“George! Emma! Dinner,” Mrs. Knightley calls us from downstairs. George quickly drops my hand, and as I follow him down the steps, my fingers are still warm and tingling. I ball my hand into a fist, trying to fight back the weird feeling of wanting just another moment, alone, standing there like that with him.
Chapter 20
Jane and Sam and I are sitting near each other on the bus ride to Princeton the following Tuesday afternoon, and Sam is showing the two of us photos on his phone from his Thanksgiving trip back to Phoenix. He slides through mountains and sunsets and tall-armed cacti and then a huge Thanksgiving turkey on a platter, which I have to look away from, as I think about that poor beautiful bird who was murdered. But Jane is really interested, asking questions about the desert biome and climate in Phoenix. I tune them both out and look through my notecards again, rehearsing my presentation one more time in my head.
“Hey, Emma.” George says my name and touches me on the shoulder. I remember the way his hand had lingered on mine on Thanksgiving and I close my eyes for a second.
He and Hannah were sitting a few rows back when I’d gotten on the bus, but he must’ve moved up to the seat behind me while I was listening to Sam and looking at my notecards and I didn’t notice. He leans over the seat now. “You ready?” He moves his hand, and I reach up to rub the warmth away from my shoulder.
“As ready as I’ll ever be, I guess?” I say.
George shoots me an empathetic smile. “It’s just regionals. All we have to do is score in the top five to go on. We’ll be fine.”
I nod. I know all that. There’s only one other high school in our region that even has a serious coding club like we do. And in all our years participating, we’ve never scored lower than third in the region, and that year, when George and I were freshmen, the president really bombed our oral presentation, and our project, coding solar energy, was kind of lame and poorly coded. Still, I’ve never been responsible for part of the oral presentation before, and I don’t want to be the one to mess it up.
“George!” Hannah’s red head bops up from four rows back. “I want to show you something funny!”
George gives me an apologetic shrug, and moves back to his seat with Hannah. “They’re good together,” Jane says.
I guess she and Sam are done discussing the desert, because now he has his head against his seat, eyes closed, headphones on. I didn’t realize Jane had been paying attention to George, and I turn back around to face her. “Really? You think so?”
Liz and Mara just seem to fit together when I see them walking down the hallways holding hands—they look like a couple, but when I look at George and Hannah, I still see them as George...and Hannah. And it bothers me that they’ve paired off in coding club, that they’re together right now, when I wish George were up here, acting like a co-president, going over our presentation with me.
“It’s nice to see George look so happy,” Jane is saying now.
Does he look happy? Happier than usual? I try and turn around again, but all I can see from here are the tops of their heads—bright red and sandy blond. The sounds of Hannah’s laugh float across the bus, and I wonder what funny thing she’s showing George and whether or not he actually thinks it’s funny, too. I wait for it, but I don’t hear him laugh, and it feels like this tiny bit of proof that Jane is wrong about him, that George isn’t happier with Hannah at all.
* * *
The oral presentation is first on our schedule at 9:50 a.m., and George and I go into a classroom to present to the judges, while the rest of the team stays behind in the cafeteria to show off the trifold we made to represent the app’s features. Later this morning, we’ll have a team demonstration of the actual app to a different panel of judges.
George and I make it through the oral presentation without any mishaps, both of us reciting the speeches we’d rehearsed. My portion of the speech is in technical terms, about how we coded the app, and George’s is about the results and how the app has helped people in our high school. As we leave the room together, we both sigh with relief at the same time. George laughs at our simultaneous sighing, and so do I. There it is, I think. George’s laughter. Coding club is what makes him happy. Winning will make him even happier.
“What do you think the judges thought?” George asks me as we walk back to the cafeteria to find the rest of our team. “It was hard to read their faces,” he says. “But I thought that one old guy looked unimpressed.”
I know exactly which guy George means, as there were only three judges in the room: one was a woman, and the third was a younger man. The older man had looked kind of skeptical, and for some reason he made me think of Mrs. Bates and her husband, and I threw an improvised line into my portion of the presentation that mentioned how our survey respondents were over sixty-five. “I don’t know. He was so stone-faced. It was hard to tell what he was thinking.”
We walk into the cafeteria and Sam waves us over, excitedly. “Jane did great!” he gushes, and Jane smiles a little, and shrugs, her cheeks reddening from the compliment. “I think she really impressed the judges when she explained how she optimized the back end.”
“Well...” Jane stammers, her cheeks still bright pink. “Sam and Hannah and Robert all did well, too. How did it go with the oral presentation judges?”
“Okay,” I say. “I think?”
George nods in agreement and adds, “Not bad.”
“Good effort all around,” Ms. Taylor says, walking over from behind Jane. “Now let’s get ready for the demonstration.” She checks her watch. “We have twenty minutes.”
* * *
The demonstration goes well, with every member of the club chiming in to explain what he or she worked on in the code, and then we take the bus back to Highbury with little fanfare. There are no award ceremonies at the regional competition. Ms. Taylor will get the results emailed soon.
She emails me and George that she has our scores by lunch the next day, and George and I call a quick meeting after school so we can see the score sheets and figure out how to proceed. My heart pounds wildly in my chest as we walk into the room after school and she waves the score sheets in the air. “Second place,” Ms. Taylor says, smiling.
Second. I feel my face fall; my stomach drops a little.
“Not bad,” George says, his voice calm, even, and I glance at him. He’s not smiling or frowning, just looking normal, like George. He catches my eye and shrugs a little and it makes me think that, inside, we’re both feeling the same way.
It’s fine. We still advance to the state competition in February. But I can’t help but feel disappointed. Last year we came in first in the region, and I always thought during my senior year—my co-presidency—that we would be first, too. This also means we have a lot of work to do in the next few months if we want to have any chance at winning states and advancing to nationals.