Chapter 17: Telling Jake
Jake called me on Wednesday evening while I was sitting at my desk pretending to do coursework.
"Liam. How are you doing, mate?"
"Yeah, good. You?"
"I've been great except for the fact that you haven't been to uni this week. At all. Not once. I've had to sit in lectures on my own like some kind of loser and Dave's not the same, Liam. Dave doesn't laugh at my jokes. Dave doesn't even look at my jokes. I need you back."
I smiled at that. "Sorry. I've had stuff going on. I'll try to be in next week."
"Stuff. Very specific. Very helpful. Thank you for that detailed explanation." He left a gap where I could have explained and I didn't fill it. "Anyway, I'm calling because I want to go to Thorpe Park this weekend. Saturday. Me and you. Dave's too scared so he's out."
"Jake, that's like an hour's drive. How are we getting there?"
"I asked my mum. She said I can have the car for the day as long as I fill it up before I bring it back. So all you have to do is say yes and bring money for food because I'm not paying for your burger."
"I'll pay for my own burger."
"Good. Pick you up at ten."
He hung up before I could say anything else.
Saturday morning he was outside my house at ten on the dot, which was the first time in his life he'd ever been on time for anything. His mum's car smelled like dog and air freshener and had a crack in the windscreen that had been there since January.
"Get in. We're losing daylight."
"It's ten in the morning, Jake."
"And I plan to use every second of it." He pulled out of my street and nearly stalled at the roundabout and then immediately started talking about Gemma. Some bloke had liked her Instagram post. Or she'd liked his. The details changed every time he told the story.
"He has abs, Liam. Visible abs. I don't even have invisible abs. I have the space where abs would go if abs existed in my body, which they don't."
"Have you considered doing sit-ups?"
"I've considered it. I considered it for about three seconds and then I had a biscuit. The chocolate kind, not your dog, although your dog is also shaped like a biscuit at this point."
"Oi. Don't talk about Biscuit like that. He's not fat, he's... broad."
"He's a sphere with legs, Liam. Last time I was at yours he tried to sit on my lap and I lost feeling in both legs. I love that dog but he's a unit."
"He would be offended if he could hear you."
"He wouldn't care. He'd look at me and then walk away unless I had food. That dog doesn't move for anything less than a full meal."
I laughed. He was right. That was exactly Biscuit.
We hit the motorway and the conversation drifted. Dave and some girl in his Finance module who kept asking to borrow his notes. A lecturer who'd caught Jake on his phone and made him read his texts out loud to the class. "It was a message to Dave about whether Greggs still does the steak bake after two o'clock. The whole lecture heard it. Someone in the back row answered. They said yes, by the way. In case you were wondering."
I was looking out the window watching the motorway barriers go past and thinking about how to tell him. I'd been thinking about it for a week. Every day I put it off it felt heavier. Jake was my best mate. He'd been my best mate since the first week of uni when he'd knocked on my door and asked if I wanted to go to the pub and I'd said I didn't really know anyone and he'd said neither did he and that was the whole point. Not telling him felt wrong. Like I was carrying something that belonged to both of us and only I knew about it.
"You've gone quiet," Jake said.
"Just thinking."
"Dangerous. Stop that." He turned the radio up and sang along to something he didn't know the words to, replacing every line he didn't recognise with "something something YEAH" until I told him to stop or I was getting out of the car.
We got to Thorpe Park around eleven. The queue for tickets took twenty minutes and Jake spent the entire time ranking the rides in order of how likely they were to make him sick. "That one looks like a solid seven out of ten on the vomit scale. That one's a nine. That one... that one I'm not going on. That one's a death wish with a seatbelt."
He insisted on the biggest rollercoaster first. We queued for fifteen minutes and Jake talked to the family in front of us about whether the ride had ever broken down and the dad said once and Jake said "brilliant, love that, very reassuring" and the man's daughter laughed and Jake gave her a thumbs up.
The ride was fast. Properly fast. Jake screamed the entire way around. Not a cool scream. The kind of scream that comes from somewhere deep in your chest and doesn't stop until the brakes hit. I was laughing so hard I could barely breathe by the time we got off.
"Again," Jake said. His hair was everywhere and his face was white.
"You look like you've seen a ghost."
"I have. It was me. My soul left my body on the second drop and I need to go back and get it. Again. Come on."
We rode it again. He screamed again. We did two more rides after that and then Jake said he needed food or he was going to die and I said he was being dramatic and he said "Liam, I can see colours that don't exist. My brain needs a burger."
We got burgers from a stand and found a bench near the lake. It was warm. Families everywhere, kids chasing each other, a toddler having a meltdown near the ice cream van. We sat down and Jake started eating like someone might take the burger from him.
I ate mine slower. Looking at the lake. Thinking about the thing I needed to say.
Jake got halfway through his burger and stopped. He put it down on the wrapper and looked at me.
"Right. I've been patient. I've been very patient, actually, which isn't something I'm known for. But you've been weird all day. You were weird in the car, you've been weird in every queue, and right now you're staring at a lake like it owes you money." He wiped his hands on his jeans. "What's going on? And before you say nothing, I want to remind you that I've known you for two years and I can tell when you're carrying something."
I put my burger down. Took a breath.
"I solved a maths problem."
"Okay..."
"A big one. Famous. It's been open for twenty-four years and some of the best mathematicians in the world have tried to crack it. I found the answer. Wrote a paper, put it online, and the whole thing exploded."
Jake stopped chewing. "Exploded how?"
"Emails from professors all over the world. MIT, Germany, Japan. All saying the proof is right. Someone posted it on Twitter and hundreds of people were arguing about it in the replies. Mathematicians, Jake. Arguing about something I wrote in my bedroom."
He was looking at me.
"And you didn't think to mention this? Not once? Not a text? Not a casual 'oh by the way Jake, I changed mathematics forever, fancy a pint?'"
"I'm mentioning it now."
"Over a burger. At Thorpe Park. After four rollercoasters." He shook his head. "Only you."
"There's more." He closed his eyes. "Of course there's more." So I told him. Cambridge. A professor called Eleanor Shaw. She read the paper and invited me to visit. I went last Thursday with Mum and Dad.
Jake put his burger down completely. "Last Thursday. When you said you had a family thing." I nodded. "The family thing was Cambridge," he said, not as a question.
He rubbed his face with both hands. Sat there for a second. "Right. Tell me. From the start. Everything."
So I told him. Not the short version. The long one. About the drive, Mum talking the entire way because she was nervous, Dad spending three minutes reading a parking sign because he didn't trust it. About standing on the pavement and looking at the buildings and realising that pictures don't prepare you for how old everything is, how the stone doesn't care who you are.
"And then Shaw took me to her office. Grey hair, cardigan, plain watch. She looks like she stopped caring what people think of her about thirty years ago. But when she talks about maths her whole face changes. She asked me how I found the solution and I walked her through it and she just sat there, not nodding, not smiling, just listening. And when I finished she didn't say good job or well done. She just asked how long it took. I said about a week. Jake stared at me. "A week. You solved a thing that beat the entire field for twenty-four years. In a week."
"And then she gave me a problem. Something she'd been working on herself for months. Handed me a piece of paper and said it wasn't a test. She just wanted to see how I'd think about it."
Jake leaned forward. "And?"
"I couldn't solve it. Not there, not in fifteen minutes. But I found a direction she hadn't considered. An approach she hadn't tried. And afterwards she told me she'd been stuck on it for two months and what I'd found was something she'd missed."
Jake was quiet. He picked up a chip, looked at it, put it down.
"She offered me a place," I said. "Full funding. Tuition, room, food, everything. Starting September."
He let out a breath through his teeth.
"Mum completely fell apart," I said. "Shaw came downstairs and told her and Dad everything. Explained the funding, answered all their questions. And Mum just sat there crying. She tried to tell Shaw about the hospital, about the coma, about not knowing if I was going to be okay. And Shaw listened to the whole thing and then told Mum I was the most gifted student she'd seen in her career."
"What did your dad do?"
"He asked practical questions. Room and board, travel costs, books. Made sure everything was actually covered. And then he went quiet in the way Dad goes quiet when he doesn't trust himself to speak."
Jake smiled. Small. "Classic Paul." He was looking at the lake again. "September. Three months."
"Yeah."
"So you're going."
"I'm going. But I'm not disappearing, Jake. It's an hour and a half. I'll be back. You'll come visit. This isn't—"
"I know. I know it's not." He shrugged. "I'm happy for you. I need you to know that. I'm really happy. It's just... Saturday pub is going to be shit without you."
"You'll have Dave."
"Dave doesn't count. Dave agrees with everything I say. I need someone who argues back. That's you. That's always been you."
We sat there for a bit. Not talking.
"Jake, I'm going to study maths. I'm not becoming a different person."
"You better not. If you come back with a posh accent I'm disowning you."
"If I come back saying 'old chap' you have my permission to hit me."
"Deal." He picked up his burger. Took a massive bite. Talked with his mouth full. "Right. Log flume. I want to get absolutely soaked and I want to film you screaming and I want to send it to everyone we know."
"Jake, do not film me."
"Too late. Decision's been made."
He filmed me. I screamed. He sent it to Dave. Dave replied saying congratulations on Cambridge and that I scream like a goat. Jake showed me the message and said "he's not wrong though" and I shoved him and he nearly fell into a bin.
We drove home at half five with the heating on full because we were both soaked. The radio was on low. The motorway was quiet. Jake was quieter than normal.
About twenty minutes from home he spoke. "You know when I said you'd been different since the hospital?"
"Yeah, I remember."
"I wasn't having a go. I just noticed. You came back and you were still you but something had shifted. Like you'd woken up properly." He was looking at the road. "I didn't push it because you didn't seem like you wanted to talk about it."
"I think the coma changed something," I said.
"Yeah. Well. Whatever it changed, it got you into Cambridge. So I'll take it." He glanced at me. "Just don't forget where you came from."
"Jake. My mum ironed my shirt for the visit. I'm not forgetting anything."
He dropped me off outside my house. Engine running. The street was quiet and the sun was low and the houses looked the same as they always did.
He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. Then he looked at me.
"I'm proud of you, Liam. That's a weird thing to say and I'm never saying it again so take it in."
"Cheers, Jake."
"Get out of my mum's car."
I got out. He drove off. I watched the car turn the corner and stood there for a second.
Mum was in the kitchen drying a plate when I came in. She asked how the park was and I said good, really good. She asked if I told him and I said yeah. She put the plate down and looked at me properly. "How'd he take it?"
"He called me an absolute freak. Then he said he was proud of me and told me to get out of his mum's car."
She smiled. "That sounds like Jake."
I went upstairs. Biscuit was on the bed. I lay down next to him and he shifted over just enough to press his back against my leg.