The Square Root of Summer(12)

“All right.”

“He was a champion shagger,” Grey boomed. “Screwed his way round Austria!”

I could hear his laughter as he made his way down the stairs, even as I went back to trying to work out how two opposites could both be true. Jason was my Schr?dinger. Inside the box was us: a secret, something special; no one else could take it over or spoil it. But we’d been together a few weeks, and now there was another thought inside the box: I wanted him to claim me out loud.

Before I left the bookshop, I went into the biographies section and looked it up—about Schr?dinger, and the shagging. Grey was right.

I don’t know how Papa manages to work there every day.

But once I pedal away from town, on the coastal road back to Holksea, I begin to relax. The air is honey on my skin, and after a while, the world is nothing but sun and sky and sea. Occasional pubs and churchyards flutter in my peripheral vision. I speed up till they blur, salt air filling my lungs. I breathe it deep, and then I’m a kid again and for a moment nothing matters—not Thomas, not Grey, not Jason.

After a few minutes, a cluster of old buildings approaches in the distance—the outskirts of Holksea. The bookshop is on the sea side of the village, and you can see the sign from space: the Book Barn. It’s huge, flashing neon-pink capitals, dim in the sunlight but still as bright as Grey himself, and the letters imprint themselves on the back of my retinas.

I’m fifty feet away and still going fast when they disappear. Just—blink—and gone.

No.

My heart speeds up, my feet slow down, but not much. I’m compelled to keep going. Thirty feet now. Where the letters should be, there’s nothing but space. And this time I don’t mean emptiness, nothing, a negative integer, the square root of minus-f*cking-seventeen. I mean, literally: outer space. There’s a hole in the sky where the sky should be.

Twenty feet now. I’m half a mile from the sea, 52.96 degrees north, and a billion light-years away from Earth. This isn’t a telescope. It’s the ficken Hubble.

And at the edges of the hole, where the sky turns back to blue, the same untuned-television fuzz that I’ve seen before, twice now. What did Ms. Adewunmi say, about vortexes? That the image would be distorted? This is crystal.

I’m sick with terror, but I can’t make my feet stop pedaling. Because, oh shit, oh shit, oh shit. Grey’s bedroom. Grey’s diaries. Grey’s bookshop. Whatever this is—and there’s definitely a this, yesterday I saw last summer, and today there’s a hole filled with the Milky Way!—it has to do with Grey. And Grey’s dead. Which means it has to do with me …

At ten feet away, instinct jerks my handlebars, aiming for the footpath to the sea. I lean my body into the turn, one I’ve taken a million times before, and faster. But this time, for whatever reason, I’m in trouble.

I hit the turn too hard, it’s more of a swerve, and adrenaline floods me. This is going to be bad. There’s a shot of fear as I try to correct my balance, jerking to the right. But then my front tire veers from a rock to a pothole, and I’m down—and it hurts—but I don’t stop moving, even when I hit the path. My elbow meets the ground first, and a throb shoots up my arm. There’s fire in my thigh as I slide along for a few feet, leaving my skin behind. I crumple to a halt when I land in the hedge—but the bike keeps sliding, my foot trapped in the pedal. It drags my leg round, twisting my ankle, before discarding me and spinning away with a crash. Leaving me alone.





Tuesday 6 July (Later)

[Minus three hundred and eight]

I lie in the hedge for an eternity, looking up. All I can see is the sky—the real sky, the one that’s supposed to be there. It’s huge and cloudless, bright and blue, and very, very far away.

A century or so later, I check my watch—smashed, the LCD digits scattered—and my phone—dead, however hard I mash the buttons. But even so, I know I haven’t lost any time at all. I felt every second. Because

Jesus

Fuck

Ow

it hurts.

My heart hurts. I want Jason. I want the mami I’ve never had. I want Grey. I want.

“Hello?” I say eventually, experimentally, my voice wavering. “Hello?”

And I wait and wait, but nobody comes to find me. I’ve been making myself smaller and smaller for a year, and now I’m barely here at all.

Finally, eventually, I stand up, testing my ankle. It’s not broken, I don’t think—I’d have heard it snap, like when Thomas dared me to jump off the pier and I spent three months in a cast that he drew swears all over. But shit, it kills. I stumble on it a few times till I’m able to lean against the hedge and look around.

On the other side of the road, the bookshop sign flashes pink neon. Normal as pie. My bike is at an angle in the ditch, taking a bubble bath in the white wildflowers. I hobble over and see it’s mostly unharmed: the front wheel is twisted and the chain has come off, but it’s all stuff I can bash back in place. I haul it out of the ditch and lean on it while I hop, wincing, to the bookshop.

After avoiding it forever, it’s the only place I want to be.

*

The door is locked, Papa at the airport picking up Thomas. It takes a couple of tries of fumbling with the key. Inside it’s dark and quiet, the smell hitting me in a whoosh—paper, old wood, pipe smoke, and dusty carpets. Home.