“Where are you going tonight? You said you’re going out?” I honestly don’t care where she’s going, but I’d much rather talk about that than have her bug me about my project, or my social life, or lack thereof, again.
“John and I are going to this film festival in Hollywood. It’s all films from the ’20s and you have to dress like the era. I got this really cute flapper dress...”
She’s still talking but I’m not really listening. At the mention of her flapper dress, I remember again about all the dresses she left here in her closet and Hannah needing one for the dance. “Hey,” I interrupt her. “Speaking of dresses. Is it okay if Hannah borrows one of yours for the fall formal?”
“Okay, wait. Back up. One, who’s Hannah? And two, YOU ARE GOING TO THE FALL FORMAL?” She holds the phone so close to her face I see a blur of green and the white pearls of her teeth.
“Hannah’s a friend from coding club,” I say vaguely, not wanting to get into it again with Izzy about my app. “She needs a dress. And I’m not going, she’s going.”
Izzy pulls the phone back again, and now she’s frowning. “Okay, I’ll make a deal with you, Em. Your friend can borrow any dress she wants, as long as you borrow one and go to the dance, too.”
I have no desire to go to the dance, and normally I wouldn’t lie to Izzy. I’d just tell her the truth. But she’s so far away, and I’m still kind of annoyed with her. “Okay,” I tell her. “Fine.” Just to get her off my back.
When we hang up, I feel a little pang of guilt. I’m not actually going to borrow a dress, or go to the dance. And I’m sure George will update John and he’ll tell Izzy, and in a few weeks from now, she’ll FaceTime me with her disappointed face, which is way scarier than her green, gooey face-mask face. But I push that out of my mind for now and I text Hannah and ask her if she wants to come over and look through Izzy’s closet tomorrow.
* * *
Dad shoots me a quizzical look when the doorbell rings the next afternoon, and I jump up quickly from eating the grilled cheese sandwiches I’d made for our lunch to answer it.
“You’re expecting someone?” Dad asks, raising his eyebrows, finishing off his sandwich in one large bite.
“Yeah, some people from coding club,” I say. Hannah is coming for the dress, Sam to work on his own profile in my Excel file.
“George?” Dad asks, sounding hopeful. George follows baseball and so does Dad, and every time they see each other, Dad likes to talk about some play or another with him, and George likes to show off all the stats he knows, and Dad gets all excited about that. Which, from a mathematical perspective, I guess I can kind of understand why George cares about that. But in my opinion, actually watching baseball is pretty much like watching grass grow.
I shake my head. “Not George.” Dad looks vaguely disappointed, and I’m certainly not about to tell him that George is currently not even talking to me. So I leave him in the kitchen and go answer the door. Hannah and Sam are both standing out on the porch, having been dropped off at almost the exact same time.
Dad has walked out to the foyer, too, and looks with interest.
“This is Hannah,” I tell Dad as I usher them inside. “And Sam.”
I’m worried he’ll ask them if they watch baseball. But he doesn’t. “Nice to meet you both,” Dad says. Then he adds, “I have to go into work for a few hours, Em.” He kisses me on the forehead, then turns back to look at all three of us. “No wild parties, kids. Okay?” He laughs a little.
“Don’t worry, Mr. Woodhouse,” Hannah says. Her hair is crazy today, nearly covering her eyes, so maybe she doesn’t get that Dad is just being Dad...joking. He winks at me, and walks toward his office to gather his things. I roll my eyes back in response.
“Come on, let’s go upstairs,” I say, and motion for them both to follow me. Dad’s words are still resonating a little guiltily in my ears as I walk up the steps.
One time, when Izzy was a junior and Dad went away for a few days for a trial in Boston, she actually threw a wild party. It was supposed to be small, just a few friends. But before she knew it, it got out of hand, and there were twenty kids in our house. They were making so much noise, and someone had brought a water bottle filled with some kind of alcohol and they were passing it around. I’d sworn to Izzy beforehand I wouldn’t tell Dad no matter what, so I’d sat on the floor in our upstairs bathroom, clutching my phone, worrying the police were about to come, we were all about to be arrested and all my hopes of Stanford would be ruined. I tried to block out the noise, to pretend I could be anywhere else but here. Sometime after midnight, I’d heard a lamp crashing to the living room floor below me, and I’d been so tempted to text Dad, but instead I’d texted George.
Ten minutes later, he and his mom were at our house, ushering everyone out and home and then they helped me and Izzy and John clean up.
“You can’t tell my dad,” Izzy had implored John and George’s mom, and she had frowned and said only if Izzy and John promised to never do anything that stupid again. They swore to her they wouldn’t and, to this day, Dad still doesn’t know about it.
We walk inside Izzy’s room now, and I haven’t been inside it since she left. It’s dark and smells a little dusty. But I flip on the light, and everything is exactly as it was the morning she left me. I inhale deeply and catch just the slightest whiff of her strawberry shampoo. It makes me miss her, even though I wish it didn’t.
“Take whatever you want from the closet,” I tell Hannah, pointing to the walk-in on the left side of the room. “And bathroom’s right there if you want to try anything on.”
“Are you sure?” Hannah asks me, her eyes wide.
“I asked Izzy last night and she said it was fine.” I leave out the part about how I promised to take a dress, too. Hannah hesitates for another second, but then walks into the closet and turns on the light.
I sit down on the floor, my back against Izzy’s queen bed. Sam sits down next to me and I open my laptop to my Excel file database, his empty entry blinking in front of me. “Here you go.” I hand my laptop to him. “Fill your information in.” I know my database is still rudimentary. That if we move forward with the project, we will need more categories, better information and more trial and error on the algorithm. And Sam is not the only new kid this year, of course. But for now, I can make a match for Sam based on this.
I look over his shoulder as he types in his interests, and see he’s in choir, he plays volleyball and that he’s bilingual, fluent in Spanish. I’m not sure why, but each one of those things surprise me about him in a different and weirdly disappointing way. Because I already know as I look over his shoulder those interests don’t really match mine (piano, math, coding), or only in the smallest way, if you’re counting music as an interest in the vaguest sense. I still have physical features weighted fairly high, too. My hair is blond, my eyes blue. And Sam has deep green eyes and tar-black hair. Though we are about the same height...