Every instinct tells me that behind me, on the other side of the kitchen door, is my bedroom. A week from now. The universe’s safety exit.
He trails a finger down my arm, whispering into my mouth. “We should probably go to bed.”
I squeak in surprise.
“Separately, to clarify, you perv,” he laughs. “Before Ned storms out here and murders me.”
“I should…” I turn and gesture to the open kitchen door. I’m right: I can step through it into my bedroom. My ceiling glows with stars, and no storm rattles the window. The books I left scattered on my bed are stacked neatly on my desk, and—oh! Umlaut is there, sleeping on my pillow. I’m going back to a different world than the one I left.
But not necessarily a better one.
On my wall, among the equations, there’s a pool of dark matter. Waiting.
There’s a week to go to the party. And I walked through the worst aspects of the universe to come back here. I don’t believe the Weltschmerzian Exception will let me get away with that.
And I can’t take Thomas with me to hold my hand. If this version of him jumps five days forward, he’ll displace his future self—time will still be twisted. He belongs here. I belong in the future. Only I can go through the wormhole.
These are my choices: Path A. I take this chance to tell Thomas about Jason. I stay in the kitchen, with the truth. And the universe would gradually implode.
Or Path B. I go through the doorway. The universe stays safe but my lie still stands.
Either way, it’s the end of the world.
Quickly, before I can change my mind, I turn around and kiss him. Hard and fast on the mouth, sucking on his bottom lip, clinging on for desperate seconds before I have to let go, before I have to—
I pull away and step backwards, away from him, and then I’m standing in my room. My lungs burst with just those few steps.
Across the doorway, the garden glimmers in the dawn.
“Goodnight,” I say, even though no one is there.
Sunday 10 August
[Minus three hundred and forty-three]
A shaft of sunshine wakes me. My clock says it’s Sunday. My head aches. I swim slowly up through sleep, staring into the window-ivy, which is laced with dark matter, thinking about that universe-changing kiss. It was on my lips a few hours ago, but to Thomas, it never happened.
The past is permanent.
I roll over, struggling with philosophy and the weighed-down duvet.
Thomas is on the bed next to me. Whoa! I go from sleepy to wide awake at warp speed.
He’s still asleep, his breathing warm and heavy and metronome-even, and I watch him, watch the mouth that I’ve kissed. Multiple times now. Thomas Althorpe. Who said he liked me. Who I changed the universe with. Who’s in bed with me. Kind of.
He may have spent the night, but he’s fully dressed on top of the duvet. Even so, I’m alarmed: I stepped through negative energy to come back here. What world have I fast-forwarded us into?
I run my tongue round my mouth and huff a little air at Umlaut to check for morning breath. The kitten is a good sign. How can a universe where he’s back be bad? Then I put my hand on Thomas’s arm and shake him.
“Thomas,” I hiss. “Thomas, wake up.”
He blinks awake, his face half-mushed into my pillow. Seeing him without his glasses it’s like sharing a secret.
“Hey.” Sleepily, he wriggles, closing his eyes again. A heavy arm is draped over me and I’m a bear tucked up for autumn.
“Hi,” I whisper, snuggling myself into his warmth. It’s fine. There’s an entire duvet between us. “Do you, um, do you remember what happened?”
“Mmm, must’ve fallen asleep,” Thomas mumbles into the pillow.
“Yes. But. When.”
“Was up early.” He yawns. “Choux pastry practice. Saw your light on and thought”—rawr, another yawn—“I’d say hello. But you were asleep and then Ned came home and passed out on the grass right outside the kitchen door. Didn’t want to risk climbing over him. Bed looked comfortable.”
“It’s okay,” I squeak, trying to talk out of the corner of my mouth so I don’t breathe on him. Jason and I never spent the night, or even fell asleep together. I’ve never woken up with anyone before, what if I’m a wildebeest? I shouldn’t speak. But I want to find out what happened between hanging out in the garden on Friday, and him falling asleep in my room just now. I’ve hopped about in spacetime, skipped an entire day.
“Did I see you at the Book Barn yesterday? My mind’s gone blank.”
“Mmmm,” Thomas says noncommittally, and shivers.
“Are you cold? Get in,” I say, without thinking.
“I smell like a monkey cage.” But he’s already rolling off the bed and clambering under the duvet with me.
Uh-oh.
Serious uh-oh, because Thomas on my bed is one thing. It’s safe. It’s friends. We’ve been here a million times before. But underneath the duvet is arms and legs, skin on skin, warm sleepiness. I’m only wearing a T-shirt and underwear.
Atomic particles, on high alert.
“Hi,” he whispers into my mouth, his lips brushing against mine with each word. “I think we’ve got about fifteen minutes before Ned goes on the rampage.”
There’s no morning breath, just warmth and cinnamon cake, his mouth against mine.
And then it’s his hands underneath my T-shirt, cold on my warm back. Then it’s my legs tangled with his. Then it’s our bodies pressed together. Our mouths, pressed together.
My heart hammers, and I break away. Back and forth, up and down, happy and sad. I can’t keep track of where we are, how far I want to go. Last night was crazy intense, and now we’re here, a week later from a kiss that doesn’t exist—kissing like we’ve done a lot more than that. I want to live my life in the right order.
“Hi,” Thomas says again, pushing towards my mouth.
“Hello,” I respond formally, tucking my chin down like Umlaut, which makes him laugh.
“Okay. Back to sleep for you,” he says, lifting his arm and letting me burrow into him. I curl up, staring at the ceiling stars. The pattern is different.
When I stepped through the doorway, I changed something.
Above me, the stars start moving, spiraling open. Television fuzz. I’m not upset right now. I’m not lost, or sad, or lying. There’s no diary nearby. A glance at Thomas tells me he’s asleep. I clamber out from underneath the duvet, and Superman my hand to the stars. It’s going to hurt. But beam me up anyway, Scotty.
* * *
My body bursts apart, scattering particles across the sky.
* * *
“You made a fort?” Jason looks from the hay bales to me, and back again. He shakes his head, smiling. “I forget you’re younger than me.”
It was a solid-gold idea this morning. I regretted it a little when it took me an hour to move one bale, sweating in the sun. But when I came back with a blanket to go inside and an umbrella propped up at the top for shade, it was brilliant again. A little three-sided hideaway. But Jason’s looking at me like I’m nuts.
“Not just any fort, party pooper.” I grab his hand and drag him inside, sort of half push him to sit before plonking myself next to him. It’s August and the wheat’s been harvested—the cut-off stalks prickle up through the blanket like leg hair underneath tights. “Look.”
“All right.” Smirking, Jason aims his sunglasses in the direction I’m pointing. Golden fields, stretching out forever and fading into blue sky. Nothing in sight but birds. “What am I looking at?”
“The universe,” I point. “The whole, wide world. Isn’t this great?”
“Margot,” he says. “Holksea’s hardly the whole world. Wait till I get to college…”
I tune him out and turn away to rummage for all the stuff I brought: books, apples and packs of biscuits, bottles of fancy fizzy water in a little picnic cooler. I haven’t quite figured out what we’re going to do when we need to have a
wee, but otherwise we could hang out here all day.
He’s leaving in three weeks. We haven’t talked about what will happen after that. But I think, nothing, very much. A fizzle and a fade and a forgetting. I almost don’t mind. We’ve had a whole summer. And he’s still talking, but I’m not listening.
“I got ice cream,” I interrupt. “You have to eat it now, before it melts.”
I hold out a Creamsicle and an ice-cream sandwich, and, annoyingly, he reaches for the Creamsicle, my favorite—then takes my wrist instead, and pulls me into his lap.
“I’ve got to be at work pretty soon,” he says. I’ve still got both ice creams in my hand as Jason slowly lies down. I shriek, but his hands are on my waist, holding me steady. I end up in this weird position with my elbows beyond his shoulders, fists clenched round the ice creams, face in his neck, laughing.
“Margot,” Jason says into my neck, “put the ice cream down, yeah?”
“Oh.” I drop them. We only have a few more weeks, so I remember what else you can do in a fort with your secret boyfriend, on the last day of summer.
* * *
My skin feels flayed raw—traveling through time, it’s not like before. It’s starting to hurt. But I’m back in bed, face-to-face with Thomas. He has his glasses on now, and Umlaut is snuggled between us, making little kitteny snores.
My heart is still half in the field fort. How had I forgotten what I’d known back then, that Jason and I weren’t going to be forever? How had I forgotten that I hadn’t minded? It’s like Grey’s death was a tornado, wiping out everything that came before it. Leaving me clueless.
“Shall we do it on Wednesday?” Thomas asks me. For a moment, I think he’s asking me about it, sex. Put a condom on a banana and never eat fruit again. And I blush from my head to my cherry-red toenails.
Across the pillow, Thomas matches me blood cell for blood cell.
“G.” He smiles, reading my mind. “I wasn’t asking you to do it. Although…”
He bats his lashes, slowly. Reaches out, pushes my hair back from my face. Between us, Umlaut purrs in his sleep. I lean over the kitten and poke Thomas in the chest.
“Shuddup.” I grin back, leaving my hand where it is. No dark matter in sight. I didn’t need a do-over after all. My lie doesn’t even matter—aren’t I right back where I should be? “Don’t make me paint The Wurst No. Zwei.”
“How do you make German sound so cute? It’s so terrifying when Ned does it.” Thomas stuffs his face into the pillow for a second, then pops up again. “Never mind—so, Wednesday night is go? You, me, the finest fish and chips Holksea beach has to offer.”
I think he asked me out. I think I missed me saying yes.
I wish I was here for the big moments in my life.
Thomas clambers out of bed, stretching down and putting his shoes on. When he straightens up, he’s looking over at my corkboard. “Aw, you kept my email! Cool. And you’ve … done math all over it. Okay, rawr.”
He bounces to the door, back again to kiss me, and out into the garden before I can react.
“Hello, Ned,” I hear from outside. My brother’s voice growls in reply, but I can’t make out the words. “It’s not what…”
I wait for their voices to fade before climbing out of bed and fetching the email. It’s transformed again, but as meaningless to me as ever—though it obviously made sense to Thomas. And he’s right: I have done math all over it. At least, it’s my handwriting. But I don’t recognize the equation.
Wednesday 13 August
[Minus three hundred and forty-six]
The evening we go to the beach, a daytime full moon looms giant on the horizon. The world’s biggest optical illusion. Huge and heavy, it follows Thomas and me as we cycle along the marsh path, past the hedge—my crash a hundred years ago now. The hole in the leaves is filled with dark matter, waiting for me, reminding me.
The car park is half empty when we get there, small kids carrying buckets and shovels, trailing their parents as they head home through the dusk. We chain our bikes to a railing and run to the food hut just before its shutters close.
“Fries, please,” says Thomas, just as I say, “Chips.”
They grumble, it’s the end of the day, they’ve turned the fryer off; but Thomas charms them and soon we’re on a blanket in a hollow in the dunes, warm vinegar steam rising up between us into the dusk. His satchel spills open when we sit down. He has my copy of Forever, two postcards keeping each of our places in the pages.
“Thomas!” I blurt.
He turns to me, holding down his hair against the wind, a smile as wide as the sky. I wish I could tell him: I don’t want to time-travel anymore. I want to stay here, and discover the universe with you. But I can’t make the words come out of my mouth.
“You okay?” he asks.
I nod and rescue a chip from his ketchup overkill. All day, our us has stalled—replaced by stutters, long pauses, and then both of us speaking at the same time. No, you go, no, you say. I know what’s wrong with me: I’m waiting for a wormhole to drag me away. I’m not sure what Thomas’s problem is; he’s been antsy since leaving my room on Sunday. We eat in silence till a gust of wind sends hot vinegar straight up my nose, and I start spluttering. I catch Thomas’s eye.
“All right, clever clogs,” he says, standing up. “Wait here.”
He scrunches the empty Styrofoam container, dripping vinegar all over the blanket, then runs off with it through the dunes.
“Where are you going?” I call after him, leaning over to see him jog down to the path that leads to the beach.
“It’s a surprise,” I hear. Just before he rounds the corner and disappears out of sight, he slam-dunks the carton into the bin, with a little heel-click in the air and a “Yessssss!”
While I sit and wait, I watch the sea. Or rather, its absence—over the top of our hollow, there’s nothing but flat, wet sands, stretching into the distance. Somewhere, invisible beyond it, is the North Sea. When I was little, the tide going this far out made me sad. I’d want to run for miles, right into the horizon, until I was invisible too. If I ran and ran and ran into the emptiness now, would I leave all this behind? Grey. Wormholes. Myself.
Then Thomas pops into sight, walking backwards across the flats and waving his arms in the air. It makes me want to stay right where I am. When he sees I’ve noticed him, he puts his hands to his mouth and shouts something.
“What? I can’t hear you,” I yell.
He shrugs dramatically, then he’s off, jogging farther on, not stopping till he’s about fifty yards away. I sit with knees up to my chin, arms around my legs, watching as he drags his foot through the wet sand. After a few seconds, I work out what he’s writing. I grin and grab our bags and blanket, running down the dune to join him. By the time I reach him, breathless, he’s written the best equation I’ve ever seen:
X2
It’s what Grey said about us when we were little. “Uh-oh,” when I walked into a room. Then, if Thomas was following me, “Uh-oh, trouble times two.” After a while we said it ourselves, a little chant when we were up to no good. Water is already pooling inside the letters. Thomas still has one foot in the tail of the 2—his jeans are soaked up the knees, his hair is crazy-curly from the salt and humidity, his glasses sea-flecked.
I stumble through the wet sand to him, but he shrinks back—barely perceptibly—shoving his hands in his pockets so his shoulders hunch.
“Very mature,” I settle for saying, pointing at the letters. “Thank you.”
“You’re so welcome,” he says with exaggerated formality.
“There’s seaweed on your foot,” I tell him.
He flicks his trainer and the samphire jumps into the air—he catches it, then stares at his hand, amazed. “Let’s pretend I’m truly that dexterous on purpose,” he says, and reaches over to tie it to my bag strap. “There. Now you’re a mermaid.”
There’s a pause. I’m missing something.
“What do you—” I
start, and at the same time Thomas says, “Listen. Hey, we keep doing that, don’t we?”
“You go.”
“Before I say this…” he begins. Then circles his foot in the air, gesturing to the X2. “We’ve always been friends, right? And I promise this time, we always will be. I won’t let that go. I don’t go silent on you, you don’t go silent on me. Deal?”
“Um, okay.” I prod the sand with my trainer, squelching it underfoot. Obviously, I’ve misunderstood something about Thomas and me, about tonight.
“Ned made me say that bit. It’s true. But I can’t believe he did the whole ‘protective big brother’ thing.” Thomas does his air quotes extra jazzily to make me laugh, but I don’t. For all the hot chips I’ve eaten, there’s still an ice block in my stomach.
“What do you mean? What about Ned?” My voice sounds small and thin.
“He found out … Look … There’s something I didn’t mention, about this summer. Ned found out a few days ago, and when he caught me coming out of your room the other morning, he said I had to tell you, before anything happened.”
“What?”
“I’m not staying in Holksea. When my mom moves back to England, we’re not going to be next door.”
“Where are you going to be? Brancaster?” It’s a stupid question. Thomas wouldn’t be acting this squirrelly if he was moving ten minutes up the road.
“Manchester.” He shoves his hands in his pockets and looks at me. Between us, the X2 is melting back into wet sand. Soon, the marks will disappear, as though they were never there at all. “You know, it’s not so far. We could get the train.”
“It’s five hours,” I guess. Manchester’s the other side of the country, and Holksea’s not exactly well connected. It takes a bike ride and a bus and a train just to get to London.
“Four and a half,” he says. “Three changes. I checked.”
“You were checking train times, but you weren’t going to tell me?” I don’t understand. “Is that why your mum keeps calling? To let you know the plan had changed?”
“Shit.” Thomas hunches his shoulders, blows air up through his curls. “Shit. Look, that was never my plan, okay? Mom got a job at the university in Manchester, it was all arranged for her to get there in September. Then I got your email and thought maybe I could come here first. This—” He gestures round to encompass everything, the moon, the sea, the sand. Me and my airless lungs. “This was only ever the summer.”
The Square Root of Summer Page 15