The Code for Love and Heartbreak - Jillian Cantor Page 0,24

her, too. Her friend says something to her, and she throws her head back and laughs, her raven hair cascading down her back. I look away from her, back at Sam. He’s still staring at her, but frowning now. I frown, too. Because it’s impossible for me to tell from the way he’s acting if my algorithm worked. If he even likes her at all.

* * *

I text Sam when I get home from piano later that day, and he texts back that he’ll be over in twenty minutes. At my lesson, Mrs. Howard gave me a new Rachmaninoff piece to learn for the state competition in May, a piece she said she knew would challenge me. But now it feels more like a hurdle, and I pull it back out of my bag and sit down at the piano to look over it again while I’m waiting for him.

I love the piano, love the way the scale patterns and the time signatures make sense the same way calculus and coding do, but right now I feel overwhelmed by the difficulty of this particular piece. When I’d tried to play through it during my lesson I’d stumbled, pretty badly. Mrs. Howard said she wasn’t at all worried, that I still have months to learn it. But I know I’m going to have to practice a lot to get it perfect, while also keeping up with all my AP classes, and working on our app. My heart pounds wildly in my chest as all that floods my brain now. I run my fingers over the keys, going through the scale patterns I know by heart, until their formulaic sequences relax me a little.

I have a keyboard up in my room, but downstairs, in the living room with Mom’s worn blue couches, we also have Mom’s old upright oak piano. One of my only memories of her still is her sitting here, playing piano, me watching the concave shape of her back as she hovered over the keys. As a toddler, I was content to sit on the living room floor listening to her play, enchanted by her music. And even now, all these years later, it’s the one thing I do that makes me still feel connected to her. The one thing I know and understand about her that makes complete and total sense—Mom loved the piano, she was good at the piano. Just like me.

After I make my way through the scales, and I can breathe a little easier, I turn back to the Rachmaninoff. I go through it again, more slowly. I stumble still, but now on the second pass through, the notes make more sense, feel more formulaic than they had at first glance at Mrs. Howard’s earlier. Maybe Mrs. Howard is right, that in a few months I’ll get this down perfectly.

I hear the doorbell ring, and I lift my fingers from the keys, and go to answer it. Sam is standing on the porch. “I heard you playing,” he says, walking inside. “You’re really good, aren’t you, E?”

My face warms with his compliment, but I answer him truthfully. “Yes, I came in first in the state competition last year.”

“Why am I not surprised?” He smiles. “I took lessons for a few years in Phoenix, but my right hand and left hand don’t like to work together. My vocal chords are luckily more cooperative.”

I don’t like to sing. I can do it. I have good pitch, but I find the whole thing unenjoyable and stress inducing. I suddenly want to hear Sam sing, but I don’t know if it’s the right time to ask him to. He’s here to work on our project, so instead I invite him to come into the kitchen, grabbing my laptop on the way and bringing it to the table with me. I open up my Excel file to the database along with my flowchart software for the algorithm.

Sam looks at my screen, and his eyes widen. “You’re going to have to explain this to me. It looks much more complicated than anything we ever worked with at my old school.”

“It’s not complicated at all,” I say. “Actually, everything is very basic right now.” He frowns, and I’m worried I said the wrong thing. The level we’re at now really is beginner stuff: a spreadsheet and a flowchart. But I didn’t mean any of that in a negative way toward him. “I mean...I can show you all this pretty quickly. You’ll get