The Code for Love and Heartbreak - Jillian Cantor Page 0,77
a while now. Of course they’re doing more than holding hands. I don’t want to think about it. I shake the thought away. Why do I even care? But also, ugh. “Okay,” George is saying. “So it needs a better name. But consider the idea.”
I close my eyes for a second, push myself to focus, to stop thinking about George and Hannah like that. Together. But now I can’t get the awful image out of my head. Plan B. Focus. Focus. “Mathematically how does that make sense? And the competition is a little over two weeks away,” I add. “I don’t know if we should change anything at this point...”
“Second chance,” Robert offers. We all look at him, surprised because he still barely speaks up at these meetings. “That would be a way better name than Plan B. We can have a second chance screen for people whose first match didn’t work out for whatever reason.”
“Yes,” Hannah agrees with him. “I like that. And what if one person is a 96 percent match and someone else is a 95.4 percent match? That would almost be statistically equal, right Emma? Jane?”
I hold up my hands, and give Jane a look, like she should try and convince everyone because I don’t think I can convince them to listen to me over George on this. “I agree with Emma,” Jane says. “I just don’t think we should reinvent the wheel this close to states.”
“Only one new screen,” George says quickly. “I already have the bugs mostly worked out. So we’re really not reinventing anything.”
“I’m with George,” Sam finally speaks up. He offers me and Jane an apologetic smile.
“I’m still worried this will hurt us more than help us,” I say, one final plea. “It almost feels like we’re betting against our own hypothesis, saying our math is wrong.”
But no one is still listening to me but Jane, who offers me a shrug, as if to say, What can we do? We’re outvoted. Everyone else is commenting on the design of the new screen, brainstorming ideas for how to integrate George’s animated hearts. I guess we’re moving ahead to states with a “second chance” screen in place.
Chapter 28
Dad always likes to say that hindsight is 20/20.
Izzy used to make fun of him because he would say it so much when we were little, any time one of us would talk about something that upset us, or that we wished we’d done differently. Hindsight is 20/20, Dad said with a shrug. He still says it from time to time.
Dad, Izzy would always say, if you pay attention, you know things way before hindsight.
But for people like Dad, and me, people who don’t always pay attention, or even understand how to pay attention, I guess Dad’s expression makes a lot of sense.
It’s snowing when George and I walk out to the parking lot after coding club the first Friday in February. We finished adding the second chance screen to the app earlier this week. George animated it with two upside-down hearts holding hands, which I do think looks cute despite my reservations about the change. And we now have the latest beta version running on 187 students’ phones. So far, according to Jane, Alyssa is the first and only one to make a match with the second chance screen. And now she’s going to the Valentine’s Day dance with Anderson Adams, whom she matches at only ninety-one percent but whom she describes, when Jane asks her, as so, so nice.
All in all, I’m feeling pretty good about things as we walk out of the meeting. States is next week, but we’re close to ready other than working out the last-minute presentation and technical details, and I don’t think the second chance screen data will mess us up too much if only one person has used it.
The snow is already dusting the parking lot, making the world around us white and blinding. Flakes swirl in the air, hit our faces as we walk toward my car. George sticks out his tongue to catch one, and I laugh and remind him about what we learned in chemistry last year about acid snow.
“Oh, shoot,” George suddenly says, and I think he’s responding to my comment about the snow until he continues, adding, “I forgot my PE clothes in my PE locker. I want to wash them over the weekend. Do you mind if I go over there really quick?”
I nod. I don’t mind. There’s actually something weirdly nice