Resisting the urge to nap, I start doodling. The Milky Way, constellations of question marks. Geometry jokes, spaceships, Jason’s name written then scribbled out, over and over and over. Then Thomas’s, same thing.
When I look down at the worksheet again, it’s a total mess.
4:21 p.m. I yawn and open my notebook, planning to copy my answers onto a clean page.
E = MC2, I begin.
And the second I write the 2, the whole equation starts to shimmer.
Um … I yawn and blink, but there it is: my handwriting is definitely shimmering. All it needs is a pair of platforms and a disco ball.
I flip the notebook shut. It’s a standard college-ruled pad. Heart fluttering, I fumble a couple of times opening it back to the right page. Those ruled lines are now rippling like sound waves across the paper.
Once, I read that lack of sleep can make you hallucinate if you stay awake long enough. But I thought it meant migraine aura-type black spots in front of your eyes, not cartoon-animated notebooks. As if to prove me wrong, the equation begins to spin. Distantly, I’m aware I should probably be panicking. But it’s like trying to wake up from a dream—you give yourself the instruction, and nothing happens.
Instead, I yawn and look away, out the window, and begin counting backwards from a thousand in prime numbers: 997, 991 … My curiosity gets the better of me around ninety-seven, and I glance back at the notebook. It’s not moving. There’s my pen scrawl on lined paper, nothing more.
All right, then, as Ms. Adewunmi would say. It’s the summer flu, or the temperature in here, or the being-awake-since-yesterday. I shake my shoulders back, pick up my pen.
I’m writing Jason’s name again when the notebook disappears.
Seriously.
My pen is hovering in the air where the page should be and suddenly now isn’t. It’s so ludicrous, I can’t help it: I laugh.
“It’s not giggle time, Miss Oppenheimer,” warns the teacher.
Ms., I correct in my head. And then, “Giggle time”? What, are we, seven? I’ve had sex! I’ve made irreversible decisions, awful ones, huge ones. I’m old enough to DRIVE.
He frowns at me—I’m grinning like a loon, so I pretend to write on an invisible notebook until, satisfied, he turns away.
I look back at the absence-of-notebook and swallow another cackle. Because I’m wrong: it’s not invisible. If it were, I’d be able to see the desk underneath. But instead, there’s a rectangle of nothing. An absence. It looks sort of like the black-and-white fuzz of an old TV that won’t tune in, or how I imagine the indescribable gloop beyond the boundaries of the universe, the stuff the Big Bang is expanding into.
Am I going bananas?
I bend down, peering underneath the desk. Lumps of gum, a Fingerband sticker, and graffiti on solid wood.
But when I sit upright again, there’s still that rectangle of television fuzz.
It’s not growing, or changing, or moving. I slump in my seat and stare at it, hypnotized. Drifting back to five years ago. When there was a boy.
An attic.
And a first kiss that wasn’t.
*
“Bawk, bawk, bawk,” Thomas says from the other side of the attic. “Chicken. Bet there’s not even arteries in your hands.”
“Mmmm.” I don’t look up from the anatomy encyclopedia. Like everything else in Grey’s bookshop, it’s secondhand, and there’s graffiti on the pictures. “Let me check.”
He’s wrong, you do have arteries in your hands, but I’m planning to do the blood pact anyway. I just want to look at this book first. The pages with boy parts especially. I turn it on its side, tilt my head. How does that even…?
“G, what are you doing?” Thomas peers over my shoulder.
I slam the book shut.
“Nothing! You’re right. No arteries,” I lie, my face bright red. “Let’s do it.”
“Gimme your hand,” he says, waving the knife. “Oops.”
The knife flies through the air. When Thomas turns to get it, he topples over a stack of books.
“What are you kids doing up there?” Grey bellows from the floor below.
I yell down the stairs, “Nothing. Thomas is just reshelving. We thought we’d use this wacky new system called the al-pha-bet.”
There’s a muffled curse and a giant rumble of laughter. I turn back to Thomas, who’s retrieved the knife and is carving our initials into a bookcase. He won’t be here tomorrow. We’ll never see each other again. On what stupid planet is that even possible?
And it means there’s about four hours left to do something I’ve been thinking about for weeks.
“Thomas. No one is ever going to kiss you,” I announce. He looks up, blinking owlishly behind his glasses. “And, no one’s ever going to kiss me either.”
“OK,” he says, and takes a huge inhaler puff. “We should probably do that, then.”
We stand up, which is a problem. I grew ninety-three feet this summer. The eaves are low and I hunch, but I’m still six inches taller than him. Thomas clambers onto a stack of books, then we’re the right mouth height. He leans forward, and I suck peanut butter off my braces. Here we go …