The Square Root of Summer

by Harriet Reuter Hapgood

  “I didn’t cry at the funeral,” I confess. There was a wake afterwards, in the village pub—all Grey’s friends, beards and corduroy. We drank ale and ate quiche, and people told funny stories that they didn’t finish, breaking off halfway through, upset. But I didn’t cry then, either. I didn’t deserve to. The first time I cried wasn’t till October, the day Jason finally texted me back. What kind of a person cries over a boy, but not their grandfather?

  I don’t tell Thomas that part.

  “It doesn’t make any sense,” I say.

  I’m lost. After remembering swimming with Jason in the canal, how it was its own kind of love—I thought I was okay. I came back to the world, and it dazzled. But this morning, I wasn’t even doing anything memorable, just writing on the blackboard that we needed washing-up liquid—and a black hole of emptiness hit. It’s as though every time there’s a moment like that, where I think I’m better, there has to be something sad to balance it out.

  “I don’t think it’s meant to make sense.”

  We’re shoulder-to-shoulder, arm-to-arm, leg-to-leg, all the way down to our toes. His sock has a hole in it. Even though he’s so clean, his socks always have holes. And I think, from nowhere: I’m going to buy Thomas a new pair of socks.

  I turn to look at him, and he’s already looking at me.

  “Thank you—”

  His kiss interrupts me, sudden-short-sweet. Unquestionable. It feels like reading a favorite book, and falling for the ending even though you already know what happens.

  It’s different from last night. That was a few giddy, unbelieving seconds before we sprang apart, wondering. This is a squash of his glasses against my cheekbone and a tentative warmth of his mouth on mine. This is my hands curled tight around the neck of his T-shirt, twisting it in my fingers, tugging him closer. This is noses and faces and chins bumping, tongues not sure whether to talk or kiss or all at once, hands on faces, hands everywhere, clumsy and new.

  Then it’s suddenly floodlights and noise blaring. The oven timer, shrieking through the garden.

  We jump apart, looking at each other wildly, then squinting towards the kitchen.

  Ned’s leaning out the window, lights blazing.

  “All right, children,” he calls over to us. “Say bye-bye.”

  “You’re sending me to bed?” Unbelievable.

  “Thomas and I have things to discuss.” Ned beckons him from the window. “Let the menfolk talk cake.”

  I glance at Thomas, who looks like he’s swallowed a bee. I kiss him on the cheek and whisper, “Ignore him.”

  Ned harrumphs—a Papa impression at Grey volume—and Thomas quickly unfolds himself, sloping away across the garden.

  “Sorry,” he mumbles over his shoulder to me. Sorry isn’t in our vocabulary.

  In my room, Umlaut hops up onto my pillow, chirruping as he paws in circles. I change into my pajamas, glancing at the email still pinned to my bulletin board.

  It’s changed.

  It’s now a string of mathematical code. It doesn’t make any sense, but it’s closer to a language than the gobbledygook that was there before. In Schrödinger’s universe—Grey’s “mad shagger,” he of the cat that is neither living nor dead—there are an infinite number of possibilities. But I think there are only a few now. I think I’m getting closer to peeking inside the box.

  The change in the constellation on the bulletin board is so tiny I almost don’t see it. I’m half turning away from my desk when I notice that the little orange dot, the Umlaut dot, has moved.

  And when I look back at my bed, the real Umlaut, the one naughtily clawing my pillow, vanishes with a pop.

  Friday 8 August

  [Minus three hundred and forty-one]

  “Do you believe in heaven?”

  The afternoon air is drenched in pollen, and everyone’s soporific in the garden.

  Seriously, everyone. Worlds converged. Inviting Sof begat Meg begat Jason begat a panicked silent sorry-no-wait-I-can’t-reveal-this-help-aaargh flail behind his back from Sof. The three of them are in the grass, ignoring the promised gluten-free cupcakes, playing a card game that doesn’t appear to have any rules.

  Ned’s in sequins, skipping his bookshop shift in favor of taking photos and swigging from a water bottle I suspect isn’t filled with H2O.

  By mutual, silent consent, Thomas and I retreated under the apple tree. Grey’s last diary is in the grass next to me. Above us, beyond the leaves, the sky is bright, bright blue, and I wonder if that’s why Thomas is asking about heaven. If he thinks Grey’s up there, looking down at us.

  But Grey didn’t believe in heaven—he was all about the reincarnation.

  “Gottie,” he’d tell me now, “I’ve come back as a beetle. That’s me climbing the stalk of grass near your foot. You want to know where Umlaut is? The answer’s everywhere around you, dude. You’re so close to figuring it all out.”

  I watch the beetle as it reaches the very top of the meadowsweet, which bends under its tiny weight. From its perspective, this garden is the whole universe. I want to tell it what I’ve discovered, that there’s so much more. For a moment, I let myself believe it’s true. That it’s Grey, and he’s thinking beetle-y thoughts: “I hope there’s ants for dinner.” But I don’t think he can see us from the grass, or the sky, or heaven. I don’t think that’s how it works.

  “No. Heaven is too easy.”

  Heaven lets me off the hook. Heaven is warm and happy and a big cosmic harp. It’s not waiting for wormholes and counting down the days to Ned’s party, powerless.

  “G—” Thomas sneezes, interrupting himself. “Gah, pollen. I didn’t say heaven. I asked if you believed in fate. You and me. This summer.” He peers at me over his glasses, solemn. “Us.”

  “Like it’s destiny that you came back?” I don’t know if I like that idea. I want to think I have some choice in any of this.

  “I mean that it doesn’t make a difference whether or not I’d fallen off the books and chinned you that day at the bookshop,” Thomas says. “You’re not my first kiss. But you’re the one that counts.”

  Whoa. I glance over at our self-appointed chaperone. Ned’s got his back turned so I dart in fast, kiss Thomas smash boom on the mouth. Intending it quickly, but it’s like the Big Bang—a kiss that keeps expanding.

  “Children,” Ned interrupts us, striding over, and we break apart. I glance across the garden—Sof’s watching, her eyebrow cocked. I’d had the sense to text her about me and Thomas before she came over.

  “Say Käse.” Ned tilts the camera. A drop from his bottle falls onto my leg, followed by the Polaroid fluttering down. Minutes drift by while the picture fades in: Thomas and me side by side, our fingers linked between us in the grass. His head is turned towards me, smiling. I want to reach inside the picture and turn my face to his.

  Ned keeps on idly playing paparazzo. Sof makes him take three or four shots on her phone with a poppy in her hair, until she gets one she’s happy with—“New profile pic,” she says to Meg. “There’s a girl I want to invite to the party…”

  Time passes in a sleepy way. It could be any summer from the past few years—ours was the house people congregated at. Except there’s no Grey to play conductor, and there never will be ever again. Ned’s party is in a week. Summer’s last hurrah. I turn the diary to a blank page and write, Why aren’t you here?

  “We should do something,” someone murmurs.

  “Definitely,” comes another voice.

  “Think we should throw the party open to the whole village?” Ned’s asking. “Or bequeath it to the next generation?”

  “What, like Star Trek?” Thomas whispers.

  I lie on my stomach, resting my chin on my hands. I want to stay this way forever, drowsy in the heat, where nothing matters. Not wormholes and a grave with my birthday on it, not willow coffins and ashes in a box. Disappearing cats. I want my biggest concern right now to be the effort required to stand up, go to the kitchen, and root around in the
freezer for Popsicles. I want it to be like last year, the endless summer when I fell in love and imagined a future and lied to Sof and didn’t care.

  Before my world fell apart.

  Across from me, Meg’s making Jason a daisy chain, one end already draped around his leather jacket collar. I watch as though they’re strangers on a cinema screen.

  And I can brush away the hurt just like it’s rain.

  “G.” Thomas’s whisper makes its way dozily through the flowers. “Why do you keep staring at him?”

  “Hmmm?”

  Jason’s laughing, Meg’s foot now in his lap. He’s playing mine and Sof’s game: writing on the sole of her shoe with a felt-tip, while she pretends to hate it, giggling. My own feet are bare, twitching in the grass. I still have a pair of shoes with Jason’s name on them.

  A nudge at my side. I look away from Jason, laughing in the daisies. Thomas has rolled over and he’s shoulder-to-shoulder with me—the way Jason and I once were, next to each other on a blanket, a long time ago. Or was it yesterday? That’s the trouble with revisiting the past—it makes it hard to live in the now, and the future, impossible.

  “Sorry, what?”

  “Jason. Whenever he’s around, you always stare at him.”

  “I wasn’t staring at him,” I lie. Then add in a lofty voice, “If you must know, I was gazing into the middle distance and thinking important thoughts. Jason’s stupid hair was just in the way of my eyeline.”

  “Important thoughts.” Thomas snorts. “Like what to plonk on your baked potato for tea?”

  First kisses, second chances. If Thomas hadn’t fallen off the books, he would have been my first kiss. I don’t care that it was Jason instead. I only regret keeping it a secret. What would Grey say? Sing a booming chorus of “My Way,” probably, then tell me love is something to shout out loud. But maybe there are a hundred different types of love, and ours was never meant to be more than a summer.

  I want an endless summer and to fall in love a new way, with a future.

  “Hey, Thomas…” I press the reset button. “You were my first kiss—at least, the first that counts. I think you’ll be my first everything.”

  I mean first love. A little white lie. But Thomas’s whole face is wide-open wondering, eyes warm on mine as he says, “Your first everything. You’ve never…?”

  I don’t get the chance to clarify, because Sof interrupts.

  “What are you guys whispering about?” she drawls from across the garden. She’s half asleep in Grey’s deck chair, a beer dangling from her fingers, her feet curled underneath her.

  “Fate,” replies Thomas, looking at me. Then he turns away, grinning at Sof. “First single by Deck-Chair Girl—you look like a pop star.”

  She smiles and toasts us, saying “C’mere” to Thomas. “C’mere and tell me more about Canada.”

  As he clambers to his feet to go over to her, he whispers to me, “Phew. For a while, I wondered if you’d based The Wurst on personal experience.”

  I laugh again and turn onto my back, closing my eyes and letting the sun wash over me, dancing red patterns through my eyelids as I tumble through half sleep. The lie I just told flickers at the edges of my consciousness. It’s a misunderstanding, I tell myself, shutting it away in a corner of my mind. I’ll clear it up tomorrow—the sex part, anyway. I’ve no intention of telling Thomas I’ve already been in love.

  Because, Thomas-and-Gottie. Somehow we’re managing friends, and something more too. I don’t know yet whether we’ll be like or love and I don’t care. Growing up, coming of age, bildungsroman, whatever—this time around, I’m growing up right. It’s fate.

  A bug tickles my arm and I brush it off. I hear Ned’s window creak open, and music spills out over us.

  “I’m bored.” Sof’s voice comes from far away. Only boring people get bored, Sofía. Grey’s voice in my head.

  Another tickle, a midge or a ladybug or an ant or something. The sun goes behind a cloud and I shiver.

  A butterfly on my arm. A cool breeze, the first of the day.

  “Gerroff,” I murmur, but another bug lands on me, another and another—cold and wet and hundreds of them, and when I open my eyes, it’s not bugs. It’s raining.

  I’m alone in the garden.

  Did I fall asleep? Not waking me up when it started to rain, and persuading everyone to go inside without me, that’s a typical Ned prank.

  “Ned! Edzard Harry Oppenheimer,” I yell, spluttering on a mouthful of rain as I sit and scramble up, slipping and sliding through the wet grass to the kitchen. It’s absolutely pouring, dark as a winter’s evening, the rain sluicing in great sheets as I burst through the door.

  “Thanks a lot, you b—”

  No one’s here. It’s dark. There’s no sound but the hum of the fridge and the steady drip of my wet clothes onto the floor.

  “Hello?” I call out, flicking on the lights. Maybe they’re all hiding. “Here I come, ready or not.”

  The rain pounds the windows as I grab a tea towel, rubbing my hair into a static frizz. A trail of damp footprints follows me through the kitchen. I tiptoe towards Ned’s half-open door and fling it wide: “Found you!”

  It’s empty. Just records and Ned’s huge stereo system, a collection of cameras, and a dank dirty-laundry smell. The sheets are the same ones Papa put on at the beginning of the summer. I wrinkle my nose: gross.

  I close the door and squelch back through the kitchen, then into the sitting room, peeking up the staircase to Papa’s bedroom and even check the bathroom. No one’s home.

  Huh. Maybe they’re at the pub or went to the beach before it started raining—maybe I was asleep for ages. But when I wander back to the kitchen, the clock says it’s only half past three. Even with the lights on, it’s Addams-family spooky. I pinch my arm and tell myself I’m being silly, flick the kettle on to follow the ritual: tea bags, mug, milk.

  But when I open the fridge, normality falls apart.

  This morning there were trays of Thomas’s fudge, a plate of brownies covered in cling wrap, leftovers in bowls and Tupperware, and a door crammed with jars of pickles. Now, there’s nothing but a moldy hunk of cheese and a milk bottle that—ugh. It fails the sniff test. Unease blooms like algae. This isn’t right.

  Still holding the milk, I shut the fridge. There are no photos on the door, no magnets.

  I can’t shake the idea that I’m not supposed to be here.

  Lightning flashes through the gloom, and I run to the window as the thunder follows fast, stare out through the rain. Where is everyone?

  Another flash makes me reel: the entire sky is television fuzz. The whole world’s a wormhole.

  I stumble away from the window, colliding with the table. Pain shoots through my hip bone. My breath comes in gulps, my lungs won’t fill. This is a nightmare. I spin round, taking in the details I should have noticed before. The blackboard is blank. It’s been marked all summer with notes for Thomas to call his mum—and somehow he never does, and it occurs too late that I’ve never asked him why not, or why his dad never calls. In the sink, there are three dirty cereal bowls, hard cornflakes barnacled to the sides.

  The calendar on the wall has the days marked off in pen as Grey used to do and Ned insists on still doing—it’s Friday the eighth. The newspaper on the table concurs. A glance at the gone-off milk says it passed its sell-by date last week.

  It is Friday, it is the eighth of August. It is the right time.

  But I think it’s the wrong branch.

  My heart collapses like a dying star. I don’t want to be here, in this lonely house. Three cereal bowls—Papa, Ned, me. This is a world where Thomas isn’t. A timeline of how this summer coulda-woulda-shoulda gone, if he’d never come home.

  I drop the milk onto the floor with a sour splash and hurtle towards the door, running out through the garden, under the rain. Ignoring the nothing sky until I’m safe in my room, the door shut, and I’m crying into my pillow, gasping, please, please. I don’t want
to be here. I want to go home. I want this all to just stop. Please.

  I’m inside a wormhole, but this is no memory of mine. It’s some other timeline, some other place. But what did I do to cause this? Think, Gottie. What did you do? What did you do? What did you do?

  {4}

  WELTSCHMERZ

  Inside the Exception, remember: the rules no longer apply.

  Don’t assume that when you enter a wormhole from one timeline, that’s where you come out. Don’t assume all timelines last forever, or are going in the same direction.

  The universe is made of hydrogen. The Weltschmerzian Exception is made of dark matter.

  And the longer it goes on, the more time gets twisted. The harder it becomes to untangle.

  But how does it start?

  And how do you make it stop?

  Saturday 9 August

  [Minus three hundred and forty-two]

  The page is blank.

  It’s past midnight. Outside, the storm rages on. I’m still on my bed, but now I’m wrapped in an old jumper of Grey’s. Staring at his diary.

  The day Jason and I tumbled into the kitchen, the day Grey died—that was early afternoon. He always wrote his diaries in the evening. The page in front of me, the first of September—he hasn’t written anything.

  The Gottie H. Oppenheimer Principle, v5.0.

  The diaries may have been navigating me at first, but they’re not any-more. The rules don’t apply—I could go anywhere. The funeral. The hospital. The world could show me all the things about myself that I don’t want to see.

  And I know now where this will all end up if I don’t stop it. Ned’s party. A wormhole. Grey’s death.

  For the third time, I write a list of all the wormholes. But now, I admit what truly happened.

  Grey’s bedroom. The first time I’d been alone with Jason since he dumped me.