The Square Root of Summer(24)

“Duh.” I copy her, dipping my toe in—then brave my whole foot. I hold it there. It’s not so cold … I take another step forward, putting both feet in. Take another step, and another.

“Gottie,” Sof hisses when I’m calf-deep. “Come back, I’m freezing.”

“In a sec,” I say, without turning round. The sea and the sky and the wormhole are grey. Grey. I want to swim. All the way to the Arctic and away from my life. Then I turn round and splosh back to Sof.

“Ugh, thank God. If you’d gone in and I hadn’t, your brother would think I was chicke—wait, what are you doing?”

I’m peeling off my jumper and I hand it over to her, along with my shorts, then step back into the water in my T-shirt and underwear. The salt water stings on my scabs, but it’s a good pain—it’s waking me up. I splash toward the wormhole till I’m up to my knees.

“Gottie!” Sof shrieks as I step into a dip and plummet up to my waist. The sudden cold takes my breath away, and the only way to stand it is to go all in—I duck until it’s over my shoulders, my lungs screaming, and swim the last couple of lengths to the wormhole. The sand grazes my knees as I kick through the water, and seaweed slimes about my feet. And then I’m there.

I can’t see the water; I can only see the television fuzz, but the sea feels deep here, up to my neck. I can hear Sof shouting something, but I’m too far away to work out what. There’s a tug at my ankle, the underwater current pulling me down—

And I swim through the universe.

“Am I adopted?”

I’m helping Grey after he re-repainted the Book Barn. Instead of cleaning, last month he painted over the dirt in bright dandelion yellow. I didn’t help that time, because my hand was still in a bandage from Thomas. The color lasted two weeks, till he blasted through the kitchen door a few days ago: “Balls and buggery to the flames of hell! It’s like a bloody cupcake café!”

So yesterday we re-repainted it off-white, the kind that looks dirty even when it’s fresh. I helped. And now we’re putting everything back. Again.

“You’re not adopted, dude,” says Grey from the top of the ladder. “Pass me that box?”

I heave it up to him, then sit back down and look at the photo album I’ve found. The Book Barn is like that: a million paperbacks, half of them the shop’s, half of them ours. Sometimes Grey will be writing a receipt and he’ll suddenly grab the book back, saying it’s not for sale.

“But there are no pictures of me.” There are hundreds of Ned, tiny and wrinkled, Mum and Papa staring at him in surprise. Then blank pages until I suddenly appear, the photos loose and not even glued into the album, and I’m a year old, sprung from nowhere. Adopted.

When the pictures return, not as many now, Papa’s face is a thousand years older. He looks faded. No more photos of Mum.

Grey sighs, looking down from his pulp fiction. I don’t tell him the spines are upside down. “Gottie, man. Sometimes … you’re too busy living to take a photo. You don’t have time to stop and freeze the moment, because you’re in it.”

“What about Ned?” Ned got a Polaroid for his thirteenth birthday, and now he’s always freezing the moment. I flip back to the beginning, to Papa and Mum getting married. A yellow dress, stretched tight across her beach ball stomach. A ribbon round her forehead instead of a veil. Her hair is short and mullety, the same as mine when I was little—like Ned, she’s totally out of step with fashion, but somehow still cool. Papa half in and half out of every photo, Grey with flowers braided through his plaits.

“Here,” Grey adds, climbing down the creaky ladder. He holds out a crumpled photo from his wallet, one I’ve never seen before. It’s Mum, and as usual I try to find my face in hers—we’re both all nose, the same olive skin dark eyes, dark hair, and I don’t know why I stopped cutting mine—before I notice she’s holding a baby. It’s small, pink, not Ned …

“Me?”

“You,” says Grey.

Until then, I’d thought it all happened at the same time: I was born/she died. No one had ever told me there’d been a moment, in between, when I’d had a mami.

*

I blink and I’m sitting in the kitchen, holding the house phone to my ear. It rings far away, already dialed, except I don’t remember doing that. The last thing I remember, pre-wormhole, is being at the beach with everyone and swimming in the cold, cold sea.

In my other hand is the photograph Grey gave me in the Book Barn, almost five years ago. The one of Mum. I’d lost it almost immediately afterwards, and I never told him. Now it’s here, in my hand.

When am I?

I put my head between my knees, trying to breathe. I can cope with the collapse of spacetime. Seeing my grandfather again, I can’t. My whole body hurts. I don’t understand how I’m supposed to get through this. I don’t understand how anyone is. I’m counting to ten and still hanging on to the phone when a boy’s voice answers with a, “Yeah?”

I stare across the kitchen. Outside the window, peach roses; beyond them, the lawn is shaggy. Ned’s fur coat is slung on a chair, and there’s a trifle on the table. Next to it is a pile of party paraphernalia—pi?atas, packs of balloons. Yet another message for Thomas on the blackboard, to call his mum when he gets back from the bookshop. This is now.