Free The Square Root of Summer by Harriet Reuter Hapgood Page B

notice. It’s as if we’re in two separate universes: for him, everything is normal. For me, the sky has gone blank. It’s a supersized screenwipe.
    When he drops his hand, stepping away, all the stars ripple back. The whole thing only lasted for a moment—a fluorescent light on the fritz, spluttering in and out.
    â€œThere you go.” Thomas stares at me, confused. Maybe he did notice how the world just got a Ctrl+Alt+Del reboot. But all he says is, “You know, I was expecting you to have short hair.”
    Whatever just happened, it definitely only happened to me. Or it happened to us both, but I’m the only one who saw it—we’re at opposite sides of the event horizon. The point of no return. I don’t want to think about which side I’m on.
    *   *   *
    â€œWhoa,” says Thomas, once we’re inside my room. “This is, as Grey would say, a trip.”
    I scuttle to the bed. I’d forgotten about the emptiness. Thomas peers at what’s on my chest of drawers—hairbrush, deodorant, telescope. That’s it.
    â€œMinimalist,” he says, prowling around.
    It wasn’t always a monastery. When I moved in, Grey painted the floorboards, assembled a bed, and gave me a flashlight and the advice to never wear shoes when I cross the garden—“Feel the earth between your toes, Gottie, let it guide you.” (I always wore sneakers.) Papa gave me a twenty, which Sof commandeered to play interior decorator. I couldn’t stop her from buying cushions and Christmas lights, or putting stickers on my wardrobe.
    When I cleared out the house last autumn, I got rid of almost everything in my room too. Made it negative space. It had felt cathartic. Now, seeing it through Thomas’s eyes and nothing on my corkboard but a handwritten school schedule, it just seems sad. There’s nothing to show that I’m here, that I exist. That this is where I live, breathe, don’t sleep.
    â€œWhere are the stars?” Thomas is turning in circles, looking at my ceiling, while I’m looking at him, and the way all the parts of him fit together. Arms and shoulders and chest.
    â€œWhat?” I say, once I work out a response is required.
    â€œOn the ceiling.” He twists to look at me. “You always had stick-on stars. They glowed in the dark. Like magic.”
    â€œLike zinc sulphide,” I correct.
    â€œThat was what I meant by the stars. You got all the references, right? In my email?”

    This is the second mention of an email—and the second occasion it’s made time go flooey. I don’t get it. And even if he had my address, I don’t. I deleted everything, after Jason. And why would Thomas send me an email now, after five years? A warning of his surprise arrival? That means I should forgive him. But I’m committed to resentment.
    I can’t screenwipe my brain into a new emotion.
    Now Thomas is sitting on the bed, still gazing around as he shucks off his shoes. I’m a little weirded out by how at ease he is in my room. He picks up my clock from the windowsill and starts fiddling with it .
    â€œWhat’s that?” he asks suddenly, pointing the clock at the equation on the wall.
    â€œIt’s math,” I explain. Then, duh, because it’s obviously math, I add, winningly, “An equation.”
    â€œHuh.” Thomas drops the clock on the duvet and brushes past me as he shuffles on his knees to get a closer look. There’s a hole in his sock and I can see his skin. I was naked with Jason a dozen times, we even skinny-dipped, and this is just a toe , but it’s surprisingly intimate. “And this is on your wall, why?”
    I reset my clock and nudge it back into place on the windowsill as Thomas flops around on the pillow end of the bed, getting settled.
    â€œIt’s homework.” That’s all I have to say—I don’t feel like explaining Ms.