The Square Root of Summer (19 page)

“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.

Outside the Book Barn. The first time I'd been there since Grey died.

Grey's chair. I'd just crashed my bike and I wanted my grandfather and I hurt.

The library. Seeing my relationship with Jason in Grey's diary. He'd called it love.

The beach. Watching Jason talk to everyone but me. As though I didn't exist.

With Jason. Deciding he'd never loved me.

The canal. Arguing with Sof.

And—

In the garden. I lied to Thomas. I told him I'd never been in love.

I can't believe I didn't see it before. The Weltschmerzian Exception.
Weltschmerz
is a German word for melancholy. It translates to
world pain
.

At their most basic level, wormholes are time machines, powered by dark matter and negative energy. And what's darker than heartbreak? Here's a theory: the twin hurts of Jason and Grey rocked me so much, time broke down. The rules no longer apply.

Every single one of the wormholes has opened when I've been sad, or angry, or grieving, or lost. Or lying.

That's the Gottie H. Oppenheimer Principle. It's nothing to do with particles or fractals or diaries. It's to do with me, and what I did on the day Grey died. I'm a bad person. And this wormhole I'm in now? It's punishment.

I want to rest my head on all these books and go to sleep, wake up to the world as it should be. Tell Thomas everything and see where time takes us. But the only way to get there is to do something about it. I force myself to pick up one of my many notebooks again and start reading it through. Third (hundredth) time's the charm.

The very first thing I see is a diagram I printed out that day in the library, weeks ago.

The Schwarzschild metric. If you stand a billion light-years away from one, a Schwarzschild black hole looks like a wormhole. They're the same thing.

It doesn't flip the TV channel to a new timeline or show you something that's already happened. If you can find a way to keep it open without a gravitational collapse, you could walk through it.

The way to keep it open is to use dark exotic matter—like jamming your shoe in a doorway. If you went through it, you'd have to cross that darkness.

Even so, I find myself “walking” my fingers across the diagram. Through the door.

And however dangerous it would be, I would go in a heartbeat. Because, oh, here I am. Under a rainstorm that shouldn't be. This can't be reality; this can't be how the summer is supposed to be—without Thomas. Fate. The thought of not seeing him again makes me ache with loneliness.

At the exact same time that I start to cry, the rain stops. The pounding on the roof, the howling wind, the noise—it's gone. It's too sudden to be a coincidence. I wipe my running nose with the back of my hand and sit up. Alert.

There's light, creeping round the edges of my bedroom door. Shining through its little wavy-glass window. I switch my lamp off, plunging my room into darkness—there are no Thomas ceiling stars in this reality. But there it is—a glow, coming from the garden. My heart pounds, but my Spidey senses are tingle-free.