The Code for Love and Heartbreak - Jillian Cantor Page 0,7
time.”
“Okay, that’s a made-up statistic.” George knows that irritates me more than almost anything: numbers are facts, right and wrong. I can’t tolerate it when people just make up statistics for emphasis. He shrugs a little, and I push my annoyance aside to tell him my idea. “What if we make our own?” I say. “For coding club.”
He laughs, unbuckles his seat belt and grabs his bag. “You’re joking, right?”
“No, I mean it. But not a dating app, necessarily. More...a matching app. We could figure out the algorithm for falling in love. Who’s supposed to be dating at our school and who shouldn’t be, based on a mathematical equation. And we start with Ms. Taylor and Mr. Weston.”
He opens the car door. “Okay, now you’re being ridiculous.”
“But remember when you said I would come up with a unique idea because I’m me. Maybe this is it?”
“This is definitely not it.” He gets out, shuts the door and waves goodbye before he walks up the driveway. He either thinks I’m joking or just plain crazy. My face burns bright red with annoyance, or is it embarrassment now? Definitely not it. What does he know?
As I watch him walk inside his house and shut the door, the idea bellows bigger in my head: loud and important and exciting. I feel a thrumming in my chest, and maybe the heat on my cheeks isn’t annoyance at all, but excitement.
This, I think, as I drive toward my dark, empty house, could be the answer to everything.
* * *
Since Izzy left, dinner has been up to me. It’s not that Dad expects me to cook for him or even that he asks me to. It’s just that when I don’t, we end up eating cereal or frozen pizzas for dinner, and there are only so many nights in a row you can exist on that stuff. Dad needs healthy food, too. His weight has crept up in the last few years, and I don’t even want to know what he orders for lunch at work, so I don’t ask. I worry a lot about what he’ll eat next year when I’m gone.
But tonight, I just resign myself to a frozen pizza later with Dad. As soon as I get home, I go up to my room and sit on my bed with my laptop. George’s words about me being ridiculous echo in my head. But I push them away. When have I ever cared what anyone has thought? Why should I start now?
What makes two people compatible? I type at the top of a blank document, and then I watch the cursor blink at me for a little while, not really sure of the answer.
I’ve never had a boyfriend. I’ve only had one kiss, at the fall dance in tenth grade when I let Izzy talk me into going with Richard Hall, one of her friends from drama club. Richard and I had slow-danced, and at the end of the song, and much to my surprise, he’d leaned down and kissed me on the lips. But Richard’s kiss hadn’t made me feel anything, other than the urge to count in my head how many seconds it was lasting, how many microbes might live in his saliva, how fast they might multiply in my mouth and also how long it would be until I could make it home and swish with Listerine. Izzy told me that was only because Richard wasn’t the right guy for me.
She and John started dating after they were cast as Romeo and Juliet in the school play when they were in eleventh grade. It wouldn’t surprise me if someday they got married, even though statistically that is very rare for couples who meet so young. But Izzy and John are special. They just...work. Why?
They both love movies, and not the new ones, either, which John calls sellouts, but those crackly black-and-white ones that they’d go see at film festivals in Brooklyn or they’d curl up and watch on AMC on our couch. Sometimes I’d sit on the love seat to watch with them; I’d fallen asleep more Sunday afternoons than I could remember, Izzy and John’s voices buzzing with excitement in the background as they would discuss what they loved about the movie afterward.
Common interests/hobbies, I type at the top of my brainstorming document.
But then I feel stuck, so I do a Google search and find that there have been scientific studies that show people are attracted to people who look