Page 14 of Seven Percent of Ro Devereux
It only took half another beer for Declan’s friends to wander off, leaving the two of us pressed into the alcove in the hallway off the living room. Kissing him wasn’t what I’d thought it would be—I’d dreamed it as this crystalline thing, but in practice it was wet and warm and sloppy. It made it hard for me to breathe. Declan’s body was much bigger than mine, and when he led me toward the bedroom at the back of the house it felt like I had no choice but to follow.
His fingers dipped into the front of my skirt before the door closed behind us, skimming the elastic of my underwear. I felt it like an eel sting, and when I jolted in Declan’s arms he laughed breathily in my ear.
“Easy,” he said, and something about that word landed on me like cold water.
“Stop,” I said, and he didn’t. His fingers tugged at the zipper on my skirt, the noise of its undoing like a beacon in the dark. I said it louder, “STOP,” but it was like he couldn’t hear me, or didn’t want to, or wasn’t listening. I let out a noise like a wounded animal and felt myself go small, shrinking against the inside of the door. He pressed against me and the doorknob ground into my spine. I scrambled for it, jerking against the suffocating weight of him.
When the door swung into the hallway I stumbled backward and Declan blinked, bewildered, into the shock of the light. Therewere three people leaned against the wall by the bathroom and they looked up, stopped talking. I zipped my skirt, righting it on my hips. I couldn’t breathe. My face was sun-surface hot.
As I put distance between us, Declan held his hands up, palms out. Those hands I’d found so beautiful for so long. It was clear, what he was saying to the people watching us:Look, I’m not touching her. Look, I didn’t do anything at all.
When I finally gasped out onto the lawn, gulping in the sharp night air, Miller’s bike was gone. Even after what I’d done, I couldn’t believe he’d left me there alone. My bike was by itself at the end of the driveway, its back tire spinning lifelessly in the wind. I made it home only because I’d lived in Switchback Ridge my whole life and knew it well enough to navigate blind.
The next day, when the beer haze was gone and all I had was cotton-mouth and a headache, I tried to call Miller but he didn’t answer. I was made of shame. I wanted to tell him sorry a hundred times and I wanted to yell at him for leaving me behind. I’d never done anything without him and I didn’t know how to do this—how to wake up into my life after the night I’d had—on my own.
I kept calling, and Miller kept not answering. And he never answered again.
I didn’t hear from Declan after that night; he switched seats in pottery class and soon he graduated, disappeared from Switchback Ridge and my life. Still, he lingered longer than I wanted him to. I donated the skirt I’d worn to his house, the best one I owned, because I couldn’t look at it without imagining his fingers on the zipper. I didn’t tell anyone what happened; not my dad, notMaren. I could barely admit it to myself.
That fall Miller came back to school six feet tall, fuller through the shoulders, sturdier than I’d ever seen him. In every single way, not my Miller anymore.
Then Maren was all I had. We’d been friends before, but with Miller gone we spent all our time together.I could never get closer to you, Maren said, when we were sophomores and I finally told her his half of what had happened.You were always saving that spot for Miller.I’d still have given it to him then, was the truth.
The space he left in my life was like a negative in the woods—the blank that remains on the forest floor where something heavy’s sat for centuries and finally disappears. Nothing grew there anymore, trained to the absence. I left room for him—never moving the log he always propped his bike against, never touching the deck of cards he’d forgotten in our living room. I dug through my desk drawer every six months to put new batteries in the walkie-talkies we’d used since we were seven, just in case his voice ever crackled over the line.
But it didn’t, and the more time passed, the more hardened I became. We were second-semester sophomores and then juniors and then two years had passed, two and a half, nearly three. Miller cut me out of his life so cleanly I could only assume it had been easy for him. And I was too proud, too angry, too—something, not to hate him right back.
We grew apart, I told my dad.It happens. It was bound to happen eventually.
09
Maren and I drive home from the match party in near silence. It’s that awful time of day, the worst time to be driving, when the sun is low in the sky and glares everything flaming orange. I’m thinking about what Evelyn said on Monday, that I’ll get us Celeritas’s buy-in by falling in love. About everything that’s happened in the last week, how the marketing team has been grooming me to become the face of all this—boosting my social posts, adding MASH branding to every single one of my profiles. And about how my match needs to be my partner for the next six months, to spin this story with me.
I’d hoped it could at least be half-real. That even if we didn’t fall in love, we’dlikeeach other. Now it’ll be a lie, and Miller would never lie. He would never, ever lie for me.
“We have two options,” Evelyn said, after pulling Maren and me into a conference room to press us for the truth. I didn’t tell her all of it, just the shadowy outline of a story: we grew up together,I hurt him, he abandoned me, and now we’re worse than nothing to each other. “We can fabricate a different match for you, or we can get Alistair Miller on board.”
Lying about the algorithm felt off-limits to me, a line we’d never be able to uncross if we breached it now.And besides,said the small voice inside me,the algorithm works. That’s the whole point of this.Which was, of course, the spikiest truth to swallow: Based on everything I knew, everything Vera knew, everything I’d spent all summer studying about human behavior, Miller was my match. We were meant for each other; the algorithm had decided. And if I believed the algorithm worked, well. It had to be true, no matter how much I hated it.
I told Evelyn I didn’t want to fabricate anything, and she looked at me with her x-ray eyes and said, “Then we’ll need to make this work as it stands. Are you prepared to do that?”
I was keenly aware of Maren next to me, the worry that rolled from her in waves. She was the one who stood by me when Miller disappeared, who watched the wall come up between us and hardened to it right along with me. Evelyn knew what this story sounded like, but Maren knew what it felt like.
“Ro.” She touched my wrist, just her fingertips. “You don’t have to put yourself through this.”
“We could do it with someone else,” Evelyn said. “Make someone else the face of MASH. Maybe Jazz, she’s media-trained already and single as far as I know.” She didn’t mince her words. “But if you want to give this app its best chance, you are its strongest narrative: a teenager, awoman, who built something on herown that works so well it handed her true love on a silver platter. You make MASH irresistible. It may work with someone else, but it won’t work as well.”
I’d already sacrificed for this: committed to a hectic-as-hell senior year, made my private life public, pissed my dad all the way off. And I believed in it. I was proud of what Vera and I had done. Evelyn played right into that pride:If you want to give this app its best chance, you need to do this. If I didn’t, and it all fell apart, it would be my fault and my fault alone. I didn’t know if I could handle Miller, but I knew I couldn’t handle that.
I looked at Evelyn. “How do we get him on board?”
She nodded, her shoulders relaxing. I’d pleased her. “Given the circumstances, our team will reach out to him first. Ideally, we’ll come to a resolution this weekend, before you’re seen together at school.”
By the time we pull into Maren’s driveway, the sun has dipped below the horizon. I can see her parents in the kitchen making dinner, one of her younger brothers at the table on his phone.
“Ro,” she says, and I look over at her. “This is batshit.”
“It’ll be okay.” I don’t know if it will, but I say it anyway. “They’ll tell us what to say, how to act. It’ll be like reading a script.”
