“But you’ve never even had a boyfriend. How are you going to tell people who they should fall in love with? This could be a social disaster for you,” Izzy says, lowering her voice, casting her eyes downward.
“Iz, this has nothing to do with love,” I tell her in my most emphatic voice. “This is all about numbers. Writing an algorithm to match people. And besides, didn’t you tell me to be more social before you left?”
“Come on, Izzy. We’re gonna be late. She’ll be fine.” I hear John’s voice again, in the background. But Izzy doesn’t answer him. She stares at me through the screen, her eyes open wide. The picture is too blurry for me to see how deeply blue they are, but I know the color of my sister’s eyes by heart. I can’t remember our mother’s eyes, but I think about what our father said earlier, and I imagine now that they were something like Izzy’s.
Finally she blinks, looks down and, even across all these miles and through my tiny blurry screen, I can tell she feels guilty, like maybe for the first time she regrets leaving me. But not because she misses me, the way I miss her, but because she’s worried I’m not capable of navigating life on my own, without her.
* * *
I can’t sleep after Izzy and I hang up, and I watch my fan make shadows across the ceiling, counting the rotations of the four blades: four, eight, twelve, sixteen... Patterns soothe and relax me.
I was only three when Mom died, and by the time I was five, in kindergarten, Dad grew concerned about me. I didn’t have any friends, mainly, my kindergarten teacher Mrs. Jennings told Dad, because I refused to play with anyone. I was too busy, off by myself, memorizing the times tables on her math flash cards.
After Dad attended our spring conferences, he worried that maybe I wasn’t at the right school. He wanted to move me to a private school where class size is smaller, but Highbury Prep is so expensive, and his practice was just getting off the ground. There were bills from Mom’s death, and he couldn’t afford to do it.
But it wasn’t ever the public school that was the problem. What both Dad and Izzy never really got is that numbers are just so easy for me to understand. Mom’s death I could never comprehend. I still can’t. Even now. No matter how you look at it, it doesn’t make sense that a healthy thirty-three-year-old woman can go to sleep one night, and then not wake up ever again. Numbers behave the way you ask them to. Numbers have always made sense to me. People don’t.
“Maybe next year I can afford private school, Emma,” Dad had said to me after he got home from his conferences that spring. We were all sitting down on Mom’s new blue couches, Dad and me and Izzy. Izzy’s conference had, of course, gone off spectacularly. Izzy was a model student and every other child in first grade just adored her. Dad hugged us both tightly to him, then pulled back to look at us.
His eyes started watering, and he rubbed them behind his thick glasses. Izzy reached out and put her tiny hand on his shoulder. “It’s all right, Dad,” she told him then. “I’m going to take care of Emma at school. I promise. You don’t have to worry about paying for private school.”
And Izzy took that promise to heart, for years. She sat with me at lunch; she made sure I had a date for that dance. Izzy still spent nights and weekends with me even after she started dating John. Izzy had a lot of friends, and she always included me: to sit with them, to go to movies with them, to drive to school with them.
But her friends were never my friends. Her activities weren’t my activities. It was just me, tagging along. I think about John, hurrying her to get off FaceTime so they wouldn’t be late for whatever they had planned for their Friday night. And for the first time, it occurs to me that maybe I’m the reason Izzy went to UCLA.
Did Izzy need to put 2,764 miles between us just so she could finally feel free to break her promise to Dad? So she could exist without me?
And then, suddenly, it is very hard for me to breathe. I watch the fan turn and turn, and I count the rotations in my head, but it is impossible to fall asleep.
Chapter 6
I wake up early the next morning, having barely slept at all. I kept tossing and turning all night, half dreaming that Izzy was here, telling me I know nothing about love. At six a.m., I finally just get out of bed, still annoyed by my conversations with dream-Izzy, and my FaceTime late last night with real-Izzy.
I put on a pot of coffee for Dad, who I know will be up soon—he’s always an early riser, even on the weekends. I wait for the coffee to brew, take a cup for myself, filling it only halfway. I add milk for the other half and pour in a packet of powdered hot chocolate, stirring it with a spoon until it’s something like a mocha. Then I take it up to my room and sip it in my bed with my laptop, populating the rest of the database that Hannah and I started on last night.
It’s tedious work, going line by line, person by person, through the high school yearbook and Hannah’s old middle school yearbook (for the freshmen), entering all their clubs and interests, and any background, defining features or likes and dislikes I can gather, but a few hours, and two mochas, later, I have enough data in to run a test match for Hannah through my algorithm. Phillip Elton’s name comes back a few seconds later, at a ninety-six percent match, blinking on my screen in bold, a little like it’s taunting me.
Phillip is a senior, like me, and though we’re not in any classes together, I know him a little from the last two years when he was in coding club. He’s tall and orange-haired with freckles, an easy smile and a muscular build. He’s the kind of guy who cares way more about sports than math, but he’s also smart enough to realize he needed to balance his academic and athletic pursuits to get into a good college. As soon as junior year was over he dropped out of coding club, saying he wanted to focus on cross-country for senior year. George and I had rolled our eyes at each other when Ms. Taylor mentioned why he said he wouldn’t be coming back. We both knew he’d only joined the club to put it on his college application for those crucial junior year activities. But we hadn’t cared all that much to lose him, either—he’d contributed very little to the club, other than, last year, helping to build the basketball court for our robot, and researching famous basketball plays to program our robot to repeat. Mostly he pretended to code while watching YouTube videos at our meetings.
But I don’t necessarily dislike Phillip. When we came in third place at the state competition last year, he’d been genuinely upset like the rest of us at the loss. I really thought we’d take it, he said to me on the bus on the way back to Highbury from Rutgers.
He’d been sitting in the seat across from me, and he’d leaned across the aisle, looking pretty glum. I was sitting in a seat by myself, listening to an old Steve Jobs TED Talk, to try and calm myself down after our loss. I’d pulled an earbud out of my ear to talk to him for a second. “We’ll win next year,” I told him with a confidence I hadn’t yet felt.