The Square Root of Summer(10)
CONSIDER DUNGEON. SHE LOOKS SO MUCH LIKE CARO.
Caro—my mum. Grey was pretty accepting that his only daughter got pregnant at nineteen by a tiny blond German exchange student—but he was also clear history wasn’t going to repeat itself. That day, I’d hurtled home from sex education at school, convinced Grey would say “Make love in the sea, Gottie! Tangle among the waves! Let Neptune protect your vital eggs!”
But instead he thundered, “I don’t know if I believe in all the things I’m doing, dude, or if I half believe them and it’s cosmic insurance. But you can get pregnant upside down, the first time, in the sea, on the grass, under a full moon—most especially under a full moon; all that romance and you forget your own name, let alone the rubber in your wallet. So take the pill, for God’s sake. Take all the pills. Use a condom, get a diaphragm.”
It’s dawn by the time I stop reading, the sun coming up as bright as a magnesium flame. No freak rainstorms have shut down the airports. Which means Thomas is arriving in T-minus eight hours.
Let the Sturm und Drang begin.
First, though, I have to make it through this end-of-year assembly. We’ve barely finished our year, and already they’re hustling us out the door—every week there’s a talk about college applications, personal statements, student loans, next year’s exams …
“This Is Your Last-Chance Summer,” Mr. Carlton, the college advisor, is stage-whispering. “Entrance Exams Start In September, People—Do Not Waste Your Summer Vacation.”
In the row ahead of me, Jake rests his head on Nick’s shoulder, unconcerned with the doom-mongering. The girl next to me is on her phone, tweeting about the unfairness of having summer homework. Across the room I can see Sof, head-to-toe in pink and frantically writing a million notes as Mr. Carlton starts whispering about the Process For Art School. I should text her and say not to bother—Ned went through all that a year ago.
But I’m too busy freaking out.
And not just about what happened last night: the memory-wormhole-whatever. Losing a huge chunk of time. Jason. But also: Thomas being halfway over the Atlantic by now. Ned retuning the kitchen radio to static, which was how Grey used to listen to it. (“Cosmic noise, man, you can’t beat it! It’s the sound of the universe expanding.”) And Papa, ballooning around the bookshop—he drifts in and out of the house, replenishing cereal supplies and springing surprise kittens and summer visitors, but he’s not there.
All of that, and then there’s Mr. Carlton striding around, telling me I need to decide what to do with the rest of my life, and for the next four years, and where to do it. Right Now!
You can practically hear the exclamation marks as he talks. That I’m expected to be excited about it. Everybody else is. Happy to escape our sleepy seaside villages, embroidered along the coast, where we’ve been our whole lives and nothing ever happens.
But I like sleepy. I like nothing-ever-happens. I buy the same chocolate bar from the same shop every day, next to our village pond with its minimalist duck population of three, and then I check the Holksea village newsletter with no news in it. It’s comforting. I can wrap my whole life up in a blanket.
I don’t want to “Think About The Future,” as Mr. Carlton keeps proselytizing. It’s hard enough living in this present.
While he keeps finding new and terrifying ways to hiss about The Rest Of Our Lives, I tune out and start making notes on my notebook. I might not be able to stop the inexorable forward motion of applying for college, Ned’s What Would Grey Do? summer agenda, or Thomas’s plane, but there is one thing I can control.
I can work out what really happened last night.
*
By the end of the assembly, I’ve got a notebook full of equations to justify my split-screen-meets-telescope hypothesis. As everyone scrapes their chairs back, Sof half waves at me across the room to join her in the escape-gaggle at the doors. I shake my head, pointing to my physics teacher, and she gives me a closed-lip smile.
Ms. Adewunmi’s lingering in her seat, frowning at a timetable, but I’m hoping she’ll welcome such out-of-the-blue questions as—
“How does spacetime work?” I blurt.
She looks up sternly. “I knew you weren’t paying attention yesterday.”
“No, I mean—I was. I did the quiz, in detention. In class, sorry…”
My apologies trail off, and she laughs: “Kidding! What is it you want to know, exactly?”
“I wanted to ask—vortexes. Wormholes. What do they actually look like?”
“Is this a curriculum question, or do I need to worry about Norfolk getting sucked into the fourth dimension?” Ms. Adewunmi asks.
“It’s hypothetical. I mean, theoretical! I’m interested in the math behind it,” I assure her. “I know you can’t create a wormhole without dark matter, or travel through one. But could you see through it? Like a long-distance TV?”
My teacher considers me, then darts a glance from left to right. There are still stragglers at the doors, and she watches them leave before leaning forward to whisper urgently, “What’s the thousandth prime number?”
“Um?” I don’t understand, compute it anyway. “7,919.”
She jerks her head to the doors. “Follow me.”
Ms. Adewunmi doesn’t say anything the whole way along the corridors. Every time I try to ask a question, she gives a tiny head shake. I start to wonder if I’m in trouble. When we get to her office, she sits behind the desk, then pushes the other chair out with her foot, wordlessly asking me to sit. It’s completely badass.