Page 5 of Swiped
But she loved her work, and she loved the rush of coding — making a function run faster or squashing a persistent bug. It was like she was constantly building and solving and then remaking a puzzle just for her, a decade-long conversation with her own mind. She’d poured thousands of blissful (if also quite stressful) hours into her app. The BeTwo algorithm had actually started as a way to sort fishing flies, her mom’s then-newest hobby and source of frustration. A professor had suggested she look into using it to sort personalities instead, as she showed Nat printed-out Yahoo! articles about the promise of a future where every lonely soul could find their match through the World Wide Web. Her overwhelmingly male classmates would never take on such a “touchy-feely” area as love, so Nat saw an opening and dove in.
Then, as breathless coverage of Elizabeth Holmes dominated magazine covers and every winking conversation with her parents’ friends about why she was going to grad school in San Francisco instead of getting a job, Nat began to notice ashift. Suddenly, she was the one people were listening to, even if she was usually the only woman in the room. Her ideas were the ones being seriously considered, especially when she “pivoted into disrupting the dating space”. Requisite tech bro jargon aside, it had seemed like there might actually be a seat at the table for her. She wanted to take it.
She paused outside a conference hall placard that readTech-Talk Opening Panel: Top Indie Apps of the Year. A grid of app logos and names dotted the sign, including her own —Natalie Lane, creator ofBeTwo. She counted half a dozen featured apps and felt her nerves relax a little. There’d be five other people on stage, plus the moderator. How much talking would she even have to do? This would be fine. She snapped a quick photo of the sign to text her mom and pushed through the doors.
* * *
On her way backstage, someone handed Nat a room-temperature bottle of water and a tote bag stuffed with stickers, pins, coasters, and flimsy sunglasses. In the green room, a dozen or so tech journalists hunched over laptops and smartphones, fingers furiously working their keyboards as their eyes scanned the room every few seconds. The biggest outlet and the event’s biggest sponsor, the online juggernautBuzzFill, had already commandeered an entire corner of the room — a teeming beehive of writers, interns, and audiovisual techs. Some of the panelists were already chatting up the reporters. Nat watched a twenty-something woman with wild pink curls gesture dramatically as she talked into a mic held by another twenty-something with asymmetrical hair and tattoos. She felt like she had only just landed where she wanted in her career, and yet she already felt the pressure of being replaced.
Nat was giving the journalists a wide berth when a hand suddenly grabbed her shoulder.
A petite producer with aThey/Themshirt and a green pixie cut scream-spoke into a headset while holding up one finger to Nat’s face. “I don’t want excuses, Connor! I want any and all normies to be kept on the balcony!”
Before Nat could decide whether to defend herself against being a “normie” or jump at the chance to escape, they stopped yelling and smiled at her. “Speaker badge, yay! Panelists are over here.”
“Hi, sorry,” said Nat, as they scooted her toward a cluster of folding chairs and an oh-so-80s floral sofa that was probably a decade older than most people in the room. “I wasn’t sure where to go.”
“Just chill here,” said the producer, whose name badge read V. “And help yourself to the spread.” They gestured to a table piled with sweating cans and bottles and deli trays. “We’ve got sparkling water, all the flavors, though I wouldn’t because the bubbles come back as burps onstage.”
“Oh, that would be bad,” Nat murmured as she took a seat against the screaming pattern of bright pink tiger lilies and palm leaves on the old sofa.
“Disaster. And we got a cheese sampler, but depending on how you do with dairy, that’s basically gonna coat your throat in mucus. Saliva is already gnarly enough in a microphone, you know?”
“Totally . . .” Nat felt her chest tightening. “I probably won’t eat the cheese then.”
“Good call. Oh, and there’s a keg of craft vodka tonics on tap.” V took a breath and squinted into the distance. “Though, alcohol? Really? During a livestream?”
“Livestream?” Nat had a vague memory of Justin and Jo mentioning this, but it was actually too vague, almost as if they’d been trying to keep her from remembering it, which was why they were so good at their jobs.
V looked at Nat with a mix of bravado and pity. “The internet. You know how it is.”
“Totally.” Nat swallowed what she hoped was a normal amount of saliva and mucus. “Totally,” she repeated.
“So, yeah, help yourself to the snacks. You’re on in ten.”
They stormed off, barking more orders into their headset, as Nat tried to take deep, calming breaths. Instead, she felt her body stiffen against the lumpy sofa cushions. Was she sweating already? She started to open the water bottle, then caught V giving her side-eye. OK, so it was a no to the water, and a yes to the sweating. She pulled out her phone to text the twins a question about maybe, just thinking out loud, maybe not doing the panel? — when someone plopped onto the sofa beside her.
“So, I guess I shouldn’t have been downing all those gin-and-brie martinis, then?”
Nat laughed and turned to the voice. “I’ve never been so terrified of cheese in my life,” she said. Beside her was a thirty-something man with deep olive skin and shiny black curls cropped above a boyish face. And he was smiling at her. Nat couldn’t help but smile back.
He had thick eyebrows and dark eyes that sparkled as he gestured to the couch and said, “Here, let this weirdly tropical sofa soothe you into believing you are far, far away. Somewhere like . . .” His full lips turned up in a little smirk as he finished his thought. “Like at a Best Western in the year 1998.”
Nat laughed again, and some more of the tension eased out of her chest. “’98?” she said. “I wish!” She turned toward him with an ominous creak in the couch, and scanned for his badge, but didn’t see one. “Then I could just ride my bike to Blockbuster, and stay up all night eating Gushers and trying to find Carmen Sandiego.”
Her companion smiled and shook his head. “I had a theory about that game and it wasn’t popular around the school lunch table.”
“Neither was I,” said Nat. “So, let’s hear it.”
His brows knitted together, and Nat couldn’t help but notice the way his boyishness sharpened into something more dashing when he was in thought. “Carmen Sandiego doesn’t want to be found, right? And so, if we stop looking for her, she’s free. We’re both free.” His dark eyes twinkled at Nat again. Mischief looked good on him. “So why catch the butterfly? Just observe its beauty.”
Gorgeous eyes aside, Nat cringed. “Yikes! You said this out loud? In middle school?”
“I wasn’t wrong!” he said as she laughed. “My point is, nothing you could say out there could possibly go over as poorly as my extended butterfly analogy to a group of seventh grade boys.”
“I believe that,” said Nat, as he paused, suddenly serious.
“Unless . . .”
