“You made a fort?” Jason looks from the hay bales to me, and back again. He shakes his head, smiling. “I forget you’re younger than me.”
It was a solid-gold idea this morning. I regretted it a little when it took me an hour to move one bale, sweating in the sun. But when I came back with a blanket to go inside and an umbrella propped up at the top for shade, it was brilliant again. A little three-sided hideaway. But Jason’s looking at me like I’m nuts.
“Not just any fort, party pooper.” I grab his hand and drag him inside, sort of half push him to sit before plonking myself next to him. It’s August and the wheat’s been harvested—the cut-off stalks prickle up through the blanket like leg hair underneath tights. “Look.”
“All right.” Smirking, Jason aims his sunglasses in the direction I’m pointing. Golden fields, stretching out forever and fading into blue sky. Nothing in sight but birds. “What am I looking at?”
“The universe,” I point. “The whole, wide world. Isn’t this great?”
“Margot,” he says. “Holksea’s hardly the whole world. Wait till I get to college…”
I tune him out and turn away to rummage for all the stuff I brought: books, apples and packs of biscuits, bottles of fancy fizzy water in a little picnic cooler. I haven’t quite figured out what we’re going to do when we need to have a wee, but otherwise we could hang out here all day.
He’s leaving in three weeks. We haven’t talked about what will happen after that. But I think, nothing, very much. A fizzle and a fade and a forgetting. I almost don’t mind. We’ve had a whole summer. And he’s still talking, but I’m not listening.
“I got ice cream,” I interrupt. “You have to eat it now, before it melts.”
I hold out a Creamsicle and an ice-cream sandwich, and, annoyingly, he reaches for the Creamsicle, my favorite—then takes my wrist instead, and pulls me into his lap.
“I’ve got to be at work pretty soon,” he says. I’ve still got both ice creams in my hand as Jason slowly lies down. I shriek, but his hands are on my waist, holding me steady. I end up in this weird position with my elbows beyond his shoulders, fists clenched round the ice creams, face in his neck, laughing.
“Margot,” Jason says into my neck, “put the ice cream down, yeah?”
“Oh.” I drop them. We only have a few more weeks, so I remember what else you can do in a fort with your secret boyfriend, on the last day of summer.
*
My skin feels flayed raw—traveling through time, it’s not like before. It’s starting to hurt. But I’m back in bed, face-to-face with Thomas. He has his glasses on now, and Umlaut is snuggled between us, making little kitteny snores.
My heart is still half in the field fort. How had I forgotten what I’d known back then, that Jason and I weren’t going to be forever? How had I forgotten that I hadn’t minded? It’s like Grey’s death was a tornado, wiping out everything that came before it. Leaving me clueless.
“Shall we do it on Wednesday?” Thomas asks me. For a moment, I think he’s asking me about it, sex. Put a condom on a banana and never eat fruit again. And I blush from my head to my cherry-red toenails.
Across the pillow, Thomas matches me blood cell for blood cell.
“G.” He smiles, reading my mind. “I wasn’t asking you to do it. Although…”
He bats his lashes, slowly. Reaches out, pushes my hair back from my face. Between us, Umlaut purrs in his sleep. I lean over the kitten and poke Thomas in the chest.
“Shuddup.” I grin back, leaving my hand where it is. No dark matter in sight. I didn’t need a do-over after all. My lie doesn’t even matter—aren’t I right back where I should be? “Don’t make me paint The Wurst No. Zwei.”
“How do you make German sound so cute? It’s so terrifying when Ned does it.” Thomas stuffs his face into the pillow for a second, then pops up again. “Never mind—so, Wednesday night is go? You, me, the finest fish and chips Holksea beach has to offer.”
I think he asked me out. I think I missed me saying yes.
I wish I was here for the big moments in my life.
Thomas clambers out of bed, stretching down and putting his shoes on. When he straightens up, he’s looking over at my corkboard. “Aw, you kept my email! Cool. And you’ve … done math all over it. Okay, rawr.”
He bounces to the door, back again to kiss me, and out into the garden before I can react.
“Hello, Ned,” I hear from outside. My brother’s voice growls in reply, but I can’t make out the words. “It’s not what…”
I wait for their voices to fade before climbing out of bed and fetching the email. It’s transformed again, but as meaningless to me as ever—though it obviously made sense to Thomas. And he’s right: I have done math all over it. At least, it’s my handwriting. But I don’t recognize the equation.
Wednesday 13 August