The Square Root of Summer(5)

He frowns at me—I’m grinning like a loon, so I pretend to write on an invisible notebook until, satisfied, he turns away.

I look back at the absence-of-notebook and swallow another cackle. Because I’m wrong: it’s not invisible. If it were, I’d be able to see the desk underneath. But instead, there’s a rectangle of nothing. An absence. It looks sort of like the black-and-white fuzz of an old TV that won’t tune in, or how I imagine the indescribable gloop beyond the boundaries of the universe, the stuff the Big Bang is expanding into.

Am I going bananas?

I bend down, peering underneath the desk. Lumps of gum, a Fingerband sticker, and graffiti on solid wood.

But when I sit upright again, there’s still that rectangle of television fuzz.

It’s not growing, or changing, or moving. I slump in my seat and stare at it, hypnotized. Drifting back to five years ago. When there was a boy.

An attic.

And a first kiss that wasn’t.

*

“Bawk, bawk, bawk,” Thomas says from the other side of the attic. “Chicken. Bet there’s not even arteries in your hands.”

“Mmmm.” I don’t look up from the anatomy encyclopedia. Like everything else in Grey’s bookshop, it’s secondhand, and there’s graffiti on the pictures. “Let me check.”

He’s wrong, you do have arteries in your hands, but I’m planning to do the blood pact anyway. I just want to look at this book first. The pages with boy parts especially. I turn it on its side, tilt my head. How does that even…?

“G, what are you doing?” Thomas peers over my shoulder.

I slam the book shut.

“Nothing! You’re right. No arteries,” I lie, my face bright red. “Let’s do it.”

“Gimme your hand,” he says, waving the knife. “Oops.”

The knife flies through the air. When Thomas turns to get it, he topples over a stack of books.

“What are you kids doing up there?” Grey bellows from the floor below.

I yell down the stairs, “Nothing. Thomas is just reshelving. We thought we’d use this wacky new system called the al-pha-bet.”

There’s a muffled curse and a giant rumble of laughter. I turn back to Thomas, who’s retrieved the knife and is carving our initials into a bookcase. He won’t be here tomorrow. We’ll never see each other again. On what stupid planet is that even possible?

And it means there’s about four hours left to do something I’ve been thinking about for weeks.

“Thomas. No one is ever going to kiss you,” I announce. He looks up, blinking owlishly behind his glasses. “And, no one’s ever going to kiss me either.”

“OK,” he says, and takes a huge inhaler puff. “We should probably do that, then.”

We stand up, which is a problem. I grew ninety-three feet this summer. The eaves are low and I hunch, but I’m still six inches taller than him. Thomas clambers onto a stack of books, then we’re the right mouth height. He leans forward, and I suck peanut butter off my braces. Here we go …

“Ow!”

His head hits my chin. The books slide out from underneath him. Our hands flail in the air, grabbing at each other, and we smash into the bookshelves. We’re still untangling ourselves when Grey comes bellowing in, chasing us downstairs to the front door, hands flapping like big hairy butterflies.

“It’s raining,” I pretend to whine. It’s the seaside; I don’t mind getting wet, but I want to hear what he’ll say—

“You’re a twelve-year-old girl, not the Wicked Witch of the West,” Grey booms, slamming the door behind us as I giggle.

Outside, Thomas and I teeter on the porch, the air soggy. He looks at me, his glasses smeared, his hair curly with humidity. His hand forms a fist. Little finger pointed straight out at me.

A salute, a signal, a promise.

“Your house?” he asks. I don’t know whether he means for a kiss or the blood pact. Or both.

“I don’t know how to be, without you,” I say.

“Me either,” he says.

I lift up my hand, and curl my finger into his. Then we jump off the step. Into the rain.

*

A paint-stained finger taps on the fuzz in front of me, and instantly, it’s a notebook again. I blink, looking around me, dazed.

“What are you doing?” Sof is standing in front of the desk. Silhouetted against the windows, she’s just an outline—pointy hair, triangle dress, stalk legs, light blazing all around her. An avenging angel, come to rescue me from detention!

I’m confused, sleepy. Sof and I have barely been on corridor nodding terms all year, yet here she is, throwing her portfolio on the ground and her body into the chair next to mine.

After blinking the sun out of my eyes, I blink again when I see her curly hair done up like fro-yo, red lipstick, rhinestone glasses. Sometime between now and whenever I stopped noticing, my erstwhile best friend has remade herself into a fifties musical.

“Uh, hi,” I whisper, unsure whether we’re allowed to talk. Not because it’s detention, but because we don’t hang out the way we did at our old school.

She leans over to peer at my notebook.

“Huh,” she says, tapping my doodles, where I’ve scribbled out both Jason’s and Thomas’s names so they’re illegible. I suppose this explains my dream. “Is this your artistic comeback?”