The Code for Love and Heartbreak - Jillian Cantor Page 0,58
lame and poorly coded. Still, I’ve never been responsible for part of the oral presentation before, and I don’t want to be the one to mess it up.
“George!” Hannah’s red head bops up from four rows back. “I want to show you something funny!”
George gives me an apologetic shrug, and moves back to his seat with Hannah. “They’re good together,” Jane says.
I guess she and Sam are done discussing the desert, because now he has his head against his seat, eyes closed, headphones on. I didn’t realize Jane had been paying attention to George, and I turn back around to face her. “Really? You think so?”
Liz and Mara just seem to fit together when I see them walking down the hallways holding hands—they look like a couple, but when I look at George and Hannah, I still see them as George...and Hannah. And it bothers me that they’ve paired off in coding club, that they’re together right now, when I wish George were up here, acting like a co-president, going over our presentation with me.
“It’s nice to see George look so happy,” Jane is saying now.
Does he look happy? Happier than usual? I try and turn around again, but all I can see from here are the tops of their heads—bright red and sandy blond. The sounds of Hannah’s laugh float across the bus, and I wonder what funny thing she’s showing George and whether or not he actually thinks it’s funny, too. I wait for it, but I don’t hear him laugh, and it feels like this tiny bit of proof that Jane is wrong about him, that George isn’t happier with Hannah at all.
* * *
The oral presentation is first on our schedule at 9:50 a.m., and George and I go into a classroom to present to the judges, while the rest of the team stays behind in the cafeteria to show off the trifold we made to represent the app’s features. Later this morning, we’ll have a team demonstration of the actual app to a different panel of judges.
George and I make it through the oral presentation without any mishaps, both of us reciting the speeches we’d rehearsed. My portion of the speech is in technical terms, about how we coded the app, and George’s is about the results and how the app has helped people in our high school. As we leave the room together, we both sigh with relief at the same time. George laughs at our simultaneous sighing, and so do I. There it is, I think. George’s laughter. Coding club is what makes him happy. Winning will make him even happier.
“What do you think the judges thought?” George asks me as we walk back to the cafeteria to find the rest of our team. “It was hard to read their faces,” he says. “But I thought that one old guy looked unimpressed.”
I know exactly which guy George means, as there were only three judges in the room: one was a woman, and the third was a younger man. The older man had looked kind of skeptical, and for some reason he made me think of Mrs. Bates and her husband, and I threw an improvised line into my portion of the presentation that mentioned how our survey respondents were over sixty-five. “I don’t know. He was so stone-faced. It was hard to tell what he was thinking.”
We walk into the cafeteria and Sam waves us over, excitedly. “Jane did great!” he gushes, and Jane smiles a little, and shrugs, her cheeks reddening from the compliment. “I think she really impressed the judges when she explained how she optimized the back end.”
“Well...” Jane stammers, her cheeks still bright pink. “Sam and Hannah and Robert all did well, too. How did it go with the oral presentation judges?”
“Okay,” I say. “I think?”
George nods in agreement and adds, “Not bad.”
“Good effort all around,” Ms. Taylor says, walking over from behind Jane. “Now let’s get ready for the demonstration.” She checks her watch. “We have twenty minutes.”
* * *
The demonstration goes well, with every member of the club chiming in to explain what he or she worked on in the code, and then we take the bus back to Highbury with little fanfare. There are no award ceremonies at the regional competition. Ms. Taylor will get the results emailed soon.
She emails me and George that she has our scores by lunch the next day, and George and I call a quick meeting after school so we can