The Square Root of Summer(14)
Those are the last words I say before I pass out.
Wednesday 7 July
[Minus three hundred and nine]
I wake up sweating under a patchwork quilt and six blankets I didn’t put there, see my clock and realize that I’m late for class, decide not to care, then turn and vomit over the side of my bed. There’s a plastic washing-up bowl on the floor, waiting for this to happen. This sequence takes place smoothly in about thirty seconds before I flop back against the pillows.
I’m not going to school today.
The sun through the ivy has turned the air Aurora Borealis green. I feel heavy—my bedroom has its own gravitational force, pushing me into the mattress. There’s a throb in my leg from falling off my bike, a pounding in my head, and the ubiquitous Jason-and-Grey-shaped hurt in my heart.
Grey. I stare across the room at his diaries. There’s something else, something pushing at the edges of my consciousness, something I need to remember …
Grey’s bedroom. And Thomas Althorpe, across the garden, sleeping in it.
Oh.
I don’t remember you being this gorgeous.
Cringe. Maybe I manifested these blankets into being with the thermodynamics of mortification, so I’d have something to hide under.
That reminds me of yesterday’s theory, right before I fell off my bike: that the strange occurrences are a manifestation of Grey, and guilt. And me.
I shouldn’t have taken his diaries. I shouldn’t be reading them. But it’s more than that. It’s this whole year, it’s how I was on the day he died—
Stop. I force my brain back to Thomas—by contrast, an easier mental topic. I make a clucking sound with my tongue until Umlaut jumps onto my bad leg. Why is he here? Thomas, I mean, not the kitten. Ned says banishment. But Thomas never did anything leave-the-country bad. Letting the pigs out at the summer fair—an annual cluster of raffles and homemade jam on the village green. Eating all the stripy Jell-O Grey made for my birthday party, then throwing up rainbows. But he’s not criminal.
My head hurts thinking about it. My head hurts, period.
“I’m going to go to the kitchen to get a glass of water,” I say out loud to a skeptical-looking Umlaut. “I’m extremely dehydrated.”
Not because I’m curious about Thomas. Not because I want to find out why he’s back, or why he never wrote to me. Not because the picture I have of him from yesterday—freckles against dark hair—is blurred by shooting stars. I want some water, that’s all.
*
It takes me ten minutes to limp through the garden, Umlaut trotting beside me, barely visible in the shaggy grass. When I get to the kitchen, Ned’s bedroom door is shut. There’s a message on the blackboard in Papa’s handwriting for Thomas to call his mum, and a wonky loaf of bread in the middle of the table. We’ve been mostly cereal people this year, eaten in handfuls out of the box. No me and Papa gathering for breakfast, two people at our huge table. The empty space where Grey always sat highlighting that Ned wasn’t here, that Mum should always have been.
It’s like Grey’s death left a hole bigger than even he was.
“Curiouser and curiouser,” I say to Umlaut as I sit down opposite the bread.
“What’s curious, Alice?”
I jump at Thomas’s voice behind me, my heart in my ears. Half of me freezes. Half of me swivels in my seat. Consequently, I almost fall off the chair as he walks into the room. Dark hair shower-wet, bare feet, a cardigan buttoned over a T-shirt. He looks clean. I run my tongue surreptitiously round my dry, post-vomit mouth.
Thomas gives this shy little wave and disappears behind the fridge door, which is now a Ned-orchestrated blur of photos and magnets, leaving me to compute the updates on the boy who left. He’d been half my height, round, and topped with thick-lensed glasses that boggled his eyes. This version is a hundred feet taller and has arms. Obviously he had arms before, but not like this. Not like you had to think about them in italics.
I’m leaning to one side and duck back in my seat as Thomas emerges from the fridge, his arms laden. He doesn’t say anything, giving me the tiniest smile as he piles butter and jars of jam and Marmite and peanut butter in front of me.
“Tea?” He smiles again, his hand hovering over the mugs that hang from the cabinet. One night and he’s completely at home. Duh, I remind myself: he practically used to live here. With Grey’s roars and Ned’s Nedness and Papa’s DIY approach to parenting—“Chocolate? Hmmm, take the whole bag”—Thomas and I spent most of our time on this side of the hedge. It was more interesting (not to mention his dad was a yeller).
As Thomas fills the kettle, silence builds in the air. There has to be The Conversation—you don’t come back after leaving and say “Tea?” Actually, Jason did. Ned did. That’s what boys do. They leave, and when they come back, act like it’s no big deal.
Thomas hacks the wonky bread into slices while he waits for the kettle to boil. I peek at him when he’s not looking, adding details to my mental file: Thomas has hairy toes! Thomas wears hipster glasses! Thomas is cool. From his vintage haircut—too short at the sides and tousling into curls on top as it dries—to his obscure-organic-coffee-brand T-shirt. And his cardigan. It’s a betrayal. How dare he grow up cool. How dare he grow up at all.
Finally he plonks a stack of toast and a mug in front of me and sits down opposite, nodding as if to say “Well, here we are.” As if to say five years is nothing.