The Square Root of Summer (32 page)

“Reading your letter.” He waves the pages at me, through the branches. If he's surprised by what I wrote, or the fact that I'm dripping wet in pajamas on a blazing sunny day, or that my feet are smeared with mud, he's not letting on. Unless … Memories of the summer drift down around me like dandelion fluff.

Remember? That day with the time capsule. You had short hair that day.

The time capsule. Maybe we opened it too soon.

Bake at 300 degrees for an hour. Even you can do this. Trust me.

“I meant here,” I say, letting my thoughts scatter. Not caring what he knows, or if it even happened this way at all. “In my garden. Up a tree.”

“Oh. Hang on.” There's a rustle of leaves and a sparkle in the air, as something small and silver lands in the grass next to me.

I pick it up. The key to the padlock, the one I tossed through the rain to Thomas five years ago.

“You kept it?” I ask, even though I know he must have. How else would he get my letter—take a chain saw to the time capsule? Actually, since it's Thomas …

“After the fair yesterday, Niall's mum booted me off the sofa,” he explains. “I found it in my suitcase while I was packing. And I got to thinking about the day we opened the time capsule, and how there was nothing in it. You'd promised me a grand gesture. I thought it was finally the right time…”

He looks down at me. I look up at him. We share a scar. And we don't need to explain anything to each other at all.

“Oh, you got one thing wrong,” Thomas says. “It wasn't July, it was April. Your email? I'm Canadian. We reverse the dates.”

April … You've got to be kidding, bored physicists!
That's
the multiplying factor of the paradoxical loop, the thing we created to make all this balance out? Umlaut?!

“I'm sorry,” Thomas voice drifts from the tree and I refocus on him. “Look. When I got your email, that was the original grand gesture.” He waves the notebook pages again. “I couldn't be sure … but it was worth all the bakery money in the world to find out. I thought you and I were fate. Unquestionable. Then that gimp in his leather jacket! I was jealous.”

“And now?”

“I sat up in the tree just then, freaking out that you'd disappeared, waiting for you to come back. Remembering about you and Grey that day, how much he loved you—he gave me the ass-kicking of my life over that scar on your hand. Anyone would be fucked up, after he died. I didn't take it seriously enough. Everything you were going through.”

My eyes search his face, his freckles too far away to be visible. He's leaving in a week. But here we are. I'm covered in teeny-tiny blades of grass, he's hiding in a tree—we might be nuts enough for this to work out.

“Hey, Thomas,” I say. Making a fist, sticking it straight out into the air—pointing my little finger. “I dare you.”

When he lands next to me in the grass, I roll over and look at him. I don't reach for his hand quite yet. I just take it all in. My pajamas are still damp from long-ago rain, but it's a nice smell. Not quite petrichor. Something new.

“Do you think if we'd written to each other after you left, we could have skipped all this?”

“Nah,” Thomas says. He reaches out and plucks a blossom petal from my hair, frowns at it, then lets it fall. “Then it might not have happened. Cannolis, and all that. Now, ask me again why I'm in your garden.”

He presses his forehead to mine, a clunk of glasses on my nose.

“Why—”

“I couldn't move to Manchester and not promise you I'll come back. Visit. Write. Email. Make my iced-bun fortune and meet you halfway across the country before you go off to science school and forget about me.”

I can tell he wants to bat-grab, but it's difficult when you're lying down.

“Let's make a new time capsule,” I say, my mouth moments from his. “Give you a reason to come back. Maybe we could put Ned's stereo in it.”

Thomas laughs. “G, I know how to be without you. But life is
so
much more interesting with.”

“And I suppose that,” I tell him, taking his hand, “has always been the point.”

This time, when we kiss, the world doesn't end. The universe doesn't stop. Stars don't fall from the sky. It's an ordinary kiss.

The kind where you can hear both your hearts beat. The kind that's about discovering each other again, mouths and hands and laughter—like when Thomas finds the knife in my pocket, or the clumsiness as I try to take his glasses off. The kind that leaves you both breathless, and covered in grass, saying goodbye, and making promises.

The kind that stops time, in its own way.

 

Monday 1 September

[One]

A week later, we give Grey his Viking funeral. I tell Papa I'll meet them at the beach—there's something I have to do first.

It's dark inside the bookshop, but I don't turn on the lights—I won't be here for long. In the attic, in a tucked-away alcove that no one comes near, I take Grey's diaries out of my book bag. Turn the pages, see his handwriting, alive in ink:
I RAGE AT THE UNIVERSE. BUT GOTTIE REMINDS ME, IT'S ALL GOING TO WORK OUT. I AM A VIKING.

There's no time loop here, yet it's winter all around me. Snow covers the books. I remember—

*   *   *

sitting at the kitchen table with my back to the wood stove, studying for English, wondering how I can explain E
=
MC
2
but I can't understand a gerund.

I'm texting Sof—
Is it a type of dog?
—when Grey comes in, filling the room. The table wobbles as he strides to the kettle, humming ebulliently.

A mug is plonked in front of me, then he half settles at the other end of the table, chuckling at the newspaper. I sip my tea, and jump when a giant hand slams my textbook shut.

“Come on, dude,” he says. “Let's go for a drive.”

I squeak about revision, but let him steer me out into the icy garden anyway. Clinging onto the car door as he speeds us bumpily away from Holksea, happy to be out of the house.

“You know I used to do this with you, when you were a baby? We'd drive around, up and down the coast. You'd stop crying, and you'd watch me. Probably thinking, ‘Hey, old man, where are we going?' Ned hated being driven. But you and me, kid, we'd motor to the sea. Sometimes I'd chat to you, like you were listening. Sometimes not, maybe we'd have on music, or just silence, like now. Whatever, you know, dude.”

He glances over at me.

“What you're saying is…” I pretend to think. “You don't know where we're going?”

Grey laughs, a huge sonic boom.

“Metaphorically speaking?”

“Driving speaking.”

“Where do you want to go?” Grey asks me. “This is for you—one day's escape from reality. I'm just the chauffeur. The world's your oyster.”

The phrase gives me déjà vu. I check the dashboard. “About fifteen miles of gas is our oyster.”

“Then let's get oysters,” he chuckles, flipping on the signal.

It's too cold for that, so we get chips in paper cones, dripping with vinegar, and eat them sitting inside the car, watching the waves through the fog. The wind turns the sea to foam.

When we get home, he goes straight to bed, even though it's only six o'clock.

“All that talking,” he tells me, dropping a kiss on my head, “it's worn me out.”

The next day, I go back to sitting at the kitchen table, wrestling adjectives. Grey ruffles my hair with his giant hand every time he walks by, and takes to cooking stews to keep me company. We tune the radio to static, and we sing along to nothing. We're happy.

Tick-tick …

Tick.

Tock.

The clock brings me back to the bookshop. And I let it. I consecrate a smile to the memory of my grandfather, driving me up and down the coast. Then I stop living in the past.

I stack the diaries on the shelf. The Book Barn is the right place for Grey's secrets. Maybe someone will try to buy them. Or maybe they'll disappear. As I hide them behind some paperbacks, I think I hear a
meow
. I think I see a flash of orange, scuttling away across the universe.

And all that time falls through my fingers.

The wrong date on an email and a cat who shouldn't exist. A time capsule we found in a tree five years ago, and the boy who gave me a summer. A best friend from the fifties and a brother from the seventies. A father who fades in and out and a mother I will never, ever know.

And Grey. Grey, who it still hurts my heart to think about. Grey, who I will always mourn. Grey, who I will always be able to find again.

This is what it means to love someone. This is what it means to grieve someone. It's a little bit like a black hole.

It's a little bit like infinity.

Ned is waiting for me when I come down the stairs. He's leaning against the desk, flipping through a book, his foot tapping to an invisible beat. He looks up and takes a picture as I approach, his face behind the lens all eyeliner and nose. My twisted big brother.

“Yo, Grots. Everybody's waiting outside,” he says. “You coming?”

“Right behind you,” I tell him.

He bounds ahead of me to the door, cape billowing. On the porch, I stand for a minute, my eyes adjusting to the light. When I can finally see, everyone is piling back into Grey's car, through the one stupid door that works. Ned, clambering over into the front passenger seat. Sof sliding in behind him, a sequin sparkle, then Thomas. He twists around to wave through the back window. We've got one more day.

Papa waits patiently outside the car for me, his Converse as bright blue as the sky.

I'm still standing on the edge of the step, rocking on my toes, holding my breath as I see the future spinning out ahead of me—getting in the car driving to the beach scattering the ashes saying goodbye going home lighting a bonfire writing an essay—when Thomas sticks his head out the window.

“G!” he yells. “Hurry up—you're missing everything!”

He's right. I don't want to wait another second. My heart fills with yellow as I step outside, because it all starts—

Now.

 

∞

Find a piece of paper. On one side, write down: “For the secret of perpetual motion, please turn over.” Then, on the other side, write down: “For the secret of perpetual motion, please turn over.”

Read what you've just written. Follow the instructions. And just keep going.

 

Acknowledgments

In memory of my grandmother, Eileen Reuter. Above all, this book is a love letter to my family—who will read it and say, “Well, it didn't happen anything like
that
.” My parents, Mike Hapgood and Penny Reuter; my sister and brother, Ellie Reuter and Will Hapgood; and all of Rabbit's friends-and-relations (most especially Martha Samphire).

And a hundred heartfelt thank-yous to:

My thoroughly wonderful agent and friend, Gemma Cooper, at The Bent Agency, who changed my life. It is as simple and as extraordinary as that. Her guidance, insight, and joy turned my writing, and me, inside out. The brilliant writers of Team Cooper. And the exceptional co-agents and scouts across the universe (I'm shooting for a moon edition…) who worked tirelessly to champion this book and only took the piss out of my “internet translation” German a little bit. I am so, so
glücklich
.

At Roaring Brook Press, my editor, Connie Hsu, who graciously let me bitch about Britishisms and cling to commas while she quietly and cleverly reshaped this book into something bolder and brighter than I dared imagine—thank you. Elizabeth H. Clark for capturing Gottie's world so perfectly on the US cover, Kristie Radwilowicz for the charming illustrations, and the entire publishing team for saying “
Ja!
” to an oddball little English novel full of Wellies and vicars and Mr. Whippy.

In the UK, my other editor (like martinis, two is the perfect amount) Rachel Petty wooed me with Judy Blume and wine, and encouraged me to immortalise my skinny-dipping days in print. Rachel Vale for my golden cover, and everyone at Macmillan Children's Books for their boundless enthusiasm.

The coven! Don't go into the writing cave without one. Jessica Alcott, who sends the longest emails (seriously, the delete key is, like, a thing?) and makes fun of me just, y'know,
constantly
. Mhairi McFarlane, who kindly read the first three chapters, didn't hate them, and quoted Batman when I most needed it. Alwyn Hamilton, side by side in the edits trenches. John Warrender, grudgingly, I guess. Whatever.

For blatant name thievery, Bim Adewunmi, Megumi Yamazaki, and Maya Rae Oppenheimer. For the books, Stacey Croft. A. J. Grainger for being a class act, Keris Stainton for the writing lessons, Genevieve Herr for sending me Gemma's way, and Sara O'Connor for the novella crash course. For in-the-nick-of-spacetime physics advice, Georgina Hanratty and Dr. Luke Hanratty—all errors very much my own. Everyone at YALC, Team #UKYA, and the book bloggers. And for sitting on top of the manuscript at every opportunity, shout-out to my cat, Stanley.

Finally, I could not have written a word without my friends. I'm forever astonished and grateful that they continue to welcome me back to the pub after I abandon them for months in favor of imaginary worlds. Catherine Hewitt. Jemma Lloyd-Helliker. The 5PA: Rachael Gibson, Isabelle O'Carroll, Laura Silver, and Emily Wright. Video Club: Dot Fallon, Anne Murphy, Maya (again!) and, more than anyone, Elizabeth Bisley—world's greatest human and navigator.