*
… we tumble into the kitchen, laughing and kissing. I don’t even care if someone sees us. But Jason lets go of my hand.
There’s a note on the blackboard. It’s in Papa’s handwriting, but it doesn’t make sense. The words swim in front of my eyes, I have to spell the letters out one by one and even then it can’t be right because they spell
G-R-E-Y-’-S-I-N-H-O-S-P-I-T-A-L
I can’t deal. I want to be back in the field with Jason, sun on his skin. I try to grab his hand, to show him.
“Shit,” he says, running both hands through his hair. “Shit.”
I look at him, wanting him to get it, to say: let’s pretend we didn’t read this, let’s pretend it’s not true, let’s have a few more hours. We never came into the kitchen. We’re still in the fort in the field, in the sunshine.
But he doesn’t read my mind. He says, “Dude, you should go. You need to—shit. My mum could give you a lift. Or if you bike to Brancaster, you can get the bus to the hospital.”
He keeps talking but I can’t hear him, like I couldn’t read the note: the sea is rushing in my ears, there’s not enough gravity in the room. Where did all the oxygen go?
“Gottie? You go. I’ll text Ned and say you’re on your way.”
Finally, I find my voice: “You’re not coming with me?”
“I can’t, I’ve got work.” Jason works at the pub. Sometimes I sit out back behind the kitchens, and he sneaks me crisps.
“But—” I point to the note on the blackboard again. Maybe he doesn’t understand it either. “Grey’s in the hospital.”
“Yeah, shit. I know. But it’ll be fine—they wouldn’t have left a note unless it was fine.” He’s steering me out of the kitchen, shutting the door behind us, holding my hand, leading me to my bike. It’s on its side on the grass where I’d left it. For some reason, I look across to the hole in the hedge and think of Thomas Althorpe. Who put me in this same hospital, long ago.
It takes me two goes to climb on the bike. I want to be back in the field.
I want to call Sof and tell her everything: me and Jason!
I want to hold hands under a blanket, and talk in whispers.
I want to go back in time. Just ten minutes. If we’d gone straight to my room instead of the kitchen, we wouldn’t have found the note. Grey wouldn’t be in the hospital, and I’d be naked with Jason.
These are the wrong thoughts to be having. I’m a bad person.
“Text me later, okay?” Jason says, squinting at me. I can’t see the blue of his blue, blue eyes. And then the world is folding in on itself, blinding white pain, I’m being squeezed, my heart hurts—
*
—and then I’m doubled over on the kitchen doorstep, spitting bile in the grass between my feet. It’s night, and raining. A hand is rubbing small circles on my back. Thomas’s voice murmuring, asking if I’m okay. The wormhole ache hasn’t even worn off when the truth hits me like a meteor: Jason never loved me. There’s no universe where he wasn’t going to break my heart.
I can solve f (x) = ∫ ∞-∞ in my head, so it’s easy enough to calculate the time I’ve wasted on him since 9 October last year: 293 days, 7,032 hours, 421,920 minutes.
This boy, who wouldn’t even hold my hand at the funeral!
Enough. That’s enough.
“Thomas.” I straighten up. His hand stays on my back, his face half-lit from the kitchen behind us, as he searches mine to find what’s wrong. “Do you want to open the time capsule?”
{3}
FRACTALS
Fractals are never-ending, repetitive patterns found in nature—rivers, lightning, galaxies, blood vessels. Mistakes.
A tree trunk splits three ways. Each way splits into three branches. Each branch carries three twigs. And so on to infinity.
Simplicity leads to complexity.
Complexity leads to chaos.
Wednesday 30 July
[Minus three hundred and thirty-two]
It rains for the next four days. Thomas skips off his Book Barn shifts, and by wordless agreement, we hole up in my room, playing Connect Four and eating wonky Schneeballs. I unroll my Marie Curie poster and stick it back on the wall. Dust my telescope. Think about wormholes, flip through Grey’s diaries, ignore Sof’s texts. Thomas reads comics, graffitis notes on cookbooks, and drops his socks all over my floor like he lives here. Which, I’m getting used to the idea that he does.
It’s as if he never left. And, ever since that hug in the churchyard, there’s something else, too. An occasional, unspoken wondering …