One Plus One: A Novel (33 page)

Jess turned slowly. He was gazing at his feet, but looked up suddenly.

“They told me what Tanzie’s wrong question was.”

“What?”

“It was about the theory of emergence. Strong emergence says that the sum of a number can be more than its constituent parts. You know what I’m saying?”

“No. I’m crap at maths.”

“It means I don’t want to go back over it all. What you did. What we both did. But I just . . . I want to try. You and me. It might prove to be a huge fuckup. But I’ll take that chance.”

He reached out then and gently took hold of the belt loop of her jeans. He pulled her toward him. She couldn’t tear her eyes from his hands. And then, when she finally did lift her face to his, he was gazing straight at her and Jess found she was crying and smiling.

“I want to see what we can add up to, Jessica Rae Thomas. All of us. What do you say?”

So the uniform for St. Anne’s is royal blue with yellow piping. You can’t hide in a St. Anne’s blazer. Some girls in my class take them off when they’re going home, but it doesn’t bother me. When you work hard to get somewhere, it’s quite nice to show people where you belong. The funny thing is that when you see another St. Anne’s student outside school, it’s the custom to wave to each other. Sometimes it’s a big wave, like Sriti’s. She’s my best friend, and she always looks like she’s on a desert island trying to attract a passing plane, and sometimes it’s just a tiny lifting of your fingers down by your school bag, like Dylan Carter, who gets embarrassed about talking to anyone, even his own brother. But everyone does it. You might not know the person waving, but you wave at the person in the uniform. It’s what the school’s always done. It shows that we’re all a family, apparently.

I always wave, especially if I’m on the bus.

Ed picks me up on Tuesdays and Thursdays because that’s when I have maths club and Mum works late at her handyperson thing. She has three people working for her now. She says they work “with” her, but she’s always showing them how to do stuff and telling them which jobs to go to and Ed says she’s still a bit uncomfortable with the idea of being a boss. He says she’s getting used to it. He pulls a face when he says it, like Mum’s the boss of him, but you can tell he likes it.

Since the start of school in September, Mum has
taken Friday afternoons off, and she meets me at school and we make biscuits together, just me and her. It’s been nice, but I’m going to have to tell her I’d rather stay late at school, especially now I’m going to do my A level in the spring. Dad hasn’t had a chance to come down yet, but we Skype every week and he says he’s definitely going to. He sold the Rolls to a man at the police pound. He’s got two job interviews next week, and lots of irons in the fire.

Nicky is at sixth-form college in Southampton. He wants to go to art school. He has a girlfriend called Lila, which Mum said was a surprise on all sorts of counts. He still wears lots of eyeliner, but he’s letting his hair grow out to its natural color, which is sort of a dark brown. He’s now a whole head taller than Mum and sometimes when they’re in the kitchen he thinks it’s funny to rest his elbow on her shoulder, like she’s a bar or something. He still writes in his blog sometimes, but mostly he says he’s too busy and he prefers Twitter these days, so it would be okay if I take it over for a bit. Next week it will be less personal stuff and more about maths. I’m really hoping lots of you like maths.

We paid back seventy-seven percent of the people who sent us money for Norman. Fourteen percent said they would rather we just gave the money to charity, and we were never able to trace the other nine percent. Mum says it’s fine, because the important thing was that we tried, and that sometimes it’s okay just to accept people’s generosity as long as you say thank you. She said to say thank you to you, if you’re one of them, and she’ll never forget the kindness of strangers.

Ed is here literally
all
the time. He sold his house at Beachfront and he now owns a really small flat in London,
where Nicky and I have to sleep on put-you-up beds when we’re there, but most of the time he stays with us. He works in the kitchen on his laptop and talks to his friend in London on this really cool set of headphones, and he goes up and down for meetings in the Mini. He keeps meaning to get a new car, as it’s really hard to fit all of us in when we want to go somewhere, but in a weird way none of us really wants him to. It’s kind of nice in the little car, all squashed together, and in that car I don’t feel so guilty about the drool.

Norman is happy. He does all the things the vet said he’d be able to do, and Mum says that’s enough for us. The law of probability combined with the law of large numbers states that to beat the odds, sometimes you have to repeat an event an increasing number of times in order to get you to the outcome you desire. The more you do, the closer you get. Or, as I explain it to Mum, basically, sometimes you just have to keep going.

I’ve taken Norman into the garden and thrown the ball for him eighty-six times this week. He still never brings it back.

But I think we’ll get
there.