The Square Root of Summer (6 page)

*   *   *

Unsurprisingly, hardly any of Ms. A's list is in the school library. I check after my last lesson, but among nine thousand poetry anthologies there's not so much as a battered
Brief History of Time
. The couple of books that should be there are checked out—I reserve them at the desk, then head to the bike sheds.

I know where I can find what I need. The Book Barn. Grey came at the universe from a different angle than me, but he had a whole floor stacked full of science—from fiction to physics. The only problem is, I haven't been there all year. Whenever Papa's floated down to earth and asked, I've made excuses—homework. Biking. Swimming, even when the sea froze in November, or lying on my bed and staring at the ceiling for hours.

If you turn people away enough times, eventually they stop trying to find you.

When I get to the gate, I stop and dig through my book bag for my helmet. See Grey's diary instead. I brought it with me this morning, a sort of talisman. Now I flip it open to find out—what was I doing, this day last year?

G SHOULD MOVE BACK INTO NED'S ROOM WHEN HE LEAVES FOR ST. MARTINS. REJOIN THE WORLD.

Underneath, there's a little doodle of a cat, and I know exactly what day this is. Exams were long over, but I was tucked inside the bookshop attic, reading. Until Grey sat down next to me, plucking the book from my hand.

“Schrödinger, huh?”

I watched him scan the text a little, the famous cat theory. It was pre-Umlaut.

“Let me get this straight,” said Grey. “You put a cat, uranium, a Geiger counter, a hammer, and a jar full of poison in a box. What the hell kind of Christmas present is that?”

I laughed, and explained the uranium has a 50 percent probability of decaying. If it does, the Geiger counter triggers the hammer to break the jar full of poison, and the cat dies. But if the uranium doesn't decay, the cat lives. Before you open the box and find out for certain, both things are therefore simultaneously true. The cat is both dead and alive.

“You want to know a fun fact about Schrödinger?” Grey asked, handing me the book back and standing up.

“All right.”

“He was a champion shagger,” Grey boomed. “Screwed his way round Austria!”

I could hear his laughter as he made his way down the stairs, even as I went back to trying to work out how two opposites could both be true. Jason was my Schrödinger. Inside the box was us: a secret, something special; no one else could take it over or spoil it. But we'd been together a few weeks, and now there was another thought inside the box: I wanted him to claim me out loud.

Before I left the bookshop, I went into the biographies section and looked it up—about Schrödinger, and the shagging. Grey was right.

I don't know how Papa manages to work there every day.

But once I pedal away from town, on the coastal road back to Holksea, I begin to relax. The air is honey on my skin, and after a while, the world is nothing but sun and sky and sea. Occasional pubs and churchyards flutter in my peripheral vision. I speed up till they blur, salt air filling my lungs. I breathe it deep, and then I'm a kid again and for a moment nothing matters—not Thomas, not Grey, not Jason.

After a few minutes, a cluster of old buildings approaches in the distance—the outskirts of Holksea. The bookshop is on the sea side of the village, and you can see the sign from space: the Book Barn. It's huge, flashing neon-pink capitals, dim in the sunlight but still as bright as Grey himself, and the letters imprint themselves on the back of my retinas.

I'm fifty feet away and still going fast when they disappear. Just—
blink
—and gone.

No
.

My heart speeds up, my feet slow down, but not much. I'm compelled to keep going. Thirty feet now. Where the letters should be, there's nothing but space. And this time I don't mean emptiness, nothing, a negative integer, the square root of minus-fucking-seventeen. I mean, literally: outer space
.
There's a hole in the sky where the sky should be.

Twenty feet now. I'm half a mile from the sea, 52.96 degrees north, and a billion light-years away from Earth. This isn't a telescope. It's the
ficken
Hubble.

And at the edges of the hole, where the sky turns back to blue, the same untuned-television fuzz that I've seen before, twice now. What did Ms. Adewunmi say, about vortexes? That the image would be distorted? This is crystal.

I'm sick with terror, but I can't make my feet stop pedaling. Because, oh shit, oh shit, oh shit. Grey's bedroom. Grey's diaries. Grey's bookshop. Whatever this is—and there's definitely a
this
, yesterday I saw last summer, and today there's a hole filled with the Milky Way!—it has to do with Grey. And Grey's dead. Which means it has to do with me …

At ten feet away, instinct jerks my handlebars, aiming for the footpath to the sea. I lean my body into the turn, one I've taken a million times before, and faster. But this time, for whatever reason, I'm in trouble.

I hit the turn too hard, it's more of a swerve, and adrenaline floods me. This is going to be bad. There's a shot of fear as I try to correct my balance, jerking to the right. But then my front tire veers from a rock to a pothole, and I'm down—and it hurts—but I don't stop moving, even when I hit the path. My elbow meets the ground first, and a throb shoots up my arm. There's fire in my thigh as I slide along for a few feet, leaving my skin behind. I crumple to a halt when I land in the hedge—but the bike keeps sliding, my foot trapped in the pedal. It drags my leg round, twisting my ankle, before discarding me and spinning away with a crash. Leaving me alone.

 

Tuesday 6 July (Later)

[Minus three hundred and eight]

I lie in the hedge for an eternity, looking up. All I can see is the sky—the real sky, the one that's supposed to be there. It's huge and cloudless, bright and blue, and very, very far away.

A century or so later, I check my watch—smashed, the LCD digits scattered—and my phone—dead, however hard I mash the buttons. But even so, I know I haven't lost any time at all. I felt every second. Because

Jesus

Fuck

Ow

it hurts.

My heart hurts. I want Jason. I want the mami I've never had. I want Grey. I
want
.

“Hello?” I say eventually, experimentally, my voice wavering. “Hello?”

And I wait and wait, but nobody comes to find me. I've been making myself smaller and smaller for a year, and now I'm barely here at all.

Finally, eventually, I stand up, testing my ankle. It's not broken, I don't think—I'd have heard it snap, like when Thomas dared me to jump off the pier and I spent three months in a cast that he drew swears all over. But
shit
, it kills. I stumble on it a few times till I'm able to lean against the hedge and look around.

On the other side of the road, the bookshop sign flashes pink neon. Normal as pie. My bike is at an angle in the ditch, taking a bubble bath in the white wildflowers. I hobble over and see it's mostly unharmed: the front wheel is twisted and the chain has come off, but it's all stuff I can bash back in place. I haul it out of the ditch and lean on it while I hop, wincing, to the bookshop.

After avoiding it forever, it's the only place I want to be.

*   *   *

The door is locked, Papa at the airport picking up Thomas. It takes a couple of tries of fumbling with the key. Inside it's dark and quiet, the smell hitting me in a whoosh—paper, old wood, pipe smoke, and dusty carpets. Home.

I leave the door open and the lights off as I inch my way through the narrow shelves, emerging into a small, book-lined cavern. A maze of more bookshelf corridors leads off it in all directions. The boxes I packed last night are piled in a corner, next to the desk. Behind it looms Grey's giant armchair.

I crawl into it, throbbing, and try to shut out the too-loud, off-kilter tick of the grandfather clock that Grey refused to have fixed. I examine the desk, squinting through the gloom for the first aid kit. The top drawer is overflowing with scraps of paper—it reminds me of the wildflowers in the ditch. Fishing through the receipts and order forms, I find chocolate bars, essential oil, a tin of tobacco, a brown glass bottle. I rattle it. One of Grey's hippie remedies. He swore by ginkgo biloba, Saint John's wort, evening primrose. I swallow two pills dry, forcing them down around the lump in my throat.

Everything hurts. My leg is gravel-scraped and gross. I'll have scabs for days. When I was a kid and fell over, my grandfather would be there to give me a Band-Aid and kiss it better.

I rest my head against the velvet chair, breathing in its Grey scent, falling apart over and over. Papa's kept the bookshop exactly as it was—dusty and disorganized, a shrine to Grey's admin policy. (“I'm a keeper of books, not a bookkeeper!”) His ginormous chair, I'm tiny inside it, the desk where he sometimes wrote his diaries, and that stupid broken clock, its tick-tick … tickticktick … -tock. Tears blob my eyes so I can't see, and the mottled velvet blurs until it looks like the untuned TV, the monochrome fuzz I saw outside, right before I crashed. Tick …

Tock.

Tick-tick.

*   *   *

“Make it look good, okay?” I say. We're in the apple tree, which is all full of slimy wet leaves, and my bum is cold, but Grey says you have to feel the earth underneath you. “They can't know it was us.”

It's Ned's tenth birthday party and he uninvited me and Thomas. Grey says we are invited and that Ned is on thin ice, but I think we should steal his cake anyway. Thomas came up with the plan to do face paint like bandits.

“Obviously,” says Thomas, rolling his eyes. “Okay, I'm going to give you a mustache as well.”

“Yes,” I agree. It's always yes when it comes to us, and I close my eyes. The paint tickles as he starts drawing. “Remember the signal: when Grey shouts ‘Trouble times two…'”

“That's when we run,” Thomas finishes. “G, open your eyes.”

When I do, Thomas is laughing and holding up a permanent marker—

*   *   *

“—what happened? Gottie? Gottie, open your eyes.”

Papa's voice breaks through the darkness. My eyelids are thick and heavy, rusted over. I must have fallen asleep. I've been dreaming of Thomas and me in the tree, but not the right day, not the day he left …

When I open my eyes, the images fade away. I blink. Papa is in front of me.

“Fell asleep. Oh. And off m'bike,” I tell him, mumbling into the chair's velvet wing, twisting a bit to the side to show him.

He makes a sucking-in-air sound, out of proportion to a scraped leg. Papa hates the sight of blood, winces when me or Ned gets a paper cut. How did he deal, when Mum died, if there was blood? Did he disappear down wormholes looking for her?

I can't keep hold of the thought, of any of my thoughts; they scatter like autumn leaves.

“
Ist
your bike outside?” Papa's asking. My bike is pink with a basket and cereal box clackers on the spokes, so I don't know whose else's he thinks it might be.

I force myself to sit up, wincing in anticipation of cotton balls and hydrogen peroxide sting. The sense memory of childhood cuts and scrapes wakes me up enough to smile at Papa, convince him I'm all right.

“Good.” Papa smiles. “The car's parked down at the beach. I go and fetch, so wait here?”

“Okay.”

“Keep her company,” I hear as Papa turns away, and I sneakily close my eyes again, snuggling back into the velvet. It's the Milky Way.
Who her?
I think.
I'm me.

Footsteps, and the bookshop door banging in the distance as Papa goes outside. But maybe not, because he's still here, holding my hand. Being annoying, too, he keeps on tapping on it.

“Gerroff.” I try to shake the hand away, but warm fingers slide into mine, squeezing me awake. “Papa, ztoppit.”

“G?” someone says. A boy's voice, coming out of the stars. “Your dad's outside. It's me.”

Me
has a funny accent; it's English but not English at the same time, and I open my eyes to look at it. There's a boy my age leaning over me, holding my hand, his face glasses and freckles and concern.

And he's surrounded by stars, all the time, everywhere. There's an entire galaxy inside the bookshop, hanging in the air.

“You're covered in stars,” I say.

His mouth crinkles. That's how Thomas Althorpe always smiled—like his face couldn't contain how hilarious he found the world, and it overflowed into dimples. This version has added cheekbones, and canine teeth that push into his bottom lip. Oh. Glasses. Freckles. It's him.

“Hello, G.” Thomas smiles as a comet whizzes by his head. “Remember me?”

“I remember you. You came back. You promised you would. But I don't remember you being this gorgeous.”

Those are the last words I say before I pass out.

 

Wednesday 7 July

[Minus three hundred and nine]

I wake up sweating under a patchwork quilt and six blankets I didn't put there, see my clock and realize that I'm late for class, decide not to care, then turn and vomit over the side of my bed. There's a plastic washing-up bowl on the floor, waiting for this to happen. This sequence takes place smoothly in about thirty seconds before I flop back against the pillows.

I'm not going to school today.

The sun through the ivy has turned the air Aurora Borealis green. I feel heavy—my bedroom has its own gravitational force, pushing me into the mattress. There's a throb in my leg from falling off my bike, a pounding in my head, and the ubiquitous Jason-and-Grey-shaped hurt in my heart.