The Dating Game

by Kiley Roache

  I consider this as I pour my juice. “I’m not sure if that’s true.” I set the carton down. “There’s a girl who is supposed to live down the hall, but is almost never here because she practically lives with her boyfriend.”

  “Oh, but that’s the thing.” Yaz pulls a chair toward her. “I have a theory about this.” She sits backward on the chair. “People here are either basically married, or so committed to just hooking up that they act like they hate each other when they’re sober or it’s like, daylight, which I like to call Vampire Fucking.”

  I roll my eyes. “That’s so stupid.”

  “Yeah, well, you know.” She rests her head on the back of the chair. “They think if you go to dinner with them you’re gonna go all Gone Girl on their ass, or like start taking sugar pills instead of birth control so you can sue them out of the start-up fortune they plan to make.”

  “I hate men,” I say, before taking a long swig of my juice.

  “Tell me about it.” She types something on her phone. “But also...” She looks up, clicking lock. “I know more than a few girls who have hooked up with a friend of a guy they started having feelings for, just to prove they’re not that into him.”

  “That makes no sense.” I lean against the cabinet, suddenly too tired to hold myself up.

  “It makes perfect sense...you have a group of super driven, super competitive people. So if they can say, this person thinks I’m the best person in the world and they have already decided to spend the rest of their life with me, it’s like, check.” She makes a squishing movement with her hand. “They accomplished that, and they’re happy.”

  I open my mouth to speak, but she doesn’t let me get a word in.

  “Or, if they can say, ‘Yeah I hooked up with that person but I don’t care about them as much as they care about me, in fact I don’t care about them at all,’ they win that little game—they have proven they are desirable and avoided the embarrassment of possibly pining after someone who doesn’t want them.

  “But to say,” she continues, “‘I like them a lot, and will see how it goes, we hopefully will go on a sixth date...’” She clutches her chest. “That is waaaay too much vulnerability for people who are used to winning everything.”

  “But caring about someone isn’t about winning,” I say. “Love isn’t a competition.”

  “Sara...” She narrows her eyes, as if trying to tell if I’m joking. “I got an email from your app today basically saying I was in tenth place in the love competition.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Roberto

  “Hola, mijo, how are you?” My mother’s voice rings with warmth. She has more of an accent than me or my father. She speaks almost perfect English now, but her words always sound smoother, in a singsong way, like they are rounded at the edges.

  I have this hazy memory from when I was young that almost seems like a dream when I try to remember it now. I am eight years old, wearing cowboy pajamas, and have woken from a dream I cannot remember. My room is quiet and cool and a sort of blue color. A sliver of orange light shines between my door and the floor. Down the hall I could hear my mother’s voice, louder than the radio in the kitchen that is playing the Luis Miguel she always put on during three-glasses-of-wine nights, but not loud enough for me to hear what she is talking about. I cuddle my blanket closer and go back to sleep smiling. It sounds safe; it sounds like home.

  Sometimes, even now, I wake up to a sound in the house, or even my dorm, and think it’s her. It’s hard to get back to sleep after that.

  “¡Mamá!” I lean back in my desk chair, tipping back onto two legs. I quickly correct myself, lowering the legs so I am sitting in a way that I won’t ‘caerme y romperme el cuello,’ although it’s not as though, from a country away, she can see how I am sitting.

  “You sound tired. Have you been getting enough sleep?”

  “Sí,” I lie. “I’ve just been very busy lately, with the app launching to more schools and everything. We went to ten more this week.”

  Back-to-back launches were brutal, but, as I was told by Braden, necessary, to keep our momentum.

  “Lo se!” Her voice goes an octave higher. “I read that article you sent me. The Huffington Post, very nice, baby, esto es grande.”

  I smile. “Gracias. My friend Braden has been doing all the press stuff.”

  “Eh, this boy is your friend now? I thought we hated him.”

  “We never hated him... I just didn’t like him that much at first, when it was mostly coding, but he’s doing more work now. He’s not too bad.” I pick up a pencil from my desk. I rub the eraser with my thumb.

  “Hmmm.” The line is silent for a moment, so I brace myself for what is next. “¿Que tal la chica?”

  Oh, great, here we go again. I shake my head. Dad must have told her.

  “Sara? What about her?”

  “How does she feel about this Braden boy? Are they still at each other’s throats all the time?”

  “Not exactly...”

  Actually, it has kind of been the opposite lately. I’d started to notice little things at first—she would bring coffee for us and not “forget” his; he would let it slide when she said something incredibly nerdy. He would tease her, and she would smile and look down instead of scrunching her nose.

  I don’t know what happened that day, when I got in the car and she went after him. But their relationship changed from tormenting each other to playful teasing. Or not being mean at all.

  And then, just the other day... They arrived together at her quad for a meeting, late, laughing and talking loudly about some inside joke as they walked up.

  “Sorry, we were just at lunch,” Sara said, still trying to catch her breath from laughing.

  “We would have invited you but it was so last minute,” Braden said.

  “Yeah.” Sara looked at him, and he looked back at her. “We were actually just texting, and I mentioned this sandwich place.”

  “And the next thing you know—” he hops into the story “—she was like, ‘when did I get so hungry.’”

  “And he was like, ‘I’m already headed there.’ So we just said, why not, and went.” She smiles, and her eyes sparkle.

  It was like having a conversation with two aliens who had taken over their bodies.

  “Que bueno,” my mother says.

  “What?” I blink, back in the present, in my messy dorm room, with someone making a ton of noise in the courtyard as they attempt to blow away the leaves that have just started to fall. Well, as much as they do fall here in paradise.

  “That’s good. That your partners aren’t driving each other crazy anymore.”

  “Oh, um.” I clear my throat. “Yeah. That’s true.”

  Just then there is a knock at the door. I stand and walk over to open it as my mother starts in on a new subject, talking a mile a minute, something about the flowers she is trying to grow.

  I yank open the door to see Braden there, radiating energy.

  I raise an eyebrow. But he doesn’t explain, he just pushes past me into my room.

  “Hold on,” I tell him. “I’m talking with my mom.”

  “I can’t hold on.” He is moving around, on the balls of his feet, and I am not sure if he is about to dance or fight me.

  “Ugh, okay...” I turn away from him for a moment, as if this gives me more privacy. “Mom, I’ll have to call you back.”

  I grumble as I hang up the phone. “What?” I ask. This better be good.

  He grabs me by the shoulders “We got a meeting with Thatcher Bell!”

  * * *

  This time the lead-up to the meeting is far less hectic. We have a few days’, not hours’, notice, and are already in a better position, having been live for around a month, not a day. Braden asks me and Sara for a few statistics, but mostly tells us to leave it all to him. I’d feel m
ore comfortable doing so if I hadn’t witnessed him crash and burn in the last meeting. But he’s the one who’s spent every summer since he was in diapers in Martha’s Vineyard and Tahoe with guys like this, so I’d have a hard time correcting him even if he was doing something wrong.

  I stand outside my dorm, adjusting my tie and wondering if this suit makes me look too much like a kid about to make his First Communion, as I wait for Braden to pick me up in an Uber.

  Well, pick us up, that is if Sara ever finishes getting ready. I glance at the door behind me, still closed, with no one visible through the glass.

  Tires crunch on gravel as a black car pulls up.

  “Sorry!” A voice says behind me. I turn to see Sara, her blond hair flying as she races through the door. She shakes her head as she reaches me. “I never budget enough time.”

  She is wearing more makeup than usual, or at least, than she does when we’re up half the night coding. Her eyelids are shimmery and her hair is curled. The ringlets still fall perfectly, so she must have just done them. After all, the last time she curled it she kept telling me how quickly her hair tends to straighten out.

  She hugs me, and the sharp smell of hair spray is overwhelming.

  “Okay.” She leans back, her hands resting on my shoulders for a moment. “Let’s do this thing.”

  I open the car door for her before walking around to climb in the other side. It’s a nice car; the inside has all the touches you don’t notice are missing in normal cars, but make you feel fancier as soon as you climb into this kind. Leather interior, seat heaters, a glowing touchscreen display in place of a radio with buttons.

  “You know, you can get an Uber that’s not a town car,” Sara says, turning to Braden, who is sitting between us in the middle seat.

  I pull my door closed. Even that feels different, the door heavier than usual.

  “No offense to you, sir,” Sara adds to the driver.

  “None taken.” The driver, a middle-aged man in a suit, laughs.

  “Hey,” Braden says. “If you’re going to get a private car, you may as well really do it.”

  Sara leans forward and looks over Braden to me, rolling her eyes.

  I laugh and turn to him, waiting for another remark filled with elitism and bravado, but he is silent.

  He’s wearing a black jacket over a crisp white shirt, far from any sort of First Communion, coming closer to a Vogue magazine. He looks young though, especially since he’s freshly shaven. And actually kind of pale in contrast to his blazer. He looks past the windshield to the road ahead, his eyes unwavering.

  The first part of the meeting goes pretty much the exact same way as our previous attempt. We pull up to a rather unassuming building along Sand Hill. We take an elevator up to a modern and airy office. We are told to wait, greeted by a suave but surprisingly causal guy who offers us coffee and water, which we politely turn down.

  We are shown to a large office and exchange pleasantries and handshakes with Thatcher Bell, a middle-aged man with salt-and-pepper hair but few wrinkles, perhaps because of medical assistance. He walks with an easy gait. We sit down and thank him for taking the time to meet with us.

  And then the question comes.

  “So how many users do you have?”

  I hold my breath.

  “With all due respect, sir,” Braden says. “That’s not the question you should be asking us.”

  Mr. Bell raises his eyebrows. He doesn’t look offended. Surprised maybe, but not offended. Or at least, not offended yet. I bite my lip. Braden is playing with fire.

  “You see, the draw of Perfect10 is its exclusivity,” Braden says confidently. “We were available only at Warren for our first three weeks. A week ago we launched to ten more schools after reviewing applications from some of the most exclusive institutions in the country.”

  He sits a little taller. “We are in the process of picking our next ten, but since we’ve already chosen Oxford and St. Andrews, we’re about to be international, while maintaining our selectivity. We could go wider, of course, but we are strategically building a brand, and I think you know that and you were asking me a trick question.

  “What you really want to know,” Braden says, “is how Perfect10 is doing in the places it’s available. You need stats, to which I will say, at the schools where we offer the app, 63 percent of single students are on it. What’s more, 75 percent of our users check the app every day, and 25 percent of our users check it more than 5 times a day on average. That is almost unheard-of levels of engagement, as I’m sure you know.”

  Bell nods and writes something on his notepad.

  “And what’s more, we’ve been able to isolate exactly when user engagement skyrockets.” He gestures to me and Sara when he says “we,” but I didn’t know we did that. “We were unsurprised to find that users check their scores far more often when they are nearing a transition point between statuses. We were surprised to find, however, that this effect is much more poignant when users are at risk of falling down a level. It turns out that insecurity, not vanity, fuels our engagement. People become addicted to checking their score when they are afraid they will fall down a level.”

  I shift my weight. It feels like the room is getting warmer. I wonder if it is too late to ask for water. Probably. But I suddenly feel like my throat is swelling closed.

  “We can easily monetize this insecurity,” Braden continues. “Perhaps by using a surge pricing model, so the cost of checking your score goes up the more times you check it per day, or by adding video ads before you can see your score if you’re within .5 of a change.”

  “And the ads could be for gym memberships or makeup,” Bell says.

  A smile spreads across Braden’s face. “I like the way you think, sir.”

  Bell stares at his notepad for a moment, pen still in hand, although he’s not writing anything, just tapping the desk so that little pen marks appear on the paper, like tiny blue sprinkles. “I worked in the television business for years, always worrying about ratings. About how many eyes we could get to the show, so they would also see the ads. And I see my kids, with their iPhones, constantly on social media—you can barely tear them away. I’ve always thought that would be a hell of a business to be in.”

  Braden’s eyes light up. “So you’re saying...”

  Bell smiles but holds up his hand. “I’m just saying you’ve got me interested, and that I would like to take your idea to the rest of my team, see what the board thinks first. But yes.” He stands, and we follow suit. “I’m saying you’ve made it farther than ninety percent of the people who have sat in that chair.” He smiles, and I swear to god, his teeth sparkle. Like a cartoon prince. “I guess we sell exclusivity too.”

  He shakes our hands as we thank him, nodding vigorously at every word he says, even though the adrenaline roaring through my brain is too loud for me to really process what he is saying.

  Chapter Twenty

  Sara

  Oh my god. Oh. My. God.

  I cannot believe what I just heard. He wants to take our idea to his board. To his board!

  I don’t know much about this venture capital stuff, but I’ve seen enough movies to know that going to the board has got to be a good thing.

  I shake Mr. Bell’s hand and smile so widely that my face would hurt if I weren’t high off pure happiness.

  It’s all I can do to keep my composure as I wave goodbye to the receptionist and wait for the elevator.

  “I’m going to run to the bathroom,” Robbie says as the doors ding open. “I’ll meet you guys downstairs.”

  I nod and step into the elevator, Braden following close behind.

  “Oh my god!” I finally let out the words that have been ricocheting around my head. “I cannot believe that just happened. I mean, did you see his face? I was worried at first because, well, you know, that was a bit risky. An
d after what happened last time—sorry if you don’t want me to mention that, but oh my god, who cares now, because that went so well and we really only need one firm to like us and oh my gosh. Whoa.” I stop to catch my breath for a second, putting my hand on my chest.

  Braden has just been smiling and nodding along as I’ve chattered on.

  The doors open and I continue as we step off the elevator. “And not to mention, did you hear at the end how he said they were exclusive too and...”

  I feel like I have had twenty cups of coffee. I’m practically shaking as I walk a million miles a minute and talk faster. It’s like I’m barely registering the words I am saying, let alone thinking and then speaking, like my mother is always reminding me to.

  “And oh my gosh,” I say, holding open the door for Braden as we step into the sunlight. “That was so perfect, the way you pitched it, it was just—” I wave my arms, miming my mind exploding, unable to put my excitement into words anymore.

  I expect him to make fun of me for being overexcited, like he did when I danced around my room when my Tory Burch package arrived, or when I cried when I watched that video of panda cubs playing to the sound of “Panda” by Desiigner.

  But right now, he is practically as manic as I am. “I know,” he says, his eyes shimmering. “I can’t believe it.”

  I practically walk into the big Bell Ventures sign in front of the building, and it becomes real again.

  “Yes, yes, yes, yes yes!” I jump up and down, laughing. I pull Braden into a hug and he stumbles back for a second before wrapping his arms around me as well. I fall into him, trying to catch my breath. “I can’t believe it,” I say into his shirt, before leaning back. His arms don’t fall from my waist.

  His eyes find mine; they are still shining, fiery and alive. And my breath catches for a different reason.

  There is a pause, and the air around us buzzes with electricity. For a moment we just stare at each other. And I wonder if what is running through my mind is running through his. I blink so that my eyelashes flutter and bite my lip.