I jump at Thomas’s voice behind me, my heart in my ears. Half of me freezes. Half of me swivels in my seat. Consequently, I almost fall off the chair as he walks into the room. Dark hair shower-wet, bare feet, a cardigan buttoned over a T-shirt. He looks clean. I run my tongue surreptitiously round my dry, post-vomit mouth.
Thomas gives this shy little wave and disappears behind the fridge door, which is now a Ned-orchestrated blur of photos and magnets, leaving me to compute the updates on the boy who left. He’d been half my height, round, and topped with thick-lensed glasses that boggled his eyes. This version is a hundred feet taller and has arms. Obviously he had arms before, but not like this. Not like you had to think about them in italics.
I’m leaning to one side and duck back in my seat as Thomas emerges from the fridge, his arms laden. He doesn’t say anything, giving me the tiniest smile as he piles butter and jars of jam and Marmite and peanut butter in front of me.
“Tea?” He smiles again, his hand hovering over the mugs that hang from the cabinet. One night and he’s completely at home. Duh, I remind myself: he practically used to live here. With Grey’s roars and Ned’s Nedness and Papa’s DIY approach to parenting—“Chocolate? Hmmm, take the whole bag”—Thomas and I spent most of our time on this side of the hedge. It was more interesting (not to mention his dad was a yeller).
As Thomas fills the kettle, silence builds in the air. There has to be The Conversation—you don’t come back after leaving and say “Tea?” Actually, Jason did. Ned did. That’s what boys do. They leave, and when they come back, act like it’s no big deal.
Thomas hacks the wonky bread into slices while he waits for the kettle to boil. I peek at him when he’s not looking, adding details to my mental file: Thomas has hairy toes! Thomas wears hipster glasses! Thomas is cool. From his vintage haircut—too short at the sides and tousling into curls on top as it dries—to his obscure-organic-coffee-brand T-shirt. And his cardigan. It’s a betrayal. How dare he grow up cool. How dare he grow up at all.
Finally he plonks a stack of toast and a mug in front of me and sits down opposite, nodding as if to say “Well, here we are.” As if to say five years is nothing.
He’s made my tea the perfect shade of brown. My toast is burnt the way I like it. It’s infuriating, that he’s got this right. I push the Marmite out of sight and scrape on hard curls of butter, then take a bite and let out an involuntary “Mmm.”
When I look up, Thomas is staring at me, puzzled.
“What?” I wipe my chin for crumbs, conscious of my sweaty hair, my grungy pajamas, my bralessness underneath them. The second I think this, my brain goes: breasts, breasts, breasts. My skin flushes.
“Nothing.” He shakes his head, then again. “Yesterday. At the Book Barn.” His voice is deeper than when he left, and not quite Canadian. Apparently my brain is on a roll with embarrassing thoughts, because it goes: his mouth must taste of maple syrup. Wie bitte?
“Your dad says that’s the first time you’d been there for a while? The bookshop?” Thomas is still talking, and I try to focus.
This must seem weird to him—the Book Barn was always our rainy-day refuge. An escape when his parents were fighting—especially then, when his dad would redirect ire to Thomas—or when Ned was refusing to play with us. We’d cycle out of the village towards the sea, and Grey would take us in until we got too noisy. I don’t know how to answer, so I cram a piece of toast into my mouth.
“Right. Sorry. How—” Thomas immediately holds up a wait-a-minute finger. After digging in his pocket, he emerges with an inhaler and takes two puffs before saying, “How are you feeling this morning?”
“Huh?” I’m distracted—I’d forgotten about his asthma. I add a mental wedge of Scotch tape to his glasses, and my memories start to shift and rearrange themselves. Past Thomas and this one, beginning to coalesce.
“Falling off your bike, remember?” prods Thomas. “Hang out with me—Ned said to tell you to pull a sick day; he’d fake a note for you.”
Ned said that?
“I’m fine,” I lie automatically, a year’s practice. It’s practically my catchphrase.
“Actually, you ralphed. You’d taken a couple of pills, morphine; you said there were shooting stars coming out of my head.” Thomas waves his hands around when he talks, grabbing invisible bats. He used to do that when he was excited, or freaked out, or nervous. I don’t know which one this is. I’m trying to get my brain to speed up: morphine?
“We got you in the car, your dad muttering in German the whole time, and WHOOSH. You hurled all over my pants. With the bloody leg, it was like the day I left. Remember? That day with the time capsule.”
Thomas pauses his insane monologue—he’s used more words in a minute than I have in ten months. And I can’t keep up, what time capsule?—and he looks at me. His eyes are muddy, with a flaw in the right iris like an inkblot. How had I forgotten that?
“You had short hair that day,” he says, like he’s planting a flag on the moon and declaring his knowledge of me.