“I hate iced buns…” I turn to tell him, viciously, and the words disappear in my mouth when I see what I’ve done.
The sand I sent flying through the air is hanging there. It won’t ever fall. The white foam waves hover over the dark sea, forever cresting and not crashing down. Everything is still. Everything is silent. And Thomas is frozen, midplea.
The geometry of spacetime is a manifestation of gravity. And the geometry of heartbreak is a manifestation of a stopped clock. Time stands still.
*
I speed-cycle the three miles home through the gathering dusk, and it never gets dark. The world is as broken as my smashed watch. The sun isn’t setting. It stays right where I left it at the beach, hovering just under the horizon, as the moon fails to climb the sky. It’s beautiful and awesome, in the old-fashioned sense. Daunting.
Pedaling fast, I take the shortcut through the field and straight through the nettle patch, not caring. I need my books, I need to figure out what’s going on—mathematically speaking. It may not make a difference. But for all that the universe is in charge, I want to at least try to take control.
I ditch my bike in the driveway, out of breath, and jog-walk-wheeze into the garden. And stop dead. Ned and his bandmates are—were?—having a bonfire. A prelude to the party, which I realize with a jolt is this Saturday. Where did the summer go? In nineteen days, my grandfather will be dead forever. No more diaries. And I’ve spent this whole time chasing myself down wormholes, without ever thinking I could be finding my way back to Grey.
The flames are frozen, sparks painted on the air. Ned stands near the Buddha, mid-beer-chug, while Sof is a tableau of worry-tinged admiration as she watches him. It’s a momentary glimpse of her private face.
I’m an interloper. I tiptoe past, trying not to look, Edmund creeping through the White Witch’s lair. Then I think, screw it, and double back to tie Jason’s shoelaces together. His lucky lighter’s in his hand and I pocket it, planning to drop it down a drain later or something.
The trees are as still and silent as gravestones. It’s spectacular and eerie—I’m already writing equations in my head to describe it all, the frozen antigravity. This is what I’ve wanted all year, isn’t it? To stop the inexorable forward motion.
As I pass under the apple tree, I see Umlaut. He’s midprowl along a branch, towards a moth he’ll never catch. I fetch Thomas’s email from my room, along with my A-level physics textbook, then I climb the tree and grab Umlaut onto my lap. If I can restart the clock, I don’t want him falling off the branch in surprise. He’s warm, which is reassuring, and taxidermy-stiff, which isn’t.
“Okay, Umlaut,” I say. I don’t think he can hear me, but talking helps me swallow the incipient panic. This is Halloween levels of creepy. “How do we fix this?”
The Friedmann equations describe the Big Bang. Maybe time could be jump-started like our crappy old car in winter. I know what Grey would do: read them aloud as if from a spell book, the origins of the universe. Perhaps he’s right. Perhaps I should enact them, create a Little Bang—heat from Jason’s lighter and a vacuum inside the time capsule. Tweak the math and make it smaller. It’s a start.
I get comfortable, flipping the time capsule shut so I can stretch my legs out.
The lid is blank.
When Thomas and I climbed up here to open it, the day of the frog, our names were on the lid. He’s disappearing. Himmeldonnerwetter! Time hasn’t just stopped. The branches are unraveling. We’re reverting to a world where Thomas isn’t here. For all that he’s lied, I don’t want that.
I want the forward motion.
I want to see summer dwindle into autumn. For school to start, university applications, mock exams, and A-level results. I want to kiss Thomas again, and kill him for not telling me he was leaving. Tell him about Jason, everything, and all about the day Grey died—a truth I don’t even admit myself. I want to see what happens with him and me, even after he leaves. Even if it all goes wrong.
Because I want the chance to cry when it hurts.
Faced with a choice between this—stopping time, making my world so small I can wrap my life up in a blanket—and smashing my heart to pieces, well. Pass me the hammer.
*
I scrawl the first equation underneath the lid of the tin, then crumple up some pages from my physics textbook, put them inside, flick Jason’s lighter—thankfully, it wasn’t lit when time stopped, and it catches flame—and drop it in. Then I shut the tin and write THOMAS & GOTTIE on top.
I cross my fingers. The inside of the time capsule was black and sooty when we opened it, clean just now. I’m lighting the fire we found a few weeks ago. Actions have consequences—it just so happens that I do mine the wrong way round.