“I don’t know why you have to be so mean, Emma,” she cuts me off. She stands up, grabs her backpack. “I’m going home. I have a lot of homework, and you don’t need my help, anyway.”
“Hannah,” I protest. “Wait. I’m sorry. Come on. We’re working on the mechanical together.”
“No,” she says. “You’re working on the mechanical. You won’t even let me touch it.”
She has to walk past George to leave, and out of the corner of my eye I see him give her a hug, say something to her in a hushed tone. But I won’t let myself look over there; I won’t stare. I continue to work on the mechanical, concentrating very hard on the app screen on my phone, on the codebase running on my laptop, on typing out my justification for each line of code. If I concentrate on the code, I won’t cry. I can’t cry.
“Jeez, Emma.” George sits down in the chair next to me, where Hannah just left. His voice is soft, but he’s clearly annoyed. “What’s wrong with you?”
“Nothing’s wrong with me.” I snap at him, too. Though it feels like everything is wrong with me. My stomach still hurts and I’m starting to get a headache, and I still can’t look at George, see the way he’s hating me right now, because then I really will cry. I shouldn’t have snapped at Hannah like that, and I shouldn’t be snapping at George now, but I can’t stop myself, either. “We have work to do,” I finally say. “And I’m trying to focus. Everyone just...needs to focus.”
“You’re supposed to be mentoring her,” George says softly. “That’s our job as presidents. If we don’t help the underclassmen learn, what will the club be next year when we’re gone?”
“It won’t be our problem next year, will it?” I don’t really feel this way, of course. I want the club to do well next year because we’ve made it good this year, but I bite my lip, not willing to agree with George out loud right now, even if he is right.
He stands, looks around the room. “We’re supposed to be a team,” he says, quietly enough at first so only I can hear him. Then he raises his voice, says it again: “We are supposed to be a team!”
Robert looks up from what he’s doing, his focus on George. Sam and Jane glance at each other, then look back at what they were working on, like neither one of them wants to make eye contact with George.
Ms. Taylor pulls her glasses down the bridge of her nose, casts us all a worried look. “Maybe we all just need a little break,” she says. “Let’s go home, take a breath and we can finish what we need for the competition tomorrow.”
* * *
But it feels impossible to take a breath, and I can’t stop replaying what just happened in my head as I drive to the Villages. Even as I’m playing piano, I can’t relax into the music the way I usually do, instead letting the memorized patterns fall from my fingers by rote, my mind still spinning. I keep hearing George’s angry voice in my head: Jeez, Emma. What’s wrong with you? And the more I hear it, over and over and over again, the more it makes me want to cry. I don’t even want to be social like Izzy, and I don’t need friends like she does. But George. George is different. I need George. He can’t be mad at me.
“Emma!” A smiling Mrs. Bates walks up to me when I’m finished playing and am gathering up my things. “Guess what? Good news! Jack is coming home from the hospital tooo-morrow.” She touches my arm with her manicured red nails as she talks, drumming her fingers against my forearm, and I can feel her excitement in the jingle of her bracelets.
“I’m so happy he’s doing better,” I say, smiling back at her. I’m really not in any mood to chat today, but I am honestly happy for her that he’s better, that he can leave the hospital. Dad was in the hospital for one night and I felt sick over it. Mr. Bates has been there for weeks at this point.
She keeps her hand on my arm. “How’s your school project coming?” she asks kindly.
I shrug, unwilling to tell her that it’s kind of a disaster, that Jane and I are no longer speaking to one another, and Sam and I aren’t eating lunch together. I was mean to Hannah, and now even George is mad at me. The competition is only a few days away, and I feel nauseous even thinking about how we’re all going to work together.
She searches my face with her eyes. “That bad, huh?” I haven’t said anything out loud, so I guess my expression is that transparent. “There wasn’t any room for it in your survey, so I didn’t ever get to tell you how Jack and I fell in love, did I?” I shake my head. “You know I played piano once, but maybe you didn’t know that I went to Julliard?”
“Julliard? No, I didn’t know that.” So Mrs. Bates didn’t just play piano once, she must’ve been amazing at it.
She nods. “Jack was there, too, and the first three months we knew each other, we didn’t even speak. We were in the same classes, and he was a little miffed that a woman was getting all the accolades.” She chuckles a little, like she’s caught up in the memory. “Then our teacher assigned us to do a duet together at the winter recital, and we still didn’t speak. Not with words, anyway. We’d show up to practice together, sit down and get to work. But I’ll tell you, Emma, I fell in love with him that first time we played that duet together. The passion that he put into his playing.” She smiles and shakes her head a little, like she can still feel that passion, all these years later. “Well...I just knew he would have that same passion in the rest of his life.”
“Common interest,” I say. “That’s what we ranked highest from the survey results.”
“Yes, perhaps... But how to explain on your survey that I had classes with other men who played the piano...and none of them were Jack?”
“There are other variables, too,” I say. I suppose she and Mr. Bates had other things in common, that there are other ways to quantify their connection.
“But passion,” she says. “How do you count passion, Emma?”
I shake my head. I don’t know the answer to that.
“Anyway.” She waves her hand in the air and her bracelets jangle. “You looked upset so I thought you needed a pick-me-up. What I was trying to say was, thank you for coming to play for us every week. It means a lot to me, and it means a lot to Jack, too. His mind isn’t what it used to be, but the piano still makes both of us remember our passion. Makes us remember what it was like to fall in love all over again.”
Is passion quantifiable? Should I have figured out a way to include that in my algorithm? Is my algorithm wrong? “I feel like I messed everything up,” I say quietly. “Everyone hates me right now.”
She grabs me and holds on to me tightly in a hug. “Chin up, Emma. Chin up,” she says. “You’re a beautiful, smart, kind and talented girl. How could anyone possibly hate you?”