The Square Root of Summer(21)

“—of who I am right now,” he continues. “Thomas Matthew Althorpe, age seventeen. Archaeologists will conclude: he was messy.”

There’s silence again as I imagine him in Grey’s room now. Without all his things. Then Thomas pokes me with his holey sock and non sequiturs. “I poured whiskey on Grey’s carpet.”

“Wait—what? Why?”

“It was a ritual. A commemoration. That was his room, you know?”

“Yeah…”

“I didn’t think it through, where I’d sleep when I got here. Your dad gave me Grey’s room for the summer, and I didn’t want to act like it wasn’t a big deal,” he continues, “move in and take it over. It needed a ritual.”

“It needed whiskey?”

“Exactly.” He rolls up his cardigan sleeves and mimes pouring it out. I try to absorb this. That Thomas not only understands his being in Grey’s room is A Big Deal, he was thoughtful enough to do a supremely Grey-like thing about it, pouring whiskey on the carpet—equal parts superstition and ritual and mess.

“This is different—you coming back—than what I expected,” I admit to him.

“You thought I’d jabber aboot moose and maple syrup, eh.” Thomas dismisses the comment, rummaging for the apple and a handful of coins, piling them on the windowsill. “There,” he beams. “Grey’s room needed whiskey. Your room needs things. All the way from Canada. And, er, your garden. A time capsule of you: Margot Hella Oppenheimer, in her eighteenth summer.”

I feel a flicker of irritation. Those are his things, not mine—that’s not a time capsule of me. Mine would contain silence, lies, and regret, and I’d need a box the size of Jupiter.

“What is it with you and time capsules?”

“I like the idea of a permanent record,” he explains. “Something to say, This Is Who I Am, even when I’m not that person anymore. I left one back in Toronto.”

“What was in it?”

“Sharpies. Comics. My old glasses. A key ring for my car, which I had for all of two months before selling it to come here. I guess I don’t need it to escape my dad anymore, though. That’s Toronto. It’s like this—” He holds out his left hand, showing me the two-inch pink scar nestled there. “I’m not twelve anymore. We may not have talked for years”—he glances at me—“but I always had this, so I could remember that day.”

Whoa. His scar matches mine. I didn’t know he had one.

But it doesn’t mean he knows me.

“I don’t want to open our time capsule,” I say, not caring whether we really made one or not as my irritation gathers steam. “I don’t want to remember being twelve. Big deal, you have a scar too. That’s not a good enough reason never to write to me!”

Mum, Grey, Jason—none of them can answer me. It’s exhilarating, finally having someone to yell at.

Thomas hops off the bed and grabs his shoes. My words have slapped the dimples right off his face. His voice is flat as the landscape when he says, “Have you even considered it from the other way around? That you never wrote to me?”

After he stalks out the door, across the garden, the kitchen light stays on for hours.

I stay up with it. First I count the coins into neat stacks on the windowsill—they come to $4.99 exactly. Then I pick up my marker pen and draw a circle around the Minkowski equation, and write underneath:

WORMHOLES—TWO TIMES AT ONCE.

SCREENWIPES—TWO REALITIES AT ONCE.

And at the top of the wall, I write: The Gottie H. Oppenheimer Principle. v 1.0





Sunday 13 July

[Minus three hundred and fifteen]

“Synthmoan de Beauvoir.”

“What?” I’m highlighting excerpts from A Brief History of Time and only half-listening to Sof. When she snatches the book out of my hands, the pen leaves a fluorescent-yellow squiggle across the page, an electrical storm.

“Hey!”

“Synthmoan de Beauvoir deserves your full attention.”

“Who?” My mind is on wormholes, not here at the beach with Sof. I had my first shift at the Book Barn yesterday, working with Papa and avoiding Thomas, and I’ve finally got hold of all the titles on Ms. A’s reading list.

When Sof rang the bookshop to make peace, I thought showing up here today would be enough. But she keeps pushing to re-create our former dynamic, not noticing we can’t slip back into our old groove, like happiness is a dress you wear. Neither of us mentions her fortune-teller, or her note.

It’s a grey, grizzly day, the cold air fuzzy with impending rain. Sof and I used to hit the beach on Sundays, weather be damned—but Ned and Fingerband only showed when the sun was cranked up. I remember whispering to Jason, confused, “But I thought you were goths?” He chuckled and explained how goth and punk and metal were totally different. I don’t know; they all wear a lot of black.

There’s a glimmer of weak sunshine. He might show.

“It’s my stage name,” Sof rasps, waving my book in front of me. “Lead singer of a feminist disco-punk band. Grrrls, guitars, glitter, and Gloria Steinem lyrics.”

Is disco-punk a genre? I stop trying to grab the book back and start rubbing arnica cream—the homeopathic stuff Sof recommended—into my bruises. I found some, new, in the bathroom cabinet. Along with coconut oil and a big lump of rose quartz. Ned. He and Sof are working from the same script, putting on a play of Last Summer. Only I’ve forgotten my lines.