Notebooks and diaries are spread out around me on the yellowing grass. It’s out of sight of the church, the graves, the road. We came here once.
It was the beginning of August, about seven weeks after our first kiss. We hadn’t slept together yet, but suddenly I could see it on the horizon. Every day, everything—the air, the sunshine, the blood in my veins—was pulsing hot and urgent. The minute we were alone, our words and clothes would disappear. Grey’s diary for that day says: LOBSTER WITH WILD GARLIC BUTTER ON THE BARBECUE. Behind the tree, Jason’s hand slipped between my legs, and I bit his neck. I wanted to eat him.
Where did all that love go? Where did that girl go, who was so alive?
My phone emits a rapid flurry of beeps, and I swoop on it. But it turns out to be old messages from Sof, arriving all at once. A couple checking if I’m okay, after our beach spat, but mostly chattering about the party I don’t want to happen. There’s no way to answer those, so I throw the phone onto the grass instead and pick up a notebook.
The Weltschmerzian Exception.
It started the day I saw Jason again. I’m writing his name down when a shadow falls across the page. Thomas is peering round the tree.
“I’d say you’re avoiding me,” he remarks, flopping down opposite me, against the wall, “but I know you know I know all our hiding places.”
He stretches out his legs, putting his feet up on the trunk next to me, making himself practically horizontal. Whatever landscape he’s in, he folds himself into. I parse my way through his sentence, come up with: “So you’d say I’m … waiting for you?”
“If you say so.” A laugh bursts across his face.
Well, I walked into that one.
“You liked the cake?” he asks.
“Delicious,” I lie.
“Funny, Ned thought so too.”
Twelve years of stare-offs between us, and my impassive face is perfect. Finally Thomas blinks and says, “Okay, subject change. Is this your extra-credit project?”
He makes a “may I?” gesture and reaches for the notebook, which is balanced on my bare legs. His fingers graze my knees as he takes it, glancing at the pages and saying, “Senior year here must be intense.”
I peer over at what he’s reading. A page of impenetrable numbers, and standing out like a big red flag, Jason’s name. For some reason it seems important that Thomas not know this particular secret. Time for my own subject change.
“How’s the jet lag?”
“I think my time zones are still cuckoo.” Thomas yawns.
“As in the clock? They’re actually very efficient.” It’s this sort of fact-based fun, Sof informs me, that doesn’t get me invited to the parties I don’t want to go to.
“For real? Okay. Wackadoodle, then.” Thomas closes his eyes. There’s no cardigan today, he’s wearing a T-shirt with a pocket, which he tucks his glasses into. He looks less artfully constructed without them. More like someone I would be friends with. “I stayed up too late. Don’t lemme sleep, though,” he mumbles. “Keep talking.”
“I need a topic. Unless you’re interested in Copernicus.”
“Not Copper Knickers,” he says. “Umlaut. What’s up with that?”
“Papa brought him home in April.” I lean forward, lifting the notebook off Thomas’s knees as gently as I dare. But he opens his eyes and squints at me. In the sunshine, his flawed iris looks like a starburst nebula.
“G. That’s not talking. That’s information. I need details.”
“Okay. Um. I was doing homework in the kitchen after school, when this orange thing shoots out from under the fridge, scuttles across the room past the stove and into the woodpile. So I picked up a ladle—”
“A ladle?” mumbles Thomas, closing his eyes again.
“You know—for soup?” Maybe they call it something else in Canada. A ladleh.
He chuckles. “I know what a ladle is. I wanna know why you got a ladle.”
“I thought there was a mouse.”
“What were you gonna do, scoop it up?”
I rap him on the knee with my pencil, and he shuts up, smiling.
“Woodpile, scuttly thing, ladle, me,” I recap. As I name each thing, the picture in my head clarifies, and I suddenly remember what happened right before the ginger streak across the floor: the kitchen screenwiped. At the time I put it down to a headache. Has time been going round the twist since then? That’s three months ago.
“G?” Thomas murmurs sleepily, tapping me on the shoulder with his foot.
“Oh! Right. Then this kitten pops up from behind a log and it’s Umlaut.”
“That’s it?”
“Then I put him in my jumper and rang the bookshop, because I thought maybe Papa could put a sign up. And he answers and goes, ‘Guten tag, liebling. Did you get my note?’ I look around and he’s written on the blackboard, but it just says ‘Gottie? Cat.’”
When Thomas laughs at my story, his mouth crinkling, my brain bolt-from-the-blue redelivers the thought from the bookshop: I don’t remember you being this gorgeous.
I start reciting pi to one hundred decimal places. Except my brain won’t play along, because it ends up going like this: