Speed Dating

by Natalie Standiford

  “You met all those guys in your first three hours?” Lina asked.

  “You met Sean?” Mads was impressed—and a little jealous. Sean Benedetto was a senior and the school’s major hottie. As a ninth grader, Mads had taken one look at him and vowed that someday he would be hers. Now, a year and a half later, she still had a long way to go. But the goal was always there in the back of her mind. Sean. He was her ideal guy. It took her a year and a half to get him to notice she was alive. And he was offering Quintana a muffin on her first day? Why was life so unfair?

  “Why, is he a big deal?” Quintana took the top off her hamburger bun, smothered the meat patty in ketchup, then cut into it with her knife and fork.

  “Kind of,” Mads said.

  “To Mads, he is,” Lina said.

  “Not just to me,” Mads said. “He’s the sex god of Rosewood.”

  “Granted,” Holly said. “But that’s only because there’s so little competition.”

  Quintana laughed that low laugh again. “Madison, you can’t let boys intimidate you. If you give them too much power, they get so out of hand.”

  She finished three-quarters of her hamburger, wiped her mouth with her napkin, and took a tube of lip gloss from her bag. She swiped it across her lips. It was a bright magenta color with gold sparkles in it.

  “I love your lip gloss,” Mads said. “What kind is it?”

  “Munchies,” Quintana said. “Try some.” She handed the tube to Mads. “I don’t wear it for the color so much as the flavors.”

  Mads dabbed the gloss on and licked her lips. “It tastes like… what is that? Chili pepper?”

  “Jalapeno,” Quintana said. “It comes in regular flavors like mint and cinnamon, but you can also get chocolate, vanilla, pepperoni pizza, and taco. Boys love it. If you wear this while a boy is kissing you, he’ll go crazy. They can’t get enough of it. It’s like they want to eat your lips.”

  “Wow,” Mads said, memorizing the label on the tube. “I’ve got to get some.” Maybe this lip gloss was just what she needed to spice things up with Stephen.

  Her instinct about Quintana was turning out to be right: She knew a lot of things. Useful things. Boy things. Already she’d given Mads info she could really use. Maybe Rebecca and Autumn didn’t want to be friends with her, but Mads thought they were foolish. Quintana knew boys, and Mads wasn’t going to pass up a chance to learn everything she could.

  4

  At the Tone, the time Will Be…

  * * *

  To: hollygolitely

  From: your daily horoscope

  HERE IS TODAY’S HOROSCOPE: CAPRICORN: A mysterious stranger will enter your life today, so make sure you’re wearing clean underwear.

  * * *

  Holly glanced around the ivy-covered garden at Vineland Café, a favorite coffee hangout for RSAGE students, checking out the fifteen guys who huddled near the chips and salsa. The first Speed Dating party was being held that afternoon. Kids from schools all over the Carlton Bay area had clamored for a spot, but Holly thought they should limit enrollment or the whole process could take hours. So they signed up the first fifteen girls and fifteen guys. Holly was number one on the list.

  “This should be good,” Sebastiano Altman-Peck whispered to Holly. Her locker neighbor at school, he was slinky and snake-hipped, with abundant loose brown curls any girl would envy, an elegant Roman nose, and full lips. Basically Michelangelo’s David without the muscles and with a smart mouth.

  “You didn’t sign up, did you?” Holly asked. “I don’t remember seeing your name.”

  “Me? No. I’d never put myself through a meat-grinder like this. I’m just here to witness the carnage.”

  “Well, go sit down someplace.” Holly shooed him toward a white iron table, away from the Speed Dating party. “You’re making me nervous.”

  Sebastiano ignored her. “There’s that new girl.” He was looking at Quintana. “She’s hot.”

  “Mads says that, too,” Holly said. “What’s so hot about her? She’s pretty, but there are lots of girls at school just as pretty as she is.”

  “There’s just something about her,” Sebastiano said. “She looks so, I don’t know… at home in her skin. Like a cat. Or a wild animal.”

  “’A wild animal,” Holly scoffed. “That’s just a stupid boy fantasy. Wild animals don’t wear padded bras.”

  “In this nature preserve, they do.” He caught Holly’s irritated glance and added, “She can’t hold a candle to you, of course, Boobmeister.” Holly winced slightly at Sebastiano’s favorite nickname for her, which Mads had started as a good-natured joke about Holly’s bustiness. “I don’t see anyone here good enough for you,” he said, scanning the crowd. “You deserve someone out of the ordinary. These guys, I don’t know…”

  “Don’t doom me before the party even starts,” Holly said. “I’ve got to give them a chance.”

  “Be my guest. But I’m not seeing you with that.” He nodded at a squat guy wearing an extra-large T-shirt over extra-large shorts barely clinging to his butt.

  “It’s just like you to pick out the worst offender,” Holly said. “That’s one guy out of fifteen.”

  Sebastiano nodded toward another boy, who was stuffing his face with chips.

  “All right, two out of fifteen,” Holly said. “That still leaves thirteen chances to find love. And if it doesn’t work out today, we’ll just hold another Speed Dating party. There are plenty more kids who want to try it.”

  Mads clapped her hands. “Okay, ready to start? Girls, sit down where you see your name.” She’d set up a long table with fifteen chairs on each side. The girls would stay seated while the boys moved from one girl to the next every six minutes. After each meeting, the boys and girls would jot down notes about each other, and then meet the next candidate. At the end, everyone would hand in their scorecards and Mads, Holly, and Lina would compare the notes and make matches based on the comments.

  Holly took her place in the middle of the table. To her left sat Ramona Fernandez and two of her Goth friends, Siobhan Gallagher and Chandra Bledsoe.

  “Ramona?” Holly said. “I’m surprised to see you here.”

  “Are you kidding?” Ramona said. “Pass up a chance to ridicule fifteen guys to their face—and behind their backs? We wouldn’t miss it.”

  Great. Already, people weren’t taking this seriously. Holly hoped at least some of the boys were actually looking to go out with a girl, and not just joke around.

  Lina sat at a table behind a big alarm clock. “Okay,” she said. “Remember, you have six minutes to talk to each person, then it’s time to switch. Are you ready? Boys take your places.”

  The boys, wearing name tags, lined up and sat down across from the girls. Three boys scuffled over to the seat across from Quintana.

  “You’ll get a chance to talk to everyone,” Mads said. “Just sit anywhere.”

  Finally everyone settled down at the long table. Holly looked at the boy in front of her. He had a round face and very short hair. He smiled at her. He had something green stuck in his teeth.

  “Ready?” Mads shouted. “Go!”

  “Hi, Holly, it’s nice to meet you,” the boy said. “I’m talking really fast so you can know all about me in six minutes. Where should I start? There’s so much to say. Um, I play baseball, but I’m not shooting for pro or anything, I just like to play… .”

  Holly stared at his name tag so she would have something to look at besides the spinach in his teeth. Jon Pinchbeck. Jon Pinchbeck. Jon Pinchbeck. Okay, this was getting boring. She looked up. No! Spinach! She looked down again. Red T-shirt. Red T-shirt. Nice shade of tomato red. Spinach and tomato go well together… .

  “So, what about you?” Jon asked her. “What’s your favorite subject in school? Do you have any hobbies?”

  “I like geometry,” Holly said. “And Spanish and biology. And my hobbies are, um, let’s see, I enjoy brushing my teeth, and flossing can be fun—”

  That got a
blank stare. Holly glanced at the clock on the table. Four minutes to go! Who knew six minutes could feel so endless?

  She struggled to come up with something interesting to say about herself. “I play tennis, and I love to swim in the summer… .” Why did she suddenly feel so boring? She didn’t usually think of herself that way. Her friends never called her dull. But she wished she’d gone to camp in Peru, or volunteered to save the endangered purple stinkbeetle—anything to have something to talk about besides school.

  Next to her she could hear Ramona saying, “I am a Mistress of the Night. I know how to make love potions and voodoo dolls. It doesn’t matter if you like me or not, because if I like you, I can make you like me. And if I don’t like you—you’d better run.” Holly couldn’t resist a glance at the face of the boy Ramona was speaking to. Just as she’d suspected: frozen with terror. At least Ramona wasn’t boring.

  “—but, you know, I do like to watch baseball with my dad once in a while,” Holly heard herself saying. Jon Pinchbeck’s eyes glazed over. At least he’d closed his mouth, so she didn’t have to see the spinach in his teeth anymore. The alarm clock buzzed. “Time’s up!” Lina shouted. Thank god.

  “Nice meeting you,” Jon Pinchbeck said as he got up to move across from Ramona. Holly silently wished him luck. Then she picked up her pen and marked her scorecard next to Boy #1: Oral hygiene. Enough said.

  Boy #2 sat down and grinned at her. Perfect, spinach-free teeth. What a relief.

  Gus Anastas. He wasn’t bad-looking: olive skin, even features, black hair in a short, modified pompadour. A jutting chin. The fuzzy upper lip would have to go, but that was easily taken care of. His aura was a little bland, but that was a common boy pitfall. Sometimes, once you got to know them…

  “Okay, first, I’ve just got to say that you are, like, really hot, okay? I mean, whoa, Mama! Mm-mm—mm. I noticed you as soon as I got here. I looked around to pick out the filthiest girl in the place ‘cause I knew I wasn’t going to waste a lot of time talking to a dog, you know what I’m sayin’? Even six minutes is too long. And you are smokin’. Like Kansas City barbecue. Oh yeah. And finger-lickin’ good, too, I bet. Am I right? Am I right?”

  Holly stared at him. She knew her mouth was hanging open, yet somehow she couldn’t find the strength to close it. How did this person exist in civilization as she knew it?

  “Quiet type, huh? I like that. I can’t stand those bitches who just yap, yap, yap—”

  “You might as well move along now,” Holly said quietly. “Because the day I go out with you is the day I lose all hope for mankind, and frankly, on that day I’d rather suffer alone.”

  “Tough girl, huh?” Gus said. “That’s okay, I like ’em when they play hard to get. The chase is half the fun, right? But we both know what happens at the end.” He leaned forward and suggestively wiggled his eyebrows at her. Some kind of acid liquid burbled up from her stomach into the back of her throat. She swallowed it down, hoping she wasn’t about to throw up.

  “Please—just get away from me,” she said.

  The alarm clock mercifully buzzed, and she gladly fed Gus Anastas to the gaping jaws of Ramona. She marked her score card. Boy #2: Asshole.

  Boy #3 was a familiar face: Jay Mukherjee, from her parents’ country club. Holly’s parents played golf and tennis with Jay’s from time to time.

  “Hey, Holly,” he said. “Haven’t seen you since the Christmas dance at the club. You’re looking good.”

  “Thanks, so are you.” She’d known him since sixth grade—not well, but well enough. If sparks were going to fly between them, wouldn’t it have happened by now? Maybe not. Maybe he’d changed. Maybe he’d cultivated some exciting new personality trait she’d never seen before. Like race car driving, or bank robbery…

  “So, you teaching tennis at the club this summer?” he asked.

  “I don’t know yet,” she said. “You?”

  “Probably. Same every year. It’s fun, though. I like hanging with the kids. Did you know Martin Crisp is going to Yale next year?”

  “Really?” She tried to remember which of the hordes of bland, nice-enough guys at the club was Martin Crisp. Oh, yeah. The one who always replaced the alligator on his polo shirt with a tiny bulldog. Cute. He’d known he was going to Yale since before he could pronounce it.

  “But guess what—Kent Schweitzer didn’t get into Harvard. Can you believe that? And he’s a double legacy!”

  “Really?” Who cares? Holly thought.

  “So he’s going to Amherst,” Jay said. “That’s still a good school.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “My mother’s on the planning committee for the Picnic this year,” Jay said. The Picnic was the first big social event of the Carlton Bay Country Club’s summer calendar. It involved a lot of halfhearted family games, super-competitive swim meets and tennis matches, and lemonade spiked with vodka. Holly had been hoping to get out of it this year.

  “Are you going?” Jay asked her. “Maybe we could go together. I’ve got two tennis matches that day, but we could be partners in the three-legged race.”

  “Um—”

  Buzz! “Time!” Lina called. Aw, too bad.

  “I’ll let you know,” Holly said as Jay stood up. “I think we’ll be away that weekend.”

  Boy #3: Boring, she wrote. And too much in common with her family. She needed someone fresh. Someone different. Someone surprising. As it was, sitting next to Ramona was more fun than she’d expected. Knowing what each boy would face after her almost made the whole fiasco worthwhile.

  Boy #4 was kind of cute, but obsessed with NASCAR. That was too different. Boy #5 seemed kind of out of it. (What gave it away? The dilated pupils? Or the fact that he kept calling her “Kelly”?)

  Boy #6, she knew from school. Not smart enough. The less said about Boys #7, 8, and 9, the better. She was losing hope. Maybe this Speed Dating thing wasn’t such a good idea after all.

  Then came Boy #10. He sat down and flashed her a Mona Lisa smile. Coy. Was it a come-on, or was he just very sure of himself? Holly didn’t know. All she knew was she couldn’t stop looking at him. He was small-boned, maybe a couple inches taller than she was, with a chiseled face, a thatch of straight black hair, and the lithe, muscular figure of a martial arts aficionado. He wore a white button-down shirt. He didn’t say hello. He just said, “What time is it?”

  “What?” She laughed a little.

  He smiled at her. It was a nice smile, and pleasantly lacking in food particles. “Just look at the clock and tell me what time it is.”

  This was certainly different. “Why? You can see it from where you’re sitting,” she said. Unless he has a vision problem, she thought. Maybe he’s blind and I’ve just insulted him! “Can’t you?” She waved her hand in front of his face. He wasn’t wearing glasses or contacts, as far as she could tell. People who wore contacts usually showed a telltale sign, like eyes too wide open or habitual rabbity blinking.

  “I can see it,” he said. “But I want you to look at it, too. Just go along with this for a second. It will pay off, I swear.”

  Holly giggled, mystified but amused. “Okay.” Whatever. She looked at the big alarm clock on the table where Mads and Lina were sitting. Mads looked up and waved at her. Holly waved back.

  “What time is it?” Boy #10 asked. “Exactly.”

  “3:17,” Holly said.

  “3:17,” the boy repeated. “That’s my new magic number. I’ll always remember that I met you at 3:17.”

  Holly laughed again. “Always? Like, even on your deathbed? Even if we never speak to each other again?”

  He nodded. “These are our first six minutes together. From now on, every Saturday at 3:17, I’ll think, That was my first minute with Holly. Or maybe second minute, since it took you a minute or so to get around to looking at the clock.”

  “So should we say 3:16?” Holly asked. “Should 3:16 be the official time of our first meeting?”

  “No, let’s stick with 3:17,”
the boy said. “It has a better ring to it.”

  Holly stared at him, mesmerized. What was he talking about? Whatever it was, she liked it. It wasn’t cars, or tennis, or school, or booty. It was just itself.

  He had gray eyes, mixed with blue and green and gold. His irises seemed to contain a maze, which she tried to follow with her own eyes. It was too complicated. She got lost.

  She waited for him to say something else, but he just gazed back at her as if he could find the meaning of life in her face. The minutes ticked by. At least, Holly assumed they did. She forgot about time. She forgot about everything but that gray maze.

  “Time’s up!” Lina called.

  Boy #10 smiled. The spell was broken.

  Holly felt dazed. She watched him stand up, as if she were watching her own dream. He nodded and smiled at her again. Then he sat down in front of Ramona. Holly sensed that a new boy had deposited himself in the seat across from her, but she couldn’t bring herself to look at him yet.

  Who was that guy? She’d been so caught up in his mesmerizing stare that she’d forgotten to look at his name tag. She leaned toward Ramona to get a glimpse of it. Eli Collins. What a beautiful name.

  “Number 11!” Lina shouted. “Go!”

  Holly looked up at Boy #11. She could hardly see his face. “Just a sec,” she said, and picked up her pen to write something about Eli Collins. “Boy #10,” she wrote. “3:17.”

  Boy #11 started talking, but she barely heard him. She hardly looked at or listened to another boy for the rest of the party. Her eyes kept straying toward Eli. Was what he had said to her just a schtick, a line? Was he pulling the same trick on other girls?

  He chatted easily with Ramona, and Holly didn’t once see her glance at the clock. Ramona looked uncharacteristically charmed by him, but she wasn’t his type.

  As the boys streamed past her, Holly watched him with the next girl and the next. She saw him talking and laughing and listening. But never once did he sit and stare at the girl as he had with her.