The Square Root of Summer(38)

I stand on the towpath for a couple of seconds, watching as Mrs. Petrakis goes from watering the plants to sprinkling Sof, who shrieks with laughter. Grey used to do that to us in the garden. Did he do that to my mum? Would she have done it for me? The thought is a wormhole yank to my heart.

“Sof!” I bellow, to stop thinking about it.

She sits up, peering over the ferns, and her mouth forms a perfectly lipsticked, perfectly gobsmacked O.

As in, oh, my hair. I’d forgotten about the makeover.

While Sof stares at me, I clamber on, rocking the boat—my movement makes all the leaves sway, even though there’s no breeze. Sof shakes her head, maybe in disbelief.

“Hi, Mrs. Petrakis.” I wave, awkwardly.

“Hello, stranger.” Her mum’s smile is warm, sending lines radiating out from her eyes. She puts the watering can down. “Darling, I’d give you a hug, but my hands are covered in compost. It’s only been four days since all the rain, but everything’s totally dried out. I expect your garden’s much the same?”

She and Grey used to bond over mulch and leaf mold and compost, oh my. Her ideas are all throughout the diaries. It’s how Sof and I first became friends. Sof, who still hasn’t spoken.

“It’s okay,” I fib. Has Sof told her how neglected the garden has become? I should invite her round to say hello to the plants. Ask her what we need to do to restore the garden to its former glory.

“Let me get you a drink—coconut water?” Mrs. Petrakis smiles again, turning away and taking off her gardening gloves. She touches the back of her hand to Sof’s shoulder. “Don’t forget sunscreen.”

Sof follows her inside to get it, and I try not to hate her for having a mum who remembers about sunscreen.

“Wow,” Sof finally says when she returns, carrying bottles of water and a bag of dried apple slices.

“You think it was a mistake?”

“No, no…” Sof looks like she thinks it was a mistake. Her own hair is done up in giant Princess Leia buns as she stares at mine. “Turn around, let me get a better look at it.”

I do a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree spin, then sit down on the towel next to hers, sweating from the small exertion.

It’s blazing hot. The air is still and smells of salt and sea lavender, with the kind of endless sky you only get here on the fens, where the land is so flat it could prove Ptolemy wrong, and the blue goes all the way to the edges. Not that I’ve been anywhere else to compare. Perhaps Ned sees similar skies all the time in London. Perhaps Thomas left behind a Canadian sky as big as this one.

I want to see all the skies, not only the one I know. This is how you discover the universe.

“Do you hate it?” I rub my hand over the bristles on my neck, still not used to it.

Sof adjusts her lime sunglasses—they match her bikini—not looking at me as she croaks, “I don’t hate it. But I wish you’d told me about it first.”

“So you could tell me not to do it?” I half joke. “I know it’s wonky, I think Thomas got peanut butter on our scissors…”

Sof doesn’t answer, just stares out at the canal. The surface is a mirror: all that blue sky is underneath us too. We’re at the center of everything.

“You and Thomas. I haven’t seen you in weeks, but he’s cutting your hair with you—”

“I cut my hair. Thomas had nothing to do with it.”

“He’s in your house. He’s getting peanut butter on your scissors, working at the Book Barn … You barely reply to my texts, you never said you cut your hair.”

This isn’t fair. Sof’s abandoned me before to spend hours on the phone with girls she’s never met, going googoo-eyed over an Internet crush. Can’t she just be happy I’m happy? I don’t want to wade into a quagmire of conversation. I want to fast-forward through all the awkward like coming out of a wormhole, and emerge with us as friends and have everything be normal.

“It looks like it did when I first met you,” Sof mutters. “How it would have been when Thomas lived here before.”

“Thomas lives with us,” I say. “I can’t not see him. And didn’t you guys hang out in London with Meg?”

“You and Thomas are friends,” she says, finally looking at me—or at least, pointing her sunglasses in my direction. “Me and Thomas are friendly. Where are you and me?”

I stuff an apple slice in my mouth—it’s the texture of sea sponge—for something to do. When Grey died, Sof visited me every day, bringing magazines and chocolate and wide eyes full of question marks: are you okay, are you okay, are you okay? I started dreading the tap-tap-tap of her knock because I could feel her wanting—wanting me to talk to her, wanting me to let her in, wanting me to come to her. Wanting me to act a certain way. It was exhausting.

What if friendship has a best-before date, and ours has gone off?

“Bet they’d be a novelty one-hit band,” I say, nudging her. “Peanut Butter Scissors.”

No response.

“Surprise Haircut—quirky singer and a couple of nerds on keyboards.”

Nothing from Sof.

“Your Best Friend’s A Moron And She’s Sorry—me on Niall’s drums, scatting a song of apology.”

Sof smirks. Only a little. And she quickly pretends she didn’t. But it’s a start.