The Square Root of Summer(76)

When he lands next to me in the grass, I roll over and look at him. I don’t reach for his hand quite yet. I just take it all in. My pajamas are still damp from long-ago rain, but it’s a nice smell. Not quite petrichor. Something new.

“Do you think if we’d written to each other after you left, we could have skipped all this?”

“Nah,” Thomas says. He reaches out and plucks a blossom petal from my hair, frowns at it, then lets it fall. “Then it might not have happened. Cannolis, and all that. Now, ask me again why I’m in your garden.”

He presses his forehead to mine, a clunk of glasses on my nose.

“Why—”

“I couldn’t move to Manchester and not promise you I’ll come back. Visit. Write. Email. Make my iced-bun fortune and meet you halfway across the country before you go off to science school and forget about me.”

I can tell he wants to bat-grab, but it’s difficult when you’re lying down.

“Let’s make a new time capsule,” I say, my mouth moments from his. “Give you a reason to come back. Maybe we could put Ned’s stereo in it.”

Thomas laughs. “G, I know how to be without you. But life is so much more interesting with.”

“And I suppose that,” I tell him, taking his hand, “has always been the point.”

This time, when we kiss, the world doesn’t end. The universe doesn’t stop. Stars don’t fall from the sky. It’s an ordinary kiss.

The kind where you can hear both your hearts beat. The kind that’s about discovering each other again, mouths and hands and laughter—like when Thomas finds the knife in my pocket, or the clumsiness as I try to take his glasses off. The kind that leaves you both breathless, and covered in grass, saying goodbye, and making promises.

The kind that stops time, in its own way.





Monday 1 September

[One]

A week later, we give Grey his Viking funeral. I tell Papa I’ll meet them at the beach—there’s something I have to do first.

It’s dark inside the bookshop, but I don’t turn on the lights—I won’t be here for long. In the attic, in a tucked-away alcove that no one comes near, I take Grey’s diaries out of my book bag. Turn the pages, see his handwriting, alive in ink: I RAGE AT THE UNIVERSE. BUT GOTTIE REMINDS ME, IT’S ALL GOING TO WORK OUT. I AM A VIKING.

There’s no time loop here, yet it’s winter all around me. Snow covers the books. I remember—

*

sitting at the kitchen table with my back to the wood stove, studying for English, wondering how I can explain E = MC2 but I can’t understand a gerund.

I’m texting Sof—Is it a type of dog?—when Grey comes in, filling the room. The table wobbles as he strides to the kettle, humming ebulliently.

A mug is plonked in front of me, then he half settles at the other end of the table, chuckling at the newspaper. I sip my tea, and jump when a giant hand slams my textbook shut.

“Come on, dude,” he says. “Let’s go for a drive.”

I squeak about revision, but let him steer me out into the icy garden anyway. Clinging onto the car door as he speeds us bumpily away from Holksea, happy to be out of the house.

“You know I used to do this with you, when you were a baby? We’d drive around, up and down the coast. You’d stop crying, and you’d watch me. Probably thinking, ‘Hey, old man, where are we going?’ Ned hated being driven. But you and me, kid, we’d motor to the sea. Sometimes I’d chat to you, like you were listening. Sometimes not, maybe we’d have on music, or just silence, like now. Whatever, you know, dude.”

He glances over at me.

“What you’re saying is…” I pretend to think. “You don’t know where we’re going?”

Grey laughs, a huge sonic boom.

“Metaphorically speaking?”

“Driving speaking.”

“Where do you want to go?” Grey asks me. “This is for you—one day’s escape from reality. I’m just the chauffeur. The world’s your oyster.”

The phrase gives me déjà vu. I check the dashboard. “About fifteen miles of gas is our oyster.”

“Then let’s get oysters,” he chuckles, flipping on the signal.

It’s too cold for that, so we get chips in paper cones, dripping with vinegar, and eat them sitting inside the car, watching the waves through the fog. The wind turns the sea to foam.

When we get home, he goes straight to bed, even though it’s only six o’clock.

“All that talking,” he tells me, dropping a kiss on my head, “it’s worn me out.”

The next day, I go back to sitting at the kitchen table, wrestling adjectives. Grey ruffles my hair with his giant hand every time he walks by, and takes to cooking stews to keep me company. We tune the radio to static, and we sing along to nothing. We’re happy.

Tick-tick …

Tick.

Tock.

The clock brings me back to the bookshop. And I let it. I consecrate a smile to the memory of my grandfather, driving me up and down the coast. Then I stop living in the past.

I stack the diaries on the shelf. The Book Barn is the right place for Grey’s secrets. Maybe someone will try to buy them. Or maybe they’ll disappear. As I hide them behind some paperbacks, I think I hear a meow. I think I see a flash of orange, scuttling away across the universe.