“You shouldn’t feel stupid. I know Phillip, too, and it never would’ve occurred to me, ever,” I say.
George looks up, cracks a small smile. He picks up my hand and squeezes it. “That’s because you’re such a good person, Emma, with such a kind heart.” I suddenly feel warm from his unexpected compliment, from his hand holding on to mine. “It would never even cross your mind to consider what Phillip and those guys might be doing. That’s why this is all on me.”
I squeeze his hand back. Maybe it doesn’t matter whose fault it is? “Our project is still very beta,” I tell him. “There’s mistakes, but we’re going to test and figure them out. We’ll fix it. Together, okay? We’re co-presidents, right?”
George doesn’t let go of my hand for another few seconds. And then once he does, he smiles at me, a real genuine smile, and he nods. For once, somehow, I’ve managed to say the right thing. And I walk into school feeling just a little bit lighter.
* * *
“I’ve designed a new survey,” Jane says after school at our emergency meeting. She opens up her laptop and sets it out on the table in front of all of us. “And after what happened with the cross-country team...well, I think I can fix things going forward.”
We’re all gathered in our normal Friday afternoon meeting space, except for Robert, who has marching band practice Mondays after school, and couldn’t make it.
I glance at Hannah as Jane is talking. Her hair is down today, and covering most of her face. She has her head down on the desk as she’s listening to Jane, and she either won’t or doesn’t want to look up to meet my eyes—all that’s visible is a sea of messy red curls. I look back toward Jane, and Ms. Taylor hovers over her screen, a worried look on her face, so I guess either Jane or George told her what happened at the dance.
“The survey is twofold.” Jane is still talking. “One, we get the user to enter his or her own likes and dislikes and sexual orientation to go into our database for matching. And two, it allows users to note any persons in the school who’ve exhibited past bad dating behavior. If a person gets more than one bad mark, we filter him or her out of the database for matching completely.”
No one says anything for a moment, and Jane’s words settle. Until Ms. Taylor says, “I don’t know, Jane. There’s a lot to unpack here. Bad dating behavior could constitute a lot of things. And we wouldn’t want anyone to be unfairly called out.”
Jane frowns, like she can’t believe Ms. Taylor would question her. I think about what George said this morning, how he knew that Phillip was a jerk and how he wishes he would’ve said something beforehand. If George knows, then other people know, and why shouldn’t that kind of information disqualify someone from getting one of our matches? It absolutely should. As much as Jane normally annoys me, this is a brilliant idea, and it will fix the problem we ran into this weekend.
“I don’t think anyone would be called out unfairly,” I say. Both Jane and Ms. Taylor turn to look at me, shocked expressions on their faces, like neither one of them can believe I’m defending Jane. “We’re never going to publish or announce the names of the people who are marked with bad behavior in the survey. We’ll simply exclude them from the database, so they’ll never come up as anyone’s match. And if one of them tries to make a match, they’ll get a response that no matches are found for them. No one will ever have to know why but us.”
“I don’t know...” Ms. Taylor still looks skeptical.
“Also,” Jane chimes in, “we’ll only do this if more than one person says someone has exhibited past bad dating behavior. So it would have to be something chronic. I think that’s more than fair.”
“I agree,” George chimes in. I meet his eyes across the room and offer him a smile.
“So do I,” Sam says quickly.
“Me, too,” Hannah says, lifting her head from the desk, looking at me for the first time. Her hair still covers her eyes so I can’t really see what she’s thinking, or how she’s feeling. But I remember the way she threw her head back and laughed Saturday night as she was dancing with Phillip and I feel a little sick to my stomach.
Ms. Taylor nods—she’s only our adviser, after all, and here we are, all agreeing with each other for once.
“Okay,” Jane says. “I’m going to set up a SurveyMonkey. Anyone in the school who wants to participate can take the survey, and then once enough people in the school take it, we can repopulate our database and try again.”
* * *
George is staying after the meeting to take down dance decorations and plans to take the late bus home—he’d signed up to volunteer to work toward his NHS service hours. I’d rather stab my eyes out than touch dance decorations—I always get my quarterly hours volunteering to play piano at the Villages, a local retirement home. So I’m walking out to the parking lot alone after the meeting when I hear Jane, calling after me.
I stop and turn. She’s running toward me, her silly lab coat flapping out behind her in the October wind. The air has finally turned and it’s chilly today, crisp, suddenly somewhere halfway between fall and winter, and I shiver a little, wishing I’d worn something heavier than a hoodie this morning.
“Thanks for backing me up in there,” she says, out of breath, when she finally catches up to me.
“Yeah,” I say. “I mean, it’s a really good idea. I’m glad you thought of it.”
“I know we’ve had our differences in the past, Emma. But I do really want to win the state competition this year. It’ll look great on my college applications, and next year I want to be president. So even though your app wasn’t my first choice, and even though Saturday was kind of a disaster—”
“Kind of?” I interrupt her, surprising us both, and we both laugh a little bit, which makes everything feel just a little easier between us for the first time.
“Well, even in spite of all that, I want this to work, to be the best it possibly can be. So, no hard feelings?”
She holds her hand out awkwardly, and I’m not sure if she wants to high-five me, or shake my hand, or wave. But she grabs my hand to shake, and it’s the first time I’ve ever really stood that close to her. Her lab coat sleeve shifts up a little bit, and then I notice it: the edge of a jagged pink line. A scar?
I’m about to ask her what happened, but then she seems to notice it, too. She quickly pulls her hand away, pulls her lab coat sleeves down and turns and runs off to her own car before I can say another word.
Chapter 13
At lunch the next day, Sam and I are eating and talking about music. He’s telling me about Laura’s solo in their upcoming choir concert. And I’m telling him about the piano piece Mrs. Howard has me working on for the New Jersey state competition in May that I also plan to perform today for the elderly residents of the Villages when I volunteer after school: Rachmaninoff’s Prelude #6.