The Square Root of Summer (28 page)

The door isn't quite closed and it swings open under my hammering fists.

The bed is stripped, the Black Forest cake smears from last night, gone. There's a neat stack of cookbooks on the piano, borrowed from around the house and the Book Barn. A faint smell of whiskey still in the air. And
The Wurst
, hovering over the emptiness like a sad blue penis.

“He knocked on my door very early.”

I turn around. Papa's standing behind me, watching.

“He was all packed up, and he told me…” He hesitates. “He said he couldn't stay here. That he was going to stay with a friend.”

“Who?” I'm Thomas's only friend. Except for Sof and Meg and whoever he hung around with all the days I ignored him to dive into wormholes. He probably knows loads of people in Holksea. He did live here before, after all. “Where is he?”

“I checked that it was okay. And his mum knows. But, Gottie,
Liebling
.” Papa reaches out for me, offering his arms, but I'm already pushing past him as he says, “He didn't want me to tell you.”

 

Sunday 17 to Monday 18 August

[Minus three hundred and fifty to fifty-one]

I hit my room running, yanking the patchwork off my bed, balling it up and throwing it next to the door. The bike-crash blankets join it—it's summer, who needs wool blankets?—spilling out a million pairs of balled-up socks. Thomas's socks. Umlaut pounces on one and scuttles off underneath the bed with it.

What next? Thomas's cardigan is draped over the back of my chair, and I hurl it onto the laundry heap, yanking the chair over. I have to keep moving, keep doing something, otherwise I'll think:
Thomas hates me
and
Thomas is gone
and—

I'm so angry.

I can't believe he's pulled a disappearing act again!

A broken lipstick gets chucked in the trash, followed by a pair of earrings borrowed from Sof. I tip my little bowl of hairbands and bobby pins in as well, then throw the bowl after them. Every surface is littered with plates, a legacy of Thomas's baking and hours spent at my desk in search of lost time. When they're stacked by the door and everything's in the trash, the room seems a little less haywire—but my heart is still bouncing off the walls. How dare he do this.

I clamber onto the desk, flick the plastic stars one by one onto the floor. It's grimly satisfying. But when I gather the constellations in my hand, it's too much. I can't throw these away. I heap them on the stripped bed instead, where they're joined by a pile of coins from the windowsill. On top of the chest of drawers, the piece of seaweed from the beach. I take down everything from my corkboard, the email, the cake recipe, Polaroids of Ned's.

Then I'm done. I stand and look at the bed, breathing heavily. All of these
things
, a time capsule of our summer, and what does it amount to? A heap of junk, and broken promises. Thomas hasn't given me anything of meaning, not even his word. I barely know anything about him. I suppress the voice that says—
because you never asked.

I had no choice, I was disappearing down wormholes.

Is that true?
Grey's voice answers me.
Determinism, dude. Drive your own lawn mower.
What to do with all this Thomas stuff? Grey would call it a cleansing and have me burn it in a herb-spiked fire. Sof would donate it all to a charity shop. Ned would chuck it in the trash. But me, what would I do? Do I know myself well enough to make a decision?

I dig inside my wardrobe for my book bag, unused since the last week of term, and cram everything inside. The front pocket rustles. I fumble with the zip, and pull out a crumpled piece of paper—Ms. Adewunmi's quiz. How did I not notice she asked about the Weltschmerzian Exception?

I put the book bag at the back of my wardrobe. I put The Great Spacetime Quiz! on my windowsill. Then I crawl into my unmade bed and sleep for the next sixteen hours.

*   *   *

I wake up in the middle of the next afternoon, to sun streaming green through the ivy. The first thing I see is the quiz.
Clocks are a way of measuring time … It's infinite … A spacetime boundary—the point of no return … what is the Weltschmerzian Exception?

Good question.

Ten minutes later I'm out in the fens. The sky is huge, infinite and empty as I cycle along the deserted coast road. I'm the last person left in the universe. The whole wide world is in high-definition 3D, bigger and brighter than I've ever known it. Or perhaps that's me. Facing down that final wormhole, I feel like sunshine, burning the fog away.

When I reach school and chain my bike to the rack, there are students everywhere. Anxiety tweaks at me—has term started?

Ms. Adewunmi's classroom is unlocked and empty. It's strange, being at school when you're not meant to be. It makes me nervous—stools I'd normally sit on and whiteboards I'd normally take notes from are suddenly museum exhibits. Look but don't touch.

The whiteboard is covered in equations from last term, second-year stuff. It'll probably be cleaned off before lessons begin again in September, so I grab a pen and add the equation from Thomas's email, the one in my handwriting. I still don't know what it means.

“Whoa.”

I jump. Ms. Adewunmi's in the doorway, and she's staring not at the whiteboard, but at me. “You changed your hair,” she says.

“Uh, yeah.” I prod my mullet self-consciously. “You too.”

She puts the box she's carrying down on the desk, tossing her braids. “I like it. Very Chrissie Hynde.”

“You're moving?”

“Getting ready for the new term.” She starts unpacking: fresh board pens, reams of paper, plastic-wrapped sets of cardboard folders, a catering-size bag of lollipops, which she shakes at me. “Get a cola one before they all go.”

I take the bag from her and fish out a lollipop at random, waiting while she finishes sorting her things out before plying her with questions.

“Sit down, smarty-pants,” she says, gesturing to the desk. “Scooch. I'll be with you in a sec.”

I perch on the edge of the desk and gaze at the whiteboard.
Am I clever?
I know I understand all the numbers I'm looking at. But it's no different from the way Sof can decipher a Renaissance painting or Ned can read music. How Thomas can translate a recipe into cake.

This summer is the world's doing, not mine—the wormholes could have happened to anyone. I just knew how to recognize them mathematically. Even so, the equations on the board—they're incredible. Maybe that's something I could do when I go to university. Learn all the ways to describe the world.

“All right, then, Ms. Oppenheimer.” My teacher hops up next to me, talking round her lollipop like it's a cigarette. “You're a bit early. Term starts next month.”

“I needed to talk to you,” I say. “I brought my quiz back. And I wanted to ask about a theory—there's a page missing, in one of the books from your reading list…”

“Oh! That reminds me, I have something for you.” She takes the quiz from me, but doesn't look at it, just puts it on the desk and rummages through her things. “Aha. I picked these up, was planning to bombard you on the first day, in exchange for your essay. But, well—here.”

Ms. Adewunmi hands me a stack of brochures: Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial in London. But also faraway places I've not thought about, like Edinburgh and Durham, and ones I've not even heard of, like MIT and Ludwig-Maximilians. I run my hand over the glossy covers, trying to imagine myself in a year's time, who I'll be then.

She taps the stack with a long, lightning-bolt-adorned nail. “I got your theory notes.
The Gottie H. Oppenheimer Principle
?”

It takes me a second to remember: the emails I sent her from the Book Barn.

“It's good. A touch science-fiction, but still. Type that into something comprehensible, and world's your oyster.”

“This might be a silly question, but—”

“Of course you'll get in wherever you want, Gottie. If money's a problem, there's funding available, especially for girls wanting to pursue STEM industry degrees, there's all sorts of programs, grants, and such. It's hard finding them, but they're there. You'll get my recommendation.”

“Actually, I was going to ask if you could understand that equation I wrote on the board?”

“No. Oh, no, I can't.” She turns to me, wide-eyed and terrified, and whispers, “You must be a
genius
.”

I roll my eyes while she laughs harder than when she welcomed me to the Parallel Universe Club. Finally, she says, “Sorry. Oh, boy. It's a paradoxical time loop.”

I quiz her with a baffled headshake.

“A joke,” she clarifies. “An equation for something that doesn't exist. A sci-fi thing—c'mon, you don't watch TV?”

“Could you explain it to me anyway?”

“Eh, why not.” She leaps up and wipes a space on the whiteboard clean, talking over her shoulder as she diagrams the equation.

“It describes a loop, yeah? A tunnel to the past, created in the present. A two-way wormhole. But the joke is, it can only be opened because it's already been opened, in the past.” She circles with her pen. “And the reverse is true. It exists because it exists. It's a paradox. Make sense?”

“Kind of.” I point to the part that most confuses me. “What's this factor, though?”

“That's matter created when all this happened. A sort of overflow valve. Excess energy. The equation only works if you funnel off this solution into its own section—which means it'll never work. The whole thing is some bored physicist's idea of a joke.”

“A joke,” I repeat. I'm disappointed—I'd hoped it was the Weltschmerzian Exception. That's obviously a physics gag too, a hilarious mathematical urban legend. I'll never know what happened this summer. Ms. Adewunmi sits back down next to me, swinging her legs under the desk.

“All right, then,” she says, “a joke. But it's some pretty cool math. That it, no more questions? Surely you want to be outside on a day like this.”

I slide off the desk. When I reach the door, I turn back. “One more thing. On the reading list. How come you put
Forever
?”

She chuckles. “I thought you could do with some light reading. It's a classic.”

 

Saturday 23 August

[Minus three hundred and fifty-six]

“
Liebling
.” Papa appears from the ether, knocking softly on my door.

“I'm fine, Papa,” I mumble into the pillow. “New shifts, remember? It's my day off.”

“
Ja
, I know,” he says, putting a cup of tea next to my head. It's been almost a week of moping, and he keeps trying to coax me out of it with “treats”—such as letting Ned play music at the Book Barn. This is the first time he's sought me out in my room, though. Maybe ever. Grey was always the one to find me when I was in a funk.

I peel one eye open and watch him as he looks around, noting the emptiness, the equations on the wall, lingering by the desk, running his hand over the brochures Ms. Adewunmi gave me. The diaries.

He turns back to the bed. “Sof's outside.”

Bah.

Papa hovers while I gulp the tea—as though he thinks I'll book it out the window if he leaves me to it.

It's going to be a scorching day—the air already smells like toffee, and the sun is beginning to burn. I find Sof in the shade, sitting with her sketchbook among overblown raspberries, tangles of ivy, brambles, and nettles gone to flower.

“Hi.” I half wave as Papa floats off, and plonk myself in the grass next to her, the dew soaking through my pajamas. Her sketchbook is full of doodles of the garden.

“You realize I can
literally
say it's a jungle out here?” Sof waves her pencil at the wilderness as Umlaut bounces, then disappears into the grass. All the flowers have long wilted and burst in the heat. They straggle across the bushes, limp balloons after a party. In the winter, Norfolk's beaches are shrouded in bleak white fog, and you can't imagine spring will ever break through. The garden has that same air of loneliness now.

“Do you think your mum would come over?” I ask. I don't have the right to ask her for a favor, but I know her mum would want to help. “Help us, I don't know, prune?”

I wouldn't blame Sof if she told me to piss off, if she was only here to say that. Or maybe she's here to see Ned, and Papa's misunderstood.

“Ask Mum yourself, later today,” she says. “She's running the plant stall at the fair.”

Ah, the fair. Holksea's annual jamboree of cake competitions and donkey rides marks the end of summer—for the village. For me, I had Grey's party for that. I always thought of the fair as the start of autumn. A new beginning.