Page 35 of Swiped
“Technically we’re just meeting tonight, but I feel like I already know him, you know?” Nat blinked her sharp green eyes. “Meeting in person just feels like a formality at this point.” She stretched and cracked her neck. “We’ve got so much in common!”
“Cool, yeah, good luck!” Sara fidgeted by the sofa. “Hey, so did you get a chance to look at my résumé that I gave you the other day? My apprenticeship is almost over and I’ve got to submit a formal job app before the salon will let me wield scissors around the public.”
Nat winced and covered her face. The text exchange where Sara had asked for her help resurfaced in her mind like a phantom. “Oh shit! I’m sorry. This whole BeTwo thing is just . . .” She looked at Sara with guilt. “They’re totally gonna hire you! You don’t need help from some coder who’s never had a real job.”
Sara nodded to downplay her disappointment. “It’s fine.” She slipped some envelopes into her tote bag as she pulled outa bottle of wine and shot Nat a guilty look. “I’m probably just gonna send it in. It’s due tonight.”
Nat wasn’t sure what the envelope thing was about, but she didn’t want to ask while still feeling the tension from the forgotten résumé. “List me as a reference though, if you want?” she offered. “Or, like, the pics of my hair if that’s a thing?”
Sara nodded and grabbed a wine opener from the kitchen. “Cool, I will.”
Nat hopped up. “Yes, go get it!” She clapped her hands. “OK, now I’m gonna go grab the shoes, get dressed and go on my date.” She gave Sara a quick squeeze. “Wish me luck!”
* * *
Rami stared at his eyebrows in the bathroom mirror. Were they OK? As far as eyebrows go? It was like saying a word so many times that it lost all meaning and sounded like gibberish. He had two hairy clumps of gibberish on his face. Should he do something about that?
Tonight was his second date with Gemma. They’d exchanged numbers after the whole shopping cart incident, and already met up once for a beer (for him) and a kombucha (for her). It’d gone surprisingly well. He’d confessed his situation of being in a livestreaming dating competition as soon as they’d sat down. He made sure to paint Nat as not just his competitor, but an ideological scourge on society with her capitalist faith in algorithms and, if you asked him, all the technology that was supposed to bring us together and yet only pushed us farther apart.
He might have been playing to his audience a little bit.
But it worked. Gemma had nodded enthusiastically to his screed against dating apps. She, too, felt they were capitalistic and she, too, had an innate mistrust of technology. (Rami had left out the part about him being a coder for his own app. Ithadn’t seemed like the right time to bring it up.) In fact, Gemma was a self-proclaimed Luddite, and even if she hadn’t gotten Rami’s joke about smashing cotton mills on their next date, she hadn’t balked at the prospect of a second date, either. She tried to live as analog of a life as possible, having been converted after a profound experience with mushrooms and a pyrotechnic statue of a giant hog at Burning Man. Rami had never been to Burning Man, because Rami had never wanted to do anything less in his life than go to Burning Man.
But Gemma had pretty eyes and full lips, and seemed to think Rami was, against all prior evidence to the contrary from other women, absolutely amazing.
Ian’s phone blared its aggressively long ringtone for what seemed like the millionth time. Still, it broke the spell of staring at his eyebrows, and Rami headed to the source of the sound in the living room.
“That’s, like, the seventh alarm, Ian,” he said to his roommate, who was stretched out on the sofa with his head on a stack of folded towels.
“It’s not an alarm,” said Ian without opening his eyes.
“Is someone actually calling you? On the phone?”
“Looks like it.” Ian sighed.
“A voice call is rarely a good sign, man. You should answer it.”
Ian rolled over and fixed Rami with a bleary gaze. “Deflecting anxiety about your date onto others is like . . .” He trailed off and closed his eyes. “Cutting the same bird twice in the mirror,” he mumbled.
Rami frowned and poked his roommate’s shoulder. “Hmm, even weirder metaphor than usual. And I’m not nervous to go out with Gemma, at all, actually. Why would I be?”
Ian sat up and relit the glass pipe lying on the coffee table. He took a huge inhale and gestured at Rami while holding in the smoke, as if to say,Because of you.
Rami got the idea. “Did it strike me as odd that she carries a flip phone from the mid-2000s? Or that she literally told me what time it was when I asked if she was on TikTok?” He began to pace. “Yes. Yes, it did.”
Ian nodded through another cloud of smoke as his phone blasted them with another robotic siren.
Rami stopped pacing. “Seriously, man. Do you want me to just answer it for you?”
“It’s the Green Party. They’re relentless in all the wrong ways.” Ian grabbed the phone and silenced it. “It’s their tragedy, and also mine for voting my principles.” He gestured with the smoldering pipe for Rami to continue. “You were saying?”
“OK, well, yes, I did think some things about Gemma were odd.” Rami resumed his pace around the room. “Then I realized that ‘odd’ is just another word for ‘uncommon,’ which is just another word for ‘special.’ And that is what she is.”
Ian opened his mouth to speak, but sputtered into a wracking cough.
“Whatthisis, I mean,” Rami corrected himself. “A special opportunity to connect with someone totally outside of our digital conditioning. Sociologists would kill for this!” He stroked his freshly shaven chin. “I could do a post on Medium about it, maybe.”
Ian set down the pipe and curled up around the towels on the sofa again. “Yeah. Go get ’em, analog tiger.”
