The Code for Love and Heartbreak - Jillian Cantor Page 0,90
is broken, and even numbers and piano can’t soothe me.
* * *
My phone chimes with a FaceTime from Izzy, and I hesitate before I answer, not ready to face her. But I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised, either. It’s after three now; I haven’t gone downstairs all day. Dad must’ve put her up to this.
I reluctantly accept her call. “Hey, Iz.”
“What’s going on with your hair?” she says right away. I reach my hand up, pull my hair into an awkward ponytail in my fist. “Are you still in bed?”
I ignore her questions. “What’s going on? How are you?”
“What’s going on with you?” she says. “I called to see how your app competition was yesterday.”
“We came in second,” I say. “So we don’t get to move on to nationals.”
She shrugs. “Bummer, Em. But second is good! And you still have the dance tonight. Are you excited?”
I forgot I’d told her a few weeks ago that coding club was all going as a group. I haven’t talked to her in over a week, so I haven’t updated her on the fact that the whole club hates me now. “I’m not going,” I say.
“What?” she squeals. “Why not?”
I reluctantly tell her what’s happened, starting with how I freaked out when I saw Jane and Sam kissing and ending with how we lost yesterday and George stormed out of my car. “This is all your fault, you know,” I say. My voice shakes by the time I get to this part, and I feel so angry with her I can’t control my tone. Or maybe, it’s that I’m angry with myself, for listening to her.
“Me?” She widens her eyes, confused.
“You were the one who told me to code a boyfriend before you left for school. You gave me the idea for this whole thing. You told me to be more social this year without you.”
She frowns and rubs her forehead. “Oh, Em,” she says. “That’s not what I meant at all.”
“Great. So, now I’m back where I started,” I tell her. “No friends.” Actually, it feels much worse than where I started, because now that I’ve had friends, it feels harder not to have them again. I have this dull ache of loneliness in my chest. I’ve always been fine keeping to myself, being alone, and now I’m not so sure. I feel weirdly empty.
Izzy shakes her head. “So...you were a little mean. Go apologize. That’s what friends do. Sometimes they fight, but then they make up. You can fix this, Em.”
“Me? But what about Jane and Sam?”
“You’re mad at them...because they like each other?” Izzy frowns.
“They’re not supposed to like each other, mathematically. It’s like they were sabotaging everything we worked for with our app.”
“But your competition is over now, right?” Izzy asks. I nod. “So who cares what the app says? Jeez, Em, go take a shower, get a dress from my closet and go to that dance and apologize to your friends.”
She makes it sound so easy, like I can fix everything. But what she said is at least partly right. The competition is over. We lost. And it’s almost the end of my senior year. Coding club is done for me, forever. That’s what George was trying to say to me yesterday in the car, isn’t it?
Numbers are still better than people. Some people. But not Izzy, never Izzy. And not Jane. Or Sam. Or Hannah. Or George. Definitely not George.
“I don’t know, Iz,” I finally say. “What if they won’t forgive me? Especially George. He looked really mad when he got out of the car yesterday.”
“Em.” Izzy sighs so loud it’s almost like I’m hearing her from 2,764 miles away, her frustration bouncing across all those miles and not just coming through the speaker in my phone. “George will forgive you.”
I remember what she’d said about George over Christmas break. That she’d based her assumption on this ridiculous idea that she could tell his feelings simply by the way he looked at me. “He’s dating Hannah,” I remind her.
“He might be dating Hannah, but only because of the silly app you guys made,” Izzy says.
But I think about the way they were holding hands at the competition yesterday, the way George convinced the judges how great our app was by using her as an example, and I tell Izzy she’s wrong. That with all the miles between us, she really doesn’t see what’s going on the way I do.