The Dating Game

by Kiley Roache

  “We’re ready now,” he says more directly to her.

  “This way,” she says shyly, grabbing three menus. The restaurant is light and airy, with large windows opening to a garden and luckily not the gas station that would be visible if the windows were on the other wall, which is covered in bamboo. The tables are draped in immaculate white cloth and have weird sculptures as centerpieces.

  After the first two tables are deemed unacceptable, we are placed near the window at what is meant to be a six top. I wonder briefly if being too close to the door or too near to the air vent was really the problem, or if he just wanted a table big enough that he could sit more than an arm’s length from my mother.

  We silently read the menu for a few minutes. I decide quickly which cut of meat I’ll be getting—it’s the same as when we came here when I visited Warren as a senior in high school, but I continue to pretend to read so that I don’t have to be the one who breaks the tense silence.

  I reach for my water, and my mother seems to take this movement as invitation for conversation.

  “Everything looks very delicious,” she says. “Doesn’t it, Jared?”

  My father nods.

  “It reminds me of that place we went to, years ago, when we were in Japan, that place the Williams took us. Do you remember what it was called?”

  “No.” My father shakes his head. He looks around. “Where is the waiter? I would love to order a drink.”

  My mother presses her lips together and looks at her menu. I await her next attempt at “normal family conversation.”

  The waitress comes by, and my father orders dinner for all three of us.

  I study the reflection of the light on my glass. Sometimes, being in a room with both my parents is like being trapped inside a play. One of those perverted Levittown nightmare kind, the sort that peel back the glossed-over 1950s American Dream, exposing the hell that it really was. When conversations about what’s for dinner and how the kids are doing erupt into screaming matches and threats. Except, my parents perform only the first act when we’re all together, and wait for the explosion of anger when they call me from opposite sides of the earth, wanting me to convey to the other what they think about the models brought back to hotel rooms or a boat purchased without calling to check first.

  It would almost be better if there was screaming and yelling. If, right now, they started throwing drinks and voicing all the thoughts that must be racing through their minds as their lips weigh the pros and cons of various appetizers. Sure, it would make quite a scene in this eerily quiet and stuffy restaurant. But then everything would be out in the open. And then, maybe issues would be dealt with and changes would be made.

  Instead, I’m supposed to go along with this charade, like I don’t mind talking about the weather or passing the bread when there is so much pain.

  The infidelity, the threats of extortion if divorced, the games of control over bank accounts and properties... It makes me want to scream.

  Sometimes when I’m with them, I feel like I’m drowning and trying to scream but no one can hear. With no outlet, my body is destroying itself from the inside out.

  “So how are your classes going?” my mother asks as the waitress sets down our food.

  I blink, and it takes a second for me to realize she’s talking to me. I clear my throat. “Uh, good, actually.” I squirm in my seat. “You know that one with Dustin Thomas? Our project went really well.” I adjust the napkin on my lap. “We got an A-plus, the first in the class’s history, and our professor recommended that we pursue the idea outside of class. And Thatcher Bell’s daughter is actually in the class and showed a lot of interest, so hopefully we’ll be able to meet with his firm.”

  “Are you going out to any other firms?” my father asks. He doesn’t look at me as he speaks, focusing on cutting his steak.

  “Uh, um, no, we don’t really have the resources for that right now. At this point I just feel very lucky that she—”

  “It’s not about luck.” He stops cutting his food and looks up, piercing blue eyes on me, knife and fork still in his hands. “What’s your strategy? Angel investors don’t actually come down from heaven, Braden.” His voice is stern.

  My mom drains her wine. “Why don’t we talk about something else? Are you making friends?”

  “No,” my father interrupts. “It’s important that he understands that this is not an opportunity to waste. An A-plus in a class is nothing if you don’t play this right from here on out. He’s made a mockery of what I’ve paid for his education before—I am not going to let him do it again.”

  I push my food away from me. I’ve lost my appetite.

  I was stupid to think that a man who’s made the Forbes list would be impressed by a leading grade in one class. Stupid to think he would see me as anything but the kid who was almost expelled from boarding school.

  “Excuse me for a moment,” I say, setting my napkin on the table as I stand up. I pull out my cell phone as soon as the restroom door swings closed behind me.

  “Hello?” the voice on the other side of the line says.

  “This is Braden Hart. I’m calling about your article. I’d like to give you an exclusive interview.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Sara

  GROUND BREAKING APP

  COMES OUT OF WARREN CLASS

  PALO ALTO—The first ever A-plus was awarded this week in Professor Dustin Thomas’s famously brutal class, Econ 214: “Becoming an Entrepreneur”. But that is just the beginning of the enormous success expected from Perfect10, CFO Braden Hart said.

  “This is going to change the face of dating throughout the United States, if not the world,” he told the Daily.

  The app, which allows users to rank other singles resulting in a cumulative score that decides a user’s status as platinum, gold, silver or unranked and lets other users block certain groups, will go live next Friday.

  “The vote of support from Thomas is huge,” Hart said. “Especially since he’s a venture capitalist by trade himself. We expect great interest in the project.”

  Hart went on to say that he would be shocked if there weren’t one million users on the app in three months’ time.

  “Braden!” I pound on the door in front of me, the half-crumpled newspaper in my other hand.

  Finally, it swings open. Braden rubs his eyes and looks down at me. He’s wearing only boxers and his hair is a mess. He looks really good. Like he definitely works out—he has a six-pack and even those little triangle things by his hips that seem designed to draw the eyes downward.

  My face gets warm and I avert my eyes. I will not be distracted from my rage.

  “What’s up?” he asks, half yawning.

  “I’m going to kill you.” I hold up the paper.

  He smiles crookedly. “Pretty great, right?”

  “CFO?”

  He leans against the door frame. “Since clearly I’m the only one who understands the business side, I thought it made sense.”

  I throw my copy of the Warren Daily at his dumb washboard abs. It falls to the floor.

  “You can’t just make up a title for yourself! You...you can’t just make up a company, for God’s sake. Not to mention—” I exhale. “It will ‘change the face of dating throughout the United States, if not the world’?”

  “Right?” He smiles as he leans over to pick up the paper.

  “I swear to God, Braden Hart—”

  “Have you checked your email?” he asks. He holds the paper against the wall and smooths out the wrinkles with his other hand.

  “Don’t change the subject.” I push past him into his room. I am momentarily distracted by the feeling that I have left campus. Furnished more like a house than a dorm, the room is full of grown-up furniture. And not the type I’d even expect actual grown-ups to own. From the decorative clock to the stain
less steel desk, it’s like a room out of a magazine. I shake my head to dispel the distraction.

  “One million users?” I ask. “Not only is that an absolutely bonkers number, but predicting the number of users is the most arrogant metric. We have no idea if that’s even possible.”

  “It’s totally possible. Instagram had one million in two months.”

  “Why the hell do you think we’re Instagram?”

  He sets the newspaper down carefully on his desk. “Why do you think we’re not?”

  I press my fingertips to my temple. “We’re supposed to roll out the app in a week, and we’re still not done building it. And now you’ve set the expectations higher than we could ever possibly meet.”

  “That’s so much better than us unveiling a perfect app to no one listening.”

  I raise my hands like I’m about to literally pull my hair out. “Says the guy who doesn’t code!”

  “Hey now, I just signed up to take CS 101 next semester,” he says.

  “I—” I lunge toward him, but he grabs my wrists to hold me back.

  “Seriously, Sara, just check your email.”

  I force myself to take a deep breath and lower my arms. “I don’t see why...” I shake my head as I pull out my phone.

  Ten new emails pop up as soon as my in-box refreshes. All of them are addressed to me, Robbie and Braden with subject lines about the app. They’re from Business Insider, TechCrunch, the Huffington Post...

  “Wow.” I look up.

  “Yeah.” He raises his eyebrows. “This is going to be huge.”

  “Holy shit, holy shit.” I skim some of the emails. “Okay, will you get on answering these? I have to... I have to go finish an app.”

  Suddenly there is no time to be mad. A part of me is even excited about this, and maybe even grateful to Braden. Not that I’d ever let him know that. I race across campus to find Robbie.

  * * *

  That night, when the clock strikes twelve, we’re still in the common room of Robbie’s suite, working on the app.

  “I am so hungry and so tired,” I say. I turn around to lie upside down on the couch. It’s become my usual restless position. “Is it really worth a million dollars to keep going?”

  “Good question.” He laughs. “But look at it this way—think of all the naps you could take if you were your own boss, not to mention the doughnuts you could buy if you had all that money.”

  “Doughnuts you say?” I raise an eyebrow.

  “Yeah. There’s this place in Palo Alto that has amazing doughnuts. Open 24-7 too.”

  “Really?” I spin around to sit upright.

  “Yeah, you wanna go?” he asks. I’m already looking for my keys.

  I practically skip downstairs.

  “You know,” I yell across the dark courtyard as I look for my bike. The yard is filled with row upon row of bike racks, two wheels being the preferred way to get around the largest college campus in the United States. “We’re probably too hungry to work anyway. So really, getting food is the productive thing to do.”

  “Exactly.” He walks toward me, navy bike in tow. He takes in my light blue beach cruiser, complete with large white basket and bell. “Nice bike.”

  “I always wanted one like this.” I blush. Fumbling with my key, I try to unlock the bike, but it’s as if there’s something wrong with my hands all of the sudden.

  “Here.” He reaches for the key. His hand brushes mine, sending electricity through my body.

  He doesn’t seem to notice. “This happens to mine after the rain—you just have to wiggle it.” He unlocks it with ease and hands me the key. Stepping back to examine his work, he smiles and says, “It’s a very Sara bike. I like it.”

  I try to talk but make a series of mumbling syllables as I hop on my bike. My head feels fuzzy all of a sudden. Pull it together, Sara. I take off pedaling, not looking back. I’m too embarrassed to meet his eyes right now.

  He catches up to me before the first stop sign but doesn’t say anything. Everything’s a lot quieter than it is during the day, and it almost feels like we have the whole campus to ourselves.

  Streetlights glimmer every few yards, popping up between some of the hundreds of palm trees that line our path from Main Quad into town, so that we are constantly in and out of darkness. The breeze blows back my hair and I breathe in the air, which still smells like summer here, even though it’s late fall.

  I feel so free. That’s what I really love about college. The freedom of it. And I don’t mean drinking or being allowed to have a boy in my room if I want to. Sure, that would be nice.

  But I’m talking about not having to ask anyone when I want to leave the house. Not having anyone telling me it’s time for bed, or that I’m not allowed to have a doughnut at 1:00 a.m. if I want one. It’s a sort of happiness I didn’t know I was missing.

  “Do you ever feel guilty?” Robbie breaks the silence. He veers off slightly into the empty road so that he’s riding next to me.

  “About what?”

  “Perfect10. Like, I’m not sure it’s the best thing for the world, you know, to have people rank each other. And we’re building it.”

  “We’re making a dating app,” I say. He’s biking faster now, and although his breathing sounds totally normal, I’m struggling to keep up. “It’s not like we’re running an oil company or, like, killing puppies to make coats.”

  He laughs, but not as fully as I hoped he would. It was more polite than anything. “I’m not saying we’re Cruella de Vil. Maybe we aren’t doing something that bad—I’m just not sure we’re doing something good, you know?”

  I consider this as we reach an empty intersection and stop at the red light even though no one’s around. I’ve been so busy trying to make the app work properly that I haven’t thought about this sort of moral dilemma for the past few weeks. It felt like we kind of already made our decision when we pitched our project to Professor Thomas.

  “Like...” Robbie says as the light turns green. He kicks off the ground and pedals forward. “What if we designed the app not so you end up with the ‘most desired person around,’ but, like, the best person for you? Those are probably different things, right? For different people?”

  “Yeah, I guess so.”

  “So why don’t we help people find that?”

  “Well, I feel like the competition is the thing that will keep people on the app, right? That will make them obsessed with it? If they find their soul mate and leave, we lose a customer.”

  He laughs heartily this time, from his chest. But I wasn’t joking. “You sound like Braden.”

  My stomach twists. That’s the last comparison I want to hear.

  “I’m just thinking like a businesswoman,” I say. “I don’t have time to be nice—the VCs certainly won’t be.”

  We turn onto a main road, and there are a few cars, so we have to ride one behind the other in the bike lane.

  He doesn’t say anything for the rest of the ride.

  We arrive at a cute little shop with a neon pink doughnut sign, the only place in town still open on a weekday at this hour. As we lock our bikes, I see people through the window. Rowdy college students who have pulled way too many chairs up to one table and tired-looking middle-aged people in various uniforms, clearly night shift workers on a break.

  A soft bell rings as we enter. An impossibly-cheerful-for-the-time girl in a pink apron greets us at the counter and takes our order with a feathered pen. I assumed we would get one doughnut each, but Robbie insists we share a half dozen.

  “You can’t just have one doughnut,” he says. He turns to the cashier.

  “Tell her.”

  “That’s true.” She nods seriously, blinking her heavily lined eyes.

  We settle into a booth and Robbie sets down the box in front of me. My eyes go wide as I open it and
examine our bounty. There are two chocolate-frosted doughnuts with rainbow sprinkles, one with no hole that’s filled with frosting, a plain glazed, a half-chocolate-dipped glazed, and one with peanuts on the outside.

  I carefully remove a chocolate sprinkle doughnut and take a bite. “Mmmmmm.” I close my eyes. “This is heavenly.” I lick the sugary frosting on my lips.

  Robbie nods as he bites into the peanut one.

  “You know...” I say. “My mom would kill me if she knew I was eating this.” I rip off another bite. “She never let me have doughnuts as a kid. She was all about ‘breakfast is the most important meal of the day it has to be healthy blah blah blah.’” I take another bite and consider which doughnut I will have next. “I was always sooo jealous of the kids at school whose parents would buy sugary cereal and all that.” I take another bite and keep speaking, even with my mouth full. If I’m breaking one rule, I might as well be a full-on wild child. “And she still tries to micromanage my diet, calling to ask what I ate in the dining hall and so on.”

  Robbie is quietly eating his doughnut, and I realize that I’ve been rambling, something I do that I hate. “How about you?” I ask. “Is your mom like that?”

  He exhales and looks away. “My mom, uh...” He turns back to me. “My mom lives in Mexico.” He pauses to take a sip of his coffee. “She was detained, and then deported a few years ago. So, uh, no. She doesn’t give me input on breakfast. I mean, I call her as much as I can, and we talk about lots of things. But doughnuts aren’t usually one of them.” He laughs in an uncomfortable sort of way.

  “Oh no, I’m so sorry,” I say. The words seem to fall flat as soon as they’re out of my mouth, hitting the table between us with a hollow thud.

  What are my stupid words of sympathy in the face of something so unbearable?

  But he smiles gratefully, like I’ve actually said something helpful.

  I feel an overwhelming need to fill the silence. “That was rude of me, I shouldn’t have asked, I—”

  “Nah.” He waves his hand, dismissing my second apology. Great, now he’s comforting me. What kind of friend am I? “How could you have known? I usually just say something vague or avoid the subject. But... I don’t know.” He fiddles with the plastic lid of his coffee. “Something made me want to be honest with you.”