The Square Root of Summer(20)
When he drops his hand, stepping away, all the stars ripple back. The whole thing only lasted for a moment—a fluorescent light on the fritz, spluttering in and out.
“There you go.” Thomas stares at me, confused. Maybe he did notice how the world just got a Ctrl+Alt+Del reboot. But all he says is, “You know, I was expecting you to have short hair.”
Whatever just happened, it definitely only happened to me. Or it happened to us both, but I’m the only one who saw it—we’re at opposite sides of the event horizon. The point of no return. I don’t want to think about which side I’m on.
*
“Whoa,” says Thomas, once we’re inside my room. “This is, as Grey would say, a trip.”
I scuttle to the bed. I’d forgotten about the emptiness. Thomas peers at what’s on my chest of drawers—hairbrush, deodorant, telescope. That’s it.
“Minimalist,” he says, prowling around.
It wasn’t always a monastery. When I moved in, Grey painted the floorboards, assembled a bed, and gave me a flashlight and the advice to never wear shoes when I cross the garden—“Feel the earth between your toes, Gottie, let it guide you.” (I always wore sneakers.) Papa gave me a twenty, which Sof commandeered to play interior decorator. I couldn’t stop her from buying cushions and Christmas lights, or putting stickers on my wardrobe.
When I cleared out the house last autumn, I got rid of almost everything in my room too. Made it negative space. It had felt cathartic. Now, seeing it through Thomas’s eyes and nothing on my corkboard but a handwritten school schedule, it just seems sad. There’s nothing to show that I’m here, that I exist. That this is where I live, breathe, don’t sleep.
“Where are the stars?” Thomas is turning in circles, looking at my ceiling, while I’m looking at him, and the way all the parts of him fit together. Arms and shoulders and chest.
“What?” I say, once I work out a response is required.
“On the ceiling.” He twists to look at me. “You always had stick-on stars. They glowed in the dark. Like magic.”
“Like zinc sulphide,” I correct.
“That was what I meant by the stars. You got all the references, right? In my email?”
This is the second mention of an email—and the second occasion it’s made time go flooey. I don’t get it. And even if he had my address, I don’t. I deleted everything, after Jason. And why would Thomas send me an email now, after five years? A warning of his surprise arrival? That means I should forgive him. But I’m committed to resentment.
I can’t screenwipe my brain into a new emotion.
Now Thomas is sitting on the bed, still gazing around as he shucks off his shoes. I’m a little weirded out by how at ease he is in my room. He picks up my clock from the windowsill and starts fiddling with it.
“What’s that?” he asks suddenly, pointing the clock at the equation on the wall.
“It’s math,” I explain. Then, duh, because it’s obviously math, I add, winningly, “An equation.”
“Huh.” Thomas drops the clock on the duvet and brushes past me as he shuffles on his knees to get a closer look. There’s a hole in his sock and I can see his skin. I was naked with Jason a dozen times, we even skinny-dipped, and this is just a toe, but it’s surprisingly intimate. “And this is on your wall, why?”
I reset my clock and nudge it back into place on the windowsill as Thomas flops around on the pillow end of the bed, getting settled.
“It’s homework.” That’s all I have to say—I don’t feel like explaining Ms. Adewunmi’s offer, I’m not even sure I want to take her up on it—but Thomas just impassively waits for more. “I’m supposed to come up with my own mathematical theory. I’m working on this idea that the time it takes to travel back and forth through a wormhole is less than the time an observer would spend waiting for you. You’d emerge late.”
“Reverse Narnia.” Thomas nods—the same conclusion I’d come to. Telepathy. “Okay. You were always Ms. Astronaut Science Girl Genius.” He nods at the telescope across the room, then looks around at the nothing else. “But what happened to your stuff?”
“I have stuff.” I’m instantly on the defensive. I point to Grey’s diaries, still stacked on my desk, and—ha!—“Look, see, there’s a cereal bowl on my chair.”
“Ooh, a bowl.” He waves his hands. “You need THINGS. My room’s like a monkey cage—plates, mugs. A Maple Leafs poster, cookbooks, Connect Four … I have postcards—all the places I haven’t been. Felt-tips, comics. You could walk in and immediately know, okay, this guy draws, he wants to travel, he likes Marvel more than DC, which tells you a lot.”
I gaze around my room, thinking, No, it doesn’t. It doesn’t tell me if you’ve ever been in love, or if you still don’t like tomatoes, or when you switched from sweatshirts to cardigans. It doesn’t tell me what happened when you left, or why you’re back. Then again, all I have are Grey’s diaries. Sof’s stickers. Other people’s things. Martians would be baffled.
“My room is a time capsule of me—” Thomas widens his eyes dramatically, stressing the words, as though I’m supposed to think, Oh, of course, a time capsule. Like the one he mentioned in the kitchen earlier this week.