s time to meet Jason.

  “Papa, I’m going to the café,” I bellow up the stairs. No reply.

  I don’t waste time standing in the rain locking the door, or wrestling with an umbrella, just scurry the few yards across the grass. The café’s empty, the windows fogged up as I pick my way through the Formica tables and order a herring on rye for Papa and a tuna melt for me. I’m going to be blasé as hell when Jason arrives—hanging out with my sandwich, no big deal. Even though my stomach is turning flips.

  “Fifteen minutes for the tuna melt,” the man grunts from behind the counter. Great. “I haven’t turned the grill on yet.”

  “Can I use your restroom?” I ask, and he jerks his thumb.

  The toilet is rickety, with overhead Victorian plumbing, but it’s a palace compared to the Book Barn. I sit down and shiver in the draught, then see the rusty streak of blood. Oh. I don’t have anything with me. I’ve got money, but the café isn’t exactly fancy-tampon-machine territory.

  In the end, I wedge cheap, shiny toilet paper into my underwear, then waddle out to the sink, rustling. When I got my first period, I marched to the pharmacy with my legs clamped at the thigh, not wanting to tell anyone. Grey would’ve tried to throw a pagan ritual. I ended up buying giant winged mattresses that scraped at my thighs and gave me diaper rash, till Sof gave me a crash course in vaginacrobatics. I’d just turned thirteen, and she’d got hers at twelve—apparently this was light-years ahead of me. She forced me to write tampons on the shopping list we kept on the blackboard. “Otherwise I’m starting a performance art band called Are You There, Gottie? It’s Me, Menses.”

  I stare at myself in the mirror as I wash my hands with gritty liquid soap and cold water. I haven�
�t seen Sof in any real way since that day at the beach two weeks ago. We’ve nodded when she and Meg trail in Fingerband’s wake. I dry my hands on my jeans and reply to her texts. Kind of. I ignore her questions about the party and write the performance art band name, and—remember? Maybe we can all go to the beach tomorrow, if the rain clears. If she replies.

  I wish I didn’t feel sick.

  * * *

  He’s standing by the till when I come out, laughing with the man behind the counter and ordering a black coffee. Black coffee. Black leather jacket. Blond hair dark from the rain, swept back into what Grey called a duck’s arse. Jason. He’s shorter than Thomas, I notice for the first time.

  I’m glad his back is turned so I can stare at him. I itch with not knowing whether I’m allowed to hug him yet, or even touch him. Last summer, I knew I could reach out and brush straw from his shoulder, sand from his stomach, grass from his legs. Even when the others were around, I’d find a thousand excuses to touch him. And I knew he wanted me to.

  I’m falling to pieces when the man calls out, “Tuna melt girl!”

  Jason turns around. “Margot. Been. Swimming?”

  “No.” I finger-comb my topknot. “It’s raining. The sea will be cold.”

  “It was a joke,” he drawls. “Your hair’s wet.”

  “Tuna melt,” Counter-man grunts irritably.

  “Oh. Yes. Ha-ha-ha,” I say to Jason, then fumble in my pocket for change, swapping a handful of coins for two greasy paper bags. The combined smell of Papa’s herring and my melted cheese hits my anxious stomach with a hurl.

  “You okay?” Jason tilts his head. But he’s still leaning against the counter, not reaching out to me. I wish I believed he was as nervous as I am. I want to believe it so, so much.

  “I’m fine,” I say queasily as he pays for his coffee, and we sit down.

  “You going to eat that?” My sandwich is still in its bag. Jason’s building a tower out of the sugar cubes.

  I lift it up, mechanically take a bite. It takes an hour to chew and longer to swallow around the moon-sized lump in my throat. My ankles twitch, wanting to wrap themselves around his, make both our bodies a pretzel. We were in this café once before. Everyone else was at the beach that day, so we came here instead of the food stand, even though the chips aren’t as good. We barely ate anyway, just smiled goofily at each other while they got cold and congealed. That was the day he asked, “Do you love me?” That was the day—

  Get it together, Gottie. You have to ask about the wormhole.

  “Jason, when you came by the house the other week—when we were in Grey’s room, packing his things. What happened?”

  His sugar cubes tumble down onto the table. This is it. This is where he tells me I disappeared.

  “Ouch. Hot,” he says after a slurp of coffee. “Yeah, it was awkward, wasn’t it? It’s been a while. We’re out of practice.”

  He smiles at me, and I try to smile back.

  “But,” I persist, “I was, um. I was there?”

  “Yeah, I see what you mean.” He frowns. “You were a bit daydreamy.”

  I fumble for a neat way of asking, I didn’t disappear like a magic trick? There isn’t one. Jason’s rearranging the sugar, unconcerned. He’d mention it, if I’d vanished. But I have to ask.

  “Sorry, so, what was awkward?” I imagine watching me sucked into a cardboard box would fall into that category.

  “Oh, I was trying to tell you about college—how busy it is, all the work. How it wasn’t fair to you, me being distracted. Then Ned interrupted us talking, and like I said—we’re out of practice. You need to work on your subterfuge.” He winks.

  I should be relieved. I’m not disappearing. I’m right about the split screen—my brain wanders off down memory lane, but at the same time, I’m still walking and talking in this reality.

  But all I can think about is how last time we were here, he said, Margot. Forget the chips. Let’s go to my house. That was the day we had sex for the first time.

  “But we’re cool, right? We’re friends,” Jason assures me now. He reminds me of Sof, telling me what my opinion should be.

  “Tuna melt! Coffee!” Counter-man interrupts. “Sorry, folks, I’m going to close up. If this is the lunchtime rush, I’m going home.”

  Our chairs scrape the floor as we stand up. In the doorway, I hesitate, my fingers tightening round the greasy sandwich bags.

  “Have a good swim,” Jason says, nodding at the rain. “Shit—you were going to tell me something about Ned’s party.”

  “You want to come to the bookshop? Papa’s upstairs, but it’s warm. You can share my sandwich…”

  I will him one last time to follow me outside, across the grass, onto my spaceship. Fly away through the rain, kiss me like it’s last summer. But he just crumples his coffee cup and throws it in the trash.

  “Can’t. Sorry. This is like a whatdyacallit?” He snaps his hands into a finger gun, an echo of Fingerband’s fratty vibe, when he finds the word he wants: “Halfway. It’s halfway. I can catch the bus from here—my girlfriend lives in Brancaster. You know Meg.”

  He keeps talking but my ears are roaring with that word—girlfriend, girlfriend, girlfriend—and of course it’s Meg, perfect pretty Meg. I was a secret but not her, and I’m running out the door: outside, across the grass, through the rain, the storm roaring too. The Book Barn door has blown open but inside it’s not the bookshop, it’s not my spaceship. It’s nothing, it’s television fuzz, it’s a wormhole, it’s a rip in the fucking spacetime continuum.

  And this time, I choose to run right into it.

  * * *

  … we tumble into the kitchen, laughing and kissing. I don’t even care if someone sees us. But Jason lets go of my hand.

  There’s a note on the blackboard. It’s in Papa’s handwriting, but it doesn’t make sense. The words swim in front of my eyes, I have to spell the letters out one by one and even then it can’t be right because they spell

  G-R-E-Y-’-S-I-N-H-O-S-P-I-T-A-L

  I can’t deal. I want to be back in the field with Jason, sun on his skin. I try to grab his hand, to show him.

  “Shit,” he says, running both hands through his hair. “Shit.”

  I look at him, wanting him to get it, to say: let’s pretend we didn’t read this, let’s pretend it’s not true, let’s have a few more hours. We never came into the kitchen. We’re still in the fort in the field, in the sunshine.

  But he doesn’t read my mind. He says, “Dude, you should go. You need to—shit. My mum could give you a lift. Or if you bike to Brancaster, you can get the bus to the hospital.”

  He keeps talking but I can’t hear him, like I couldn’t read the note: the sea is rushing in my ears, there’s not enough gravity in the room. Where did all the oxygen go?

  “Gottie? You go. I’ll text Ned and say you’re on your way.”

  Finally, I find my voice: “You’re not coming with me?”

  “I can’t, I’ve got work.” Jason works at the pub. Sometimes I sit out back behind the kitchens, and he sneaks me crisps.

  “But—” I point to the note on the blackboard again. Maybe he doesn’t understand it either. “Grey’s in the hospital.”

  “Yeah, shit. I know. But it’ll be fine—they wouldn’t have left a note unless it was fine.” He’s steering me out of the kitchen, shutting the door behind us, holding my hand, leading me to my bike. It’s on its side on the grass where I’d left it. For some reason, I look across to the hole in the hedge and think of Thomas Althorpe. Who put me in this same hospital, long ago.

  It takes me two goes to climb on the bike. I want to be back in the field.

  I want to call Sof and tell her everything: me and Jason!

  I want to hold hands under a blanket, and talk in whispers.

  I want to go back in time. Just ten minutes. If we’d gone straight to my room instead of the kitchen, we wouldn’t have found the note. Grey wouldn’t be in the hospital, and I’d be naked with
Jason.

  These are the wrong thoughts to be having. I’m a bad person.

  “Text me later, okay?” Jason says, squinting at me. I can’t see the blue of his blue, blue eyes. And then the world is folding in on itself, blinding white pain, I’m being squeezed, my heart hurts—

  * * *

  —and then I’m doubled over on the kitchen doorstep, spitting bile in the grass between my feet. It’s night, and raining. A hand is rubbing small circles on my back. Thomas’s voice murmuring, asking if I’m okay. The wormhole ache hasn’t even worn off when the truth hits me like a meteor: Jason never loved me. There’s no universe where he wasn’t going to break my heart.

  I can solve f (x) = ∫ ∞-∞ in my head, so it’s easy enough to calculate the time I’ve wasted on him since 9 October last year: 293 days, 7,032 hours, 421,920 minutes.

  This boy, who wouldn’t even hold my hand at the funeral!

  Enough. That’s enough.

  “Thomas.” I straighten up. His hand stays on my back, his face half-lit from the kitchen behind us, as he searches mine to find what’s wrong. “Do you want to open the time capsule?”

  {3}

  FRACTALS

  Fractals are never-ending, repetitive patterns found in nature—rivers, lightning, galaxies, blood vessels. Mistakes.

  A tree trunk splits three ways. Each way splits into three branches. Each branch carries three twigs. And so on to infinity.

  Simplicity leads to complexity.

  Complexity leads to chaos.

  Wednesday 30 July

  [Minus three hundred and thirty-two]

  It rains for the next four days. Thomas skips off his Book Barn shifts, and by wordless agreement, we hole up in my room, playing Connect Four and eating wonky Schneeballs. I unroll my Marie Curie poster and stick it back on the wall. Dust my telescope. Think about wormholes, flip through Grey’s diaries, ignore Sof’s texts. Thomas reads comics, graffitis notes on cookbooks, and drops his socks all over my floor like he lives here. Which, I’m getting used to the idea that he does.