Page 9 of Most Likely to Match
I smile at her.
She does not smile back.
I wipe my hands— suddenly sweating more than any other part of my body— on my athletic pants, thankful the sweat-wicking qualities have disappeared.
I started Core Cupid out of my U of T dorm room. I was a lonely first year without any friends, nursing a broken heart of my own making, whose roommate constantly complained about her inability to find a “nice” guy at various frosh events. Core Cupid started as an attempt to bridge the gap between us, strangers in a co-living space. A quirky, glitchy little script of code that took her Facebook friends and labeled them Dateable or Not. It was a quiet fuck-you to Zuckerberg because it used everything but profile pictures; it looked at commonalities and differences.
It resulted in my very first successful match. Safia and I never became true friends, but she did find her husband because of me. I have their wedding invitation framed in my office.
Core Cupid is more than “just a dating app.” It is not even, really, meant to disrupt the professional matchmaking industry— whatever the fuck that is supposed to mean— despite what the write-up in the Toronto Star stated.
Core Cupid is my life’s work. It takes love and humanity, two things that have always felt incomprehensible to me, and distills them down to something I can understand, something I can control. SomethingIlove: code.
I can’t lose it. Iwon’t. I will do whatever it takes to keep Core Cupid going. Somehow.
A herd of teens passes by the woman and me on the bench. All girls. Beautiful, thin, and chattering in that way teenagers have, where every topic— school, parents, boys or girls— sounds serious, life-altering. My stomach aches at the sight of them. Not for some time long lost, but because I wish I could stop them. I wish I could shake them and tell them in a way that they’ll hear me and tell themthat there is so much life to live. That the things that seem insurmountable today probably won’t be a few years from now. The things that you think are important— like what the rest of these girls think of you— probably aren’t.
Behind them comes another group of teens, smaller in size and stature. Boys who haven’t quite grown into themselves yet. Most on foot, two on skateboards. All of them stare at the group of girls in front of them. Not leering, more like longing.
Dean loved to skateboard. The sound of the wheels on the sidewalk outside my house were a warning bell, reminding me that I had only minutes before my cute, sweet French tutor would knock on my door.
We used to spend hours speaking in stilted French. And then more hours doing stuff with our mouths that didn’t involve speaking.
We may never have gone public as a couple, at least not until we were outed by the LKs, but Dean was the closest thing to a best friend, and a boyfriend, I’ve ever had.
I’ll never claim that my pain was worse than his, but losing him, so publicly, so swiftly, turned into a wound that still doesn’t feel all the way closed.
All because I left my phone on the table during lunch. By the time I’d returned with a basket of French fries from the caf kitchen, they’d already hidden it away. I didn’t even notice until next period. And by then it was too late.
Sometimes, late at night, when I should be sleeping but instead uselessly review all of my most embarrassing life moments, I see his face when I finally met him on that stage. The horror, the shock. The betrayal.
The LKslaughed. Their boyfriends did, too. And then the whole cafeteria was laughing at him. The whole school.
In the aftermath, Lauren G., the ringleader and the one using my phone, had gotten in trouble, but so had Dean.
By then, it was the end of the school year and Dean never came back. He never showed up at graduation, either. The adults seemed tosimply choose to forget; the students talked about it in snickered whispers.
And I relived it. Every moment. Everything I could have done but didn’t. Everything I should have done, like stopped them, like protected him, but was too cowardly to.
I was frozen, standing on that stage, watching the life of someone I cared for be ruined. And I did nothing. Sometimes I still feel trapped there. The smallest, scaredest version of myself, paralyzed by the fear of what? Speaking up? Speaking out?
Maybe if I could explain all that to the clients who are quitting, they’d understand. They’d see how absurd it would be for me to have a boyfriend, a husband, a partner. How could I ever be in a relationship when I couldn’t even do my secret friends with benefits the solid of not ruining his life?
Admitting the truth would most definitely lose me more clients, not keep them. But maybe Jasmine is right. Maybe it’s not a matter of finding a boyfriend; maybe it’s a matter of faking one.
I have Dean’s number saved in my contacts — the BIA gave it to me after he left — and he might say no. He might laugh in my face at the idea of helping me. But I’ve never had the chance to say I’m sorry, so maybe, at the very least, I could finally do that.
I unzip my phone from the back waistband pocket of my running leggings and do my best to wipe the condensation from the screen.
Then I dial.
2
DEAN
There aren’t many benefits to moving back in with one’s parents in your early thirties.
Scratch that.
