I have a keyboard up in my room, but downstairs, in the living room with Mom’s worn blue couches, we also have Mom’s old upright oak piano. One of my only memories of her still is her sitting here, playing piano, me watching the concave shape of her back as she hovered over the keys. As a toddler, I was content to sit on the living room floor listening to her play, enchanted by her music. And even now, all these years later, it’s the one thing I do that makes me still feel connected to her. The one thing I know and understand about her that makes complete and total sense—Mom loved the piano, she was good at the piano. Just like me.
After I make my way through the scales, and I can breathe a little easier, I turn back to the Rachmaninoff. I go through it again, more slowly. I stumble still, but now on the second pass through, the notes make more sense, feel more formulaic than they had at first glance at Mrs. Howard’s earlier. Maybe Mrs. Howard is right, that in a few months I’ll get this down perfectly.
I hear the doorbell ring, and I lift my fingers from the keys, and go to answer it. Sam is standing on the porch. “I heard you playing,” he says, walking inside. “You’re really good, aren’t you, E?”
My face warms with his compliment, but I answer him truthfully. “Yes, I came in first in the state competition last year.”
“Why am I not surprised?” He smiles. “I took lessons for a few years in Phoenix, but my right hand and left hand don’t like to work together. My vocal chords are luckily more cooperative.”
I don’t like to sing. I can do it. I have good pitch, but I find the whole thing unenjoyable and stress inducing. I suddenly want to hear Sam sing, but I don’t know if it’s the right time to ask him to. He’s here to work on our project, so instead I invite him to come into the kitchen, grabbing my laptop on the way and bringing it to the table with me. I open up my Excel file to the database along with my flowchart software for the algorithm.
Sam looks at my screen, and his eyes widen. “You’re going to have to explain this to me. It looks much more complicated than anything we ever worked with at my old school.”
“It’s not complicated at all,” I say. “Actually, everything is very basic right now.” He frowns, and I’m worried I said the wrong thing. The level we’re at now really is beginner stuff: a spreadsheet and a flowchart. But I didn’t mean any of that in a negative way toward him. “I mean...I can show you all this pretty quickly. You’ll get it really fast...” I stumble over my words the way I just stumbled over the Rachmaninoff, wanting so badly to say the right thing to Sam. I want to see him smile at me again.
He does, and I exhale a little. “I really want to learn what all this is. Thank you for teaching me, E.” His stomach rumbles, a low growl, and he laughs and puts his hand on it. “Sorry. Guess I’m hungry.”
“We can order a pizza,” I suggest. “Eat dinner and work at the same time?”
“Yeah? Pizza sounds great.”
I grab my phone and open the Giuseppe’s app to order. The last time I ordered pizza I must’ve been with George because it asks me if I want to reorder a half pepperoni, half mushroom and olives. “How do you feel about mushroom and olives?” I ask Sam tentatively, waiting for him to tell me how gross it is the way George always does. Agree to disagree, I hear George’s voice in my head.
But instead Sam says, “Sure, sounds great. I love mushrooms and olives.”
“Of course you do,” I say, clicking to update my order. “Because you’re smart like me.”
He laughs and points back to my screen. “I don’t know about that, E.”
“I do,” I tell him. “I’ll explain this to you and you’ll have everything figured out before the pizza even gets here.”
* * *
By Friday afternoon, we’ve made matches for four more of Phillip’s friends on the cross-country team, and one for Jenny Hampton’s friend Ellie. I update everyone at our meeting—we have ten couples matched for the dance now, including Hannah and Phillip and Sam and Laura.
“Okay,” George says. “The dance is tomorrow night. Let’s stop matching couples for now. Hannah, Sam and Robert, I want you to finish getting our application done for the state competition and get it submitted today with Ms. Taylor. And Jane, Emma and I will start working on improving our algorithm and database, and turning this into an app.”
I’d brought all my work in on a thumb drive, and Jane is already scanning through my Excel file on her laptop. I watch her scroll, then jot something down, then scroll some more. The lab coat she’s wearing today is embroidered in purple stitching around the cuffs of her sleeves, and I wonder if she did the stitching herself, if she knows how to sew?
“If we’re going to make this user-driven,” Jane says, and I blink my attention away from her lab coat, back to what she’s saying, “we need a different way to populate the database other than us entering information from the yearbook.”
She’s right. “What are you thinking?” I ask her.
“Well...” She chews on the end of her pen. “I can set up a skim for socials. But I also think we should start with a survey, so everyone who wants to participate can enter their own information, too. You’re relying on yearbook and social media profiles now to determine people’s interests and their sexual orientation, but I think people need to be able to input their own preferences. It’ll be more accurate.”
“Good point, Jane,” Ms. Taylor says from across the room.
I nod, agreeing with everything she’s saying now, and I tell her if she works on designing the survey, I can start working on code in Swift.
George pulls out his own thumb drive, and shows us the animations he’s been working on this week in Blender. He’s taken the cute googly-eyed face he’d designed for Karma Can and put it onto a yellow heart that he’s also given arms and legs. “I made it yellow to keep it gender neutral,” George explains. “I’m thinking this can be our icon, and I can also animate it to guide people through the app. What do you think?” He’s asking everyone, but his eyes fall on me, like my approval is what he really cares about.
“I think it’s perfect,” I tell him. He smiles at me, and his face relaxes.
“Oh, and—” Ms. Taylor interjects from where she’s working with Hannah across the room. “We need a better name to go on the application.” She turns to look at me now, too, like she thinks I might be upset, but I’m not.
“Of course,” I say. “Something with the word code actually in it.”
Ms. Taylor nods and explains for Sam, Hannah and Robert. Every year, people always try and use the word code in the title of their project in some way. Last year our title was Code Layup, having to do with some basketball term Brian and Daniel liked.