“Come on,” says Sof, taking her arm. “Bed.”
She starts leading her away, Ned lumbering after them. Sof glances back over her shoulder at me, concerned. Then Thomas and I are alone under the apple tree. I can’t not look at him any longer.
“You lied to me?” he asks, his face barely visible in the dark.
“You lied too,” I say, and even though it’s true, I immediately want to chop off my tongue. I should be pointing out that me and Jason makes no difference—it doesn’t make me and Thomas a lie. In the grass, clumsy and new. How we were in the tree, when we held elbows. In the attic in the Book Barn, making promises to each other a long time ago. We can have all that, and I can have my summer with Jason too.
“Seriously? It’s hardly the same thing,” Thomas scoffs. “And I suppose everyone knows except me and, I’m guessing, Ned?”
“No one knew, that’s the point—”
“Then what? I don’t get it. You didn’t have to lie to me. It’s fucked up.” He runs his hands through his hair, then finger-quotes at me. “‘First everything.’”
“That’s not even what I meant!”
“Whatever,” Thomas says, not listening to me. “You know, I saw you with him earlier at the party? Before I came and found you, you were whispering together, and I knew—”
“Knew what?” I hurl my hands in the air, an imitation bat grab of frustration. “I’m allowed to talk to him! I’m allowed to keep it a secret, if I want. And you’re right; it’s not the same thing—running off to Manchester without telling me? That’s actually my business. Me and Jason is none of yours.”
I’m picking up steam, ready for a fight—I think I’m in the right here, I think I deserve one—but Thomas interrupts me.
“And when you kissed me earlier—in your grandpa’s room,” he emphasizes, full of scorn. “When you tried to do more, was it my business then?”
“I didn’t lie,” I say calmly, thinking back to the kitchen on Thomas’s first morning, weeks ago. How I’d tried to pick a fight, and he hadn’t let me. “At least, not how you mean. When I said first everything, I meant I’d never been in love before. Except that’s not actually true. And I don’t even think you’re angry I lied. I think you’re jealous that I’ve been in love and you haven’t.”
When I say that, he turns and disappears into the night.
Ned’s right. I am selfish. That’s what stops me from running after him.
I go to my room to wait. I know what’s coming next. Minus three, minus two, minus one. I strip off my wet clothes, dropping them onto the floor, not bothering with the laundry basket.
Exhaustion sweeps over me as I climb into bed and pull up the covers. I’ve lived ten lifetimes in one summer. But sleep doesn’t come. All the secrets and all the revelations and all the anger—me and Thomas, Ned and Sof—it all crashes over me in waves, smashing me onto the sand again and again. Drowning me.
“Umlaut?” I pat the duvet. Nothing. Even my cat wants nothing to do with me.
When I turn off the lamp, the light of the day, pooled in corners and hiding under the bed, slides out the door. There’s just the glow from the ceiling, the fluorescent stars Thomas sticky-taped there for me, that match no constellation at all.
I stay awake, watching them blink out, one by one.
Until I’m alone with the darkness.
Zero
It’s the last day of summer. Except it isn’t, not really. I’m here and I’m not here. This is the first time I’ve been here, but also it isn’t. Déjà vu. I’m watching myself, inside myself. It’s a memory, it’s a dream, it’s a wormhole.
A wormhole. But it still hurts.
It’s the day Grey died.
And I’m wishing. Not cross-your-fingers lightly, or how six-year-old me wished for my vegetables to magically disappear.
I’m pouring everything I have into wishing to a God I don’t believe in.
How could I be sleeping with Jason in the sunshine three hours ago, and now I’m in the hospital?
Papa was nowhere to be found when I got here, but Ned was in the waiting room, green snakeskin on a grey plastic chair. We’d exchanged information: the note I found on the blackboard. The texts we swapped on that long bus ride. As though by knowing exactly what had happened, we could change the outcome.
“The paramedics say he was all right when they arrived.”
“They think he might have had a stroke after getting to the E.R.”
“He’s in the ICU.”
“He’s in the stroke ward.”
“Didn’t you say?”
“I thought he was…”
Papa eventually showed up. Maybe he’s always been here, invisible. Maybe when Mum died, Papa never left this hospital.
We follow him down the corridor.
Grey has shrunk. He was a giant, a grizzly bear. Now, he’s under some evil wizard’s spell. His face is a landslide.
He blinks at me, mewing, his hands frantically pawing at his flimsy hospital gown over and over again, unwittingly exposing himself, a baby.