“I’ll have a word with Althorpe, tell him not to mess you around. But I’m gonna hang out at Sof’s today.”
“Why don’t you invite her here? Her mum will give you vegan food.” I don’t know much about hangovers, but instinct tells me I’m going to need pizza.
“Because Papa’s going to yell at you.” Ned grins, heading out the door. “I’ve already been through that, I don’t fancy another one.”
After he leaves, I take the garbage bag outside, then go back to the kitchen and wipe the counters with a dishrag and a squirt of something violently chemical that Grey would disapprove of. I force myself to eat a banana, make a pot of coffee. Then I put all the chairs back on the floor, sit in one, and wait for Papa.
I look at my hands, side by side on the table: this is what I did when I was little. Thomas and I would adventure, hell-bent on destruction, profit, or scientific inquiry (sometimes all three). When we got home, he would hide while I’d trot straight to the kitchen to await discovery, detection, punishment.
“Am I grounded?” I ask Papa as soon as he floats in, first checking his trademark red Converse won’t get wet.
It wrong-foots him, I can tell. “Ah, nein? This was Ned’s party, Ned’s trouble. He tells me the tap was an accident?”
“Yes.” I wait for the goose-hissing, but it doesn’t come.
“And the kitchen is cleaned up? Maybe you can call plumber, and Ned pays.” Papa pours himself a cup of coffee and sits down next to me. “I think I arrange the Book Barn shifts this time, until school starts again. Work together, no more fights. And maybe dinner as a family tonight, tomorrow, the next day…” He smiles. “I’ll cook. Or your brother. No more baked potatoes or cereal, please. You cook like your mami.”
“That’s it?”
“You want a punishment for having fun?” He wrinkles his nose. “If Grey had done this party, it would have turned out the same. I do think, is you maybe owe Thomas a sorry. I don’t know the details, what happened between you, but he was very upset when he left this morning—”
Papa’s still talking as I push my chair back with a squeak. I stub my toe on the table leg as I turn and shove open the sitting room door, run through to Grey’s, to Thomas’s room.
The door isn’t quite closed and it swings open under my hammering fists.
The bed is stripped, the Black Forest cake smears from last night, gone. There’s a neat stack of cookbooks on the piano, borrowed from around the house and the Book Barn. A faint smell of whiskey still in the air. And The Wurst, hovering over the emptiness like a sad blue penis.
“He knocked on my door very early.”
I turn around. Papa’s standing behind me, watching.
“He was all packed up, and he told me…” He hesitates. “He said he couldn’t stay here. That he was going to stay with a friend.”
“Who?” I’m Thomas’s only friend. Except for Sof and Meg and whoever he hung around with all the days I ignored him to dive into wormholes. He probably knows loads of people in Holksea. He did live here before, after all. “Where is he?”
“I checked that it was okay. And his mum knows. But, Gottie, Liebling.” Papa reaches out for me, offering his arms, but I’m already pushing past him as he says, “He didn’t want me to tell you.”
Sunday 17 to Monday 18 August
[Minus three hundred and fifty to fifty-one]
I hit my room running, yanking the patchwork off my bed, balling it up and throwing it next to the door. The bike-crash blankets join it—it’s summer, who needs wool blankets?—spilling out a million pairs of balled-up socks. Thomas’s socks. Umlaut pounces on one and scuttles off underneath the bed with it.
What next? Thomas’s cardigan is draped over the back of my chair, and I hurl it onto the laundry heap, yanking the chair over. I have to keep moving, keep doing something, otherwise I’ll think: Thomas hates me and Thomas is gone and—
I’m so angry.
I can’t believe he’s pulled a disappearing act again!
A broken lipstick gets chucked in the trash, followed by a pair of earrings borrowed from Sof. I tip my little bowl of hairbands and bobby pins in as well, then throw the bowl after them. Every surface is littered with plates, a legacy of Thomas’s baking and hours spent at my desk in search of lost time. When they’re stacked by the door and everything’s in the trash, the room seems a little less haywire—but my heart is still bouncing off the walls. How dare he do this.
I clamber onto the desk, flick the plastic stars one by one onto the floor. It’s grimly satisfying. But when I gather the constellations in my hand, it’s too much. I can’t throw these away. I heap them on the stripped bed instead, where they’re joined by a pile of coins from the windowsill. On top of the chest of drawers, the piece of seaweed from the beach. I take down everything from my corkboard, the email, the cake recipe, Polaroids of Ned’s.
Then I’m done. I stand and look at the bed, breathing heavily. All of these things, a time capsule of our summer, and what does it amount to? A heap of junk, and broken promises. Thomas hasn’t given me anything of meaning, not even his word. I barely know anything about him. I suppress the voice that says—because you never asked.
I had no choice, I was disappearing down wormholes.
Is that true? Grey’s voice answers me. Determinism, dude. Drive your own lawn mower. What to do with all this Thomas stuff? Grey would call it a cleansing and have me burn it in a herb-spiked fire. Sof would donate it all to a charity shop. Ned would chuck it in the trash. But me, what would I do? Do I know myself well enough to make a decision?
I dig inside my wardrobe for my book bag, unused since the last week of term, and cram everything inside. The front pocket rustles. I fumble with the zip, and pull out a crumpled piece of paper—Ms. Adewunmi’s quiz. How did I not notice she asked about the Weltschmerzian Exception?
I put the book bag at the back of my wardrobe. I put The Great Spacetime Quiz! on my windowsill. Then I crawl into my unmade bed and sleep for the next sixteen hours.
* * *
I wake up in the middle of the next afternoon, to sun streaming green through the ivy. The first thing I see is the quiz. Clocks are a way of measuring time … It’s infinite … A spacetime boundary—the point of no return … what is the Weltschmerzian Exception?
Good question.
Ten minutes later I’m out in the fens. The sky is huge, infinite and empty as I cycle along the deserted coast road. I’m the last person left in the universe. The whole wide world is in high-definition 3D, bigger and brighter than I’ve ever known it. Or perhaps that’s me. Facing down that final wormhole, I feel like sunshine, burning the fog away.
When I reach school and chain my bike to the rack, there are students everywhere. Anxiety tweaks at me—has term started?
Ms. Adewunmi’s classroom is unlocked and empty. It’s strange, being at school when you’re not meant to be. It makes me nervous—stools I’d normally sit on and whiteboards I’d normally take notes from are suddenly museum exhibits. Look but don’t touch.
The whiteboard is covered in equations from last term, second-year stuff. It’ll probably be cleaned off before lessons begin again in September, so I grab a pen and add the equation from Thomas’s email, the one in my handwriting. I still don’t know what it means.
“Whoa.”
I jump. Ms. Adewunmi’s in the doorway, and she’s staring not at the whiteboard, but at me. “You changed your hair,” she says.
“Uh, yeah.” I prod my mullet self-consciously. “You too.”
She puts the box she’s carrying down on the desk, tossing her braids. “I like it. Very Chrissie Hynde.”
“You’re moving?”
“Getting ready for the new term.” She starts unpacking: fresh board pens, reams of paper, plastic-wrapped sets of cardboard folders, a catering-size bag of lollipops, which she shakes at me. “Get a cola one before they all go.”
I take the bag from her and fish out a lollipop at random, waiting whil
e she finishes sorting her things out before plying her with questions.
“Sit down, smarty-pants,” she says, gesturing to the desk. “Scooch. I’ll be with you in a sec.”
I perch on the edge of the desk and gaze at the whiteboard. Am I clever? I know I understand all the numbers I’m looking at. But it’s no different from the way Sof can decipher a Renaissance painting or Ned can read music. How Thomas can translate a recipe into cake.
This summer is the world’s doing, not mine—the wormholes could have happened to anyone. I just knew how to recognize them mathematically. Even so, the equations on the board—they’re incredible. Maybe that’s something I could do when I go to university. Learn all the ways to describe the world.
“All right, then, Ms. Oppenheimer.” My teacher hops up next to me, talking round her lollipop like it’s a cigarette. “You’re a bit early. Term starts next month.”
“I needed to talk to you,” I say. “I brought my quiz back. And I wanted to ask about a theory—there’s a page missing, in one of the books from your reading list…”
“Oh! That reminds me, I have something for you.” She takes the quiz from me, but doesn’t look at it, just puts it on the desk and rummages through her things. “Aha. I picked these up, was planning to bombard you on the first day, in exchange for your essay. But, well—here.”
Ms. Adewunmi hands me a stack of brochures: Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial in London. But also faraway places I’ve not thought about, like Edinburgh and Durham, and ones I’ve not even heard of, like MIT and Ludwig-Maximilians. I run my hand over the glossy covers, trying to imagine myself in a year’s time, who I’ll be then.
She taps the stack with a long, lightning-bolt-adorned nail. “I got your theory notes. The Gottie H. Oppenheimer Principle?”
It takes me a second to remember: the emails I sent her from the Book Barn.
“It’s good. A touch science-fiction, but still. Type that into something comprehensible, and world’s your oyster.”
“This might be a silly question, but—”
“Of course you’ll get in wherever you want, Gottie. If money’s a problem, there’s funding available, especially for girls wanting to pursue STEM industry degrees, there’s all sorts of programs, grants, and such. It’s hard finding them, but they’re there. You’ll get my recommendation.”
“Actually, I was going to ask if you could understand that equation I wrote on the board?”
“No. Oh, no, I can’t.” She turns to me, wide-eyed and terrified, and whispers, “You must be a genius.”
I roll my eyes while she laughs harder than when she welcomed me to the Parallel Universe Club. Finally, she says, “Sorry. Oh, boy. It’s a paradoxical time loop.”
I quiz her with a baffled headshake.
“A joke,” she clarifies. “An equation for something that doesn’t exist. A sci-fi thing—c’mon, you don’t watch TV?”
“Could you explain it to me anyway?”
“Eh, why not.” She leaps up and wipes a space on the whiteboard clean, talking over her shoulder as she diagrams the equation.
“It describes a loop, yeah? A tunnel to the past, created in the present. A two-way wormhole. But the joke is, it can only be opened because it’s already been opened, in the past.” She circles with her pen. “And the reverse is true. It exists because it exists. It’s a paradox. Make sense?”
“Kind of.” I point to the part that most confuses me. “What’s this factor, though?”
“That’s matter created when all this happened. A sort of overflow valve. Excess energy. The equation only works if you funnel off this solution into its own section—which means it’ll never work. The whole thing is some bored physicist’s idea of a joke.”
“A joke,” I repeat. I’m disappointed—I’d hoped it was the Weltschmerzian Exception. That’s obviously a physics gag too, a hilarious mathematical urban legend. I’ll never know what happened this summer. Ms. Adewunmi sits back down next to me, swinging her legs under the desk.
“All right, then,” she says, “a joke. But it’s some pretty cool math. That it, no more questions? Surely you want to be outside on a day like this.”
I slide off the desk. When I reach the door, I turn back. “One more thing. On the reading list. How come you put Forever?”
She chuckles. “I thought you could do with some light reading. It’s a classic.”
Saturday 23 August
[Minus three hundred and fifty-six]
“Liebling.” Papa appears from the ether, knocking softly on my door.
“I’m fine, Papa,” I mumble into the pillow. “New shifts, remember? It’s my day off.”
“Ja, I know,” he says, putting a cup of tea next to my head. It’s been almost a week of moping, and he keeps trying to coax me out of it with “treats”—such as letting Ned play music at the Book Barn. This is the first time he’s sought me out in my room, though. Maybe ever. Grey was always the one to find me when I was in a funk.
I peel one eye open and watch him as he looks around, noting the emptiness, the equations on the wall, lingering by the desk, running his hand over the brochures Ms. Adewunmi gave me. The diaries.
He turns back to the bed. “Sof’s outside.”
Bah.
Papa hovers while I gulp the tea—as though he thinks I’ll book it out the window if he leaves me to it.
It’s going to be a scorching day—the air already smells like toffee, and the sun is beginning to burn. I find Sof in the shade, sitting with her sketchbook among overblown raspberries, tangles of ivy, brambles, and nettles gone to flower.
“Hi.” I half wave as Papa floats off, and plonk myself in the grass next to her, the dew soaking through my pajamas. Her sketchbook is full of doodles of the garden.
“You realize I can literally say it’s a jungle out here?” Sof waves her pencil at the wilderness as Umlaut bounces, then disappears into the grass. All the flowers have long wilted and burst in the heat. They straggle across the bushes, limp balloons after a party. In the winter, Norfolk’s beaches are shrouded in bleak white fog, and you can’t imagine spring will ever break through. The garden has that same air of loneliness now.
“Do you think your mum would come over?” I ask. I don’t have the right to ask her for a favor, but I know her mum would want to help. “Help us, I don’t know, prune?”
I wouldn’t blame Sof if she told me to piss off, if she was only here to say that. Or maybe she’s here to see Ned, and Papa’s misunderstood.
“Ask Mum yourself, later today,” she says. “She’s running the plant stall at the fair.”
Ah, the fair. Holksea’s annual jamboree of cake competitions and donkey rides marks the end of summer—for the village. For me, I had Grey’s party for that. I always thought of the fair as the start of autumn. A new beginning.
“You could come with me…” Sof croaks so quietly, I almost miss it.
“You’d want me to? I thought you’d still be pissed off at me.”
“I was,” she says, then off my look, adds, “Okay, I still am, a bit. Look, last year? Not telling me you were ditching art, ditching me, it sucked. Worse than getting dumped. But I understand it, now. I mean, you lost your dad.”
I blink at the oddity of her mistake. “My grandfather.”
“Nah. I’ve been talking to Ned about this. He was your dad. Your papa’s your dad, obviously. But Grey was his and your dad too. He was, like, all of our dads, or something.”
“Yeah, he was.”
I sigh and lean my head on her shoulder. She puts an arm round me and we sit there for a bit, both waiting for it not to be awkward. Maybe it always will be. I look at my feet, seeing how tanned they are. And dirty. The earth is definitely between my toes, and the cherry-red nail polish I put on at the beginning of summer is nothing but chips. I’m ready to fall asleep on Sof till autumn, when she pulls away.
“Please? I want to see pig racing! And eat cake—I’m going to go crazy and have gluten and dairy. And s
ugar! And the vegetable sculpting! Pleeease,” she begs. “I can’t go alone.”
“What about Meg? And—is it”—I can’t remember the name of her latest girlfriend—“er, Susie? Or won’t Ned go with you?”
“Meg will be there. Susie’s old news. And Ned’s playing with Fingerband. But anyway, I wanna go with you.” She prods me with her pencil, and I giggle, reluctantly.
“Fingerband? You didn’t want to perform as Jurassic Parkas?”
“I like rehearsing,” she muses. “And singing at the party was fun. But I think I prefer being behind the scenes. Being looked at is ugh.”
She full-body shudders. I take in her gold-sequin T-shirt, Hawaiian-print trousers, pineapple hairdo. I don’t know if we’ll stay friends. But I do know that if Sof can simultaneously be spotlight-reluctant and wear this outfit, and all that contradiction can be contained in one person, well: we might be more than the sum of our past.
* * *
Without Thomas, the fair is devoid of drama. My righteous anger at him has burned away and I kind of miss the chaos he might have caused.
After the pig race, Sof and I wander through the village green—sheep shearing, bric-a-brac, the world’s smallest petting zoo. Distantly, I can hear Fingerband squawking. By unspoken agreement, we avoid the cake competition tent.
“What about the Bunting Belles?” says Sof as we get to the food stands, peddling everything from organic veggie burgers to hot fried doughnuts. “Girls-only touring band visiting summer fairs around the country. All our songs have hand claps in them.”
“Supported by doo-wop duo the Marquee Men. Bratwurst?” I point to a hot-dog stand. Sauerkraut will soothe my soul.
She shakes her head. “The worst. We’ll travel in a gingham-themed bus.”
“And live off farmers’ market food.”
Sof keeps wrinkling her nose at said food until I suggest ice cream, then gleefully scampers off to line up for soft-serve, while I sit down on the grass to watch the world. Children tugging on their parents’ hands, a girl crying for her balloon that’s floating off miles into the sky. People from school, a handful of faces from the party, swigging cider in milk bottles and eating jerk chicken and coleslaw from Styrofoam trays. A few wave at me as they walk by. I smile back shyly.
The Square Root of Summer Page 20