The Square Root of Summer

This is what it means to love someone. This is what it means to grieve someone. It’s a little bit like a black hole. It’s a little bit like infinity.

And as he looks at me, I suddenly get it. This isn't the Big Bang. It's just summer. But it's still love. It's still something.

But I like sleepy. I like nothing-ever-happens. I buy the same chocolate bar from the same shop every day, next to our village pond with its minimalist duck population of three, and then I check the Holksea village newsletter with no news in it. It’s comforting. I can wrap my whole life up in a blanket.

The Uncertainty Principle states that you can know where a particle is, or you can know where it's going, but you can't know both at the same time. The same, it turns out, is true of people. And when you try, when you look too closely, you get the Observer Effect. By trying to work out what's going on, you're interfering with destiny. A particle can be in two places at once. A particle can interfere with its own past. It can have multiple futures, and multiple pasts. The universe is complicated.

If you turn people away enough times, eventually they stop trying to find you.

What is it with you and time capsules?" "I like the idea of a permanent record," he explains. "Something to say, This Is Who I Am, even when I'm not that person anymore...

After nearly a year of mourning, I feel like the Victorians when Edison came along- all those years in the darkness, and then electric light. I've got the earth between my toes.

But perhaps it's that Grey is dead. It still feels like the moon fell out of the sky.

Where did all that love go? Where did that girl go, who was so alive?

That's how I'll score my Nobel: one girl's experiment to live off cereal in her room for an entire summer.

This is where Grey slept. In twenty-four hours, Thomas is going to erase his dreams.

Everyone says you have to be super-precise to bake - like your extra-credit thing, the time-travel project. One calculation out of place and the whole thing would go wrong, right? It's hogwash! Look at this - bit of eggshell in there, scoop it out with a finger, what the hell. Too much flour, forget the butter, drop the pan - it doesn't matter how many mistakes you make, it mostly turns out OK. And when it doesn't, you cover it with icing.

He's right I don't want to wait another second. My heart fills with yellow as I step outside, because it all starts - Now.

Talk to Papa. Eat your vegetables. Phone Ned when he's in London. Pay attention to the world. Say yes when someone asks you to bake a cake. Make grand gestures. Be bold.

Cringe. Maybe I manifested these blankets into being with the thermodynamics of mortification, so I'd have something to hide under.