The Meet-Cute Project

by Rhiannon Richardson

“I mean, are you okay?” I ask Sam.

  “Yeah,” Sam says. “It was more of a minor emergency, and we figured it out anyways.”

  “What did you figure out? Your texts were cryptic.”

  Sam sighs before saying, “Kevin isn’t coming to the wedding.”

  Kevin who? Sam stares at me, waiting for a reaction, so I try to remember who he is.

  Kevin. Kevin. Kevin?…

  “Geoffrey’s college roommate?” I ask.

  “You mean your groomsman? Your date to the wedding!”

  His face flashes through my mind. I met him in passing when we were helping Sam move out of her dorm after graduation.

  Kevin Krox—or “Krotch,” as those who witnessed him drunkenly pee in one of the campus hallways liked to call him—was Geoffrey’s roommate and track teammate and, after living in such close quarters for the most stressful years of their lives, best friend. Other than practices and occasional online gaming, the two barely have anything in common. But they were there for each other when Kevin became Kevin Krotch and when Geoffrey was working up the courage to ask Sam on a date.

  “I’m surprised you’re not as shocked as I am,” Sam says before tossing another torn-off piece of bagel into her mouth.

  “Why isn’t Kevin coming to the wedding?”

  “He got accepted to this literature program at Cambridge, and he starts in November. So, we’re happy for him,” she says unconvincingly. “But that leaves you without a date, which was a disaster—”

  “At first,” Brooke cuts in. “But then we found a workable solution.”

  When no one immediately offers it up, I feel nervous. Sam always drags out bad news. I ask, “What’s the solution?”

  “You can find your own date,” Sam says, beaming.

  “What?” I ask, figuring I didn’t hear her correctly. I think what she means is, You don’t have to have a date.

  “You can find your own date. That way you’ll be more comfortable with someone you know. You weren’t excited about Kevin from the beginning, so look at this like a good thing. It’s an opportunity for you to find someone perfect for you.”

  “Why can’t I just go without a date?” I ask the—in my opinion—obvious question.

  “No, Mia, that won’t work.”

  “Why not?” I ask. This isn’t the same as Sam asking me to run errands for her so she can sit at home and write in her little color-coded planner all day. This is asking me to go far out of my way to do something she and Geoffrey should figure out together.

  Sam takes me by the shoulders and looks me dead in the eyes. It makes me uncomfortable, and she knows that. Nevertheless, I’m afraid she’s about to shake me like I’m the one being crazy.

  “You’re not going to my wedding alone. All the photos will be uneven. It would look weird if you walk down the aisle alone and every other bridesmaid is paired up with someone.”

  “I don’t see why I have to find my own date. Isn’t there someone else you can use?”

  “Well, Geoffrey bumped one of the other groomsmen up to be best man… but I guess there’s one other option for your date. I just don’t think Geoffrey is going to go for it so easily,” Sam says, turning her attention back to her bagel.

  “Who is it?” I don’t know why she didn’t just lead with this. Again, making a big deal out of nothing.

  “Mia, I just think it would be better if you found someone yourself,” she says through a chunk of bagel.

  “Sam, I don’t want to. I already have enough on my plate with swim practice and math team. We’ve been over this. I can’t add one more thing right now, so if you have a solution, just use it.”

  “The backup groomsman is Geoffrey’s brother,” she tells me, picking the crust off her bagel.

  My heart stops. “You can’t be serious.”

  Geoffrey’s brother, Jasper, is a twelve-year-old throbbing gland of testosterone whose Nintendo Switch is perpetually glued to his hand. At the engagement party he was dressed in a Fendi men’s colorblock tracksuit and a pair of Nikes that hadn’t been released yet. Whenever one of his relatives spoke to him, he didn’t look up to respond. He just mumbled while staring at his precious Nintendo under the table. He is what I was glad Geoffrey turned out not to be: spoiled, brand obsessed, and governed by money. What’s worse is that he kept kicking my feet under the table during dinner. I ate quickly so that I could get up and leave the room without it looking weird. It turns out he was trying to play footsies! How do I know this? How do I know this middle schooler was flirting with me? Because while his parents were grabbing their coats and Geoffrey and Sam were looking for the keys to their—at the time—new apartment, he mumbled, “Let me get your number.”

  I looked down at him, sure that I’d misheard whatever had just come out of his mouth.

  “What?”

  “Your number.”

  I stared at him, listening to the chime of his game as his little character ran into a bunch of coins.

  “Why?”

  “You’re hot; I’m hot. Fate has brought us together.”

  “Fate? You mean the fact that we’re literally becoming family?” I asked, feeling disgusted at the implied incest.

  “It’s not like we’re related by blood.” When he said that, he actually glanced up at me and flashed a smile. I can almost swear I saw a baby tooth.

  I cringe at the memory.

  I’m not walking down the aisle and posing in pictures with a twelve-year-old, especially not Jasper Davenport. What’s worse than going to the wedding alone is going to the wedding with a preteen hitting on you the entire time over the low but eternally annoying sound of his Nintendo dinging every five seconds.

  “Plus, isn’t he the ring bearer?” I ask, figuring they can’t pull him away to be a groomsman when he already has a job.

  “Toby could do that instead.” That is, Toby the goldendoodle, also known as the senior Mr. Davenport’s favorite child.

  “Fine,” I decide. “I’ll find someone.”

  “Thank you, Mia. I’m glad you’re being an adult about this.”

  She starts to turn back to her bagel, but her comment holds me in place. “Have I not been an adult about other things?”

  Without looking at me, she admits, “I just feel like you’ve been shirking your responsibilities when it comes to helping out with the wedding.”

  Of course, she would use the word “shirking.”

  “It’s not my wedding,” I say in my defense.

  “You’re right. You’re not obligated to do anything. The reason friends and family help someone with a wedding is because they love them. So just do this for me. Do this one thing that I’m asking you to do for me, if it’s so hard for you to take responsibility and want to do it for yourself.”

  I want to explode. I want to remind her of all the things I’ve done for her. All the errands. The favors. Lending her my twenty-dollar highlighters only for her to use them up and not replace them. Convincing the florist to not give up on her in the midst of her flower “emergency.” Buying her facemasks after an all-nighter with her charts and dioramas and color-coded lists. I might not do the heavy lifting, but I certainly haven’t sat around doing nothing.

  But I know none of that is going to matter, because to her I’m the baby sister who only thinks of herself, when in reality she’s the big sister who does just that.

  “Do I smell a blueberry muffin?” Dad glides into the kitchen, still wearing his pajamas and silk nightcap.

  I back away from Sam and look over toward Dad. I don’t want to fight in front of him, especially because I know Sam would just say I’m acting like a child and that Mom and Dad should be doing more to turn me into an adult—whatever the heck that’s supposed to mean.

  “How are you, Peach?” Dad asks as he pops his muffin into the microwave.

  “Great,” I mumble on my way out of the kitchen.

  CHAPTER THREE

  When I was seven, in science class we did a very basic lesson on the c
oncept of dominant and recessive genes. We learned that the dominant ones express themselves and the recessive ones hide until they meet each other and show themselves. We had to go around to our family members and see who had what genes and then determine which ones we had. It turns out, I am all the recessive genes of my family. I have hazel eyes, have hitchhiker’s thumb, and can roll my Rs. My earlobes are detached and my left cheek has a dimple.

  Sometime after I did this worksheet, Sam and I had a fight. Either I stole her bracelet or she ate my last Klondike bar. It was something stupid that we blew out of proportion. She was seventeen and I was seven at the time, so she was responsible for babysitting me after school, something both of us thought was stupid. Whenever we fought, I would find my way to the top of the stairs and I would scream down at her, since on the same level she was nearly two feet taller than me. Eventually we would drift away from what we were fighting about and simply start calling each other names or shouting random insults at each other.

  At one point in this particular fight, she asked me if I knew what it meant that I had all the recessive genes. She told me that the dominant genes were stronger and that’s why they showed up more often. She said the recessive genes were weak, that since I had all the weak genes in our family, that meant I was weak. Now I realize that we were just trying to hurt each other and that she didn’t mean it. But back then I didn’t know any better. For a long time I didn’t know any better. She won that fight. I ran up to my room, closed the door, and just stared at myself in the mirror. I stared at all of my recessive traits and wondered if she was right.

  I still sometimes think about it—when I’m sitting on the bleachers at school dances while my friends are on the floor either with dates or moving rhythmically with each other in a way that I just can’t; when I mouth the words to songs in the car while my friends manage to always sing on key; and when my friend Abigail runs up to her boyfriend at the end of a swim meet and the first thing she does is kiss him.

  As I struggle to run argan oil through my tight damp curls, I stare at my eyes and how they look odd against my dark chestnut-colored skin. I think about how gracefully Sam’s hair falls, how she never gets pimples, how she never scratches her face in her sleep. I think about how Sam is getting ready to be married to the man of her dreams, and the biggest accomplishment of my life is being one of the best swimmers on a high school team.

  My cousin Lucas would just tell me that the recessive genes are the ones that wait until they’ve found a worthy host before they show themselves. He’d say that I am the only one in my family worthy of their expression, and for that I am unique. I am special. I try to hold on to that as I get flustered in the middle of my history homework. I try to refocus, and realize that in my annotations on the passage about the War of 1812, I wrote Joey Delmar and Peyton Banks. When I start writing a list of boys’ names in the middle of my English essay, I push my laptop aside and pull out a blank piece of paper. James Palmer. Kyle Richards. Skylar Willoughby. I think of boys I’ve worked on projects with in class, boys from the clubs I’ve been in, and even a few of the single guys on swim team. I write the realistic ones in one column, the potential yeses in a middle column, and the far reaches in a third column. Then I go through the list and try to think of who I would actually want to spend an entire evening with, versus who would annoy me as much as Jasper would, and I highlight in different colors.

  It isn’t until my afternoon alarm goes off that I realize I’ve wasted my Sunday trying to find a potential date and haven’t finished half the homework that’s due tomorrow. I haven’t even touched the math team practice problems to review before Thursday’s competition. In my notepad I write a list of what I still have to do, and decide I’ll just have to stay up after movie night to finish.

  Every Sunday my friends and I have movie night. The third weekend of the month is always at my house, which means I get to choose what we watch. The new Ted Bundy documentary has been on my mind all week, so I set to work baking sugar cookies and icing them with the various murder weapons he used on his victims. The task helps distract me from Sam’s quest.

  “Should I be worried?” Mom asks when she looks over my shoulder. Before I answer, she snags a bloody knife and takes a bite.

  “It’s for movie night.”

  “And what movie has knives, nooses, saws, and fists?… Seems very dark,” she says, scrunching up her eyebrows at my icing rendition of Ted Bundy’s VW beetle.

  “It’s the Ted Bundy documentary,” I tell her, reaching for the gray icing to finish the tires.

  She moves around me and sets her gardening bag down on the other side of the island.

  She asks “Don’t you want to watch something fun?” above the sound of the water rushing over her soapy hands.

  “This is fun. Getting inside the mind of a serial killer.” I quickly make another knife cookie before setting the tray aside and cleaning up.

  “It sounds creepy. Didn’t you guys watch—what was it—Serendipity last weekend? Why don’t you pick a movie like that?”

  Mom peeks into the fridge and pulls out a bowl of green grapes and a bottle of water. She sits down across from me and starts picking the grapes off one by one and tossing them into her mouth.

  Her hair is pulled back in a very messy tangled bun. A few tendrils have fallen and stick to the sweaty sides of her face. There’s even a little dirt still on her nose from the community garden, but as she takes a swig of water, I can tell she’s not aware of it.

  “Serendipity is a stupid fictional movie about two people who want the same ugly pair of gloves. A documentary, however, is grounded in reality, and a murder documentary is helpful by teaching us how to not end up like the victims,” I explain. “If you know how to identify a predator, you can also know how to avoid them.”

  Mom shakes her head. “Mia, fictional movies aren’t stupid. They help you take your mind off the serial killers and predators. They bring light into your life. You already have to be careful out in the real world, so why not escape sometimes?”

  “I don’t want to take my mind off reality,” I challenge. “Serendipity is founded on something as ludicrous as people bumping hands in a department store. Give me a movie about real love, realistic romance, and maybe I’ll think about it.”

  Mom opens her mouth to say something else, but thankfully the doorbell rings.

  “That would be Grace,” I say, wiping my hands on a towel before gladly leaving the kitchen.

  Since she lives down the street, Grace usually comes over before Sloane and Abby. We usually “taste test” whatever I bake for movie night, and then she helps me put out blankets and cushions in the den.

  Grace knows me better than anyone else, maybe even better than Sam and my parents. When I was younger, I used to go to Mom and ask her questions like why some of the boys pulled my plaits or why some girls would hog the swings. She would always have something to say about when Sam was my age, and it got old really fast. Even though Grace, Abby, Sloane, and I all met in second grade, Grace and I were in the same homeroom. Instead of talking to my mom about things, I started telling Grace because she was there more than my other friends. Plus, since she also got her flat twists tugged and sometimes had to choose the slide over the swing, our bond stuck and grew a little stronger. We’re closer than I am with my other friends, literally and figuratively. Since she lives around the block, I can walk to her house whenever Sam is driving me crazy. Grace will come to my house any random night of the week to do homework and have an impromptu sleepover.

  “So, what’s the movie?” she asks as we each pick up an end of the coffee table.

  We shuffle to the side to move it out of the center of the room. Then I reach for the comforter that we spread out on the floor to protect the carpet, and Grace starts grabbing the cushions off the couch.

  “It’s a surprise,” I tell her for the third time.

  “Okay, but the cookies make it really hard to guess. I feel like I’m shooting in the dark.
”

  “Well, that’s good, because if you guessed, then it wouldn’t be a surprise.”

  We fall silent. I try to focus on spreading out the comforter, but my mind drifts back to the list I was working on. More names come to mind. A couple of guys from gym class, athletic types. Maybe I could ask someone from math team, but if he says no, then it might be awkward when we have long after-school prep sessions and competitions together. There’s also Benjamin Vasquez, captain of the math team. Gosh, if I could go to my sister’s wedding with Ben, that would be awesome. We would look amazing in pictures together. Maybe if I ask him sooner rather than later, he’d want to hang out before the wedding. We could actually have a relationship outside of classroom 132, go to some of the fall festivals downtown, and maybe he’d come to some of my swim meets.

  “Are you okay?” Grace asks.

  “What?”

  “You’ve been messing with the same corner for, like, five minutes,” she tells me. She’s sitting on the couch, all of the cushions already arranged on the floor.

  “I’m fine.”

  “You don’t seem fine.” She stares at me for a moment, shaking her head.

  Grace leans forward and undoes the buckles on her boots. I watch her, looking down, and notice a new scar on her chin. She was probably climbing a wall at school or found a new tree at the park. I’ve never understood her obsession with getting to higher ground.

  “I wasn’t ignoring you,” I say, standing up. “I just have a lot on my mind.”

  “Like what?” she asks, tossing her boots behind the couch.

  Being my best friend means she sees right through me when I try to lie.

  I still say “Nothing” anyways.

  Grace is the kind of person who doesn’t stick up for herself, but if one of her friends is in trouble, she makes it her personal mission to save them. If I told her that I needed a date to Sam’s wedding, she would probably immediately sacrifice her date. All three of my friends have dates for Sam’s wedding. I saw that they confirmed plus-ones on all their RSVPs. Abby is obviously bringing Victor, her boyfriend of two years, and Sloane has been going on and on about the guy she met at music camp. Grace decided to bring one of her cousins since she’s still not ready to move on from Shelby.