The Code for Love and Heartbreak - Jillian Cantor Page 0,13
out and put her tiny hand on his shoulder. “It’s all right, Dad,” she told him then. “I’m going to take care of Emma at school. I promise. You don’t have to worry about paying for private school.”
And Izzy took that promise to heart, for years. She sat with me at lunch; she made sure I had a date for that dance. Izzy still spent nights and weekends with me even after she started dating John. Izzy had a lot of friends, and she always included me: to sit with them, to go to movies with them, to drive to school with them.
But her friends were never my friends. Her activities weren’t my activities. It was just me, tagging along. I think about John, hurrying her to get off FaceTime so they wouldn’t be late for whatever they had planned for their Friday night. And for the first time, it occurs to me that maybe I’m the reason Izzy went to UCLA.
Did Izzy need to put 2,764 miles between us just so she could finally feel free to break her promise to Dad? So she could exist without me?
And then, suddenly, it is very hard for me to breathe. I watch the fan turn and turn, and I count the rotations in my head, but it is impossible to fall asleep.
Chapter 6
I wake up early the next morning, having barely slept at all. I kept tossing and turning all night, half dreaming that Izzy was here, telling me I know nothing about love. At six a.m., I finally just get out of bed, still annoyed by my conversations with dream-Izzy, and my FaceTime late last night with real-Izzy.
I put on a pot of coffee for Dad, who I know will be up soon—he’s always an early riser, even on the weekends. I wait for the coffee to brew, take a cup for myself, filling it only halfway. I add milk for the other half and pour in a packet of powdered hot chocolate, stirring it with a spoon until it’s something like a mocha. Then I take it up to my room and sip it in my bed with my laptop, populating the rest of the database that Hannah and I started on last night.
It’s tedious work, going line by line, person by person, through the high school yearbook and Hannah’s old middle school yearbook (for the freshmen), entering all their clubs and interests, and any background, defining features or likes and dislikes I can gather, but a few hours, and two mochas, later, I have enough data in to run a test match for Hannah through my algorithm. Phillip Elton’s name comes back a few seconds later, at a ninety-six percent match, blinking on my screen in bold, a little like it’s taunting me.
Phillip is a senior, like me, and though we’re not in any classes together, I know him a little from the last two years when he was in coding club. He’s tall and orange-haired with freckles, an easy smile and a muscular build. He’s the kind of guy who cares way more about sports than math, but he’s also smart enough to realize he needed to balance his academic and athletic pursuits to get into a good college. As soon as junior year was over he dropped out of coding club, saying he wanted to focus on cross-country for senior year. George and I had rolled our eyes at each other when Ms. Taylor mentioned why he said he wouldn’t be coming back. We both knew he’d only joined the club to put it on his college application for those crucial junior year activities. But we hadn’t cared all that much to lose him, either—he’d contributed very little to the club, other than, last year, helping to build the basketball court for our robot, and researching famous basketball plays to program our robot to repeat. Mostly he pretended to code while watching YouTube videos at our meetings.
But I don’t necessarily dislike Phillip. When we came in third place at the state competition last year, he’d been genuinely upset like the rest of us at the loss. I really thought we’d take it, he said to me on the bus on the way back to Highbury from Rutgers.
He’d been sitting in the seat across from me, and he’d leaned across the aisle, looking pretty glum. I was sitting in a seat by myself, listening to an old Steve Jobs TED Talk, to try and calm myself