The Square Root of Summer (18 page)

“Okay, G.” Thomas has finally followed me outside. He lies down next to me, scooching his arm so I can rest my head on his chest. “What are we looking at? The same stars you drew?”

“Sure.” I burrow into him and let him point out constellations to me—“That right there is Big Burrito. Over here we have Ned on Guitar”—till his voice begins to blur.

Then he yawns. It's huge and Umlaut-y and breaks us apart. I want to wriggle back to how we were, tucked up for bed on the lawn. Then it dawns on me:

“Wait.” I roll onto my side, grass tickling my cheek. “I thought you were jet-lagged?”

“I was—a
month
ago,” he teases, rolling towards me. Sleepily. “Baking was a distraction. After the chocolate cake, I noticed your light was always on late. I figured, if you were awake, maybe you'd come back to the kitchen. I've been setting my alarm.”

He yawns again, squeakily. Shakes it away and looks at me.

“But why?” I whisper. All the creepy-crawlies in the garden hold their breath for the answer as Thomas's hand finds mine.

“I like you,” Thomas whispers. “I liked you when you were twelve and you told me to kiss you, all scientific about it. I liked you when I walked off the plane and into the Book Barn, and you were passed out and covered in blood. I like you then, and now, and probably forever.”

We move slowly in the dark, finding each other. His hand moves up to touch my face; mine finds his heart. I feel its beat, steady underneath my palm, as he says, “Gottie.”

When Thomas says my name, it sounds like a promise. And for that, and for the frog in the tree and the whiskey on the carpet, for the baking lesson, and for the stars on my ceiling, I take a quantum leap.

I close the last atoms of space between us, and I kiss him.

*   *   *

It's late, almost dawn. Witches and ghosts and goblins.

We're outside on the lawn again, the following night. Side by side under the apple tree. Thomas has his head on my shoulder, his watch balanced on his knee—inside, a new gluten-free cake is in the oven, hopefully less disastrous. The minutes are ticking away and, somehow, we're talking about Grey.

“This will sound stupid,” I whisper.

“You're talking to me, remember?” His blinks take longer and longer, slow-motion eyelashes, and his usual frenetic dialogue is playing at 33 rpm.

I should be in my room, working on a telescope theory. Thomas should be asleep in Grey's room, dreaming of superheroes. We have to wait for the cake. We could have baked it much earlier. But we did it like this, because some secrets are easier to tell in the dark.

“I don't think I did it right,” I confess. “When Grey died.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know they give you a leaflet, at the hospital? When somebody dies. A to-do list. Ned was getting ready to move to London, and Papa was—he sort of tuned out.” Papa drifted into rooms and stood there not moving for ten minutes at a time. He locked the keys in the car. He cried doing up his shoelaces and forgot how to be my daddy. “So I read it.”

I pause. This is the most I've spoken about how it was, when my grandfather died. It's the most I've spoken about
anything
. All those times Sof came tap-tap-tapping, and I told her I had homework. All those silent baked-potato-and dinners after Papa tuned back in, but I didn't, till he stopped trying.

When we went to Munich at Christmas, Oma and Opa gave us
Glühwein
and sang carols and quietly suggested to Papa that he could move back. Unspoken was their real meaning: there was no reason to stay in Norfolk, now that Grey was gone. There was no connection to my mum anymore. In response, I don't think Ned knew what to do except get drunk. He smashed a glass in his hand and left blood in the sink, and I cleaned it up and didn't mention it.

“I did the things it said to do. I called the registry office and I wrote an announcement for the paper. I ordered flowers.” I tick off items on my fingers as I whisper the list. “I recorded a new message for the answering machine. I canceled his subscriptions. I cleaned his room. But Papa kept buying Marmite.” My whisper reaches hysteria pitch, and I take a deep breath. “Grey's the only one who likes it. And Papa kept buying it. It's not as though we'd ever run out—no one's eating it—but every few weeks, I see it on the list on the blackboard and wipe it off. And he buys it anyway. We have thirty jars of Marmite.”

“I'll eat the Marmite.”

“Thank you.” I sigh. “But it's not that … It's—I did everything the leaflet said! I talked to the funeral director. I chose the hymns.”

“You did the rituals,” says Thomas. “You poured the whiskey.”

My throat aches with uncried tears. Papa buys Marmite and Ned's throwing a party, but I follow the instructions. I do the rituals. So how come I'm the one who's haunted by wormholes?

“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 H
2
O.

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.