Outside the Book Barn. The first time I’d been there since Grey died.
Grey’s chair. I’d just crashed my bike and I wanted my grandfather and I hurt.
The library. Seeing my relationship with Jason in Grey’s diary. He’d called it love.
The beach. Watching Jason talk to everyone but me. As though I didn’t exist.
With Jason. Deciding he’d never loved me.
The canal. Arguing with Sof.
And—
In the garden. I lied to Thomas. I told him I’d never been in love.
I can’t believe I didn’t see it before. The Weltschmerzian Exception. Weltschmerz is a German word for melancholy. It translates to world pain.
At their most basic level, wormholes are time machines, powered by dark matter and negative energy. And what’s darker than heartbreak? Here’s a theory: the twin hurts of Jason and Grey rocked me so much, time broke down. The rules no longer apply.
Every single one of the wormholes has opened when I’ve been sad, or angry, or grieving, or lost. Or lying.
That’s the Gottie H. Oppenheimer Principle. It’s nothing to do with particles or fractals or diaries. It’s to do with me, and what I did on the day Grey died. I’m a bad person. And this wormhole I’m in now? It’s punishment.
I want to rest my head on all these books and go to sleep, wake up to the world as it should be. Tell Thomas everything and see where time takes us. But the only way to get there is to do something about it. I force myself to pick up one of my many notebooks again and start reading it through. Third (hundredth) time’s the charm.
The very first thing I see is a diagram I printed out that day in the library, weeks ago.
The Schwarzschild metric. If you stand a billion light-years away from one, a Schwarzschild black hole looks like a wormhole. They’re the same thing.
It doesn’t flip the TV channel to a new timeline or show you something that’s already happened. If you can find a way to keep it open without a gravitational collapse, you could walk through it.
The way to keep it open is to use dark exotic matter—like jamming your shoe in a doorway. If you went through it, you’d have to cross that darkness.
Even so, I find myself “walking” my fingers across the diagram. Through the door.
And however dangerous it would be, I would go in a heartbeat. Because, oh, here I am. Under a rainstorm that shouldn’t be. This can’t be reality; this can’t be how the summer is supposed to be—without Thomas. Fate. The thought of not seeing him again makes me ache with loneliness.
At the exact same time that I start to cry, the rain stops. The pounding on the roof, the howling wind, the noise—it’s gone. It’s too sudden to be a coincidence. I wipe my running nose with the back of my hand and sit up. Alert.
There’s light, creeping round the edges of my bedroom door. Shining through its little wavy-glass window. I switch my lamp off, plunging my room into darkness—there are no Thomas ceiling stars in this reality. But there it is—a glow, coming from the garden. My heart pounds, but my Spidey senses are tingle-free.
I slide off the bed and tiptoe across the room. I’m a little apprehensive of what’s behind the door, wormhole-wise, so instead of opening it, I kneel down. But when I put my eye to the keyhole, it’s not the garden I can see on the other side. It’s the kitchen.
What the scheisse?
I look behind me. Pat the floorboards with my hand. Yup, definitely my bedroom. Turn back to the door, look through the keyhole again. Yup, still the kitchen. The lights are on and there are herbs on the windowsill, magnets on the fridge. And then there’s Thomas coming out of the pantry, striding across to the hob and I’m on my feet, yanking open my door, Gott sei Dank, calling his name—
“Thomas!”
It’s not the kitchen on the other side of the door. Of course it can’t be that easy. It’s not the garden either. I teeter-totter on my toes, almost falling into it. The doorway is filled with darkness. Not television fuzz. Not the see-through film of a screenwipe. But the dense, inky infinity of a black hole.
Dark matter. Negative energy. Pure heartbreak.
What happens if I step through it? On the other side is the kitchen, is Thomas. But this is darkness. This is grief and graves. By walking through this, I’m asking for trouble, somewhere down the line. I’m volunteering to revisit the day he died.
But where I am, there’s no Thomas, no Umlaut. It’s worth it. I walk right into the dark.
* * *
I emerge, gasping, in the kitchen.
It’s nighttime. The air is hot and close, heady with jasmine and lemons, and I’m sweating in Grey’s jumper. And I’m here. Somehow, I’m here. Wherever, whenever it is. I’m home. I’m safe. The tide has come in.
Thomas hasn’t noticed me yet. Instinct stops me racing over and bear-tackling him to the ground. The pain I just felt, tearing me apart as I stepped through the dark, that can’t be leading anywhere good.
I lean in the doorway, catching my breath, and watch him whisk. His muscles tense as he beats air into the saucepan, a small frown of concentration on his face. He’s wearing the T-shirt he wore last week, when he baked lemon drizzle cake. When he stood whisking at the hob. When the air smelled of jasmine. When … When …
The tide retreats.
Holy long division. Last Monday. Thomas stood over a saucepan on a hot, still night. He wore that same T-shirt, and he baked gluten-free lemon drizzle cake for Sof. Thomas never makes the same thing twice. Ach mein Gott—I haven’t come back to the right timeline. I’ve come back to last week!
Ms. Adewunmi’s warning roars in my ears: Do I need to worry about Norfolk getting sucked into the fourth dimension?
This isn’t home, this isn’t safe—this is the past. I’m going to throw up. I’m going to win the Nobel Prize. Water. I need it. Sitting down, that too. Dizzy and delirious, I stagger away from the doorway, into the room.
“G.” Thomas looks up, noticing me at last. When he smiles, it’s all for me: an explosion of dimples and his tongue poking between his teeth with delight. And suddenly I don’t care if I’ve destroyed the whole fucking solar system.
But I can’t speak yet. I manage to make it to the table and sit down, no thanks to my legs. Thomas nods at my outfit and asks, “Aren’t you baking?”
I flush, guiltily, even though there’s no way he can know why I’m dressed for a freezing, rainy night. For another night altogether.
“Aren’t you baking?” I counter, pointing to the saucepan. My tongue is dry.
“Ha. Seriously,” he says, turning down the hob and sitting next to me. Knees bumping again. This time, he sandwiches mine between his. “You look cute in that jumper, but it’s ninety degrees out.”
Flustered by cute, I yank off the jumper without unbuttoning it. It gets stuck over my head and takes my T-shirt with it, the static cling sending out sparks from my hair. “Help,” I say from inside the jumper, and feel Thomas’s hands on my waist, holding my T-shirt down. When I eventually emerge, he’s considering me. A smile twitching at the corner of his mouth.
“Stop throwing yourself at me,” he says. “It’s embarrassing.”
“Are you jet-lagged?” I croak. My brain rapid-fires memories of last Monday at me and I grasp for them, trying to make sure we do things the same way. Because if I change the smallest thing … This is messing with time on a Back to the Future scale. This is Marvin, your cousin Marvin Berry!
“Are you feeling all right?” Thomas asks. He puts his hand to my forehead, pretending to take my temperature. I’m so tired, it’s all I can do not to lean into it. Fall and let him catch me. “Nope, normal—yet asking me about jet lag.”
“Jet lag, it’s, um,” I stammer, “when you change time zones and end up all weird.”
“I know what it is. It’s just a funny thing to ask—I left Canada a month ago. And it’s not any later than we’re usually up. What are you, seventeen or seventy?” Thomas tilts his head, considering me. “Sure
you’re okay? There’s something strange about you tonight.”
I freeze. Why did I step through the doorway? From wearing different clothes to saying things before Thomas should, I’ve already made a hundred tiny tweaks that could affect the future. I’m an enormous butterfly, flapping stupidly around the kitchen and triggering intergalactic tsunamis, and it’s going to end in disaster—
“Aha!” He snaps his fingers. “No homework. I barely recognized you without a giant calculator hanging off your arm.”
My shoulders slump in relief.
“Your nose in a book, scribbling things,” Thomas continues. “Stand back, sire. I’m away to the library! There’s math to be solved!”
He’s right. I don’t have my constellations chart. I don’t have the diaries, or my notebook. How do we end up outside, kissing? How do I get home again? I’m utterly, totally lost.
Thomas mistakes my silence, nudging me gently.
“Sorry,” he says. “Look, you are always reading something off-the-charts clever with a scary title, but to be honest … I’m jealous of your homework ethic, especially compared to my own.” He does the breathless half chuckle of someone who’s not entirely joking. Maybe whose dad tells him so.
“You work hard,” I tell him. “You do. I’ve seen you at the Book Barn, you’re the only one who bothers inputting the receipts. And you literally bake our breakfast every day.”
Without warning, Thomas pushes his chair back with a Ned-bothering squeak and darts into the pantry. He emerges, arms laden, and starts flinging ingredients on the table, like that first night. Rosewater, sugar, unsalted butter, and bags of pistachios.
“Forget Sof’s cake,” he says. “Let’s make baklava for breakfast. No project, so … You’re going to help me, right?”
A do-over. The universe is giving me a second chance. It wants me to be bold. It wants me to say: “Yes.”
Baking turns out to be surprisingly easy—or Thomas is a good teacher. A few minutes later, we’re standing side by side at the stove, me on idiot duty, melting butter, while he does something exceedingly complicated with the sugar and rosewater. And all the while I’m thinking: This is how it’s supposed to be. This is how it should have been all my life.
“Store-bought?” I tease as Thomas opens a packet of filo pastry, pretending to sound aghast.
“Shush, you.” He elbows me back.
Thomas starts folding layers of pastry into a cake tin, instructing me to brush them with my melted butter. Tutting when I keep brushing his hand instead. “Ztoppit. Now you sprinkle on the pistachios and—or, no, one giant, clumping heap like that is fine too. I think that’s what they call ‘artisan.’ A D in art, was it?”
I steal a pistachio. Thomas bats my hand away.
“Tell you what,” he says, “I’ll do the cooking, you tell me about time travel.”
I nearly choke on the pistachios I’ve crammed in my mouth. It’s not that I’d forgotten what’s going on here—absentmindedly discarding the knowledge that I’ve time-traveled, like it’s an old sock. But the universe has twisted back on itself, in order to make things right. And for a second, it seems like Thomas has figured it out.
“Your extra-credit project?” He raises his eyebrows at me, and I wonder where Ms. Adewunmi’s essay would take me. Far away from Holksea, she said. Far away from Thomas too. “It’s about time travel, right? Easy on the math, obviously—are we talking forwards or backwards?”
“A little of both, actually,” I say, stealing another pistachio.
“’Splain more.”
“Okay … If you and I went back to a point in time, like to—”
“Summer eleven years ago, after I was banned from the fair,” Thomas interrupts. “What? I’m still incensed. Those pigs were asking to be set free.”
I laugh. Sixteen racing pigs chased by Grey and Thomas’s dad, while Thomas watched gleefully from under the cake table.
“Fine. We write an equation factoring in you, and me, and our coordinates. And we need power, like ten stars’ worth, and we use it to open a Krasnikov tube…” I glance at Thomas to see if he’s following. “Erm, we bake a cannoli. One end is in the present, and we go through it to the other end—to the past.”
“G, I got what you meant,” he says gently. “I understand the word tube.”
I blush. “Then we go through the tube, tunnel, cannoli, whatever, and, er, that’s it. I mean it’s mathematically complex, but what we’re talking about is making a tunnel through spacetime.”
“Two questions,” says Thomas, as he picks up a knife and starts slicing the baklava into little diamond shapes. I keep waiting for the knife to slip, but it doesn’t. “What happens when we run into our past selves—a ‘Shoot us both, Spock!’ situation? And can you get the saucepan? That’s not the second question, by the way.”
I hand him the saucepan, peeking in. The sugar has melted and it’s pink syrup, which Thomas pours over the pastry layers as I explain, “You can’t ever meet your past self.”
He raises an eyebrow. “You sure about that?”
“Ja, because of cosmic censorship.”
“Let’s assume every time you talk science, I eye-roll till you explain it, okay?”
“Ha, ha. Space law. There are rules. If you ever got close enough to see what was inside a black hole, you’d get sucked in. The universe keeps its secrets in there. When you go back, six-year-old you temporarily doesn’t exist—the universe hides you in a little time loop until it’s safe to come out. Like a mini cannoli.”
“Otherwise—kaboom?”
“There can only be one of you.” I nod.
“Huh,” says Thomas, gazing at me like he’s trying to memorize my face. “I wonder.”
I resist the urge to prove my science credentials by pointing out: There aren’t two of me here right now, for instance. Instead, I dip my finger into the syrup and sketch a sticky diagram on the table to demonstrate. “And then vacuum fluctuations, because in algebraic terms—”
“La, la, la, la, la,” he sings, off key. “No algebra. More cake metaphors! Who knew you knew so much about patisserie? That’s also not the second question. Which is: Then what? How do you get home again?”
“That’s the interesting part.” I stand back while Thomas transfers the tin of baklava to the oven, setting the timer. “We could stay, live linearly. Wait for time to pass naturally and end up back here anyway, eleven years later. But by doing that, we’d change the universe.”
“Don’t we want to change the universe? Fight to clear my name?”
“But six-year-old you isn’t there to release the pigs, remember? You’re in a little cannoli, floating around in space until the universe is sure it’s safe.”
“So if we stayed … our younger selves wouldn’t exist?” Thomas asks. He makes a head-exploding gesture with his hands.
“And eventually, teenage us would disappear too, because we’re not meant to be there,” I confirm. “That, or it’d be your basic end-of-the-world-type situation.”
As I explain it, I understand: I can’t stay. I’m not supposed to be here. Five days from now, I’m missing. Whatever happens between us tonight—I’ll have to go back. Find a new wormhole to the future, and leave this Monday unchanged. Thomas will have no memory of this conversation—it won’t ever have happened.
I can’t undo my lie. Even if I told Thomas right now, about Jason, it wouldn’t make any difference. So what’s the point in any of this?
“What, then, if we don’t do that?” He tilts his head at me, waiting carefully for the explanation. “If we don’t stay?”
It’s still hot, but the air smells of roses now. And it takes me a minute to answer him.
“We bake a second cannoli,” I say, “and we leave the past as it was, and return to the present, and nothing will have changed at all.”
“Holy cannoli,” says Thomas. “As it were. Look at that, I understand science. Don’t tell my dad; it’ll only make him happy.”
We
go quiet, looking at each other.
“G. Why would you go back at all, then? If in the end, you couldn’t change anything?”
“You could learn something,” I say. “Find out things about yourself.”
“Where would you go?” he asks. “What do you want to learn? And please don’t say ‘How to paint better,’ because I’ve grown to love you at your Wurst.”
I take a deep breath, bunching up my hand, sticking my little finger straight out. I point it at Thomas and he curls his into mine.
“I’d go back five years,” I say, pulling him towards me. I want to make sure we do this in every reality. “And I’d make a really stable pile of books, and I’d find out what it was like to kiss a boy. And even though it wouldn’t change the future—I’d always know what it was like.”
One hand clasps Thomas’s, drawing him close. With the other, I reach up and do what I’ve secretly wanted to do all summer: poke his dimple. And when he laughs, I kiss him.
It’s electricity. It’s light. It’s a shot of liquid silver.
When I said I believe in the Big Bang theory of love, I never thought it could be like this. We fit together like Lego. It’s overwhelming. Thomas’s mouth moves to my neck, and I open my eyes to take in this moment, take in everything—
The kitchen is changing.
A row of spices on the far wall Mexican-waves itself into a new order. Over Thomas’s shoulder, the basil on the sideboard splits and blossoms and flourishes into parsley. The clock spins around; suddenly it’s sunrise. And the roses outside the window, which have always been peach—my whole life they’ve been peach—are now yellow in the pale dawn.
This kiss is changing the universe. I have butterflies, the earthquake-in-Brazil kind, as I pull away.
“Wow,” says Thomas, fake-staggering. Then he pulls me back towards him, pressing our foreheads together, his hands on my face. His glasses squish against my cheek. “Sorry,” he whispers. I don’t know what for. He doesn’t say anything about the spices, the roses, the basil. He doesn’t know anything is different. For him, it’s always been this way.
The Square Root of Summer Page 14