The Square Root of Summer(37)

I walk out while he’s still talking—I’ve found the scissors, and I’m hacking my way back through the soaked garden to my room, jabbing at random shrubs as I go. I want it all gone. Hair, party, garden, Jason, wormholes, time, diaries, death—especially death, I’ve had a lifetime of it.

My room feels like a coffin.

CHOP.

That’s how I imagine it—one swift, clean slice of the blades and I’ll be able to stuff all my sadness in the trash. Jason’s hands in my hair, his mouth on my neck, the girl I was and am and will be—whoever she is. Gone.

Reality: I ponytail my hair, reach behind me to cut, there’s a crunch—then the scissors stop. Even yanking as hard as I can with both hands … Nothing. They’re stuck.

Patting around the back of my head with my fingers, my pulse fluttering, I can tell I’m only about a third of the way through my hair—but it’s enough that I have to keep going. Except I can’t. Open. The. Scissors.

A chunk of chin-length hair swings loose.

Umlaut turns in circles on the diaries, yowling.

“Not helping,” I sing-song to him.

My face burns even though there’s no one but the cat to witness my embarrassment. There’s no Sof to call like when I shaved my unibrow instead of plucking it—I’ve shut her out. Why did I do that? The scissors hang off my hair, bouncing against my back as I throw myself across the room to my phone and text her back, reply to everything, rapidly, urgently, immediately.

Pick a color, pick a number—meet me at the beach on Sunday. Please?

A world where Sof and I are friends.

Then I grab my nail scissors and start hacking away in tiny blunt snips, not caring about the strands that are falling to the floor, how it’s going to look. I’m so ready to be—

Free. The kitchen scissors hit the floor.

I run my hand over my head–it feels really short. In places. There are also long lengths that I’ve missed. When I was a kid, Grey would cut the food out of my hair instead of washing it. I suspect I’ve accidentally re-created toddler chic.

Umlaut pads over to the mirror with me.

My eyes flick between my reflection and the photograph. Olive-skin-dark-eyes-so-much-nose-out-of-time-eighties-mullet-hair: yes, I do look like Mum. But it’s nice. Because also, for maybe the first time in forever, I look like me.

A mirror ball of light ripples across the room. I look up, catching the end of a screenwipe—and on the other side of it, my ceiling is starred with phosphorescent plastic constellations. Like I used to have when I was little and shared a bedroom with Ned. He always hated them.

Did I stick these up there? Or did Thomas?

Under their fluorescent glow, my phone beeps with an alert for gottie.h.oppenheimer. Thomas’s email has arrived. Even though it’s impossible, even though this is a brand-new address: this is the email he sent a month ago. The timelines are converging.





Thursday 31 July

[Minus three hundred and thirty-three]



I’ve deleted and reinstalled my email app, climbed the apple tree and waved my phone around for 4G, and boinked it with my fist—but, aside from our addresses and the date at the top, Thomas’s email refuses to be anything but this gibberish.

It shouldn’t even exist! I hadn’t even set up this account when he sent this. Did he guess hundreds of addresses, sending out emails like messages in bottles?

v 4.0—opening Schr?dinger’s box determines whether the cat is dead or alive.

But what if the cat isn’t in there yet?

When dawn arrives, I shove my new hair into a facsimile of normal and change out of my planet-print PJs into a vest and shorts. At my bedroom door, I pause, looking out at the damp grass—and kick off my tennis shoes. If I’m going to discover the universe, I’ll start with my feet.

When I enter the kitchen, muddy up to my ankles, Thomas and Ned and Papa are already at the table. There’s a plate of cinnamon rugelach between them.

Papa’s eyes go wide, while Thomas swallows in a choking sort of way, then says, “Whoa. Your hair.” I can’t tell from his tone if it’s good or bad.

I reach up and prod it. “Scale of one to eleventy million, how awful?”

Thomas shakes his head, his own tousled hair bouncing. “Nah, you look awesome. It’s exactly how it’s supposed to be.”

We stare at each other for a moment, something unspoken passing between us.

Then Ned whispers in Papa’s ear, and he harrumphs, muttering in German. I think I catch the word Büstenhalter. Bra.

I fold my arms across my chest, and Thomas leaps up, launching himself round the kitchen, putting a rugelach on a plate for me, flipping the kettle on, bat-grabbing and babbling a mile a minute about Ned’s croquembouche commission.

I eat the pastry, licking sticky sugar from my fingers, and let myself laugh at Thomas’s antics. Ignore the way Ned’s scowling at us both.

After nearly a year of mourning, I feel like the Victorians when Edison came along—all those years in the darkness, and then electric light.

I’ve got the earth between my toes.

*

On Sunday, I dodge Ned’s weird policeman act and walk inland out of Holksea, along the canal to Sof’s. It’s a scalding day, and she’s already sunbathing when I get to the boat, barely visible through the jungle of pot plants her mum keeps on the deck.