And I start to wonder: what would have happened if Thomas had kissed me five years ago? If he’d never left? Would I still have fallen in love with Jason, or would it have been Thomas I was behind this tree with last summer? When I let myself think this, the churchyard around us gradually fills with the numbers I was reciting in my head. They hang in the air like Christmas baubles, suspended on nothing. We’re flying through the galaxy, up in the stars. And it’s beautiful.
It’s Grey’s string theory: a giant cosmic harp. What would my grandfather say to me now? I imagine him stealing my notebook, peering at the Weltschmerzian Exception. “The rules of spacetime are buggered, are they? Make your own rules.”
“Thomas?” I ask. “That email you sent me. What was it?”
“Email? It’s a form of communication, sent through the In-ter-net.” Thomas pulls himself upright and does a cute little typey-typey motion with his hands to demonstrate. He’s oblivious to the mathematical weather phenomenon, to the thought that sparked it—a version of the world where we’d once kissed.
“Ha.” I prod him in the leg with my trainer, and he catches my ankle for an imperceptible moment, smiling, his face mirror-balled with light from the numbers.
“G, it’s no big deal,” he says. “I wrote you that, yeah, I was coming over. It was just a reply to yours.”
The numbers fall from the air, raining silver on the grass, where they fade away. We’re back to normal.
Normal—except there’s a timeline where I wrote Thomas an email!
“I guess I didn’t get what yours meant till I arrived,” he continues. “Your dad explained when he drove me from the airport. About Grey.”
A record scratch, a squeal of tires. I can pretend that life goes on, in stories of kittens and emails, but death brings it all to a screeching halt. My face slams shut and Thomas must know why, because he waves at the notebook and very carefully says, “Talk to me about timespace.”
“Spacetime,” I correct, awkwardly bum-shuffling around on the grass to sit next to him, grabbing hold of the latest subject change like a life raft. Our shoulders align. “Time travel. I’m still figuring out the rules. How it would work, if it were real.”
“Cool. Where would you go? I’m thinking dinosaurs. Or maybe the Age of Enlightenment, hang out with ol’ Copper Knickers.” He leans forward, his arm brushing against mine as he gestures out to the churchyard, almost snowy under its blanket of daisies. “Or stay here in Holksea, get some medieval times happening. Get my head stuck in the stocks again.”
“Last August,” I interrupt. “That’s where I’d go.”
“Boring,” he sing-songs. “What’s last August?”
Jason. Grey. Everything.
“Shit,” he says, realizing. “Sorry.”
“It’s okay.” I yank up a clump of dry grass and start shredding it. I don’t want to … Talking to Thomas last night, today—these have been the first conversations in forever where I haven’t felt brain-locked, searching for words to say …
Scheisse! I can’t even finish a sentence in my own head!
Next to me, Thomas puts his hand over my frantic ones, shushing them. The church bells ring out for six o’clock. A funeral chime.
“We should go,” I say. “Umlaut needs feeding.”
I scramble up, stuffing books haphazardly into my bag. Thomas scoops up half of them. As we pick our way through the grass, I see he’s holding Grey’s diaries.
“Is this where…” he trails off, obviously infected by the Gottie H. Oppenheimer disease of Never Being Able to Talk About the Worst Thing, looking round. “Is this … is Grey…?”
Oh, God. I’m übercreep. Reading a dead man’s diaries, surrounded by graves. This was always one of our hiding places, even though Mum’s buried on the other side of the church. But that’s different—she doesn’t belong to me in the same way that Grey did. She’s a stranger.
“No,” I say, too sharply. “He, we didn’t…” Deep breath. “There was a cremation.”
We shuffle along the path around the church in silence, leaving yew needle footprints behind. We pass Mum’s grave. It’s never not a shock, seeing the date covered in moss: my birthday. Her death. Carved in stone is the stark reality: that we only ever had a few hours together, before a blood clot, her brain, a collapse. And nothing anyone could do. Thomas leans down and scoops up a pebble in one fluid movement, placing it on top of the stone, keeps walking.
Another ritual. A new one. I like him.