The Square Root of Summer(50)

My heart is still half in the field fort. How had I forgotten what I’d known back then, that Jason and I weren’t going to be forever? How had I forgotten that I hadn’t minded? It’s like Grey’s death was a tornado, wiping out everything that came before it. Leaving me clueless.

“Shall we do it on Wednesday?” Thomas asks me. For a moment, I think he’s asking me about it, sex. Put a condom on a banana and never eat fruit again. And I blush from my head to my cherry-red toenails.

Across the pillow, Thomas matches me blood cell for blood cell.

“G.” He smiles, reading my mind. “I wasn’t asking you to do it. Although…”

He bats his lashes, slowly. Reaches out, pushes my hair back from my face. Between us, Umlaut purrs in his sleep. I lean over the kitten and poke Thomas in the chest.

“Shuddup.” I grin back, leaving my hand where it is. No dark matter in sight. I didn’t need a do-over after all. My lie doesn’t even matter—aren’t I right back where I should be? “Don’t make me paint The Wurst No. Zwei.”

“How do you make German sound so cute? It’s so terrifying when Ned does it.” Thomas stuffs his face into the pillow for a second, then pops up again. “Never mind—so, Wednesday night is go? You, me, the finest fish and chips Holksea beach has to offer.”

I think he asked me out. I think I missed me saying yes.

I wish I was here for the big moments in my life.

Thomas clambers out of bed, stretching down and putting his shoes on. When he straightens up, he’s looking over at my corkboard. “Aw, you kept my email! Cool. And you’ve … done math all over it. Okay, rawr.”

He bounces to the door, back again to kiss me, and out into the garden before I can react.

“Hello, Ned,” I hear from outside. My brother’s voice growls in reply, but I can’t make out the words. “It’s not what…”

I wait for their voices to fade before climbing out of bed and fetching the email. It’s transformed again, but as meaningless to me as ever—though it obviously made sense to Thomas. And he’s right: I have done math all over it. At least, it’s my handwriting. But I don’t recognize the equation.





Wednesday 13 August

[Minus three hundred and forty-six]

The evening we go to the beach, a daytime full moon looms giant on the horizon. The world’s biggest optical illusion. Huge and heavy, it follows Thomas and me as we cycle along the marsh path, past the hedge—my crash a hundred years ago now. The hole in the leaves is filled with dark matter, waiting for me, reminding me.

The car park is half empty when we get there, small kids carrying buckets and shovels, trailing their parents as they head home through the dusk. We chain our bikes to a railing and run to the food hut just before its shutters close.

“Fries, please,” says Thomas, just as I say, “Chips.”

They grumble, it’s the end of the day, they’ve turned the fryer off; but Thomas charms them and soon we’re on a blanket in a hollow in the dunes, warm vinegar steam rising up between us into the dusk. His satchel spills open when we sit down. He has my copy of Forever, two postcards keeping each of our places in the pages.

“Thomas!” I blurt.

He turns to me, holding down his hair against the wind, a smile as wide as the sky. I wish I could tell him: I don’t want to time-travel anymore. I want to stay here, and discover the universe with you. But I can’t make the words come out of my mouth.

“You okay?” he asks.

I nod and rescue a chip from his ketchup overkill. All day, our us has stalled—replaced by stutters, long pauses, and then both of us speaking at the same time. No, you go, no, you say. I know what’s wrong with me: I’m waiting for a wormhole to drag me away. I’m not sure what Thomas’s problem is; he’s been antsy since leaving my room on Sunday. We eat in silence till a gust of wind sends hot vinegar straight up my nose, and I start spluttering. I catch Thomas’s eye.

“All right, clever clogs,” he says, standing up. “Wait here.”

He scrunches the empty Styrofoam container, dripping vinegar all over the blanket, then runs off with it through the dunes.

“Where are you going?” I call after him, leaning over to see him jog down to the path that leads to the beach.

“It’s a surprise,” I hear. Just before he rounds the corner and disappears out of sight, he slam-dunks the carton into the bin, with a little heel-click in the air and a “Yessssss!”

While I sit and wait, I watch the sea. Or rather, its absence—over the top of our hollow, there’s nothing but flat, wet sands, stretching into the distance. Somewhere, invisible beyond it, is the North Sea. When I was little, the tide going this far out made me sad. I’d want to run for miles, right into the horizon, until I was invisible too. If I ran and ran and ran into the emptiness now, would I leave all this behind? Grey. Wormholes. Myself.

Then Thomas pops into sight, walking backwards across the flats and waving his arms in the air. It makes me want to stay right where I am. When he sees I’ve noticed him, he puts his hands to his mouth and shouts something.

“What? I can’t hear you,” I yell.

He shrugs dramatically, then he’s off, jogging farther on, not stopping till he’s about fifty yards away. I sit with knees up to my chin, arms around my legs, watching as he drags his foot through the wet sand. After a few seconds, I work out what he’s writing. I grin and grab our bags and blanket, running down the dune to join him. By the time I reach him, breathless, he’s written the best equation I’ve ever seen: