The Square Root of Summer

by Harriet Reuter Hapgood

  “And she wanted you to live with her in Holksea? Your dad didn’t try to get you to stay in Toronto?”

  “Living in Holksea…” he trails off.

  Silence blooms, expanding to fill the room. My mouth has rocks in it again, and I shove the remaining chocolate in to take the taste away.

  “Canada wasn’t awful,” he allows. “It wasn’t wonderful either. It was somewhere in between. The baby bear’s porridge. Just fine, you know? Mom was planning to move back to England, then I got the chance to come back minus all the awkward years. And I’ll admit: I was curious.”

  “About?”

  He holds his fist straight out at me, little finger aloft. Our childhood signal, promise, salute, whatever. I gulp my chocolate down, but don’t raise my own hand. I can’t. Not yet. Neither of us moves, then he says:

  “You.”

  This time, the stare-off goes on and on. I’m sure Thomas has a hundred reasons for coming back to Holksea. I’m only part of it. But it’s a confession, so I match it with one of my own, in the form of a question.

  “Thomas. When you left … why did you never write? And please don’t turn it round to me, because I need to know. I mean … you disappeared.”

  “I know you want one big, earth-shattering reason,” he says at last, flopping back in his chair, his hands in his lap. “The boring truth is, it’s lots of little ones. I didn’t know your email or your number—if I wanted to talk to you, I always crawled through the hedge. The next reason was I didn’t know where to get stamps. It took eight hours to get to New York, then we stayed in a hotel and my parents watched me like a hawk because of the blood pact. When we got to Toronto, my dad gave me a million chores around the new house, then I had to register at school, then Mom made me get a haircut, because what you need on your first day at a new school is to rock the medieval monk look.”

  Thomas picks up steam, waving his hands in the air.

  “My dad kept his study locked, and when we fiiinally got a kitchen drawer filled with paper clips and stamps and a rubber band ball and a pencil with a little troll on the end, I was all set to write, when you know what I noticed? It’d been over a month, and you hadn’t written to me.”

  I can’t believe that’s all it was. All this time I thought he’d Not Written as a unilateral decision, some grand sense of betrayal. It never occurred to me it was Thomas being Thomas—twelve, disorganized, and stubborn. It was geography. How different would the past five years have been if I’d just written to him?

  How different this year might have been.

  “Even Stevens?” Thomas holds out his hand for me to shake.

  “A détente,” I agree, and take his hand.

  There’s a crackle of static, then Umlaut appears, suddenly curling round my ankle. I hadn’t even known he was in the kitchen. Thomas and I disengage as the kitten springs up into my lap.

  I wait while Umlaut turns figures-of-eight on my legs, revving like an engine.

  “I looked for your email…” I admit. “I couldn’t find it. Did you use the Book Barn address? Because it’s not there—maybe Papa deleted it.”

  “No—I used yours.”

  Um. One of us is confused here, and it isn’t me. I don’t have an email address.

  There was a point in the autumn when I couldn’t stop going online, watching Jason’s status updates, talking to everybody but me. I knew I had to wait till I saw him, and seeing his life flicker by in real time was lemon on a paper cut, so I stopped going on the Internet completely, turned off my notifications, deleted all my accounts. Waited.

  I’m about to tell Thomas I don’t have email, that whoever he sent it to isn’t in this reality, when

  time

  reboots

  again.

  Umlaut’s gone. Thomas is no longer in the chair opposite me, but sliding something in the oven and asking over his shoulder, “Want to watch some TV or something?”

  “It’s late. I got up to turn out the light,” I mumble, standing up. I like my string theory theoretical, not in my kitchen in the middle of the night. The spell is broken. I’m looking for a do-over on last summer, not five years ago. “Maybe another time…”

  I expect Thomas to make a fuss or a chicken noise as I start backing out the door, but he yawns and stretches, pulling his cardigan tight against his arms.

  “You’re right. We’ve got all summer,” he says, leaning against the oven as I wave goodnight from the garden. “There’s plenty of time.”

  Outside, it’s getting light. Somehow, Thomas and I have talked till dawn. I pass Ned as I trudge back to my room.

  “Grots.” He nods formally before serenely throwing up in the bushes.

  Back on my bed, I think about what Thomas said. That there’s plenty of time. It’s not true, but it’s a comforting lie. I write it on the wall, then I finally fall asleep. Dreaming of chocolate and lavender.

  Friday 18 July

  [Minus three hundred and twenty]

  I wake a couple of hours later to sunshine and a piece of chocolate cake on my doorstep. Actually, there’s a plate between it and the step, the difference between Thomas-now and Thomas-then. What other midnight baker would be leaving cake outside my room—Umlaut? He’s sniffing round my ankles. Tucked underneath the plate, to stop it from flying away, there’s a folded scrap of paper. In Thomas’s blocky print, it reads:

  BEAT BUTTER AND SUGAR TILL CREAMED. STIR IN WHISKED EGGS, THEN FOLD IN SELF-RAISING FLOUR. USE 4 OZ OF EACH INGREDIENT PE`TWO EGGS. ADD 2 TBSP COCOA POWDER WITH THE FLOUR FOR CHOCOLATE. BAKE AT 150°C FOR AN HOUR. EVEN YOU CAN DO THIS. TRUST ME.

  There are hydrangeas in bloom, the sun is shining, and I’ve finally slept. Alles ist gut. Confessing The Wurst, if not the worst, has left me somehow able to close my eyes. Are Thomas and I friends? Age twelve, if someone had asked me that, I’d have punched them in the nose. Our friendship just was, like gravity, or daffodils in spring.

  I stand on the step with the cake, the note, the kitten, and this thought: we talked till the sun came up. And it only makes me want to say more. Next to me, Umlaut does flips in the sunshine.

  I scoop him up and head to the kitchen, where I get my second surprise of the day—a new phone. This comes with a note, too, a more enlightening one: Sie sind verantwortlich für die Zahlung der Rechnung. Dein, Papa. (You’re in charge of paying the bill. Love, Papa).

  I abandon my cake on the windowsill and tear open the phone like it’s Christmas morning, plugging it in to charge. Papa has Scotch-taped my old SIM onto the box. I’ll be able to see if Jason’s texted a time for us to meet. I’ll be able to ask him: what happened in Grey’s room—did I disappear?

  And the real question: what happened, with us?

  “Goog ’ake.”

  I look up from my phone-charging vigil to see that a pajama-bottomed Ned, his hair wild, has emerged from his nest. Wednesdays and Fridays are his bookshop shifts, which means he’s up early-ish. And he’s eating my cake for breakfast.

  “’Eckon.” He swallows in one gulp, like a snake, and tries again. “Think Thomas would make a massive one for the party?”

  This is the first time he’s spoken to me directly about the party—but he still hasn’t asked me if I’m okay with it. For all the hydrangeas and sleep in the world, alles ist not gut. I grab my satchel and my partially charged phone and run out of the house.

  * * *

  My phone chimes along with the church bells. I’ve been hiding out in the churchyard for hours, folded like origami between the yew tree and the wall. The text is from Jason. We’re meeting at lunchtime, a week from tomorrow.

  Notebooks and diaries are spread out around me on the yellowing grass. It’s out of sight of the church, the graves, the road. We came here once.

  It was the beginning of August, about seven weeks after our first kiss. We hadn’t slept together yet, but suddenly I could see it on the horizon. Every day, everything—the air, the sunshine, the blood in my veins—was pulsing hot and urgent. The mi
nute we were alone, our words and clothes would disappear. Grey’s diary for that day says: LOBSTER WITH WILD GARLIC BUTTER ON THE BARBECUE. Behind the tree, Jason’s hand slipped between my legs, and I bit his neck. I wanted to eat him.

  Where did all that love go? Where did that girl go, who was so alive?

  My phone emits a rapid flurry of beeps, and I swoop on it. But it turns out to be old messages from Sof, arriving all at once. A couple checking if I’m okay, after our beach spat, but mostly chattering about the party I don’t want to happen. There’s no way to answer those, so I throw the phone onto the grass instead and pick up a notebook.

  The Weltschmerzian Exception.

  It started the day I saw Jason again. I’m writing his name down when a shadow falls across the page. Thomas is peering round the tree.

  “I’d say you’re avoiding me,” he remarks, flopping down opposite me, against the wall, “but I know you know I know all our hiding places.”

  He stretches out his legs, putting his feet up on the trunk next to me, making himself practically horizontal. Whatever landscape he’s in, he folds himself into. I parse my way through his sentence, come up with: “So you’d say I’m … waiting for you?”

  “If you say so.” A laugh bursts across his face.

  Well, I walked into that one.

  “You liked the cake?” he asks.

  “Delicious,” I lie.

  “Funny, Ned thought so too.”

  Twelve years of stare-offs between us, and my impassive face is perfect. Finally Thomas blinks and says, “Okay, subject change. Is this your extra-credit project?”

  He makes a “may I?” gesture and reaches for the notebook, which is balanced on my bare legs. His fingers graze my knees as he takes it, glancing at the pages and saying, “Senior year here must be intense.”

  I peer over at what he’s reading. A page of impenetrable numbers, and standing out like a big red flag, Jason’s name. For some reason it seems important that Thomas not know this particular secret. Time for my own subject change.

  “How’s the jet lag?”

  “I think my time zones are still cuckoo.” Thomas yawns.

  “As in the clock? They’re actually very efficient.” It’s this sort of fact-based fun, Sof informs me, that doesn’t get me invited to the parties I don’t want to go to.

  “For real? Okay. Wackadoodle, then.” Thomas closes his eyes. There’s no cardigan today, he’s wearing a T-shirt with a pocket, which he tucks his glasses into. He looks less artfully constructed without them. More like someone I would be friends with. “I stayed up too late. Don’t lemme sleep, though,” he mumbles. “Keep talking.”

  “I need a topic. Unless you’re interested in Copernicus.”

  “Not Copper Knickers,” he says. “Umlaut. What’s up with that?”

  “Papa brought him home in April.” I lean forward, lifting the notebook off Thomas’s knees as gently as I dare. But he opens his eyes and squints at me. In the sunshine, his flawed iris looks like a starburst nebula.

  “G. That’s not talking. That’s information. I need details.”

  “Okay. Um. I was doing homework in the kitchen after school, when this orange thing shoots out from under the fridge, scuttles across the room past the stove and into the woodpile. So I picked up a ladle—”

  “A ladle?” mumbles Thomas, closing his eyes again.

  “You know—for soup?” Maybe they call it something else in Canada. A ladleh.

  He chuckles. “I know what a ladle is. I wanna know why you got a ladle.”

  “I thought there was a mouse.”

  “What were you gonna do, scoop it up?”

  I rap him on the knee with my pencil, and he shuts up, smiling.

  “Woodpile, scuttly thing, ladle, me,” I recap. As I name each thing, the picture in my head clarifies, and I suddenly remember what happened right before the ginger streak across the floor: the kitchen screenwiped. At the time I put it down to a headache. Has time been going round the twist since then? That’s three months ago.

  “G?” Thomas murmurs sleepily, tapping me on the shoulder with his foot.

  “Oh! Right. Then this kitten pops up from behind a log and it’s Umlaut.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Then I put him in my jumper and rang the bookshop, because I thought maybe Papa could put a sign up. And he answers and goes, ‘Guten tag, liebling. Did you get my note?’ I look around and he’s written on the blackboard, but it just says ‘Gottie? Cat.’”

  When Thomas laughs at my story, his mouth crinkling, my brain bolt-from-the-blue redelivers the thought from the bookshop: I don’t remember you being this gorgeous.

  I start reciting pi to one hundred decimal places. Except my brain won’t play along, because it ends up going like this:

  And I start to wonder: what would have happened if Thomas had kissed me five years ago? If he’d never left? Would I still have fallen in love with Jason, or would it have been Thomas I was behind this tree with last summer? When I let myself think this, the churchyard around us gradually fills with the numbers I was reciting in my head. They hang in the air like Christmas baubles, suspended on nothing. We’re flying through the galaxy, up in the stars. And it’s beautiful.

  It’s Grey’s string theory: a giant cosmic harp. What would my grandfather say to me now? I imagine him stealing my notebook, peering at the Weltschmerzian Exception. “The rules of spacetime are buggered, are they? Make your own rules.”

  “Thomas?” I ask. “That email you sent me. What was it?”

  “Email? It’s a form of communication, sent through the In-ter-net.” Thomas pulls himself upright and does a cute little typey-typey motion with his hands to demonstrate. He’s oblivious to the mathematical weather phenomenon, to the thought that sparked it—a version of the world where we’d once kissed.

  “Ha.” I prod him in the leg with my trainer, and he catches my ankle for an imperceptible moment, smiling, his face mirror-balled with light from the numbers.

  “G, it’s no big deal,” he says. “I wrote you that, yeah, I was coming over. It was just a reply to yours.”

  The numbers fall from the air, raining silver on the grass, where they fade away. We’re back to normal.

  Normal—except there’s a timeline where I wrote Thomas an email!

  “I guess I didn’t get what yours meant till I arrived,” he continues. “Your dad explained when he drove me from the airport. About Grey.”

  A record scratch, a squeal of tires. I can pretend that life goes on, in stories of kittens and emails, but death brings it all to a screeching halt. My face slams shut and Thomas must know why, because he waves at the notebook and very carefully says, “Talk to me about timespace.”

  “Spacetime,” I correct, awkwardly bum-shuffling around on the grass to sit next to him, grabbing hold of the latest subject change like a life raft. Our shoulders align. “Time travel. I’m still figuring out the rules. How it would work, if it were real.”

  “Cool. Where would you go? I’m thinking dinosaurs. Or maybe the Age of Enlightenment, hang out with ol’ Copper Knickers.” He leans forward, his arm brushing against mine as he gestures out to the churchyard, almost snowy under its blanket of daisies. “Or stay here in Holksea, get some medieval times happening. Get my head stuck in the stocks again.”

  “Last August,” I interrupt. “That’s where I’d go.”

  “Boring,” he sing-songs. “What’s last August?”

  Jason. Grey. Everything.

  “Shit,” he says, realizing. “Sorry.”

  “It’s okay.” I yank up a clump of dry grass and start shredding it. I don’t want to … Talking to Thomas last night, today—these have been the first conversations in forever where I haven’t felt brain-locked, searching for words to say …

  Scheisse! I can’t even finish a sentence in my own head!

  Next to me, Thomas puts his hand over my frantic ones, shushing them. The church bells ring out for six o’clock. A funer
al chime.

  “We should go,” I say. “Umlaut needs feeding.”

  I scramble up, stuffing books haphazardly into my bag. Thomas scoops up half of them. As we pick our way through the grass, I see he’s holding Grey’s diaries.

  “Is this where…” he trails off, obviously infected by the Gottie H. Oppenheimer disease of Never Being Able to Talk About the Worst Thing, looking round. “Is this … is Grey…?”

  Oh, God. I’m übercreep. Reading a dead man’s diaries, surrounded by graves. This was always one of our hiding places, even though Mum’s buried on the other side of the church. But that’s different—she doesn’t belong to me in the same way that Grey did. She’s a stranger.

  “No,” I say, too sharply. “He, we didn’t…” Deep breath. “There was a cremation.”

  We shuffle along the path around the church in silence, leaving yew needle footprints behind. We pass Mum’s grave. It’s never not a shock, seeing the date covered in moss: my birthday. Her death. Carved in stone is the stark reality: that we only ever had a few hours together, before a blood clot, her brain, a collapse. And nothing anyone could do. Thomas leans down and scoops up a pebble in one fluid movement, placing it on top of the stone, keeps walking.

  Another ritual. A new one. I like him.

  “It’s nice that you have these,” Thomas says, gesturing with the diaries. “Like he’s still around. An idea I’m far more comfortable with now I know you painted The Wurst.”

  I laugh. Sometimes it’s so easy to. Other times, it feels like I’m going to implode. And it can be totally at random, when I’m doing something irrelevant—showering. Eating a garlic pickle. Sharpening a pencil and suddenly, I’ll want to cry. I don’t get it. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. That’s what the books promised. What I’ve got instead is an uncertainty principle—I never know where my emotions are going to end up.

  “I wish Mr. Tuttle had left diaries when he died.” Thomas elbows me.

  I laugh, again. “Mr. Tuttle finally died? I thought he was everlasting.”