The Code for Love and Heartbreak - Jillian Cantor Page 0,83

want to cry. I don’t even want to be social like Izzy, and I don’t need friends like she does. But George. George is different. I need George. He can’t be mad at me.

“Emma!” A smiling Mrs. Bates walks up to me when I’m finished playing and am gathering up my things. “Guess what? Good news! Jack is coming home from the hospital tooo-morrow.” She touches my arm with her manicured red nails as she talks, drumming her fingers against my forearm, and I can feel her excitement in the jingle of her bracelets.

“I’m so happy he’s doing better,” I say, smiling back at her. I’m really not in any mood to chat today, but I am honestly happy for her that he’s better, that he can leave the hospital. Dad was in the hospital for one night and I felt sick over it. Mr. Bates has been there for weeks at this point.

She keeps her hand on my arm. “How’s your school project coming?” she asks kindly.

I shrug, unwilling to tell her that it’s kind of a disaster, that Jane and I are no longer speaking to one another, and Sam and I aren’t eating lunch together. I was mean to Hannah, and now even George is mad at me. The competition is only a few days away, and I feel nauseous even thinking about how we’re all going to work together.

She searches my face with her eyes. “That bad, huh?” I haven’t said anything out loud, so I guess my expression is that transparent. “There wasn’t any room for it in your survey, so I didn’t ever get to tell you how Jack and I fell in love, did I?” I shake my head. “You know I played piano once, but maybe you didn’t know that I went to Julliard?”

“Julliard? No, I didn’t know that.” So Mrs. Bates didn’t just play piano once, she must’ve been amazing at it.

She nods. “Jack was there, too, and the first three months we knew each other, we didn’t even speak. We were in the same classes, and he was a little miffed that a woman was getting all the accolades.” She chuckles a little, like she’s caught up in the memory. “Then our teacher assigned us to do a duet together at the winter recital, and we still didn’t speak. Not with words, anyway. We’d show up to practice together, sit down and get to work. But I’ll tell you, Emma, I fell in love with him that first time we played that duet together. The passion that he put into his playing.” She smiles and shakes her head a little, like she can still feel that passion, all these years later. “Well...I just knew he would have that same passion in the rest of his life.”

“Common interest,” I say. “That’s what we ranked highest from the survey results.”

“Yes, perhaps... But how to explain on your survey that I had classes with other men who played the piano...and none of them were Jack?”

“There are other variables, too,” I say. I suppose she and Mr. Bates had other things in common, that there are other ways to quantify their connection.

“But passion,” she says. “How do you count passion, Emma?”

I shake my head. I don’t know the answer to that.

“Anyway.” She waves her hand in the air and her bracelets jangle. “You looked upset so I thought you needed a pick-me-up. What I was trying to say was, thank you for coming to play for us every week. It means a lot to me, and it means a lot to Jack, too. His mind isn’t what it used to be, but the piano still makes both of us remember our passion. Makes us remember what it was like to fall in love all over again.”

Is passion quantifiable? Should I have figured out a way to include that in my algorithm? Is my algorithm wrong? “I feel like I messed everything up,” I say quietly. “Everyone hates me right now.”

She grabs me and holds on to me tightly in a hug. “Chin up, Emma. Chin up,” she says. “You’re a beautiful, smart, kind and talented girl. How could anyone possibly hate you?”

Chapter 30

As we’re all boarding the bus to Newark a few days later, I can still hear Mrs. Bates’s wobbly voice in my head reassuring me that no one could possibly hate me. Maybe I can just get on the bus, and put my chin up like Mrs. Bates says. I’m the