“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.
Grey. I stare across the room at his diaries. There’s something else, something pushing at the edges of my consciousness, something I need to remember …
Grey’s bedroom. And Thomas Althorpe, across the garden, sleeping in it.
Oh.
I don’t remember you being this gorgeous.
Cringe. Maybe I manifested these blankets into being with the thermodynamics of mortification, so I’d have something to hide under.
That reminds me of yesterday’s theory, right before I fell off my bike: that the strange occurrences are a manifestation of Grey, and guilt. And me.
I shouldn’t have taken his diaries. I shouldn’t be reading them. But it’s more than that. It’s this whole year, it’s how I was on the day he died—
Stop. I force my brain back to Thomas—by contrast, an easier mental topic. I make a clucking sound with my tongue until Umlaut jumps onto my bad leg. Why is he here? Thomas, I mean, not the kitten. Ned says banishment. But Thomas never did anything leave-the-country bad. Letting the pigs out at the summer fair—an annual cluster of raffles and homemade jam on the village green. Eating all the stripy Jell-O Grey made for my birthday party, then throwing up rainbows. But he’s not criminal.
My head hurts thinking about it. My head hurts, period.
“I’m going to go to the kitchen to get a glass of water,” I say out loud to a skeptical-looking Umlaut. “I’m extremely dehydrated.”
Not because I’m curious about Thomas. Not because I want to find out why he’s back, or why he never wrote to me. Not because the picture I have of him from yesterday—freckles against dark hair—is blurred by shooting stars. I want some water, that’s all.
*
It takes me ten minutes to limp through the garden, Umlaut trotting beside me, barely visible in the shaggy grass. When I get to the kitchen, Ned’s bedroom door is shut. There’s a message on the blackboard in Papa’s handwriting for Thomas to call his mum, and a wonky loaf of bread in the middle of the table. We’ve been mostly cereal people this year, eaten in handfuls out of the box. No me and Papa gathering for breakfast, two people at our huge table. The empty space where Grey always sat highlighting that Ned wasn’t here, that Mum should always have been.
It’s like Grey’s death left a hole bigger than even he was.
“Curiouser and curiouser,” I say to Umlaut as I sit down opposite the bread.
“What’s curious, Alice?”