Read Online The Square Root of Summer by Harriet Reuter Hapgood - Free Book Online Page A

can feel myself expanding. Changing. I want to stretch out like a tree towards the sun, the world at my fingertips. And Sof’s friendship is beginning to feel like a cage. She wants me to stay exactly the same.
    Jason curls his fingers under my bikini strap, his hand brushing against my skin just where my tan fades to pale. He’s right about Ned. My brother’s seventies fashion sense also translates to his gender politics, when it comes to me. And I like this bubble we’re in. This club.
    â€œLet’s keep us a secret,” I say, and it sounds like my idea. “For a bit.”
    I float home on the promise of us.
    *   *   *
    â€”then I’m not sitting on the library floor anymore or floating home from Jason and the beach. I’m walking across the school car park, directly towards Sof. Aargh.
    My hand is raised in a wave as I stagger in surprise, then try to incorporate it into my limp. Time has passed in real life, exactly like detention and the wormhole in Grey’s bedroom. The opposite of how things worked in Narnia.
    Sof’s sitting on the wall in a sundress, sipping something green and frothy. Hubble, bubble, toil and wheatgrass. Her hair is a cloud of curls that wobble as I approach. I’m unsure if it’s a nod of welcome.
    I shake my own head, trying to focus on the present, and perch next to her, sweating in my jeans. My mind is still wrapped up in Jason, remembering how I’d felt in those early days, like my heart was expanding at a million miles a minute with a hundred new senses, till I was ready to explode. It takes me a moment to think of something to say, and eventually I have to settle for, “Do you mind if I get the bus with you?”
    â€œâ€™Course not,” she says. She sounds both wary and pleased. After a few seconds, she glances at me and adds, “You’re not biking?”
    â€œI crashed my bike.”
    â€œOh, shit. You okay?” Sof turns towards me and I show her my ankle. “Eurgh. Put arnica cream on it.”
    That’s Sof. Offering advice where none was asked for. But it’s meant kindly, and it’s the sort of hippie remedy Grey would suggest, so when she asks what happened, I say, “Went round the Burnham corner too fast. It’s not so bad.”
    â€œYou were at the Book Barn?” she asks lightly, no-big-deal, tearing a sheet of paper from her sketch pad and folding origami, fingers deft. She doesn’t know I’ve not been there since September.
    â€œYeah.”
    We lapse into silence, something that never used to happen with us. We used to talk all the time, nonstop, about everything: boys, girls, homework, the infinite possibilities of the universe, which flavor milk shake was best to dip your chips into, whether I should let Sof cut my hair into a bob.
    I’m digging in my book bag for one of the books I checked out—H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine —and noticing a cinnamon muffin has materialized in there since the wormhole, when Sof nudges me. She’s flicking her origami open and shut—a fortune-teller.
    â€œWhy does your bag smell like Christmas?” she asks. “Never mind: pick a color.”
    â€œYellow.”
    â€œGotcha.” Sof counts it out and unfolds the square, then pulls an exaggerated would-you-believe-it? face. “Gottie will come to the beach on Sunday.”
    Summer vacation starts this weekend, and we always spend Sundays at the beach. Rain or shine, whether Ned and his gang go or not. It’s one of our friendship traditions, like making up stupid bands and songs to go with them, writing each other’s names on the soles of our shoes, or watching the same film while texting incessantly. Not that we’ve done any of those things since last year. Sof’s taking this bus ride as an olive branch.
    â€œOkay,” I agree. Then I open my book bag again for the Mystery Muffin. It’s slightly squashed,