The Square Root of Summer (11 page)

I need to ask Jason what happened, from his perspective. I need to get Jason alone, again. Explain that I'm not ignoring him; my phone's broken.

He catches me staring, and smiles. Then steals a chip from Ned, makes a joke to Meg about her nail polish, flips the bird at Sof. This could be a scene from last summer—but I'm only near him, not with him, and it makes my rib cage feel two sizes too small for my lungs.

I stare at my book, penciling formulas in the margins and trying not to mind that I don't have a secret bubble anymore, or that Ned's shouting about a party I don't want to happen. Tiny raindrops fleck the page and smudge my numbers. A big fat tear joins them.

I'm surprised when Niall shoves a tissue into my hand. It's gross—dirty and shredded, probably snotty—and he doesn't say anything or look at me, 'cause I'm clearly too pathetic. I need to stop sniffling and do something. Otherwise the time capsule of Margot H. Oppenheimer, in her eighteenth summer, will be a soggy mess.

I shove the snot rag into my bag, on top of Grey's diary. It's one from five years ago, bookmarked to the day Thomas left. Hearts and flowers are doodled all over the page. He used to do that on our school reports and permission slips. (Asking Papa to sign anything is like trying to catch a helium balloon in a tornado.) I nearly didn't get my measles shot because there were smiley faces in all the
O
s on the form.

When I look up, I notice two things. 1. There's a wormhole, twenty yards from shore. And 2. Thomas is looking between me and Jason with a frown.

“I'm going to swim,” I announce, standing up. Better a watery vortex than here.

Everyone stares up at me.

“You just ate,” says Sof. Her feet are in Ned's lap. “And the water'll be like icicles.”

“All right, Mum. I'll paddle,” I say, standing on the backs of my sneakers to take them off.

“Okay, well, I'll go with you,” she says reluctantly. Her teeth chatter as she peels off her sundress. Meg claims she has a volleyball injury and can't swim. And I think, meanly:
we didn't invite you
.

Then we start walking down to the tidal line, lurching as our bare feet hit the strip of sharp pebbles and seaweed. It takes a few minutes—the flats at low tide stretch on for miles—and we don't say much. It's even colder when we get to the water's edge, wind whipping in off the sea. Aside from the wormhole, it's empty. Sof jumps up and down, making exaggerated “Brrr” noises.

“If you're cold now, wait till we're in the water,” I tell her.

She puts one toe in and hops back. “Shit. Yeah, there's no way I'm going in.”

“Duh.” I copy her, dipping my toe in—then brave my whole foot. I hold it there. It's not
so
cold … I take another step forward, putting both feet in. Take another step, and another.

“Gottie,” Sof hisses when I'm calf-deep. “Come back, I'm freezing.”

“In a sec,” I say, without turning round. The sea and the sky and the wormhole are grey. Grey. I want to swim. All the way to the Arctic and away from my life. Then I turn round and splosh back to Sof.

“Ugh, thank God. If you'd gone in and I hadn't, your brother would think I was chicke—wait, what are you doing?”

I'm peeling off my jumper and I hand it over to her, along with my shorts, then step back into the water in my T-shirt and underwear. The salt water stings on my scabs, but it's a good pain—it's waking me up. I splash toward the wormhole till I'm up to my knees.

“Gottie!” Sof shrieks as I step into a dip and plummet up to my waist. The sudden cold takes my breath away, and the only way to stand it is to go all in—I duck until it's over my shoulders, my lungs screaming, and swim the last couple of lengths to the wormhole. The sand grazes my knees as I kick through the water, and seaweed slimes about my feet. And then I'm there.

I can't see the water; I can only see the television fuzz, but the sea
feels
deep here, up to my neck. I can hear Sof shouting something, but I'm too far away to work out what. There's a tug at my ankle, the underwater current pulling me down—

And I swim through the universe.

“Am I adopted?”

I'm helping Grey after he re-repainted the Book Barn. Instead of cleaning, last month he painted over the dirt in bright dandelion yellow. I didn't help that time, because my hand was still in a bandage from Thomas. The color lasted two weeks, till he blasted through the kitchen door a few days ago: “Balls and buggery to the flames of hell! It's like a bloody cupcake café!”

So yesterday we re-repainted it off-white, the kind that looks dirty even when it's fresh. I helped. And now we're putting everything back. Again.

“You're not adopted, dude,” says Grey from the top of the ladder. “Pass me that box?”

I heave it up to him, then sit back down and look at the photo album I've found. The Book Barn is like that: a million paperbacks, half of them the shop's, half of them ours. Sometimes Grey will be writing a receipt and he'll suddenly grab the book back, saying it's not for sale.

“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
*R
s, confettied on the pages. There are no
*R
s 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 here.

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: