“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 Schr?dinger?” 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 Schr?dinger. 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 Schr?dinger, 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?”