The Code for Love and Heartbreak - Jillian Cantor Page 0,82
texted me last night?
And did I tell you what he said to me last week?
George, George, George, George, George...
I think of George, handing me a cup of hot chocolate overflowing with marshmallows. George saying to me, What about you, Emma? Haven’t you ever felt something that can’t be quantified?
“Hannah, stop!” I snap at her. My words fall out angry and loud, and weirdly feel out of my control. “George doesn’t even really believe that math can predict love, okay?” I say. “And he’s not talking about you like this. You’re embarrassing yourself.”
I’m not sure when he walks in exactly, but as soon as I’m done with my outburst, I look up, and there George is, standing in the doorway, frowning. He stares at me: hurt, or disappointed, or just angry. I don’t want to look at him. I can’t look at him. So I turn away, back to Hannah.
Her face is bright red, and she scrunches up her cheeks like she’s trying not to cry. Everything I said to her rattles around in my brain and feels like a punch in my stomach, and then I want to cry, too. “Hannah,” I say softly. “I didn’t—”
“I don’t know why you have to be so mean, Emma,” she cuts me off. She stands up, grabs her backpack. “I’m going home. I have a lot of homework, and you don’t need my help, anyway.”
“Hannah,” I protest. “Wait. I’m sorry. Come on. We’re working on the mechanical together.”
“No,” she says. “You’re working on the mechanical. You won’t even let me touch it.”
She has to walk past George to leave, and out of the corner of my eye I see him give her a hug, say something to her in a hushed tone. But I won’t let myself look over there; I won’t stare. I continue to work on the mechanical, concentrating very hard on the app screen on my phone, on the codebase running on my laptop, on typing out my justification for each line of code. If I concentrate on the code, I won’t cry. I can’t cry.
“Jeez, Emma.” George sits down in the chair next to me, where Hannah just left. His voice is soft, but he’s clearly annoyed. “What’s wrong with you?”
“Nothing’s wrong with me.” I snap at him, too. Though it feels like everything is wrong with me. My stomach still hurts and I’m starting to get a headache, and I still can’t look at George, see the way he’s hating me right now, because then I really will cry. I shouldn’t have snapped at Hannah like that, and I shouldn’t be snapping at George now, but I can’t stop myself, either. “We have work to do,” I finally say. “And I’m trying to focus. Everyone just...needs to focus.”
“You’re supposed to be mentoring her,” George says softly. “That’s our job as presidents. If we don’t help the underclassmen learn, what will the club be next year when we’re gone?”
“It won’t be our problem next year, will it?” I don’t really feel this way, of course. I want the club to do well next year because we’ve made it good this year, but I bite my lip, not willing to agree with George out loud right now, even if he is right.
He stands, looks around the room. “We’re supposed to be a team,” he says, quietly enough at first so only I can hear him. Then he raises his voice, says it again: “We are supposed to be a team!”
Robert looks up from what he’s doing, his focus on George. Sam and Jane glance at each other, then look back at what they were working on, like neither one of them wants to make eye contact with George.
Ms. Taylor pulls her glasses down the bridge of her nose, casts us all a worried look. “Maybe we all just need a little break,” she says. “Let’s go home, take a breath and we can finish what we need for the competition tomorrow.”
* * *
But it feels impossible to take a breath, and I can’t stop replaying what just happened in my head as I drive to the Villages. Even as I’m playing piano, I can’t relax into the music the way I usually do, instead letting the memorized patterns fall from my fingers by rote, my mind still spinning. I keep hearing George’s angry voice in my head: Jeez, Emma. What’s wrong with you? And the more I hear it, over and over and over again, the more it makes me