The Square Root of Summer(2)

“Grots,” he says, not quite meeting my eye.

That’s Ned’s nickname for me, I think. You used to call me Margot.

I want to say hello, I want to say so much more than that, but the words vanish before they reach my mouth. The way we left things, there’s still so much unsaid between us. My feet grow roots while I wait for him to stand up. To talk to me. To mend me.

In my pocket, my phone weighs heavy, untexted. He never told me he was back.

Jason looks away, and sucks on his cigarette.

After a pause, Ned claps his hands together. “Well,” he says brightly. “Let’s get you two chatterboxes inside. There’s meatballs to fry.”

He struts off to the house, Jason and me walking silently behind. When I reach the back door, I’m about to follow them into the kitchen, but something stops me. Like when you think you hear your name, and your soul snags on a nail. I linger on the doorstep, looking back at the garden. At the apple tree, with its laundry blossoms.

Behind us, the evening light is condensing, the air thick with mosquitoes and honeysuckle. I shiver. We’re on the cusp of summer, but I have the sense of an ending, not a beginning.

But perhaps it’s that Grey is dead. It still feels like the moon fell out of the sky.





Sunday 4 July

[Minus three hundred and six]

I’m in the kitchen early the next morning, scooping birchermuesli into a bowl, when I notice it. Ned’s reinstated the photographs on the fridge, a decorating habit of Grey’s I always hated. Because you can see the gap where Mum should be.

She was nineteen when Ned was born and she moved home to Norfolk, bringing Papa with her. Twenty-one when she had me, and she died. The first photo I show up in after that, I’m four and we’re at a wedding. In it, Papa, Ned, and I are clustered together. Behind us towers Grey, all hair, beard, and pipe—a supersize Gandalf in jeans and a Rolling Stones T-shirt. I smile toothlessly: prison-cropped hair, shirt and tie, buckled shoes, trousers tucked into grubby socks. (Ned is in a pink rabbit costume.)

A couple of years ago, I asked Grey why I’d been dressed as a boy, and he’d chuckled, saying, “Gots, man—no one ever dressed you any which way. That was all you. Right down to that weird jam with the socks. Your parents want to let you and Ned do your own thing.” Then he’d wandered off to stir the dubious stew he was concocting.

Despite my alleged childhood insistence on dressing like Mr. Darcy, I’m not a tomboy. They might be in a tree, but my bras are pink. Awake all last night, I painted my toenails cherry red. Hidden in my wardrobe—albeit underneath a hundred doppelg?nger sneakers—lurks a pair of black high heels. And I believe in love on a Big Bang scale.

That’s what Jason and I had.

Before leaving the kitchen, I flip the photo over, sticking it down with a magnet.

Outside, it’s an English cottage–garden idyll. Tall delphiniums pierce the cloudless sky. I scowl at the sunshine and start heading to my room—a brick box annex beyond the apple tree. Almost immediately, my foot hits something solid in the long grass, and I go flying.

When I pick myself up and turn around, Ned is sitting up, rubbing his face.

“Nice dandelion impression,” I say.

“Nice wake-up call,” he mumbles.

From the house, through the open back door, I hear the phone ring. Ned cat-stretches in the sun, unruffled. Unlike his velvet shirt.

“Did you just get home?”

“Something like that,” he smirks. “Jason and I headed out after dinner—Fingerband rehearsal. There was tequila. Is Papa around?”

As if cued by a hidden director, Papa floats from the kitchen, a mug in each hand. In this house of big stompy giant people, he’s a Heinzelm?nnchen—a pixie-pale elf straight out of a German fairy tale. He’d be invisible if it weren’t for his red sneakers.

He’s also about as down-to-earth as a balloon, not batting an eye at how we’re scattered on the grass as he perches himself between my upside-down cereal bowl and me. He hands Ned a mug. “Juice. Here, I have to talk both of you to a proposition.”

Ned groans but gulps the juice, emerging from the mug slightly less green.

“What’s the proposition?” I ask. It’s always disconcerting when Papa tunes in to reality enough to run ideas past us. He seriously lacks Vorsprung durch Technik—German precision and efficiency. Not just a blanket short of a picnic—he’d forget the picnic too.

“Ah, well,” Papa says. “You both remember next door, the Althorpes?”

Automatically, Ned and I turn to look across the garden, at the house beyond the hedge. Almost five years ago, our neighbors moved to Canada. They never sold the house, so there was always the promise of a return along with the For Rent sign and its constant parade of tourists, vacationers, families. It’s been empty for the past few months.

Even after all this time, I can still picture a grubby little boy in coke-bottle glasses squeezing through the hole in the hedge, waving a fistful of worms.

Thomas Althorpe.

Best friend doesn’t even begin to cover it.

Born in the same week, we’d grown up side by side. Thomas-and-Gottie—we were inseparable, trouble times two, an el weirdo club of only us.

Until he left.

I stare at the scar on my left palm. All I remember is a plan to swear a blood brothers pact, a promise to talk to each other. Three thousand miles wasn’t going to change anything. I woke up in the E.R. with a bandage on my hand and a black hole in my memory. By the time I came home, Thomas and his parents were gone.