For once, I don’t care. I’m not thinking about numbers at all. I’m only thinking about George, and the feel of his lips on mine. And I don’t want to ever stop kissing him.
Six Months Later
“Em!” Izzy shouts my name from downstairs. “George is here.”
I’m in my bedroom organizing my suitcases, taking out some winter clothes in order to fit all my coding books. I’ll be back to visit Dad for a weekend before it gets too cold and I can always bring warmer clothes back to Pittsburgh with me then. I sit on the final suitcase to get it to close, then run down the steps.
George is sitting at the kitchen table talking to Izzy, but when I walk in, he stops talking, looks at me and smiles. We’ve been together since the night of the Valentine’s Day dance, but still, every time I see him, I feel the same unexplainable way I felt seeing him walk into the school that night. My heartbeat speeds up and my face grows warm. And it’s silly because he’s George, and I have seen him thousands of times in my life. But now that I understand the way he feels about me, and the way I feel about him, everything is different.
“Have fun, you two,” Izzy says. Her hair is up in twisty rollers. She and John have a date planned in the city tonight, before they head back to LA on the weekend. Dad is driving with me to Pittsburgh tomorrow, but he’ll fly back and be home in time to take Izzy to the airport to fly to LA on Sunday.
Numbers don’t lie, and George and I ended up tying for valedictorian, as we both had the same exact 3.99 GPA, in all the same honors and AP classes. Mr. Dodge called us into his office in May and said he wanted to find a way to break the tie. But I stood up and told him I thought George and I should be co-valedictorians. We were co-presidents of coding club, after all. Co-everything by the end of the year. It didn’t seem fair we had both worked so hard, both landed at number one in our class, only to have one of us be pushed to number two in some kind of random tiebreaker. It took some convincing—Mr. Dodge called it unconventional—but in the end, George and I gave the valedictorian speech together.
Still, Ms. Taylor was right that my statistical chances of getting into Stanford were low. In the end, I guess I was just another math brain in a sea of math brains—at least to Stanford. But I did get into Carnegie Mellon, and I got the scholarship Ms. Taylor found for me, for women in tech. When you do the math, CMU is just below Stanford in rankings for coding, and with the scholarship, I’ll be going there almost for free. Plus, Pittsburgh is only a five-hour car ride; I’m taking my car, and I’ll be able to come back and check on Dad on the weekend a few times a semester.
George got into the animation program both at CMU and at USC, and I thought for sure he’d go to LA with John and Izzy. But ultimately, he said LA was just too far for him. Whether he meant too far from Highbury, or from me, he didn’t clarify. But I’m so happy we’re both going to Pittsburgh together. I couldn’t imagine having to say goodbye to him, not seeing him every day, or only being able to FaceTime with him from across the country. Izzy keeps telling me that college is this big, amazing and overwhelming new world, and I’m glad I’ll have George there with me to navigate it.
“Emma.” George says my name again now. “You ready to go?” We’re supposed to meet Jane, Sam, Robert and Hannah at the diner for dinner to say goodbye before George and I are off to Pittsburgh tomorrow. Hannah has been away at camp all summer, and Sam was in Phoenix with his dad. So we haven’t all been together since the last weekend in May, when they came to watch me come in first place in my piano competition, and then we all went out to celebrate after.
“Yeah. I’m ready,” I say. Izzy grabs me for a quick hug, and I hug her back. After spending the whole summer with her, it’s not going to be any easier to say goodbye again tomorrow than it was last year. But I’ll see her again one more time in the morning before I leave. So I let her go now, and walk outside with George. I’m taking my car to Pittsburgh, and it’s partially packed, so George had offered to borrow his mom’s car and drive us to dinner.
“Hey,” George says once we’re out in the driveway, alone. He takes my hand and squeezes it. “I missed you.”
I laugh. “We saw each other last night.” George’s mom had a going-away party for him and John at their house, and George and I had another Ping-Pong rematch. I won again. And I’ll admit, it’s still satisfying to beat George, even now that we’re dating. But maybe not as satisfying as after I beat him, when we turned off the lights, shared a bean bag chair and lay next to each other, kissing for a long time. Until his mom noticed we were missing from the party and called up to ask where we were.
I smile again now, thinking about lying there with him, his lips on mine, and I stand up on my toes and give him another kiss. I feel his smile against my lips as he kisses me back. “We should go,” he says. “We’re going to be late.” But neither one of us moves.
Instead, George kisses me again. I kiss him back, and everything else disappears.
There’s no numbers, no math, no time. There’s only me and George, and this unquantifiable, beautiful feeling between us.
* * *