I’m half hoping Ned will laugh and threaten some childish revenge, but our sibling simpatico is out of sync.
“Hmmm,” he says, before peppering Thomas with questions about the music scene in Toronto, naming nine thousand Canadian metal bands, and asking if Thomas has seen them play. The theme of the responses is no, and I get the sense Thomas isn’t half the scenester his Tshirts paint him as. Ned doesn’t mention the party.
Finally he runs off to Fingerband’s rehearsal in a cloud of hair spray. Papa floats off inside with a vague “Don’t stay up too late” and a reminder for Thomas to phone his mum.
Then it’s just me and him. It’s the first time we’ve been alone together since the squabble in the kitchen, two days ago. I refuse to apologize.
Twilight’s just gloaming and the bats are here, swooping in and out of the trees. Searching for bugs that haven’t yet arrived.
I scooch my knees up to my chin, wrap my arms round my legs, feeling gangly. After all of Ned’s chatter, the silence is palpable. When Thomas and I were little, we could not-talk over entire afternoons, side by side and fingers linked in a tree house or a pillow fort or a den, days that stretched on forever. Sort of the opposite of how me and Sof were. And we never had to check what the other was thinking, because we were telepathic.
I peek at Thomas, who’s holding scraps of fish in the air to make Umlaut play jumpy-jumpy. This is a terrible silence. He’s bored and wishes he were back in Toronto and hanging out with a girl who actually speaks. Someone cool. His insanely beautiful Canadian girlfriend, who he wants to call and tell all about his bizarro childhood pal.
The mosquitoes are beginning to bite when Thomas sneezes. And again. And again. “G,” he sniffles eventually, after an inhaler puff. “Evening pollen. Can we hang out inside?”
“Um, okay.” I stand up, attack of the fifty-foot woman while Thomas is still on the grass. Today’s cardigan is fuzzy and moss green. Then he unfolds himself too, a flash of flat stomach above his jeans. He turns towards the trees, not the house. Oh. He means hang out in my room.
“I’ve been wondering about this,” he says as we walk through the garden. “I wanted to ask all week—since when do you live in the annex?”
“Five years ago?” I say, as if it’s a question, holding back a bramble, thinking how the years he’s missed are the ones that matter. I got my first period and my first bra. I left school and had sex. I’ve been in love. I’ve made bad choices.
I’ve been to a funeral.
“About six months after you disappeared,” I explain, pointedly, “Ned was going through a farting stage. So Sof—my friend Sofía Petrakis, she moved to Holksea right after you left—made me march on the kitchen, waving a picket sign and demanding my rights. A-room-of-one’s-own, type thing.”
At the apple tree—which is now, thankfully, underwear-free—Thomas pauses, trying to twist early, unripe fruit from its gnarly branch. I lean against the trunk opposite him, the air between us fuzzy with gnats.
“Oh wow,” he says, peering up into the branches. “It’s there—”
Thomas yelps in surprise as the nascent apple finally comes away in his hand. The branch springs back, ricocheting us with flecks of ancient, lichen-sticky bark, and sending him staggering towards me. “Oops.”
He stuffs the apple in his cardigan pocket, then looks up at me and laughs. His face is spattered with gross tree grot. Mine must be too.
“Sorry,” he says, not sounding it. “I’ve given you bark freckles.”
Thomas’s real freckles, beneath the bark ones, are faint and translucent, like stars on a foggy night. He yanks his cardigan sleeve over his hand and lifts it to my cheek. I hold my breath. What happened under this tree five years ago, to make him go silent on me?
All the stars in the sky flicker out.
Literally. The only light in the garden is from the kitchen. There’s no moon, no stars, no reality.
Thomas doesn’t notice. It’s as if we’re in two separate universes: for him, everything is normal. For me, the sky has gone blank. It’s a supersized screenwipe.
When he drops his hand, stepping away, all the stars ripple back. The whole thing only lasted for a moment—a fluorescent light on the fritz, spluttering in and out.
“There you go.” Thomas stares at me, confused. Maybe he did notice how the world just got a Ctrl+Alt+Del reboot. But all he says is, “You know, I was expecting you to have short hair.”
Whatever just happened, it definitely only happened to me. Or it happened to us both, but I’m the only one who saw it—we’re at opposite sides of the event horizon. The point of no return. I don’t want to think about which side I’m on.
*
“Whoa,” says Thomas, once we’re inside my room. “This is, as Grey would say, a trip.”
I scuttle to the bed. I’d forgotten about the emptiness. Thomas peers at what’s on my chest of drawers—hairbrush, deodorant, telescope. That’s it.