The Square Root of Summer(9)

*

When I open them, I’m still standing in Grey’s bedroom. Only now it’s dark, and Jason’s gone—and we just had our first kiss.

That’s what it seems like, anyway. A memory so vivid, there were sights and sounds and smells and touches. I could sense the scratch of the blanket we were lying on, smell the wood smoke in the air. The taste of beer on his tongue, the roughness of his face against mine. The first of a summer of secret kisses, something that belonged to just me.

And the loss of him is suddenly so real and so raw, I want to cry.

I take a big, juddering gulp of air, trying to fill my lungs, which are pinched and small. I’m so overwhelmed by how much it hurts—missing Jason, seeing Jason—it takes me a moment or two before I catch up with what just happened and think: WTF?

I unpack the thought I pushed down after detention today. How a daydream shouldn’t last more than an hour. How it shouldn’t leave me standing alone in the dark. Why can’t I remember Jason leaving, saying goodbye? And what was that, inside the box? It felt like I was looking the wrong way through a telescope, to another time. A time when Grey was alive.

A vortex. A one-way metric. But that would mean—

I stumble towards the door, switch on the light, turn around.

Everything’s packed. All the books are gone, the boxes too. There are little dust outlines on the shelves. Book ghosts. And the room seems smaller, now that it’s empty. The ceiling is lower and the walls are closing in.

Perhaps that’s my panic. I don’t remember doing this. I sit on the floor because my legs have forgotten how to do “upright,” and I try to think.

I touched the television fuzz, and I was with Jason, last summer. An optical illusion? A daydream? C’mon, Gottie—are you seriously saying it was a wormhole?

The boxes are packed. The room is empty. I must have done that. My pocket beeps and when I fumble for my phone, there’s a text from Jason: Nice to see you again … Nothing about me getting sucked into a box, but maybe that’s not the kind of thing you put in a text. A text that trails off into three dots, like there’s more to come.

Is there such a thing as a split-screen vortex? Last summer on one side, this room on another. And you can only tune in to one viewpoint at a time.

It makes total sense. Except for the part where I’m completely crazy!

There’s one box still on the bed, and I clamber to my feet to dig through it, fingers fumbling, hoping to find something to explain what I thought I saw. To tell me I’m not going nuts.

There’s nothing but odds and ends. A framed photo of my mum where she’s a few months older than I am now, and we look so alike it hurts. And a stack of Grey’s diaries. He used to note everything down: a new recipe for spaghetti with apricots (really), a bird’s nest on the lawn, when the village shop briefly stopped selling Marmite. He’s the only one of us who ate it.

When my scrabbling fingertips hit cardboard, I admit defeat and tell myself I imagined the whole thing. I’ve lost a few hours, that’s all. Slept on my feet, like a horse in a stable, and dreamed about Jason. Hitting the light switch with my chin, I carry the box outside, to Grey’s crappy old VW Beetle.

The car is parked on a hump of grass, skewed at an angle into the hedge, sitting so low that Papa will barely be able to get it over the speed bumps to the Book Barn tomorrow. I have to stand sideways on the small slope to reach the latch, balancing the box on my knee, and as the trunk springs up, the box slides off, bursting open on the grass in a scatter of coins and pages.

“Scheisse!” I kneel in the half-dark to pick everything up, chucking the half-open diaries clumsily back in the box.

ROAST CHICKEN AND POTATO SALAD IN THE GARDEN.

Grey’s scrawling handwriting catches my eye in the light spilling from the kitchen. Beech leaves on the fire. I dream of being a Viking.

Potato salad. He meant Kartoffelsalat, the German sort served warm with mustard and vinegar, not mayonnaise (i.e., not totally disgusting). The entry is from Midsummer’s Eve last year: the night of my first kiss with Jason. My first real kiss, ever.

It’s a thump to the heart. But it’s also an explanation: I spent the afternoon studying spacetime, and I was reading the diaries while I packed. That’s why I remembered it so vividly. Ned’s home, I hung out with Sof, Jason’s back and smiling at me … This is why my mind’s on last summer. I didn’t lie on a blanket in the grass or smell the bonfire. I’m imagining things.

Because otherwise I’d have to admit that there is such a thing as a wormhole, and that I’ve seen two today. But Thomas is arriving tomorrow, and that’s about as much as I can deal with.

I reach forward and slam the diary shut.





Tuesday 6 July

[Minus three hundred and eight]

After I text Jason back—a breezy You too!:) that takes two hours to compose—me and Umlaut stay up all night, reading Grey’s diaries and breaking our hearts. I couldn’t quite bring myself to put them in the car. And a small part of me is hoping that the wormholes are real, and I’ll be blasted back to when he was alive.

The entries are all semi-cryptic, but this one makes me laugh, because I remember the day he means:

GOTTIE ON A FRUIT AND VEGETABLE BOYCOTT AFTER LEARNING BIRDS AND BEES.

SOMETHING ABOUT A CONDOM ON A BANANA.

(BUY VITAMIN PILLS?)