[Minus three hundred and forty-six]
The evening we go to the beach, a daytime full moon looms giant on the horizon. The world’s biggest optical illusion. Huge and heavy, it follows Thomas and me as we cycle along the marsh path, past the hedge—my crash a hundred years ago now. The hole in the leaves is filled with dark matter, waiting for me, reminding me.
The car park is half empty when we get there, small kids carrying buckets and shovels, trailing their parents as they head home through the dusk. We chain our bikes to a railing and run to the food hut just before its shutters close.
“Fries, please,” says Thomas, just as I say, “Chips.”
They grumble, it’s the end of the day, they’ve turned the fryer off; but Thomas charms them and soon we’re on a blanket in a hollow in the dunes, warm vinegar steam rising up between us into the dusk. His satchel spills open when we sit down. He has my copy of Forever, two postcards keeping each of our places in the pages.
“Thomas!” I blurt.
He turns to me, holding down his hair against the wind, a smile as wide as the sky. I wish I could tell him: I don’t want to time-travel anymore. I want to stay here, and discover the universe with you. But I can’t make the words come out of my mouth.
“You okay?” he asks.
I nod and rescue a chip from his ketchup overkill. All day, our us has stalled—replaced by stutters, long pauses, and then both of us speaking at the same time. No, you go, no, you say. I know what’s wrong with me: I’m waiting for a wormhole to drag me away. I’m not sure what Thomas’s problem is; he’s been antsy since leaving my room on Sunday. We eat in silence till a gust of wind sends hot vinegar straight up my nose, and I start spluttering. I catch Thomas’s eye.
“All right, clever clogs,” he says, standing up. “Wait here.”
He scrunches the empty Styrofoam container, dripping vinegar all over the blanket, then runs off with it through the dunes.
“Where are you going?” I call after him, leaning over to see him jog down to the path that leads to the beach.
“It’s a surprise,” I hear. Just before he rounds the corner and disappears out of sight, he slam-dunks the carton into the bin, with a little heel-click in the air and a “Yessssss!”
While I sit and wait, I watch the sea. Or rather, its absence—over the top of our hollow, there’s nothing but flat, wet sands, stretching into the distance. Somewhere, invisible beyond it, is the North Sea. When I was little, the tide going this far out made me sad. I’d want to run for miles, right into the horizon, until I was invisible too. If I ran and ran and ran into the emptiness now, would I leave all this behind? Grey. Wormholes. Myself.
Then Thomas pops into sight, walking backwards across the flats and waving his arms in the air. It makes me want to stay right where I am. When he sees I’ve noticed him, he puts his hands to his mouth and shouts something.
“What? I can’t hear you,” I yell.
He shrugs dramatically, then he’s off, jogging farther on, not stopping till he’s about fifty yards away. I sit with knees up to my chin, arms around my legs, watching as he drags his foot through the wet sand. After a few seconds, I work out what he’s writing. I grin and grab our bags and blanket, running down the dune to join him. By the time I reach him, breathless, he’s written the best equation I’ve ever seen:
X2
It’s what Grey said about us when we were little. “Uh-oh,” when I walked into a room. Then, if Thomas was following me, “Uh-oh, trouble times two.” After a while we said it ourselves, a little chant when we were up to no good. Water is already pooling inside the letters. Thomas still has one foot in the tail of the 2—his jeans are soaked up the knees, his hair is crazy-curly from the salt and humidity, his glasses sea-flecked.
I stumble through the wet sand to him, but he shrinks back—barely perceptibly—shoving his hands in his pockets so his shoulders hunch.
“Very mature,” I settle for saying, pointing at the letters. “Thank you.”
“You’re so welcome,” he says with exaggerated formality.
“There’s seaweed on your foot,” I tell him.
He flicks his trainer and the samphire jumps into the air—he catches it, then stares at his hand, amazed. “Let’s pretend I’m truly that dexterous on purpose,” he says, and reaches over to tie it to my bag strap. “There. Now you’re a mermaid.”
There’s a pause. I’m missing something.
“What do you—” I start, and at the same time Thomas says, “Listen. Hey, we keep doing that, don’t we?”
“You go.”
“Before I say this…” he begins. Then circles his foot in the air, gesturing to the X2. “We’ve always been friends, right? And I promise this time, we always will be. I won’t let that go. I don’t go silent on you, you don’t go silent on me. Deal?”