The Square Root of Summer(75)

“It’s okay,” I whisper to Umlaut, scooping him into my lap. “We’re going home.”

I’m no longer afraid. I can see all the loops and snags and knots I’ve made in time. I can see all the universes at once.

The timelines layer over each other. I watch a dozen different Gotties running through the garden, appearing and disappearing, faster and faster. Mathematically speaking, all this will happen over and over again, a hundred different heartbreaks in a hundred different ways. One of the Gotties will wake up underneath this tree at the beginning of summer, drenched in déjà vu, sad, and alone. My heart goes out to her. But for me, that’s in the past.

I’m ready for now.

The years pass more quickly now, snow then sunshine then snow. The garden is a blur. As the sky gathers into one last autumn and the leaves come fluttering down, a torn scrap of paper floats by. I stand and catch it: a page from a future textbook. The yet-to-be-written equation for the Weltschmerzian Exception. And I see my name next to it, and the title “Dr.”

In a moment of complete clarity, I know: I won’t remember everything. That I shouldn’t remember everything. Especially not this. So I hold the page out to the wind and let it fly away in the snow. It vanishes into thin air. This is a secret that the universe can keep. The sun comes out, first spring, then summer. Then I close my eyes, and I jump out of the tree …





Now

I land in the grass, my pajamas still soaking wet.

Dazed, I sit up, peeling off my book bag, and look around the garden. The lawn is freshly mowed and has the scent of cut grass. There’s no more rotting fruit on the ground. Yellow roses, hundreds of them, tumble over the kitchen window.

I tilt my head back and see my room, upside down. The ivy is clipped back, and I catch a glimpse of curtains inside the windows. Beyond them, against all odds, I think I can see a glow of stars.

Curtains in my room. Yellow roses, not peach. Thomas’s cosmos, back on my ceiling. A thousand tiny details, a thousand incremental changes. I’ve remade the universe. Better. It’s the end of my weltschmerz.

A sudden burst of Black Sabbath blasts across the garden from Ned’s room. Some things stay the same. And when I tilt my head forward again, Thomas is peering down at me from the apple tree, leaf-dappled. Was it him calling my name, when I fell?

“Welcome back,” he says. A smile tugs at his face.

“Um. Hello.” I stare up at him. “What are you doing?”

“Reading your letter.” He waves the pages at me, through the branches. If he’s surprised by what I wrote, or the fact that I’m dripping wet in pajamas on a blazing sunny day, or that my feet are smeared with mud, he’s not letting on. Unless … Memories of the summer drift down around me like dandelion fluff.

Remember? That day with the time capsule. You had short hair that day.

The time capsule. Maybe we opened it too soon.

Bake at 300 degrees for an hour. Even you can do this. Trust me.

“I meant here,” I say, letting my thoughts scatter. Not caring what he knows, or if it even happened this way at all. “In my garden. Up a tree.”

“Oh. Hang on.” There’s a rustle of leaves and a sparkle in the air, as something small and silver lands in the grass next to me.

I pick it up. The key to the padlock, the one I tossed through the rain to Thomas five years ago.

“You kept it?” I ask, even though I know he must have. How else would he get my letter—take a chain saw to the time capsule? Actually, since it’s Thomas …

“After the fair yesterday, Niall’s mum booted me off the sofa,” he explains. “I found it in my suitcase while I was packing. And I got to thinking about the day we opened the time capsule, and how there was nothing in it. You’d promised me a grand gesture. I thought it was finally the right time…”

He looks down at me. I look up at him. We share a scar. And we don’t need to explain anything to each other at all.

“Oh, you got one thing wrong,” Thomas says. “It wasn’t July, it was April. Your email? I’m Canadian. We reverse the dates.”

April … You’ve got to be kidding, bored physicists! That’s the multiplying factor of the paradoxical loop, the thing we created to make all this balance out? Umlaut?!

“I’m sorry,” Thomas voice drifts from the tree and I refocus on him. “Look. When I got your email, that was the original grand gesture.” He waves the notebook pages again. “I couldn’t be sure … but it was worth all the bakery money in the world to find out. I thought you and I were fate. Unquestionable. Then that gimp in his leather jacket! I was jealous.”

“And now?”

“I sat up in the tree just then, freaking out that you’d disappeared, waiting for you to come back. Remembering about you and Grey that day, how much he loved you—he gave me the ass-kicking of my life over that scar on your hand. Anyone would be f*cked up, after he died. I didn’t take it seriously enough. Everything you were going through.”

My eyes search his face, his freckles too far away to be visible. He’s leaving in a week. But here we are. I’m covered in teeny-tiny blades of grass, he’s hiding in a tree—we might be nuts enough for this to work out.

“Hey, Thomas,” I say. Making a fist, sticking it straight out into the air—pointing my little finger. “I dare you.”