The Square Root of Summer(11)

I scramble into the chair. Is she going to give me detention again? Normally she’s all smiles, even when covering boring stuff like topology, but she’s watching at me seriously. Then she finally speaks.

“Welcome,” she says, fixing me with a stare, “to the Parallel Universe Club.”

I stare back, heart thumping.

“God! Kidding, again!” She cackles loudly. “You kids are so gullible.” She wipes her eyes, still laughing. Hilarious.

“Gottie, every year one of my students acts like wormholes are real. And c’mon, this is the first peep I’ve heard from you all year. You’ve got to let me have my fun. All right, then. Theoretically—who knows what you’d see? Maybe the vortex would be so curved the event horizon would prevent you from seeing round the corner. And if we imagine you could see through a wormhole, the gravity inside might be so strong it would distort the light waves—like a fish-eye lens.”

In English: you’d see nothing, or fun house mirrors. But Jason’s kiss last night was a live-action, Smell-O-Vision, Technicolor, 3D, IMAX replay. With popcorn.

“Okay, but,” I push, “mathematically. In theory. Say with the G?del metric, the past still exists, because spacetime is curved. If you could see the past, like through a—” I mumble the next bit, aware of my supreme ridiculousness. “TV-wormhole-telescope, and it wasn’t distorted. Would watching the past make time work, um, differently? From the viewpoint. Affect it, somehow?”

“You mean, the way a clock on a speeding train runs slower than one in the station?”

“Yes!” I beam. The clock thing is both true and amazing. “I was thinking … if you watched twenty minutes’ worth of the past through the wormhole, you’d lose a couple of hours of real time.”

“Could do.” Ms. A contemplates me for a moment. Then she reaches for a pen and starts to write. “If you’re interested in pursuing quantum mechanical theory at college, you’ll want to read these. You should also”—she points her pen at my notebook, which is open to a doodle of Jason’s name—“concentrate on your applications.”

I nod, putting my hand out for the list. She doesn’t give it to me.

“Have you thought about a branch—pure mathematics or theoretical physics?” she asks, holding the paper just beyond my reach. “We don’t want to lose you to the biologists. Ha-ha!”

“I’m not sure yet…” The thought of committing to a subject for life gives me the dry heaves. I can barely commit to an emotion for five minutes.

“Don’t take too long to decide—I’ll need time for your recommendation. In fact…” She waves the paper. “I’ll let you have this if you write it up for me. Your take on wormholes.”

“Homework?” I grimace, though I suppose a summer in the library is one way to avoid Thomas.

“Think of it as your personal statement. I want the math behind it too. You give me a kickass essay on this telescope-time theory, I’ll write you the kind of recommendation that will take you a million light-years from Holksea—scholarships, grants, the works.”

She dangles the paper at me. I don’t want to be a million light-years from here. I don’t know where I want to be. But I do want to know what’s going on. So I take it.

*

Unsurprisingly, hardly any of Ms. A’s list is in the school library. I check after my last lesson, but among nine thousand poetry anthologies there’s not so much as a battered Brief History of Time. The couple of books that should be there are checked out—I reserve them at the desk, then head to the bike sheds.

I know where I can find what I need. The Book Barn. Grey came at the universe from a different angle than me, but he had a whole floor stacked full of science—from fiction to physics. The only problem is, I haven’t been there all year. Whenever Papa’s floated down to earth and asked, I’ve made excuses—homework. Biking. Swimming, even when the sea froze in November, or lying on my bed and staring at the ceiling for hours.

If you turn people away enough times, eventually they stop trying to find you.

When I get to the gate, I stop and dig through my book bag for my helmet. See Grey’s diary instead. I brought it with me this morning, a sort of talisman. Now I flip it open to find out—what was I doing, this day last year?

G SHOULD MOVE BACK INTO NED’S ROOM WHEN HE LEAVES FOR ST. MARTINS. REJOIN THE WORLD.

Underneath, there’s a little doodle of a cat, and I know exactly what day this is. Exams were long over, but I was tucked inside the bookshop attic, reading. Until Grey sat down next to me, plucking the book from my hand.

“Schr?dinger, huh?”

I watched him scan the text a little, the famous cat theory. It was pre-Umlaut.

“Let me get this straight,” said Grey. “You put a cat, uranium, a Geiger counter, a hammer, and a jar full of poison in a box. What the hell kind of Christmas present is that?”

I laughed, and explained the uranium has a 50 percent probability of decaying. If it does, the Geiger counter triggers the hammer to break the jar full of poison, and the cat dies. But if the uranium doesn’t decay, the cat lives. Before you open the box and find out for certain, both things are therefore simultaneously true. The cat is both dead and alive.

“You want to know a fun fact about Schr?dinger?” Grey asked, handing me the book back and standing up.