The Square Root of Summer(43)

Before my world fell apart.

Across from me, Meg’s making Jason a daisy chain, one end already draped around his leather jacket collar. I watch as though they’re strangers on a cinema screen.

And I can brush away the hurt just like it’s rain.

“G.” Thomas’s whisper makes its way dozily through the flowers. “Why do you keep staring at him?”

“Hmmm?”

Jason’s laughing, Meg’s foot now in his lap. He’s playing mine and Sof’s game: writing on the sole of her shoe with a felt-tip, while she pretends to hate it, giggling. My own feet are bare, twitching in the grass. I still have a pair of shoes with Jason’s name on them.

A nudge at my side. I look away from Jason, laughing in the daisies. Thomas has rolled over and he’s shoulder-to-shoulder with me—the way Jason and I once were, next to each other on a blanket, a long time ago. Or was it yesterday? That’s the trouble with revisiting the past—it makes it hard to live in the now, and the future, impossible.

“Sorry, what?”

“Jason. Whenever he’s around, you always stare at him.”

“I wasn’t staring at him,” I lie. Then add in a lofty voice, “If you must know, I was gazing into the middle distance and thinking important thoughts. Jason’s stupid hair was just in the way of my eyeline.”

“Important thoughts.” Thomas snorts. “Like what to plonk on your baked potato for tea?”

First kisses, second chances. If Thomas hadn’t fallen off the books, he would have been my first kiss. I don’t care that it was Jason instead. I only regret keeping it a secret. What would Grey say? Sing a booming chorus of “My Way,” probably, then tell me love is something to shout out loud. But maybe there are a hundred different types of love, and ours was never meant to be more than a summer.

I want an endless summer and to fall in love a new way, with a future.

“Hey, Thomas…” I press the reset button. “You were my first kiss—at least, the first that counts. I think you’ll be my first everything.”

I mean first love. A little white lie. But Thomas’s whole face is wide-open wondering, eyes warm on mine as he says, “Your first everything. You’ve never…?”

I don’t get the chance to clarify, because Sof interrupts.

“What are you guys whispering about?” she drawls from across the garden. She’s half asleep in Grey’s deck chair, a beer dangling from her fingers, her feet curled underneath her.

“Fate,” replies Thomas, looking at me. Then he turns away, grinning at Sof. “First single by Deck-Chair Girl—you look like a pop star.”

She smiles and toasts us, saying “C’mere” to Thomas. “C’mere and tell me more about Canada.”

As he clambers to his feet to go over to her, he whispers to me, “Phew. For a while, I wondered if you’d based The Wurst on personal experience.”

I laugh again and turn onto my back, closing my eyes and letting the sun wash over me, dancing red patterns through my eyelids as I tumble through half sleep. The lie I just told flickers at the edges of my consciousness. It’s a misunderstanding, I tell myself, shutting it away in a corner of my mind. I’ll clear it up tomorrow—the sex part, anyway. I’ve no intention of telling Thomas I’ve already been in love.

Because, Thomas-and-Gottie. Somehow we’re managing friends, and something more too. I don’t know yet whether we’ll be like or love and I don’t care. Growing up, coming of age, bildungsroman, whatever—this time around, I’m growing up right. It’s fate.

A bug tickles my arm and I brush it off. I hear Ned’s window creak open, and music spills out over us.

“I’m bored.” Sof’s voice comes from far away. Only boring people get bored, Sofía. Grey’s voice in my head.

Another tickle, a midge or a ladybug or an ant or something. The sun goes behind a cloud and I shiver.

A butterfly on my arm. A cool breeze, the first of the day.

“Gerroff,” I murmur, but another bug lands on me, another and another—cold and wet and hundreds of them, and when I open my eyes, it’s not bugs. It’s raining.

I’m alone in the garden.

Did I fall asleep? Not waking me up when it started to rain, and persuading everyone to go inside without me, that’s a typical Ned prank.

“Ned! Edzard Harry Oppenheimer,” I yell, spluttering on a mouthful of rain as I sit and scramble up, slipping and sliding through the wet grass to the kitchen. It’s absolutely pouring, dark as a winter’s evening, the rain sluicing in great sheets as I burst through the door.

“Thanks a lot, you b—”

No one’s here. It’s dark. There’s no sound but the hum of the fridge and the steady drip of my wet clothes onto the floor.

“Hello?” I call out, flicking on the lights. Maybe they’re all hiding. “Here I come, ready or not.”

The rain pounds the windows as I grab a tea towel, rubbing my hair into a static frizz. A trail of damp footprints follows me through the kitchen. I tiptoe towards Ned’s half-open door and fling it wide: “Found you!”

It’s empty. Just records and Ned’s huge stereo system, a collection of cameras, and a dank dirty-laundry smell. The sheets are the same ones Papa put on at the beginning of the summer. I wrinkle my nose: gross.