The Square Root of Summer(15)

He’s made my tea the perfect shade of brown. My toast is burnt the way I like it. It’s infuriating, that he’s got this right. I push the Marmite out of sight and scrape on hard curls of butter, then take a bite and let out an involuntary “Mmm.”

When I look up, Thomas is staring at me, puzzled.

“What?” I wipe my chin for crumbs, conscious of my sweaty hair, my grungy pajamas, my bralessness underneath them. The second I think this, my brain goes: breasts, breasts, breasts. My skin flushes.

“Nothing.” He shakes his head, then again. “Yesterday. At the Book Barn.” His voice is deeper than when he left, and not quite Canadian. Apparently my brain is on a roll with embarrassing thoughts, because it goes: his mouth must taste of maple syrup. Wie bitte?

“Your dad says that’s the first time you’d been there for a while? The bookshop?” Thomas is still talking, and I try to focus.

This must seem weird to him—the Book Barn was always our rainy-day refuge. An escape when his parents were fighting—especially then, when his dad would redirect ire to Thomas—or when Ned was refusing to play with us. We’d cycle out of the village towards the sea, and Grey would take us in until we got too noisy. I don’t know how to answer, so I cram a piece of toast into my mouth.

“Right. Sorry. How—” Thomas immediately holds up a wait-a-minute finger. After digging in his pocket, he emerges with an inhaler and takes two puffs before saying, “How are you feeling this morning?”

“Huh?” I’m distracted—I’d forgotten about his asthma. I add a mental wedge of Scotch tape to his glasses, and my memories start to shift and rearrange themselves. Past Thomas and this one, beginning to coalesce.

“Falling off your bike, remember?” prods Thomas. “Hang out with me—Ned said to tell you to pull a sick day; he’d fake a note for you.”

Ned said that?

“I’m fine,” I lie automatically, a year’s practice. It’s practically my catchphrase.

“Actually, you ralphed. You’d taken a couple of pills, morphine; you said there were shooting stars coming out of my head.” Thomas waves his hands around when he talks, grabbing invisible bats. He used to do that when he was excited, or freaked out, or nervous. I don’t know which one this is. I’m trying to get my brain to speed up: morphine?

“We got you in the car, your dad muttering in German the whole time, and WHOOSH. You hurled all over my pants. With the bloody leg, it was like the day I left. Remember? That day with the time capsule.”

Thomas pauses his insane monologue—he’s used more words in a minute than I have in ten months. And I can’t keep up, what time capsule?—and he looks at me. His eyes are muddy, with a flaw in the right iris like an inkblot. How had I forgotten that?

“You had short hair that day,” he says, like he’s planting a flag on the moon and declaring his knowledge of me.

But if an old haircut and a scar on my hand is everything he has—I was wrong. He doesn’t know me at all.

“G.” Thomas tilts his head at me. “Do you think that email—”

Screenwipe.

I don’t know how else to describe what happens. One minute, Thomas is tilting his head, holding his mug, mentioning an email. Then there’s this ripple across the air, for a few seconds. Cling wrap peels off across the room. Revealing what’s underneath: everything looks exactly the same, except the clock has jumped forward a minute, and Thomas is holding his toast and laughing, shoulders and curly hair shaking, as he says:

“—Okay, so what’s the plan this summer?”

It’s as though time skipped. Not for long, but like a jumpy DVD stuttering through a scene. I think I’m alone in noticing this glitch, which reinforces what I thought about yesterday’s space trip: that it’s to do with me. Me and Grey. Something I did has made time go all Eternal Sunshine.

Thomas is waiting for me to answer, acting as though nothing has happened. I don’t know—maybe it hasn’t. Maybe this and the wormholes are all in my head. Maybe it’s this alleged “morphine.” Is that Canadian slang? Grey spurned traditional medicine—he was once caught trying to fish for leeches in the village pond, and I never saw him take so much as an aspirin—so I’m more inclined to believe it was a legal high or something potently herbal.

“G,” he repeats, poking my good leg under the table. “This summer—what’s our plan?”

“Our plan?” I repeat, incredulity and annoyance helping me find my voice. “Are you kidding? You can’t drop off the face of the planet then come back wanting there to be a plan.”

“Canada,” he says mildly, sipping his tea.

“What about it?”

“It’s in the northern hemisphere. About three thousand miles west of here?”

“So?”

“It’s on this planet.”

If you didn’t know Thomas, you’d say he sounded calm. But there’s nothing I find more infuriating than someone refusing to have a fight when I’m picking one, and he knows that. And I hate that he knows that.

“Whatever. I’m going to have a bath.” I can’t quite storm off, but I swallow the pain as I limp out of the kitchen as fast as I can. When I get to the bathroom, I lock the door and crank the taps till they thunder. I sit on the edge of the bath and stare at the sink. Four toothbrushes in the mug, where all year it’s been two. Baking soda toothpaste. An explosion of Ned’s hair products and boy deodorant and joss sticks jostling for space. Above them, the mirror fogging up with steam, revealing a finger outline of Ned’s band logo.