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Nat waved his words away. “There will always be bad actors. I can’t be responsible for every time someone acts like a jerk on the internet.”
Rami stood his ground. “And yet you know that now there’s all sorts of ghosting and toxic messaging and abuse and general people-treating-each-other-like-shit that’s happening because of platforms like BeTwo, and on a scale that it never did before.”
She shrugged, hoping he wouldn’t see the doubt in her eyes. She’d always known those things were happening, of course, and on every app, not just BeTwo. But for the first time, she was a victim of the bad behavior herself, instead of just an outside observer. She had to admit that it hit differently.
“So, then it comes down to this,” he said. “Either you think something about the technology is encouraging people to act like assholes, or you think all of humanity is just, innately, a bunch of assholes.” He crossed his arms. “Personally, I can’t be that cynical.”
“You take it too seriously.”
“You don’t take it seriously enough!”
Fully clothed, from opposite sides of the room, they glared at each other.
Anger and exhaustion and bubbling tears throbbed in Nat’s chest. How had she gotten here? Not just the ruined night with Rami, or the ruined night with Nick, or the one with Eric, or even the years of ruined camaraderie with Jo. But how had the one thing that had always been the antidote to all the ups and downs of her personal life — her steady, successful work — led her to this? Burned out and humiliated from some disastrous stunt that put every single aspect of her life on the line. And she wasn’t even close to winning.
She should never have pivoted from sorting fishing lures to trying to match people. Then the conversation about her app would have focused on the quality of her work instead of being a referendum on her love life. Then she could have at least kept her dignity. And maybe a boyfriend, too.
“I just think . . .” Rami trailed off and blinked away the tears of frustration forming in his eyes. “People are getting hurt.”
“I’m fine,” said Nat.
She watched his face harden. He gave her a cold nod. “You sure about that?”
She picked up her purse. “See you tomorrow.”
Rami sank onto his bed. “Sure, have a good night.”
Nat’s feet stayed put. She didn’t want to leave. “Good luck finding your next date.”
“You know what? I hope that you find a really good date, too,” he said. “I really mean that.” He held her eyes with a look of genuine tenderness before it flashed into defiance. “Then you might remember what actual human feelings are like.”
Suddenly, Nat couldn’t leave fast enough. “You have no idea what my feelings are like,” she said, and left before he could see her tears fall.
Chapter 13
The next morning, Nat watched as Tracy Goodwin-King and the BuzzFill crew set up lights, mics, and an unbelievable amount of cables as they readied the BeTwo office rooftop for the interview. Whither, Weather didn’t have an office, and apparently, Rami had felt that being outdoors was an adequate gesture toward neutral territory. At least the BeTwo billboard wasn’t in view, even if part of Nat wished that it were.
Justin and Jo rushed around making notes on the instructions and taking pictures for the BeTwo socials. They seemed to be avoiding her on some instinctive, animal level, and Nat had noticed that they were leaving her out of any of the shots. She could guess why they weren’t speaking to her, and as for making sure she wasn’t in the pics — that was probably because she couldn’t stop pacing and because she was wearing every hour of her sleepless night under her eyes.
Tracy and V, the green-haired producer from Tech-Talk, approached Nat with a clip-on microphone.
“So glad we’re doing this outside,” said V, squinting into the bright sunlight. “A lot of these tech offices have glass walls everywhere, which, hello? San Andreas Fault?”
Nat’s stomach gurgled loudly. Had she eaten since the pizza with Rami? She didn’t think so. V eyed her with what looked to Nat like fear.
Tracy struck a confident pose and hit Nat with a glowing smile. “So, this is just a natural, friendly chat today, OK? Our audience wants to know how you’re doing, how the dates are going, and if you’ve met anyone promising.” She nudged Nat with a playful elbow. “Have you?”
Nat stayed quiet, staring at the microphone clipped to her shirt.
“Have you met anyone promising?” Tracy repeated, her smile starting to crack into a more aggressive, manic energy.
Nat’s eyes searched Tracy’s flawless skin as she wondered how to even answer that question. Yes, she had met men who had seemed promising. But then, pretty much the moment she’d met them, all of the promise had gone down in flames faster than someone posting a nuanced opinion on the internet.
So, where did the problem lie? Her profile had been specifically engineered to get the most matches from the top users on the app. She had basically fed her app’s data back to itself — it should have been a perfect closed loop of victory. Yet her dates had been disasters and almost all of her messaging had gone nowhere. Rami’s words rose in her mind in spite of her best efforts to push them away. Either her user pool was really just that bad, or there was something wrong with the approach, aka her app. Now she stared down the barrel of two options for an existential crisis — A) an entire segment of the human population, namely cis-het men, were irrevocably inept, or B) her entire career was.
But of course, there was a third option for what the problem could be — the problem could be her. Even a city full of desirable men and a complex and high-performing algorithm would be utterly thwarted by someone who was, essentially, unlikeable even when she was hiding behind the veneer of proven crowd-pleasers. Maybe she was the wrench in her own machine. Maybe she was the design flaw.
So, which theory was she going to posit for this live interview?
