The Square Root of Summer

by Harriet Reuter Hapgood

  “But there are no pictures of me.” There are hundreds of Ned, tiny and wrinkled, Mum and Papa staring at him in surprise. Then blank pages until I suddenly appear, the photos loose and not even glued into the album, and I’m a year old, sprung from nowhere. Adopted.

  When the pictures return, not as many now, Papa’s face is a thousand years older. He looks faded. No more photos of Mum.

  Grey sighs, looking down from his pulp fiction. I don’t tell him the spines are upside down. “Gottie, man. Sometimes … you’re too busy living to take a photo. You don’t have time to stop and freeze the moment, because you’re in it.”

  “What about Ned?” Ned got a Polaroid for his thirteenth birthday, and now he’s always freezing the moment. I flip back to the beginning, to Papa and Mum getting married. A yellow dress, stretched tight across her beach ball stomach. A ribbon round her forehead instead of a veil. Her hair is short and mullety, the same as mine when I was little—like Ned, she’s totally out of step with fashion, but somehow still cool. Papa half in and half out of every photo, Grey with flowers braided through his plaits.

  “Here,” Grey adds, climbing down the creaky ladder. He holds out a crumpled photo from his wallet, one I’ve never seen before. It’s Mum, and as usual I try to find my face in hers—we’re both all nose, the same olive skin dark eyes, dark hair, and I don’t know why I stopped cutting mine—before I notice she’s holding a baby. It’s small, pink, not Ned …

  “Me?”

  “You,” says Grey.

  Until then, I’d thought it all happened at the same time: I was born/she died. No one had ever told me there’d been a moment, in between, when I’d had a mami.

  * * *

  I blink and I’m sitting in the kitchen, holding the house phone to my ear. It rings far away, already dialed, except I don’t remember doing that. The last thing I remember, pre-wormhole, is being at the beach with everyone and swimming in the cold, cold sea.

  In my other hand is the photograph Grey gave me in the Book Barn, almost five years ago. The one of Mum. I’d lost it almost immediately afterwards, and I never told him. Now it’s here, in my hand.

  When am I?

  I put my head between my knees, trying to breathe. I can cope with the collapse of spacetime. Seeing my grandfather again, I can’t. My whole body hurts. I don’t understand how I’m supposed to get through this. I don’t understand how anyone is. I’m counting to ten and still hanging on to the phone when a boy’s voice answers with a, “Yeah?”

  I stare across the kitchen. Outside the window, peach roses; beyond them, the lawn is shaggy. Ned’s fur coat is slung on a chair, and there’s a trifle on the table. Next to it is a pile of party paraphernalia—piñatas, packs of balloons. Yet another message for Thomas on the blackboard, to call his mum when he gets back from the bookshop. This is now.

  It’s not exactly a stab in the dark when I croak: “Jason?”

  “Yeah…” he says. “Who’s this?”

  “Aaargh,” I cough. “Aaargot. Margot. I mean … me. Hey,” I finish up, smooth as a cucumber (Papa’s phrase).

  “Gottie?” he says in his teasing voice, as though he knows more than one Margot and needs to clarify with the nickname he never used to use. “What’s up?”

  I remember what I need to ask—what happened when I disappeared into the wormhole. All my split-screen theories collapse if it turns out I disappeared in a puff of smoke. But I can’t form the question. My brain’s still catching up with my body, and the complexity of what I have to say is beyond me right now.

  “Can we meet up? It’s important,” I say instead. “Sorry.”

  “Maaaybe,” he drawls, and then adds, “You sound kind of strange. You okay?”

  I lean my head on the wall, drowning in his question. In all the things I want it to mean. That I can find my way home.

  “It’s about the party,” I lie. “I want to surprise Ned.”

  I hate myself for using this stupid party as an excuse. But perhaps I can persuade Jason to persuade Ned to cancel.

  “What about a coffee at the café, a week from Saturday? Ned’s busy that day,” he adds. “I’ll text a time.”

  Ned chooses this moment to strut in from the garden. I garble, “Okayseeyouthengottagobye,” and yank the receiver away from my head before I can mention that my mobile isn’t working.

  “You’re meant to put it up to your ear,” Ned says, demonstrating with his hand. Then, because he’s Ned, he adds a phone gesture with his other hand, segues into devil’s horns, then flashes a Vulcan salute. At least he’s acting normal.

  “Fixed your bike, by the way,” he adds. “Want to go for a ride this weekend?”

  “Ned—what day is it? The date, I mean.”

  “The phone?” he reminds me, shimmying across to the fridge and peering inside, bottom waggling in purple paisley Lycra. “Tuesday. Fifteenth of July in the year of Our Satan two thousand and—”

  “Thank you,” I say. Then, “Oh.” And slam the receiver down.

  Ned kicks the fridge door shut and hops up to sit on the windowsill, swigging milk straight from the carton.

  “Wrong number?” he asks.

  “Heavy breather,” I lie. The amount that Ned knows about me and Jason is zero, and I want to keep it that way. “What you up to, Freddie Mercury?”

  Ned wipes off his milk mustache before answering.

  “Garage. Did your bike, then planned my set for the party. My guitar solo’s going to be like”—air guitar, tongue between teeth—“whoa.”

  I smile, despite the party reference and the photograph in my hand, despite seeing Grey in the wormhole and the way Ned seems back to normal while I’m anything but. Because making that phone call, Jason agreeing to see me—it means I’m going to get some answers. It means something. Doesn’t it?

  Thursday 17 July

  [Minus three hundred and nineteen]

  Fick dich ins Knie, H. G. Wells!

  It might be a sci-fi classic, but The Time Machine turns out to be all fi and no sci—sphinxes and troglodytes, rather than equations and mechanics. I throw the book on my bed and look up to the wall where I’ve scribbled my notes. My room is starting to take on a serial killer’s lair Wall O’ Crazy appeal.

  This is the first chance all evening I’ve had to be alone. Fingerband was in the kitchen, brainstorming “something major” for the summer’s-end shindig, while Papa flitted in and out. Newly minted groupies Sof and Meg tagged along, and when Thomas came back from his Book Barn shift, all three of them launched into a furious comic-book debate. (“Graphic novels,” Sof corrected me.) I lurked, cradling the warmth that Jason and I had a secret again.

  Now it’s past midnight. I’m hypothesizing, trying to narrow down what the wormholes have in common.

  Meow. On my desk, Umlaut is hopping around atop the stack of diaries. I get up, grabbing them—kitten and all—and carry them back to the bed. As I move around the room, I notice the kitchen light through the garden, still on.

  The diaries. Grey wrote about the day I first kissed Jason. There was DRUNK ON PEONIES, the same day we met at the beach. If I can find some of the other wormholes, I could plot the dates. Establish a pattern.

  I let myself fall into the pages, ripping my heart wide open with how the world once was.

  Umlaut paws at the duvet as I find the day at the Book Barn, how Grey wrote RESHELVING WITH CARO before scribbling it out and writing my name. In last year’s diary, I find more of those asterisked *Rs, confettied on the pages. There are no *Rs in the earlier diaries, but I do find an entry about me and Thomas going on a school trip to the Science Museum, which ended in disgrace when he got trapped inside the space probe.

  Seeing the words on the page reminds me that before we got in trouble, there was a projection of the galaxy on the ceiling. Lying on the floor, staring up, it was like …

  Like being in the Milky Way.

  It’s not just one diary entry that corresponds to a vortex. All the wormholes are her
e.

  Are the diaries what’s causing everything? It can’t be a coincidence—even if it doesn’t explain the screenwipes, or the way the stars went out in the garden. This means I can only wormhole to days Grey wrote about. I don’t have to revisit his funeral.

  I don’t have to see the day he died.

  I grab the nearest textbook and flip through the index. Causality … Einstein … String theory … Weltschmerzian Exception … The words catch my eye, faintly familiar and already highlighted yellow. When I turn to the page, there’s just a brief description:

  The Weltschmerzian Exception manifests itself between two points, where the rules of spacetime no longer apply. As well as vortex violations, observers would witness stop-start effects, something like a “visual reboot” as they passed between different timelines. Based on theories of negative energy or dark matter and developed by Nobel-winning physicist

  The next page is torn out, cutting off the entry.

  The rules of spacetime no longer apply …

  Vortex violations—that has to mean wormholes, which shouldn’t be real. But I’ve witnessed them.

  The Gottie H. Oppenheimer Principle, v2.0. The world has “visually rebooted” twice now, both times when Thomas mentioned an email. An email I never received. What if that’s because it doesn’t exist in my reality? Thomas and I share a timeline in common except for this, so every time he mentions it, the world reboots? Is that even possible?

  As I put the diaries back on my desk, I notice the kitchen light is still on. Cursing Ned, I yank on my sneakers. The earth’s not getting anywhere near my toes, I think, stomping out into the night.

  * * *

  When I open the kitchen door, I discover Thomas. Baking.

  While I’m still half out of my skin in surprise, he smiles, then goes back to painting something warm and golden-scented onto dough.

  The past week clicks into place: the wonky bread, his first morning. The cinnamon muffin in my book bag. The mess in the pantry, which I’ve been blaming on Ned. And he never once came out and said, “It’s me.” He’s as secretive as I am.

  “You’ve been making the bread. You bake,” I accuse.

  “I bake, I stir, I cook, I roll!” He flips the brush in the air like a baton. We watch as it lands on the floor with a clatter, splattering honey on the tiles. “Oops.”

  “Papa used that brush to varnish the table,” I tell him, and he stops trying to pick it up. “But why do you bake now? It’s almost one in the morning.”

  “Jet lag.”

  I point at the dough. “What’s that?”

  “It’s when you travel through different time zones and it takes your body clock a while to adjust.” Thomas manages about two seconds of straight-facedness before his mouth wobbles and he cracks up at his own joke.

  “Funny.” My mouth twitches. “I meant that.”

  “Lavender bread. Here, smell.” He lifts the baking tray up and starts towards me. I shake my head and he shrugs, spinning on his heel to the oven instead, talking over his shoulder as he slides the loaf in. “Good with cheese—normal stuff, not your weird German ones.”

  “Rauchkäse is normal,” I reply automatically, surprising myself. Thomas keeps shaking words out of me. Perhaps it’s friendship muscle memory. “You honestly bake now? This is what you do?”

  “Where did you think the food was coming from?” Thomas cocks his head, sitting down sideways in a chair. I sit the same way next to him, and our knees bump awkwardly; we’re both too tall. I still don’t know what to think of him.

  “I thought Ned was going shopping,” I explain. “He’s a foodie—well, he lives in London.” We’re probably keeping Ned awake—his bedroom is off the kitchen. Then again, he might have gone out after the Fingerband meeting. He mostly gets in at dawn, dry-heaves in the garden, then sleeps all morning. A blur of glitter, guitar, gotta-go-bye out the door every afternoon.

  “You think anyone who can bake more than a potato is a foodie,” Thomas points out, then leaps up with a stop-hand and a “Wait there!”

  I sit, confused, till he returns from the pantry, piling ingredients on the table: flour, butter, eggs, as well as things I didn’t even know we had, like bags of fancy nuts and bars of dark, bitter chocolate wrapped in green paper. It reminds me of that first morning, a week ago, when he made me toast and jam and got Grey’s Marmite jars out of their shrine.

  “The best way to learn what’s so great about baking,” Thomas says, not sitting back down, “is to do it. I want to open a pastry shop.”

  He beams down at me, and I resist the unexpected urge to reach up and poke the resulting dimple.

  “A pastry shop,” I repeat, in the tone I’d use if he suggested casual larceny. I can’t imagine the Thomas I knew in charge of hot ovens and knives and edible foodstuffs. Well, I can, but it would end in disaster.

  “Ouch. Yes, a bakery. You’ve eaten my muffins—don’t even try to tell me I’m not Lord of the Sugar.”

  …

  “King of the Muffin.”

  …

  “Impresario of Flapjacks.”

  I pinch my mouth into a hard line. He’s not funny. He’s a hobgoblin. We stare-off, and Thomas gives in first, cracking a smile and an egg into a bowl.

  “Honestly? It’s fun, and against all odds, I’m good at it,” he explains. “You know how rare it is to find something that combines those two things? Actually, you probably don’t, you’re good at everything.”

  Ugh. I hate that—as though an A in math means I’m figured out. Not everything comes easily. I don’t know the names of any bands. I can’t dance, or do liquid eyeliner, or conjugate verbs. I baked more than one hundred potatoes this past year, and I still can’t get the skin to crisp up. And I don’t have a plan.

  Ned was born a seventies glam rocker, has wanted to be a photographer since he got his first camera. Sof’s been a lesbian since she could talk and a painter from not long after that. Jason’s going to be a lawyer, and now even Thomas—chaos theory incarnate—is opening a freaking bakery? All I’ve ever wanted was to stay in Holksea and learn about the world from inside a book. It isn’t enough.

  “I’m not good at everything. You know The Wurst?” I tell Thomas, to prove it. “The painting above Grey’s—your—bed.”

  “G, for the love of”—he bat-grabs the air, no, pterodactyl-grabs it—“why would you WANT to paint like that?” In a church-library-funeral whisper, he adds: “I can’t believe you never told me Grey did erotic art.”

  “No, I—” The laughter comes so suddenly I can’t get the words out. Thomas must think I’m a complete loon, doubled over and wheezing, flapping my hands in front of my face.

  “Wait, wait,” I squeak, before I’m gone again. This laugh is a burst of relief. Briefly, tantalizingly, reminding me of what it can be like—to be happy to the tips of your toes.

  Thomas starts laughing too, saying, “G, it’s not funny! I have to sleep under that thing. I think it’s watching me.”

  Which only makes me laugh harder, sucking in shallow breaths as I begin to verge on the manic. A kind of happy hysteria that threatens to overflow, spilling into something worse.

  I suck in air, pushing the laughter and everything else down. Then explain, “No, I painted it. That got me a D.”

  “G. You are joking.” He sits down opposite me again, astonished. And no wonder, if he thinks it’s a six-foot blue penis! Maybe it is, maybe I’ve got boy parts on the brain and that’s been my problem all along. I wonder if the Boner Barn has anything on Freud.

  “Told you I was terrible,” I say cheerfully. I’d faked my laughter at the school exhibition, pretending to make fun of myself, but somehow with Thomas, it’s real. I’m terrible and it’s okay. “Your turn. Why baking, really?”

  “Everyone says you have to be superprecise to bake—like your extra-credit thing, the time travel project. One calculation out of place and the whole thing would go wrong, right?”

  “Yeah…”

 
“It’s hogwash!” Thomas announces gleefully. I’m charmed by his use of the word hogwash—it reminds me of the pigs at the fair. He points at the bowl. “Look at this—bit of eggshell in there, scoop it out with a finger, what the hell. Too much flour, forget the butter, drop the pan—it doesn’t matter how many mistakes you make, it mostly turns out okay. And when it doesn’t, you cover it with icing.”

  “Is that true?” I’m suspicious of Thomas’s grasp of commercial health and safety.

  “Probably. It’s mostly metaphorical, but I suspect you missed that part. Here.” He holds out the green-paper-wrapped chocolate and I break off a chunk. “Okay, so that’s me—wannabe pâtissier and upside-down apple cake of my father’s eye. Which is another terrible metaphor for saying my dad’s not exactly thrilled by my career ambitions. Or, outside of home ec, my grades.”

  “You’re failing?” I ask.

  After confessing The Wurst, I feel full of questions. The Great Thomas Althorpe Quiz! We’ve got five years to fill, and I’ve been wordless for so long. Wanting to use my mouth, to ask-talk-laugh—it feels as good as a thunderstorm when it begins to break.

  “I’m majoring in biscuits—hey, look at that, I said biscuits not cookies. Canada’s wearing off. My grades are okay, but cookies-not-college is failing, according to my dad.” He says it lightly, but there’s an edge. I can imagine Mr. Althorpe’s response to a harebrained bakery scheme.

  “Is that why your parents split up?” I nibble on my chocolate.

  “Bloody hell, G,” Thomas says, suddenly as full English as breakfast. “This is what I like about you—that Teutonic sensitivity. It’s a chicken/egg thing.” He stares at the mixing bowl unhappily, flicks a bag of flour with his finger. “They were fighting nonstop anyway; my one-man detention parade probably didn’t help. It was a conduit—do I mean catalyst? Anyway, Dad was fuming when Mom took a pro-bakery stance. I won her over with my chocolatines.”