The Code for Love and Heartbreak - Jillian Cantor Page 0,12

think outside the box and actually win this year, that’s all. And the teachers were just for the prototype. We’re going to match students.” Izzy frowns again and twirls a blond curl around her finger. “Maybe George is the one who lost his mind?” I retort.

“My brother is way too nerdy to lose his mind.” I hear John from across the room.

“Yeah, well, so is she.” Izzy turns, so I know she’s talking more to John than to me.

“Uh, thanks, Iz. I’m still here.”

She turns back. “Yeah, I know,” she says. “Sorry.” But she doesn’t sound sorry. “George is worried about you. And now we are, too.”

I don’t think John gives me a second thought, and George is jealous that I came up with this idea without him. Or annoyed with me, that I don’t want to do something to try and save the world with our senior year co-presidency. Which is not the same as worried. But Izzy, she might genuinely be worried. I want to tell her that if there’s any reason to worry, it’s all her fault, for abandoning me in the first place. But instead I reassure her that I’m fine, that George is just jealous and that I have everything in coding club completely under control.

“But you’ve never even had a boyfriend. How are you going to tell people who they should fall in love with? This could be a social disaster for you,” Izzy says, lowering her voice, casting her eyes downward.

“Iz, this has nothing to do with love,” I tell her in my most emphatic voice. “This is all about numbers. Writing an algorithm to match people. And besides, didn’t you tell me to be more social before you left?”

“Come on, Izzy. We’re gonna be late. She’ll be fine.” I hear John’s voice again, in the background. But Izzy doesn’t answer him. She stares at me through the screen, her eyes open wide. The picture is too blurry for me to see how deeply blue they are, but I know the color of my sister’s eyes by heart. I can’t remember our mother’s eyes, but I think about what our father said earlier, and I imagine now that they were something like Izzy’s.

Finally she blinks, looks down and, even across all these miles and through my tiny blurry screen, I can tell she feels guilty, like maybe for the first time she regrets leaving me. But not because she misses me, the way I miss her, but because she’s worried I’m not capable of navigating life on my own, without her.

* * *

I can’t sleep after Izzy and I hang up, and I watch my fan make shadows across the ceiling, counting the rotations of the four blades: four, eight, twelve, sixteen... Patterns soothe and relax me.

I was only three when Mom died, and by the time I was five, in kindergarten, Dad grew concerned about me. I didn’t have any friends, mainly, my kindergarten teacher Mrs. Jennings told Dad, because I refused to play with anyone. I was too busy, off by myself, memorizing the times tables on her math flash cards.

After Dad attended our spring conferences, he worried that maybe I wasn’t at the right school. He wanted to move me to a private school where class size is smaller, but Highbury Prep is so expensive, and his practice was just getting off the ground. There were bills from Mom’s death, and he couldn’t afford to do it.

But it wasn’t ever the public school that was the problem. What both Dad and Izzy never really got is that numbers are just so easy for me to understand. Mom’s death I could never comprehend. I still can’t. Even now. No matter how you look at it, it doesn’t make sense that a healthy thirty-three-year-old woman can go to sleep one night, and then not wake up ever again. Numbers behave the way you ask them to. Numbers have always made sense to me. People don’t.

“Maybe next year I can afford private school, Emma,” Dad had said to me after he got home from his conferences that spring. We were all sitting down on Mom’s new blue couches, Dad and me and Izzy. Izzy’s conference had, of course, gone off spectacularly. Izzy was a model student and every other child in first grade just adored her. Dad hugged us both tightly to him, then pulled back to look at us.

His eyes started watering, and he rubbed them behind his thick glasses. Izzy reached