The Code for Love and Heartbreak - Jillian Cantor Page 0,15
me for another second, and then he bursts out laughing. I was not expecting that, and I frown. “Wait...” He’s still laughing. “You’re going to tell me who...I should...date, Em?” He can barely choke his sentence out, he’s laughing so hard.
“Not me,” I say, putting my hands on my hips. “Math. And stop calling me Em. Emma.”
Hannah stands up. Her cheeks are so red she looks sunburned, and her eyes have turned glassy. “I’m gonna go,” she says, her voice trembling. “Nice to meet you, Phillip.”
“No, Hannah, wait.” Phillip stops laughing, stands and grabs her arm. “I wasn’t laughing at you, I swear. I’m sorry if you thought that. It’s just...Em...er, Emma, setting me up.” He swallows back another laugh.
“It’s not me,” I say again, unable to keep my annoyance out of my voice. “Hannah and I wrote an algorithm—”
“Yeah, yeah, math,” he cuts me off. And none of us say anything for a minute. I’m wondering what I’m supposed to do, if I should walk away. We could try and match someone other than Hannah to start. Or should I try and convince him some more? I bite my lip, really not sure.
He’s not laughing any longer, but he looks at Hannah and smiles a little. He looks back at me. Then back at Hannah again. I can’t tell at all what he’s thinking. “All right,” he finally says. “I actually need a date for the fall formal, anyway. Hannah, would you like to go with me?”
“I...” Hannah opens her mouth to speak but can’t seem to form a coherent sentence.
“Yes. She would love to,” I answer for her. I’m somewhere between relieved that my idea is actually working right now and giddy that I’m proving George and Izzy and John wrong about me. So it doesn’t occur to me to question why he’s gone from laughing at me to helping me in the span of a few minutes.
But it does occur to Hannah. “Why would you want to go to the formal...with me?” she blurts out.
“Why not?” Phillip says quickly. “If Emma says that math makes us a good match, who am I to deny that?”
“Exactly,” I say, hoping Hannah will stop talking. Things are going better than I’d hoped—why does she need to question it?
Phillip gets Hannah’s number and promises to text her so they can figure out the details about the dance and maybe meet up for coffee or a movie before then. The first bell rings, and we all gather up our things to get to class, and just as Phillip starts to walk away, I have an idea. “Hey, Phillip,” I call after him. “If anyone else on the cross-country team wants a date for the dance, text me, okay? I’ll run them through my algorithm, too.”
He turns back to look at me, and for a second, I think he might laugh at me again. But instead he shoots me a thumbs-up, smiles and walks to class.
I turn to Hannah, and she doesn’t look as happy as I would expect. But she doesn’t look upset anymore, either, more like confused. “What?” I say. “This is a good thing. This is what we wanted.”
“Okay, he’s a senior, one. And two, I’ve never been to a formal,” she says. “I don’t even have a dress.”
Izzy has dresses, half a rack in her closet that she’d left behind at home, saying she wouldn’t have much use for all her formal wear in LA. She’d made a point of telling me I could borrow them anytime I liked, and I’d rolled my eyes at the suggestion. I measure up Hannah silently with my eyes now. She’s about Izzy’s size, maybe an inch shorter. That should be close enough. “I can help you figure out a dress,” I tell her. “And anyway, why are you worried about that? You match him. It doesn’t matter what you wear. You’re going to be perfect together.”
* * *
I spot Sam at lunch, and make a quick beeline to his table. I sit down across from him and update him on what happened this morning with Phillip and Hannah. He’s peeling an orange with his thumbs, and I’m curious what else he has in that insulated lunch box of his, what else his mom managed to keep in the fridge over the weekend. He pulls out a canister of soup, and then I remember that his mom had picked him up Friday after coding club. Maybe she’d had the weekend off?