The Square Root of Summer(46)
I flush, guiltily, even though there’s no way he can know why I’m dressed for a freezing, rainy night. For another night altogether.
“Aren’t you baking?” I counter, pointing to the saucepan. My tongue is dry.
“Ha. Seriously,” he says, turning down the hob and sitting next to me. Knees bumping again. This time, he sandwiches mine between his. “You look cute in that jumper, but it’s ninety degrees out.”
Flustered by cute, I yank off the jumper without unbuttoning it. It gets stuck over my head and takes my T-shirt with it, the static cling sending out sparks from my hair. “Help,” I say from inside the jumper, and feel Thomas’s hands on my waist, holding my T-shirt down. When I eventually emerge, he’s considering me. A smile twitching at the corner of his mouth.
“Stop throwing yourself at me,” he says. “It’s embarrassing.”
“Are you jet-lagged?” I croak. My brain rapid-fires memories of last Monday at me and I grasp for them, trying to make sure we do things the same way. Because if I change the smallest thing … This is messing with time on a Back to the Future scale. This is Marvin, your cousin Marvin Berry!
“Are you feeling all right?” Thomas asks. He puts his hand to my forehead, pretending to take my temperature. I’m so tired, it’s all I can do not to lean into it. Fall and let him catch me. “Nope, normal—yet asking me about jet lag.”
“Jet lag, it’s, um,” I stammer, “when you change time zones and end up all weird.”
“I know what it is. It’s just a funny thing to ask—I left Canada a month ago. And it’s not any later than we’re usually up. What are you, seventeen or seventy?” Thomas tilts his head, considering me. “Sure you’re okay? There’s something strange about you tonight.”
I freeze. Why did I step through the doorway? From wearing different clothes to saying things before Thomas should, I’ve already made a hundred tiny tweaks that could affect the future. I’m an enormous butterfly, flapping stupidly around the kitchen and triggering intergalactic tsunamis, and it’s going to end in disaster—
“Aha!” He snaps his fingers. “No homework. I barely recognized you without a giant calculator hanging off your arm.”
My shoulders slump in relief.
“Your nose in a book, scribbling things,” Thomas continues. “Stand back, sire. I’m away to the library! There’s math to be solved!”
He’s right. I don’t have my constellations chart. I don’t have the diaries, or my notebook. How do we end up outside, kissing? How do I get home again? I’m utterly, totally lost.
Thomas mistakes my silence, nudging me gently.
“Sorry,” he says. “Look, you are always reading something off-the-charts clever with a scary title, but to be honest … I’m jealous of your homework ethic, especially compared to my own.” He does the breathless half chuckle of someone who’s not entirely joking. Maybe whose dad tells him so.
“You work hard,” I tell him. “You do. I’ve seen you at the Book Barn, you’re the only one who bothers inputting the receipts. And you literally bake our breakfast every day.”
Without warning, Thomas pushes his chair back with a Ned-bothering squeak and darts into the pantry. He emerges, arms laden, and starts flinging ingredients on the table, like that first night. Rosewater, sugar, unsalted butter, and bags of pistachios.
“Forget Sof’s cake,” he says. “Let’s make baklava for breakfast. No project, so … You’re going to help me, right?”
A do-over. The universe is giving me a second chance. It wants me to be bold. It wants me to say: “Yes.”
Baking turns out to be surprisingly easy—or Thomas is a good teacher. A few minutes later, we’re standing side by side at the stove, me on idiot duty, melting butter, while he does something exceedingly complicated with the sugar and rosewater. And all the while I’m thinking: This is how it’s supposed to be. This is how it should have been all my life.
“Store-bought?” I tease as Thomas opens a packet of filo pastry, pretending to sound aghast.
“Shush, you.” He elbows me back.
Thomas starts folding layers of pastry into a cake tin, instructing me to brush them with my melted butter. Tutting when I keep brushing his hand instead. “Ztoppit. Now you sprinkle on the pistachios and—or, no, one giant, clumping heap like that is fine too. I think that’s what they call ‘artisan.’ A D in art, was it?”
I steal a pistachio. Thomas bats my hand away.
“Tell you what,” he says, “I’ll do the cooking, you tell me about time travel.”
I nearly choke on the pistachios I’ve crammed in my mouth. It’s not that I’d forgotten what’s going on here—absentmindedly discarding the knowledge that I’ve time-traveled, like it’s an old sock. But the universe has twisted back on itself, in order to make things right. And for a second, it seems like Thomas has figured it out.
“Your extra-credit project?” He raises his eyebrows at me, and I wonder where Ms. Adewunmi’s essay would take me. Far away from Holksea, she said. Far away from Thomas too. “It’s about time travel, right? Easy on the math, obviously—are we talking forwards or backwards?”