The Square Root of Summer (31 page)

“No,” I say, at the same time as Thomas says, “Yes.”

I glare at him.

“After I'm gone, climb this tree and see what you find,” says the girl, taking something out of her pocket and throwing it through the rain to Thomas. It's small and silver.

“I've got a knife!” I blurt. It's true.

“I know.” She winks. “And you really shouldn't. Gottie. Listen. I know I should say something so
ficken
wise to you right now. Like, talk to Papa. Eat your vegetables. Phone Ned when he's in London. Pay attention to the world. Say yes when someone asks you to bake a cake. Make grand gestures. Be bold.”

She laughs. “But … eh, we're going to forget, and do everything wrong, anyway. But be careful with that knife, okay? We could get hurt.”

I think
We?
But the girl's already darting off through the garden and Thomas is tugging on my hand, saying, “There's something in the tree, I've got the key. C'mon.”

And he's leaving me for forever in an hour and we have a blood pact to swear, so I climb up after him, the knife in my pocket.

*   *   *

Since it's already happened, I can't stop my idiotic younger self from getting stabbed in a tree, so I go and hide from the rain in Grey's car. It's parked askew, half in the hedge. One wheel is missing, propped up on bricks. We got an ambulance to the hospital today, so I'm safe here. I won't bump into anyone else.

What did I cause by meeting myself just now? When Thomas asked me about time travel, I'd been absolutely certain in my explanation of why this could never happen. Cosmic censorship. Clearly, I was wrong—you
can
see beyond an event horizon. But, then, this: I still don't remember what happened with the blood pact, but I do recall the part beforehand, when Thomas and I were in the garden, in the rain. It's coming back to me.

And there definitely wasn't a cat. There definitely wasn't another me. What's different about this time?

Rain slashes at the car windows as I try to figure out what's missing from my theory, what could cause the memory gap. Then I hear a yell and turn to see little Thomas, running across the garden, clutching his bleeding hand, screaming fit to bust for Grey, for Papa, for tree girl—
that must mean me
, I think—for anyone, to come quickly.

Papa pokes his head out the kitchen door. When he sees Thomas, he turns green, turns away. A few seconds later, Grey strides out of the house.

And I'm
verklemmt
.

It's been one thing, seeing him in my memories, reading his diaries. Remembering him, over and over. But this, this is him here now, flesh and blood and here and alive …

I ache with how much I miss him.

He starts crossing the garden, half running to the apple tree as Thomas wails and runs behind him.

Grey. Grey, alive, and
here
, and I'm here too, and if I could just follow him through the garden—he's disappearing beyond the shrubbery, almost gone, if I could just talk to him … My hand is on the door handle, ready to leap out, to run across to him, one last time—

If I could just.

But I can't. It's the wrong time. It's the wrong place. It's the wrong me.

And anyway, Grey is moving out from behind the rhododendron now, carefully and urgently. He's carrying other Gottie in his arms. I'm already with him. Another me, in another time, always I'll be with him.

I laugh, a little, through my tears. Seeing my younger face, its stubborn, gremlin-y achievement, muddled with pain and confusion. And pride! I think that I look safe. I think that Sof was right—Grey was all of our dads. He was my daddy. There I am, in his arms.

All the love we've lost hits me like an ocean wave.

There are sirens now; Papa must have called the ambulance. And there's shouting, and there's pain.

God. Why can't I remember this?

Is it because there are two of me? And why weren't there two of me when I went back a week to the kitchen? I made all that stuff up, about the universe hiding you in a tiny cannoli—but perhaps it's true, and that's where my memory has been all along.

Or, perhaps, it's this: when only seven days had passed, I was the same person, unchanged. I couldn't meet my week-ago self, because of causality. This is different. Me at twelve, and me at seventeen—there's a chasm of grief between us. I lost myself when Grey died, and there isn't a single particle left of who I was. I can meet my younger self, because we're not the same person. I'll never be that girl again.

Thomas scurries to keep up with Grey's seven-league strides. I squint, trying to see what he's holding. As he runs across the garden, his unhurt hand forms a fist. The Canadian coins? There's chocolate cake round his mouth. And I hope, in his pocket, there's a recipe. He doesn't look left or right, or at me in the car: he runs after Grey, after me, into the kitchen. And then we're gone.

It's time to go home.

The rain is easing as I climb out of the car and cross the garden. Under the tree, I retrieve the discarded knife from the grass. Water has washed the blood away. I stuff it in my pocket, then climb up into the branches.

Umlaut is waiting for me, next to the open time capsule. The padlock is lying next to it, and all that junk I put in there before—the seaweed, the coins—is gone. Was I really going to woo Thomas back with a pair of old socks?

I settle myself on my usual branch, take a notebook out of my book bag, and I start to write.

The Gottie H. Oppenheimer Principle v 7.0.

A general theory of heartbreak, love,

and the meaning of infinity, or:

the Weltschmerzian Exception

Dear Thomas,

You promised me that whatever I tell you, you'll believe. Remember? So here it goes.

Time travel is real.

Five years ago, you and I accidentally created a paradoxical time loop. It's fate.

What's a paradoxical time loop? Okay, so you bake a cannoli … Kidding! It's a wormhole that exists because it exists. You know the equation I wrote on your email? My physics teacher called it a joke. It describes a wormhole opening in the present, because at the same time, it's opening in the past. Impossible, right?

I disagree.

It's real. And I think its power comes from the negative energy, or dark matter, that naturally exists in the universe.

I think it comes from grief.

I'd already lost my mum. There was already grief in my world. The circumstances for a Weltschmerzian Exception (more on this later) were ideal. And you were more than my best friend. We were unquestionable. When you went away, all I had left was a scar, a hole in my memory,
*
and the thought that you didn't want to kiss me. I broke your heart? You broke mine first. So we're Even Stevens. That's why the loop comes back to this day in particular (I'm writing this from our tree, the day you cut my hand, by the way).

When my grandfather died, I imploded. This second heartbreak completed the loop. Could I have traveled down a wormhole to five years ago if Grey hadn't died? Would his death have shattered me, if I hadn't already lost you? To put it another way: would losing you have hurt so much, if I hadn't lost Grey in the future?

And then there's this summer. You're not supposed to be here. You're here because of an email I sent. But I only sent it, because you're already here. When you came back to Holksea, time went wackadoodle. I think you triggered something. What did we find, that day in the tree? I still can't remember, but I'm going to guess: Canadian coins, which you took to Toronto with you. Did you buy a comic with them, and bring it back on the plane this summer? You wrote me a recipe for chocolate cake this July and discovered it five years ago—is that why you want to be a baker?

The universe has been tying itself in knots trying to correct all these paradoxes.

It's called the Weltschmerzian Exception.

The rules of spacetime don't apply. When you broke my heart, the world split into a thousand timelines. In your version of the universe, you got an email from me. Want to know why I was so weird this summer? Every time you mentioned it, we jumped to a new timeline. You know how particles get to their destination without traveling there? That was me. Sometimes time froze, like a knot in a thread. Or it bent and distorted completely, letting me step from my bedroom one rainy night into a warm kitchen the week before. Where I kissed you. (There's a secret I never told you!)

There are years of twists and turns, but the world kept bringing me back to last summer most of all, because that's where I needed to be. And for that, I wanted to say: thank you.

Indelibly yours,

G. H. Oppenheimer x

PS
*
That memory is in a tiny cannoli somewhere. Lost in spacetime. I don't need it anymore.

I write the future date, 24 August, at the top, then I put the letter in the time capsule, close the lid, and padlock it.

The effect is instantaneous. First the apple tree bursts into blossom. Within seconds, the petals are falling like confetti. The sun rises and sets, rises and sets, a heartbeat in the sky. The clouds race by.

“It's okay,” I whisper to Umlaut, scooping him into my lap. “We're going home.”

I'm no longer afraid. I can see all the loops and snags and knots I've made in time. I can see all the universes at once.

The timelines layer over each other. I watch a dozen different Gotties running through the garden, appearing and disappearing, faster and faster. Mathematically speaking, all this will happen over and over again, a hundred different heartbreaks in a hundred different ways. One of the Gotties will wake up underneath this tree at the beginning of summer, drenched in déjà vu, sad, and alone. My heart goes out to her. But for me, that's in the past.

I'm ready for
now
.

The years pass more quickly now, snow then sunshine then snow. The garden is a blur. As the sky gathers into one last autumn and the leaves come fluttering down, a torn scrap of paper floats by. I stand and catch it: a page from a future textbook. The yet-to-be-written equation for the Weltschmerzian Exception. And I see my name next to it, and the title “Dr.”

In a moment of complete clarity, I know: I won't remember everything. That I
shouldn't
remember everything. Especially not this. So I hold the page out to the wind and let it fly away in the snow. It vanishes into thin air. This is a secret that the universe can keep. The sun comes out, first spring, then summer. Then I close my eyes, and I jump out of the tree …

 

Now

I land in the grass, my pajamas still soaking wet.

Dazed, I sit up, peeling off my book bag, and look around the garden. The lawn is freshly mowed and has the scent of cut grass. There's no more rotting fruit on the ground. Yellow roses, hundreds of them, tumble over the kitchen window.

I tilt my head back and see my room, upside down. The ivy is clipped back, and I catch a glimpse of curtains inside the windows. Beyond them, against all odds, I think I can see a glow of stars.

Curtains in my room. Yellow roses, not peach. Thomas's cosmos, back on my ceiling. A thousand tiny details, a thousand incremental changes. I've remade the universe. Better. It's the end of my weltschmerz.

A sudden burst of Black Sabbath blasts across the garden from Ned's room. Some things stay the same. And when I tilt my head forward again, Thomas is peering down at me from the apple tree, leaf-dappled. Was it him calling my name, when I fell?

“Welcome back,” he says. A smile tugs at his face.

“Um. Hello.” I stare up at him. “What are you doing?”