Curtains in my room. Yellow roses, not peach. Thomas’s cosmos, back on my ceiling. A thousand tiny details, a thousand incremental changes. I’ve remade the universe. Better. It’s the end of my weltschmerz.
A sudden burst of Black Sabbath blasts across the garden from Ned’s room. Some things stay the same. And when I tilt my head forward again, Thomas is peering down at me from the apple tree, leaf-dappled. Was it him calling my name, when I fell?
“Welcome back,” he says. A smile tugs at his face.
“Um. Hello.” I stare up at him. “What are you doing?”
“Reading your letter.” He waves the pages at me, through the branches. If he’s surprised by what I wrote, or the fact that I’m dripping wet in pajamas on a blazing sunny day, or that my feet are smeared with mud, he’s not letting on. Unless … Memories of the summer drift down around me like dandelion fluff.
Remember? That day with the time capsule. You had short hair that day.
The time capsule. Maybe we opened it too soon.
Bake at 300 degrees for an hour. Even you can do this. Trust me.
“I meant here,” I say, letting my thoughts scatter. Not caring what he knows, or if it even happened this way at all. “In my garden. Up a tree.”
“Oh. Hang on.” There’s a rustle of leaves and a sparkle in the air, as something small and silver lands in the grass next to me.
I pick it up. The key to the padlock, the one I tossed through the rain to Thomas five years ago.
“You kept it?” I ask, even though I know he must have. How else would he get my letter—take a chain saw to the time capsule? Actually, since it’s Thomas …
“After the fair yesterday, Niall’s mum booted me off the sofa,” he explains. “I found it in my suitcase while I was packing. And I got to thinking about the day we opened the time capsule, and how there was nothing in it. You’d promised me a grand gesture. I thought it was finally the right time…”
He looks down at me. I look up at him. We share a scar. And we don’t need to explain anything to each other at all.
“Oh, you got one thing wrong,” Thomas says. “It wasn’t July, it was April. Your email? I’m Canadian. We reverse the dates.”
April … You’ve got to be kidding, bored physicists! That’s the multiplying factor of the paradoxical loop, the thing we created to make all this balance out? Umlaut?!
“I’m sorry,” Thomas voice drifts from the tree and I refocus on him. “Look. When I got your email, that was the original grand gesture.” He waves the notebook pages again. “I couldn’t be sure … but it was worth all the bakery money in the world to find out. I thought you and I were fate. Unquestionable. Then that gimp in his leather jacket! I was jealous.”
“And now?”
“I sat up in the tree just then, freaking out that you’d disappeared, waiting for you to come back. Remembering about you and Grey that day, how much he loved you—he gave me the ass-kicking of my life over that scar on your hand. Anyone would be fucked up, after he died. I didn’t take it seriously enough. Everything you were going through.”
My eyes search his face, his freckles too far away to be visible. He’s leaving in a week. But here we are. I’m covered in teeny-tiny blades of grass, he’s hiding in a tree—we might be nuts enough for this to work out.
“Hey, Thomas,” I say. Making a fist, sticking it straight out into the air—pointing my little finger. “I dare you.”
When he lands next to me in the grass, I roll over and look at him. I don’t reach for his hand quite yet. I just take it all in. My pajamas are still damp from long-ago rain, but it’s a nice smell. Not quite petrichor. Something new.
“Do you think if we’d written to each other after you left, we could have skipped all this?”
“Nah,” Thomas says. He reaches out and plucks a blossom petal from my hair, frowns at it, then lets it fall. “Then it might not have happened. Cannolis, and all that. Now, ask me again why I’m in your garden.”
He presses his forehead to mine, a clunk of glasses on my nose.
“Why—”
“I couldn’t move to Manchester and not promise you I’ll come back. Visit. Write. Email. Make my iced-bun fortune and meet you halfway across the country before you go off to science school and forget about me.”
I can tell he wants to bat-grab, but it’s difficult when you’re lying down.
“Let’s make a new time capsule,” I say, my mouth moments from his. “Give you a reason to come back. Maybe we could put Ned’s stereo in it.”
Thomas laughs. “G, I know how to be without you. But life is so much more interesting with.”
“And I suppose that,” I tell him, taking his hand, “has always been the point.”
This time, when we kiss, the world doesn’t end. The universe doesn’t stop. Stars don’t fall from the sky. It’s an ordinary kiss.