But if an old haircut and a scar on my hand is everything he has—I was wrong. He doesn’t know me at all.
“G.” Thomas tilts his head at me. “Do you think that email—”
Screenwipe.
I don’t know how else to describe what happens. One minute, Thomas is tilting his head, holding his mug, mentioning an email. Then there’s this ripple across the air, for a few seconds. Cling wrap peels off across the room. Revealing what’s underneath: everything looks exactly the same, except the clock has jumped forward a minute, and Thomas is holding his toast and laughing, shoulders and curly hair shaking, as he says:
“—Okay, so what’s the plan this summer?”
It’s as though time skipped. Not for long, but like a jumpy DVD stuttering through a scene. I think I’m alone in noticing this glitch, which reinforces what I thought about yesterday’s space trip: that it’s to do with me. Me and Grey. Something I did has made time go all Eternal Sunshine.
Thomas is waiting for me to answer, acting as though nothing has happened. I don’t know—maybe it hasn’t. Maybe this and the wormholes are all in my head. Maybe it’s this alleged “morphine.” Is that Canadian slang? Grey spurned traditional medicine—he was once caught trying to fish for leeches in the village pond, and I never saw him take so much as an aspirin—so I’m more inclined to believe it was a legal high or something potently herbal.
“G,” he repeats, poking my good leg under the table. “This summer—what’s our plan?”
“Our plan?” I repeat, incredulity and annoyance helping me find my voice. “Are you kidding? You can’t drop off the face of the planet then come back wanting there to be a plan.”
“Canada,” he says mildly, sipping his tea.
“What about it?”
“It’s in the northern hemisphere. About three thousand miles west of here?”
“So?”
“It’s on this planet.”
If you didn’t know Thomas, you’d say he sounded calm. But there’s nothing I find more infuriating than someone refusing to have a fight when I’m picking one, and he knows that. And I hate that he knows that.
“Whatever. I’m going to have a bath.” I can’t quite storm off, but I swallow the pain as I limp out of the kitchen as fast as I can. When I get to the bathroom, I lock the door and crank the taps till they thunder. I sit on the edge of the bath and stare at the sink. Four toothbrushes in the mug, where all year it’s been two. Baking soda toothpaste. An explosion of Ned’s hair products and boy deodorant and joss sticks jostling for space. Above them, the mirror fogging up with steam, revealing a finger outline of Ned’s band logo.
As I watch, the steam pixelates. And even though it doesn’t tune in to anything yet, I know, when it does, where it will take me. It’s time to admit it.
Whatever I told Ms. Adewunmi—theoretical this, hypothetical that—the mirror, Jason’s kiss, yesterday’s galaxy in the sky, even Thomas and me in the Book Barn. They’re all wormholes. They’re all real tunnels to the past.
{2}
WORMHOLES
From a billion light-years away, a Schwarzschild black hole looks exactly like a wormhole. They’re the same thing.
Our universe could itself be inside a black hole, which exists inside another universe, inside another, like a set of nesting dolls.
Infinite worlds, infinite universes. Infinite possibilities.
Thursday 8 July
[Minus three hundred and ten]
When I emerge from my bath, Thomas is curled up in the sitting room, asleep. Umlaut too, tucked inside his cardigan. His glasses are folded on the sofa arm—without them, it’s even harder to connect this cheekboned troublemaker with the round-faced boy who left.
There’s a laptop on the table; I don’t suppose Papa warned him we’re the last house on Planet Earth not to have Wi-Fi. “Keep your swipe cards and hoverboards, dude,” Grey would tell me when I asked for a decent Internet connection. “Talk to me about the cosmos. What’s new in astrology?” “Astronomy,” I’d correct, and we’d be off, arguing over Pluto’s planetary status or Gaia versus Galileo.
A little part of me wants to wake Thomas up and ask him why he disappeared. Instead I limp-lurch past him to the kitchen, grab a box of cereal, and spend the rest of the day in my room.
But if I want to figure out the wormholes—and the screenwipe!—I can’t keep hermiting. The next morning, after covering my bruises in jeans and a long-sleeved flannel shirt, I ambush Papa early and ask him to drive me to school. On the way, I spring a plan on him: vacation shifts at the Book Barn.
“Good idea,” Papa says. “You’ll do the same days to Thomas?”
I nearly swallow my tongue. Thomas is going to help out at the bookshop? “Um, maybe we should work different shifts. That way, you get more help,” I suggest, then add, as an oh-so-casual-afterthought: “I’m sure Ned would want a shift too.”
Swaps. You put the photos of Mum all over the house; I make you work on Fridays.