The Square Root of Summer (2 page)

“Ah, well,” Papa says. “You both remember next door, the Althorpes?”

Automatically, Ned and I turn to look across the garden, at the house beyond the hedge. Almost five years ago, our neighbors moved to Canada. They never sold the house, so there was always the promise of a return along with the For Rent sign and its constant parade of tourists, vacationers, families. It's been empty for the past few months.

Even after all this time, I can still picture a grubby little boy in coke-bottle glasses squeezing through the hole in the hedge, waving a fistful of worms.

Thomas Althorpe.

Best friend
doesn't even begin to cover it.

Born in the same week, we'd grown up side by side. Thomas-and-Gottie—we were inseparable, trouble times two, an el weirdo club of only us.

Until he left.

I stare at the scar on my left palm. All I remember is a plan to swear a blood brothers pact, a promise to talk to each other. Three thousand miles wasn't going to change anything. I woke up in the E.R. with a bandage on my hand and a black hole in my memory. By the time I came home, Thomas and his parents were gone.

I waited and waited, but he never wrote me a letter, or emailed, or Morse code–messaged, or anything we'd said we'd do.

My hand healed; my hair grew long. Little by little, I grew up. Little by little, I forgot about the boy who forgot me first.

“The Althorpes?” Papa interrupts my thoughts. “You remember? They're getting divorced.”

“Fascinating,” croaks Ned. And even though Thomas abandoned me, my heart skips a little on his behalf.

“Indeed. Thomas's mum, I was on the phone with—she's moving home to England in September. Thomas is coming with her.”

There's a strange sense of inevitability to this announcement. Like I've been waiting for Thomas to come back this whole time. But how dare he not even tell me! To have his mum call Papa!
Chicken.

“Anyway, she'd like that Thomas is settled back before starting school, which I agree,” he says, adding a
harrumph
, a classic Papa telltale sign that there's more to the story than he's letting on. “It's a bit last-minute, her plan, but I offer that he stay with us this summer. That's … that's my proposition.”

Unbelievable. It's not enough that he's coming home, but he'll be on my side of the hedge. Unease blooms like algae.

“Thomas Althorpe,” I repeat. Grey always told me saying words out loud made them true. “He's moving in with us.”

“When?” asks Ned.

“Ah.” Papa sips from his mug. “Tuesday.”

“Tuesday—as in
two days' time
?” I shriek like a tea kettle, all calm evaporating.

“Whoa,” says Ned. His face has reverted to hangover green. “Am I meant to share a bunk bed with him?”

Papa harrumphs again, and launches the Götterdämmerung. “Actually, I offered for him to stay in Grey's room.”

Four horsemen. A shower of frogs. Burning lakes of fire. I may not know my Revelations, but disturbing the shrine of Grey's bedroom? It's the apocalypse.

Next to me, Ned quietly throws up on the grass.

 

Monday 5 July

[Minus three hundred and seven]

“Spacetime!” Ms. Adewunmi scrawls on the whiteboard with a marker-pen swoosh. “The four-dimensional mathematical space we use to formulate—what?”

Physics is my favorite subject, but my teacher is way too energetic for 9 a.m. For a Monday. For any day after I've been awake all night, which since October is basically always.
Spacetime
, I write down. Then, for some inexplicable reason—and I instantly scribble it out—
Thomas Althorpe
.

“E equals McSquared,” mumbles Nick Choi from the other side of the classroom.

“Thank you, Einstein,” says Ms. Adewunmi, to laughter. “That's the theory of special relativity. Spacetime—space is three-dimensional, time is linear, but if we combine them, that gives us a playground for all sorts of physics fun. And it was calculated by…?”

Hermann Minkowski
, I think, but instead of raising my hand, I use it to stifle a yawn.

“That guy, Mike Wazowski!” someone yells.

“What, from
Monsters, Inc.
?” asks Nick.

“They travel between worlds, don't they?
McSquared,
” I hear from behind me.

“Minkowski,” Ms. Adewunmi attempts over whoops and catcalls. “Let's try to focus on reality…”

Good luck with that. It's the last week of term, and the atmosphere is as fizzy as carbon dioxide—probably why Ms. Adewunmi's given up on the curriculum and is making her own fun.

“Anyone else for interstellar dimensions? How would you describe a one-way metric?”
A wormhole
, I think. A one-way metric is a blast from the past. That's how I'd answer. Ned bringing back Grey by repatriating his Buddhas, leaving crystals in the bathroom sink, cooking with way too much chili. Jason, smiling at me in the garden after almost a year.

Thomas Althorpe.

But I've never spoken up during any of Ms. Adewunmi's lessons. It's not that I don't know the answers. And back at my old school, I never minded saying so and having everyone stare at the math-genius-prodigy-freak-show-nerd. We'd all known each other since forever. But like a lot of the villages along the coast, Holksea's too small to support a real high school. At sixteen, everyone transfers to the giant school in town. Here, classes are twice the size and full of strangers. But mostly, it's that ever since the day Grey died, talking exposes me. As though I'm the opposite of invisible, but everyone can see right through me.

When Ms. Adewunmi's gaze lands on me, her eyebrows go shooting off into her Afro. She knows I know the answer, but I keep my mouth clammed shut till she turns back to the whiteboard.

“All right, then,” she says. “I know you guys have fractals next period, so let's keep moving.”

Fractals
, I write down.
The infinite, self-replicating patterns in nature
.
The big picture, the whole story, is just thousands of tiny stories, like a kaleidoscope.

Thomas was a kaleidoscope. He turned the world to colors. I could tell you a hundred stories about Thomas, and it still wouldn't be the big picture: He bit a teacher on the leg. He got a lifetime ban from the Holksea summer fair. He put a jellyfish in Megumi Yamazaki's lunch box when she said I had a dead mum, and he could thread licorice shoelaces through his nose.

But it was more than that. According to Grey, we were
wolf cubs raised in the same patch of dirt
. Thomas didn't belong on his side of the hedge, where the lawn was neatly clipped and his scary dad's rules were practically laminated. And I didn't quite belong on mine, where we were allowed to roam free. It wasn't about like or love—we were just always together. We shared a brain. And now he's coming back …

I feel the same way as when you flip a rock over in the garden, and see all the bugs squirming underneath.

The bell rings, too early. I think it's a fire drill, till I see everyone around me holding worksheets in the air. The whiteboard is covered in notations, none of them about fractals. The clock suddenly says midday. And, one by one, Ms. Adewunmi is plucking paper from hands, adding them to her growing pile.

Panicked, I look in front of me. There's a worksheet there, but I haven't written on it. I don't even remember being given it.

Next to me, Jake Halpern hands in his worksheet and slouches away, his bag knocking against me as he slides off the stool. Ms. Adewunmi snaps her fingers.

“I…” I stare at her, then back at my blank paper. “I ran out of time,” I say, lamely.

“All right, then,” she says, with a small frown. “Detention.”

*   *   *

I've never had detention before. When I check in after my final lesson, a teacher I don't recognize stamps my slip, then waves a bored hand. “Find a seat and read. Do some homework,” he says, turning back to his grading.

I make my way through the hot, half-empty room to a seat by the window. Inside my binder is the college application packet I got in homeroom this morning. I shove it to the bottom of my book bag, to be dealt with
never
, and pull out Ms. Adewunmi's worksheet instead. For lack of anything better to do, I start writing.

THE GREAT SPACETIME QUIZ!

Name three features of special relativity.

(1) The speed of light NEVER changes. (2) Nothing can travel faster than light. Which means (3) depending on the observer, time runs at different speeds. Clocks are a way of measuring time as it exists on Earth. If the world turned faster, we'd need a new type of minute.

What is general relativity?

It explains gravity in the context of time and space. An object—Newton's apple tree, perhaps—forces spacetime to curve around it because of gravity. It's why we get black holes.

Describe the Gödel metric.

It's a solution to the E
=
MC
2
equation that “proves” the past still exists. Because if spacetime is curved, you could cross it to get there.

What is a key characteristic of a Möbius strip?

It's infinite. To make one, you half twist a length of paper and Scotch tape the ends together. An ant could walk along the entire surface, without ever crossing the edge.

What is an event horizon?

A spacetime boundary—the point of no return. If you observe a black hole, you can't see inside. Beyond the event horizon, you can see the universe's secrets—but you can't get out of the hole.