The Square Root of Summer(3)

I waited and waited, but he never wrote me a letter, or emailed, or Morse code–messaged, or anything we’d said we’d do.

My hand healed; my hair grew long. Little by little, I grew up. Little by little, I forgot about the boy who forgot me first.

“The Althorpes?” Papa interrupts my thoughts. “You remember? They’re getting divorced.”

“Fascinating,” croaks Ned. And even though Thomas abandoned me, my heart skips a little on his behalf.

“Indeed. Thomas’s mum, I was on the phone with—she’s moving home to England in September. Thomas is coming with her.”

There’s a strange sense of inevitability to this announcement. Like I’ve been waiting for Thomas to come back this whole time. But how dare he not even tell me! To have his mum call Papa! Chicken.

“Anyway, she’d like that Thomas is settled back before starting school, which I agree,” he says, adding a harrumph, a classic Papa telltale sign that there’s more to the story than he’s letting on. “It’s a bit last-minute, her plan, but I offer that he stay with us this summer. That’s … that’s my proposition.”

Unbelievable. It’s not enough that he’s coming home, but he’ll be on my side of the hedge. Unease blooms like algae.

“Thomas Althorpe,” I repeat. Grey always told me saying words out loud made them true. “He’s moving in with us.”

“When?” asks Ned.

“Ah.” Papa sips from his mug. “Tuesday.”

“Tuesday—as in two days’ time?” I shriek like a tea kettle, all calm evaporating.

“Whoa,” says Ned. His face has reverted to hangover green. “Am I meant to share a bunk bed with him?”

Papa harrumphs again, and launches the G?tterd?mmerung. “Actually, I offered for him to stay in Grey’s room.”

Four horsemen. A shower of frogs. Burning lakes of fire. I may not know my Revelations, but disturbing the shrine of Grey’s bedroom? It’s the apocalypse.

Next to me, Ned quietly throws up on the grass.





Monday 5 July

[Minus three hundred and seven]

“Spacetime!” Ms. Adewunmi scrawls on the whiteboard with a marker-pen swoosh. “The four-dimensional mathematical space we use to formulate—what?”

Physics is my favorite subject, but my teacher is way too energetic for 9 a.m. For a Monday. For any day after I’ve been awake all night, which since October is basically always. Spacetime, I write down. Then, for some inexplicable reason—and I instantly scribble it out—Thomas Althorpe.




“E equals McSquared,” mumbles Nick Choi from the other side of the classroom.

“Thank you, Einstein,” says Ms. Adewunmi, to laughter. “That’s the theory of special relativity. Spacetime—space is three-dimensional, time is linear, but if we combine them, that gives us a playground for all sorts of physics fun. And it was calculated by…?”

Hermann Minkowski, I think, but instead of raising my hand, I use it to stifle a yawn.

“That guy, Mike Wazowski!” someone yells.

“What, from Monsters, Inc.?” asks Nick.

“They travel between worlds, don’t they? McSquared,” I hear from behind me.

“Minkowski,” Ms. Adewunmi attempts over whoops and catcalls. “Let’s try to focus on reality…”

Good luck with that. It’s the last week of term, and the atmosphere is as fizzy as carbon dioxide—probably why Ms. Adewunmi’s given up on the curriculum and is making her own fun.

“Anyone else for interstellar dimensions? How would you describe a one-way metric?” A wormhole, I think. A one-way metric is a blast from the past. That’s how I’d answer. Ned bringing back Grey by repatriating his Buddhas, leaving crystals in the bathroom sink, cooking with way too much chili. Jason, smiling at me in the garden after almost a year.

Thomas Althorpe.

But I’ve never spoken up during any of Ms. Adewunmi’s lessons. It’s not that I don’t know the answers. And back at my old school, I never minded saying so and having everyone stare at the math-genius-prodigy-freak-show-nerd. We’d all known each other since forever. But like a lot of the villages along the coast, Holksea’s too small to support a real high school. At sixteen, everyone transfers to the giant school in town. Here, classes are twice the size and full of strangers. But mostly, it’s that ever since the day Grey died, talking exposes me. As though I’m the opposite of invisible, but everyone can see right through me.

When Ms. Adewunmi’s gaze lands on me, her eyebrows go shooting off into her Afro. She knows I know the answer, but I keep my mouth clammed shut till she turns back to the whiteboard.

“All right, then,” she says. “I know you guys have fractals next period, so let’s keep moving.”

Fractals, I write down. The infinite, self-replicating patterns in nature. The big picture, the whole story, is just thousands of tiny stories, like a kaleidoscope.




Thomas was a kaleidoscope. He turned the world to colors. I could tell you a hundred stories about Thomas, and it still wouldn’t be the big picture: He bit a teacher on the leg. He got a lifetime ban from the Holksea summer fair. He put a jellyfish in Megumi Yamazaki’s lunch box when she said I had a dead mum, and he could thread licorice shoelaces through his nose.