The Dating Game

by Kiley Roache

  He smiles. “It’s honestly ridiculous—” He looks around himself. “Has anyone seen the lighter?”

  Sara shakes her head no and then looks down at her lap, where the yellow Zippo is resting. “Oh!” Her head shoots up. “Yeah.” She laughs and hands it to him.

  “What was I saying?” Brett says.

  “It’s ridiculous...” I answer.

  “Oh yeah, it’s ridiculous. You just walk in with a semigood idea and the skills to code it, and you can walk out with more than enough money to live off,” he says. “There’s really no reason to get a degree or go work for a company anymore, when they’re so ready to fund, you know?”

  “Yeah,” I say, twisting the edge of my notebook. “But what about when it runs out?”

  “Yeah, do you ever worry about that?” Sara asks.

  “Hmmm?” Brett looks up from joint he is rolling. Apparently he is too impatient to let the bong come back around to him.

  “Like with the dot-com bubble,” I say. “What if that happens again?”

  “I’m really not worried about it.” He picks up the Zippo and lights the joint. After a long drag, he continues. “Sure, this could fail. But I also could work my ass off at a Fortune 500 just for another recession to hit. And all of a sudden that good, stable job doesn’t look so stable anymore.”

  Braden hands me the bong again, and I pass it to Sara without a word. No one seems to care that I’m not smoking, but a part of me still feels uncomfortable. I reach for my beer.

  Brett continues to talk about the benefits of start-ups and the anachronism that is a college degree while he hooks his computer up to the Apple TV. He doesn’t say anything I haven’t heard a million times before, about how many dropouts are now millionaires and billionaires. He also carefully doesn’t talk about the dropouts that are now living paycheck to paycheck or frantically searching through classified ads for anything that doesn’t require a degree.

  “Okay, let’s see this thing y’all are making then.” He hands the computer to Braden. The screen is now in sync with the TV and the app store is pulled up. “Make me an account. Help me find a supermodel or whatever.” He wiggles his eyebrows.

  Braden downloads the app and accepts the terms and conditions within seconds. “I’m gonna hook it up to your Facebook and use your profile picture,” he says. “Makes it quicker.”

  Braden selects “man interested in women” without pausing to ask Brett how he identifies. I frown.

  He then types what Brett dictates for his bio, a few sentences about himself—Brett chooses to highlight his high school alma mater, his status as a start-up founder and his love of all things green, “money and otherwise.” And just like that, he’s now part of the search to find a perfect 10. Or I guess, to become a perfect 10? I’m honestly not sure what the name is supposed to imply. Maybe I should start reading the marketing materials Braden keeps sharing with me on Google Drive.

  The welcome screen of our app loads, featuring a large red button that says: Find Me a 10.

  Brett leans over to take the laptop back from Braden and click it. The introduction sequence begins.

  Everyone starts at the beginning: for now you are unranked.

  We will show you all singles in your area who allow unranked users to appear in their dating pool.

  As you swipe through users, they will swipe through you.

  Once you get an average “yes” swipe of 6.5/10 you will reach Silver status.

  If you get to an average of 8/10 you will become Gold.

  And if you manage a 9/10 or above, you will be one of the few users who reach Platinum.

  Best of luck!

  Another button appears that says: View Singles Near Me. He clicks on it, and a picture of a brunette girl with glasses appears. He swipes yes.

  He clicks through the pictures rapidly, making decisions in a split second, based only on the photo, since there’s no way he is reading their bios that quickly.

  A picture comes up I recognize. Lily, a quiet but kind girl in my CS class. Her photograph is with her mom on vacation. She is wearing a turtleneck sweater. At the bottom of the screen it says she is currently Unranked.

  Brett swipes left, saying no to her. My chest tightens. I can’t help but feel bad for Lily, thinking about her shy voice when she asks a question in class. I hate that she’s about to get an alert that her score has dropped.

  An alert comes up on Brett’s screen: “You have reached Silver Status!”

  “Damn,” he says with a shit-eating grin. “People like me.”

  “Silver’s not that hard,” I say. I flinch. I don’t know why I said that. I guess I was just mad for Lily. I take a sip of my beer; it’s getting warm. Whatever. I’m not really in the mood to drink.

  “So now I can filter out some of these duds, right?” Brett asks, still clicking through images.

  “That’s the idea.” Braden smiles. “But you might want to leave unfiltered on,” he adds. “That way they can see you and bump up your score.”

  “Good point,” Brett says. “That’s why I can see her then?” he asks, when a pretty, curly-haired girl comes on the screen, her information bar reading: Gold. “Because she has silver settings on?”

  “Oh my god.” Sara sits up, finally paying attention. “That’s Yaz. I know her.”

  “She’s hot,” Braden says.

  “She’s also brilliant.” Sara sits up taller in her chair.

  “Well yeah, it says right there, former Instafriend intern.”

  “A definite right swipe,” Brett says.

  Sara falls back onto the couch cushions. “Can we do something else?” She says. “This feels weird.”

  “Sure.” Brett switches over to Netflix.

  He scrolls through Netflix before settling on Planet Earth, and I watch as the camera pans over an African landscape, the colors vibrant on the HD, curved screen, all-the-bells-and-whistles machine.

  The narrator’s voice, a soothing baritone, introduces a family of meerkats and I settle farther back into the couch. I exhale.

  I always liked this show. It reminds me of science class, back when it was mapping constellations and playing with baking soda volcanoes. Just a few minutes of sweeping nature imagery paired with quick trivia, and it’s like I’m back to that time of building simple circuits that illuminate tiny lightbulbs and planting beans in plastic cups so you can see the roots grow.

  Back before science became about complex physics equations, endless problem sets and tedious lab procedures. Not that those aren’t important, but they’re not what I fell in love with.

  Or at least, I thought I fell in love with it. But I don’t think I’ve ever felt quite so passionate as Braden, Brett and Sara seem to right now. They gawk at the screen, and I’m surprised no one is drooling.

  The meerkat segment ends and the screen pans over a river of lava, pooling from a volcano. A segment of black lava rock caves from the pressure and starts to flow through the red liquid.

  Sara watches with tears in her eyes. “It’s just so beautiful.” She begins to cry softly.

  “I know,” Brett says. “And we’re destroying it.” He shakes his head. “It’s a damn shame.”

  I want to ask—if he really feels so strongly, why he uses his mind and skills to make a stupid app instead of working on some sort of green technology?

  But who am I to talk? I’m here to work on an app that helps people rate each other, not exactly the kind of social problem I dreamed about trying to solve with computer science when I applied to Warren.

  By the time we roll into the second episode, Sara’s eyes are starting to flutter shut. Her hair is disheveled, strands running like yellow streaks across her face, and there is a slight smile on her lips.

  Braden gets up from his chair and takes a seat close to her on the couch.

  “How do you fe
el?” he asks.

  “Good.” She smiles sleepily.

  “Doesn’t your skin feel so weird?” he says.

  “Whatcha mean?”

  “Like...feel.” He runs his finger across her arm delicately.

  She giggles. “That’s bizarre.”

  I swallow, my stomach in knots, and turn toward the TV.

  “The Lion stalks its prey, lying dormant and undetected in the grass until the gazelle is vulnerable.”

  “Hey!” I say, standing up as I turn back to the group. “How about we listen to some music?”

  “That sounds great!” Sara perks up, leaning forward to the edge of her seat, away from the arm Braden had slipped around her.

  A half-asleep Brett seems to remember we are here and stands up slowly, then walks toward the speakers in the corner of the room. He fumbles with his phone for a few seconds, and then the first few bars of a sugary pop song by The Chainsmokers floats through the room. He clicks mute on the TV, and then cranks the dial.

  “I love this song!” Sara says, her eyes like shining silver dollars. She stands up and bounces on the couch, holding her sensible shoes in her hand and singing, or more accurately, yelling, along to every word. She makes her way along the couch to me. She points to me as she sings along. I smile and laugh.

  She gestures for me to stand up and join her, but I shake my head. I appreciate the pure joy she’s exuding, but with only half a beer in my system, I’m not exactly on that level. She realizes I’m not going to budge, and her shoulders fall, just a centimeter. She does one of those jump-to-sitting moves we all used to try when someone in the neighborhood would get a bounce castle for a birthday or First Communion. But because it is a just a couch, she does not bounce right back up, but sinks in the cushion. Right next to me.

  “Can you imagine,” she says, “if someone wrote a song like that about you?” She grips my shoulders, her eyes bright and urgent. She is millimeters from my face, but her gaze stays on me. She blinks but doesn’t look away. “That would be an amazing feeling, don’t you think?”

  “I—I don’t...” I lean away from her, not sure why, but just sort of, overwhelmed with the raw emotionality of the moment.

  She looks down for a second, her eyelashes fluttering. But then in half a beat, she is back again, standing up and skipping to the center of the room, where she announces with her chin high in the air that she is going in the pool now.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Sara

  Yaz’s phone dings for at least the tenth time in the last minute, interrupting the rose ceremony. I reach for the remote so that I can go back and hear which name he said, although the contestants’ reactions did kind of give it away. Dani “with an i” is jumping up and down and smiling while Danny “with a y” has started to cry mascara-darkened tears.

  “Will you stop texting?” I say. “It’s supposed to be girls’ night.”

  Yaz sticks her tongue out at me before tapping her screen a few more times. “For your information—” she sets her phone on the coffee table “—I was not texting, I happen to be using your app, missy.”

  “Really?” I set down the remote and scoot forward to look over her shoulder.

  “Yeah, it’s kind of like, crazy addictive.” She quickly types a hello to her newest match. She turns and raises her eyebrows. “Guess what level I’m at now?”

  “Gold?” I act like I don’t know.

  “Yeah,” she smiles. “I’m like, famous now.” Her phone lights up again, the headshot of a guy named Scott popping up. Next to his name, his status: Silver appears.

  “Ugh.” She shakes her head. “I matched with him early on and he keeps chatting me.”

  Sorry, watching the bachelor, can’t talk! Girls night!

  “I have to at least say something.” She clicks lock and sets her phone down. “Last night I didn’t answer a guy because, like, it was clearly a booty call, and he unmatched with me because of it.”

  “Oh jeez, really?”

  “Yeah,” she says. “Only knocked me down 0.3 so it’s not a big deal. But if I want to keep my Gold I have to give little bread crumbs of conversation to guys like Steve, or they might knock down my score.”

  “Oh.”

  “I like some of my other guys though,” she says, as if she can tell I’m upset. “Here. I’ll show you my boys.”

  She walks me through the cast of her own personal, digital version of The Bachelorette. There is a cute boy she once had a class with who is only a 5.6, and while she usually doesn’t accept requests from people who are unranked, he did offer to take her out to a nice dinner. While, on the other hand, a basketball player who will probably go to the NBA this year with a strong Platinum of 9.7, just keeps sending her group messages inviting her and every other girl he’s matched with to parties.

  “He knows he can get away with it too, with that ridiculous ranking.” She rolls her eyes. “I’m always debating unmatching with him so he’ll be taken down a peg. But also, like, what if he becomes a Warrior?”

  I nod knowingly, wondering how appropriate it would be for me to go in and “accidentally” cut his total score down to three.

  “How about you?” She wiggles her eyebrows. “Any boys?”

  I think back to the other day and that... I’m not sure what it was, with Robbie. When I looked in his eyes, I really thought I felt something, some sort of connection. Like maybe he liked me back. Like maybe we could be something.

  The memory is kind of fuzzy around the edges, with the image of his face in my mind kind of glowing, and I’m not sure it’s only because of the pot.

  Ever since, I started to do my dumb Sara thing, picturing cute dates we could go on to get frozen yogurt, or see an old movie. How maybe we could take the train to visit his dad sometime, and I could see where he grew up, maybe his elementary school, or the park where he played soccer. I jumped one hundred steps ahead, like I do with every guy I like.

  Which was especially dumb, because just as soon as the moment seemed to happen, it disappeared, like a soap bubble popping in the air. One second, I thought we were about to kiss, and the next he couldn’t get away from me fast enough. Proving that, like always, this relationship existed solely in my mind.

  “Uh...no.” I answer.

  She shakes her head. “Kind of ironic, don’t you think?”

  “What do you mean?”

  She doesn’t answer at first, instead getting up and walking to the kitchen. She digs through the junk food cabinet. “It’s just like, you run the most popular dating app on campus. I can’t go anywhere without seeing someone on that damn thing. I’ve had teachers start class by telling everyone if they are caught on it during lecture, they’ll automatically lose points. And—oh!” She pulls a package of Red Vines from the back of the stash. “Sorry,” she looks over her shoulder, smiling sheepishly. “Can I have some?”

  I nod.

  “Did you see the Daily story?” She takes the top off the container and pulls out a rope. “That a TA used the app to chat with one of his students, and like, got fired.” She bites down on the red candy rope, twisting the end in her hand so it makes a snapping sound.

  I sigh. “I did see that.” It wasn’t my favorite news to come out of something I’d help build, but the way her eyes light up, I can tell she thinks this is a really fun real-life soap opera.

  “You should get a profile!” She plops back onto the couch. “It really is fun.”

  “Well that hardly seems appropriate.” I adjust my sweater.

  “Why not?” She looks down and inspects the identical red candies, as if weighing which she will eat next.

  “Because...that would be weird.”

  “Mark Zuckerberg has Facebook.” She raises her eyebrows and turns her head to the side.

  “Yeah, but that’s different.” I lean back on the couch, moving away fro
m her, but really just trying to get more comfortable.

  “Why?”

  “Because he’s using it to promote his website, not to date people.”

  “Why can’t you do both? Then it’s like, download Perfect10, you may get to go out with Sara Jones.”

  “That sounds an awful lot like prostitution.”

  She considers this, pausing as she bites into another Red Vine. I click play on the show; I’d much rather focus on these strangers’ dysfunctional love lives than my own.

  A few minutes later, as the credits are rolling, Yaz’s phone goes off again.

  “Oh, well this one’s cute,” she says. “Look at him.”

  I lean toward her to see. “Nuh-uh.” I shake my head. “He literally says ‘not tryna date.’ I mean, I don’t want turn away users, but this is a dating app—why would he even want to be on it?” I roll my eyes and stand up, having seen enough of his shirtless beach pics. “You shouldn’t talk to him.” I head toward the kitchen.

  She follows me, gaze still glued on her phone.

  “I don’t care about that.”

  I open the refrigerator door and squat down to look for the orange juice, wondering if that counts as my exercise for the day.

  “I respect that at least he’s up-front about it,” she continues. “Most guys here think that, but don’t tell you until after they sleep with you.”

  “What do you mean?” I pop up, looking at her over the fridge door. “Most guys are against dating anyone?”

  “I mean, yeah... Haven’t you talked to a guy at a party and had him give you the whole, you-only-have-four-years-of-college-to-be-a-single-idiot speech?”

  I locate the juice carton on the top shelf and close the door with my hip. I skillfully avoid looking her in the eyes as I head to the cabinet for a glass. “Um, sure.”

  Lie lie lie, you know damn well the only guy you’ve talked to at a party was Robbie and you both were there out of spite.

  I try to keep a good game face as I turn to her, setting my glass on the counter with a clank.

  “It’s unbelievable.” She shakes her head. “Although, to be fair, I definitely know a lot of antirelationship girls here too. That’s why everyone is always complaining that there’s no dating at Warren.”