Page 10 of Swiped

Justin stretched his arms tall above his head as Jo clicked rapid-fire around the BeTwo reporting interface.

Nat pulled up a blank profile on her laptop and projected it to their other big monitor.

Just like any other user , she told herself, before squinting into the analytics spinning on the adjacent screen.

“OK, so the data shows that mentioning international travel gets high engagement rates among straight male users,” said Jo.

“Well, you kinda used to live in London, right?” offered Justin.

Nat flashed to the last time she’d been in that city — her undergrad study abroad program over ten years ago.

Sara had stayed in Bloomington for a sports media work-study job, commentating for the women’s soccer team — just one of the five majors she’d sampled in college.

But Nat had made fast friends with a jock-ish guy named Jake, and fast enemies with her London roommate, a model-gorgeous mean girl on a dance scholarship named Katie.

By the time London had influenced them enough that Katie was insisting on being called Kate, and Nat was downing several cups of PG Tips a day, their dynamics had been set.

Nat was in love with Jake, who was in love with Katie, who was in love with Jake’s attention.

The routine was that Nat and Jake would have hours-long chats in the pub, and swap homemade mix CDs before class, and marathon Monty Python DVDs together in her dorm, but Nat would all but vanish as soon as Katie swept into their tiny room.

Then Jake would jump up from where he almost always sat, on Nat’s bed, and stutter and brush off his time with her like Cheetos dust from his fingers.

Katie would inform Jake of what party they would be going to that night as she touched up her makeup, and Jake would turn back to Nat, suddenly sheepish when they’d been cracking each other up just moments before, and ask, “Uh, Nat, do you want to come with us?”

And Nat would reach for a book, pull on the drugstore reading glasses that she thought made her look sophisticated, and shake her head no.

Katie would roll her eyes and scoff, and Jake would shuffle out behind her, floating away from Nat on a wave of Katie’s fruity body spray and flat-ironed hair, while somewhere deep inside Nat’s heart she believed that one night Jake would come back and choose to spend the evening with her, instead.

Night after night, she clung to the hope that maybe a twenty-something guy on a semester abroad would see the romance of staying in and doing the crossword with her.

After all, she thought it was pretty ideal.

He never did.

“We’re not putting London in my profile,” said Nat. She pulled her hair into a time-for-business ponytail and began typing.

MOST IMPORTANT THING ABOUT ME: I’m a total travel junkie, always down to visit a new continent. Wanderlust is my middle name!

Jo sighed loudly. “That keyword only works if you misspell it.”

Nat blinked at her in confusion.

“W-o-n-d-e-r-lust . . .” Jo rolled her eyes.

Nat winced. She was trying to win this bet with Rami, yes, but she was also the same person who had won her elementary school spelling bee three years in a row, and asked for a trophy case for her birthday, and cried when she had gotten a bicycle instead.

So, choosing between victory and accuracy was truly like choosing between her own babies, and yet, she knew her data wouldn’t lead her astray. She changed the spelling.

“Wait, there’s more!” Jo pulled up more analytics. “Men only respond to the international travel keyword if the travel is for pleasure, not work, and if the words ‘itinerary’ and ‘spa’ are not included.”

I just go wherever the open road guides me . . . the only plans I make are for whatever seems F-U-N!

“Too much?” asked Nat.

Justin frowned at Nat’s projected profile-in-progress. “I mean, it doesn’t exactly seem accurate,” he said.

“How so? It aligns with the data Jo just presented.”

“It doesn’t seem accurate to you ,” he clarified.

Nat waved her hand as if shooing a fly. “But it’s accurate to the data ,” she said, pointing to the screen. “That’s how we’ll win.”

Justin leaned toward Nat with the delicate air of a besweatered guidance counselor. “But what would winning really mean in this situation, anyway?”

Jo shot her brother a loaded glance as she continued. “So, the word ‘fitness’ performs way above average, and you should use as many, like, sporty words as you can because each one of those is like a mating call for most guys, apparently.”

“Easy,” said Nat.

HOW I SPEND MY TIME: You can usually find me biking through the park or brushing up on my G.O.A.T. yoga. Fitness is super important to me! Almost as important as football, baseball, basketball, soccer, lacrosse, badminton, and bowling.

“Nailed it,” said Justin, nodding sagely.

“Again, ‘goat’ is not an acronym,” said Jo, already exasperated. “It’s literally yoga with goats. And I feel like you’re just listing all the sports you’ve heard of.”

Justin grunted and agreed with his sister. “Dude. And, actually, you do not want to date a badminton guy — they are such bad news. Trust me.”

“What’s just, like, one physical activity that you actually do?” asked Jo. “You live in California. There must be something.”

The last time Nat had gone for a nature walk had been after Tech-Talk 2023, during her last romance, if you could call it that.

She’d met him during one of the dozens of crowded happy hours where people wearing lanyards yelled over DJs and exchanged business cards, chintzy swag, and in the case of Owen, phone numbers because he was handsome, witty, and lucky enough to have met Nat before she’d started compiling her wish list.

So, they’d linked up for a stroll in Golden Gate Park, not exactly a hike but walking distance from her apartment in the Panhandle and definitely very beautiful.

Their conversation had carried them past the entrance gate at the tail end of the Haight-Ashbury (neither of them were Grateful Dead listeners), past the Conservatory of Flowers (both of them had trouble keeping houseplants alive) and all the way to the California Academy of Sciences (Owen informed her that the penguins had a live stream.

Nat informed him that the albino alligator was named Claude) before their chat had simply, inexplicably, dried up.

Nothing offensive had been said, nothing major had gone wrong, but Nat remembered looking around the objectively gorgeous park and the objectively gorgeous guy next to her and just feeling like suddenly all the air had gone out of the balloon.

It was as if the switch had flipped to OFF between them, and she could see it all over Owen’s face, too.

Now his eyes darted around instead of winking at her.

Now his stride was quicker, instead of leisurely, and matched to hers.

Now he responded with one-word answers instead of volleying questions.

There was no ignoring it — Owen radiated discomfort and, palpably, boredom.

And she felt the same way. It seemed like in the fated hourglass of their time together, they only had about twenty-five minutes’ worth of sand.

Which would have been less tragic had they not been in the middle of the park.

So, they’d made strained chit-chat as they doubled back on the route that had unspooled around them so effortlessly before. Now every inch felt like an acre.

At some point, he’d asked for more detail on what her app did, and she’d revealed that she was working on a dating app called BeTwo, to which he blurted, “I haven’t tried that one yet, but I will now!

” She winced, and he managed an awkward laugh, but he didn’t even try to cover the fact that he’d just told his current date that he was going to look for a new date.

Some part of Nat had wanted to stick up for herself, say something to salvage the shreds of her dignity she felt slipping away like the wispy clouds in the sky above them, but she couldn’t think of the right words.

The silence between them grew thicker after that.

Back at the gates, they managed a polite back-tapping hug before waving goodbye and, Nat assumed, thanking their respective gods it was over and vowing to never see each other again.

Her Golden Gate Park date experience had at least inspired her to make BeTwo sort users based on the most specific set of criteria out there, thus doing her part to spare anyone else the nightmare of a date running out of gas midair.

As it turned out, however, Owen also lived in Nat’s neighborhood, so she’d started seeing him at her bus stop pretty regularly after that.

They never spoke or even made eye contact.

He radiated discomfort in a way that made it seem both compassionate to ignore him and impossible not to feel his presence like sticky syrup on her skin.

Then he started showing up with a girl who, Nat was not proud to admit, she immediately judged as beneath her.

That was based solely on her haircut — flattering and fashionable and therefore, to Nat’s wounded, bitter eyes, unoriginal.

Then again, Nat was never very charitable before ten in the morning.

Still, basic haircut aside, for months and months, Nat had started every morning with the sight of her awkward date holding hands and sharing umbrellas and leaning on the shoulders of the woman he actually desired. And she had to admit it hurt.

It wasn’t like she had wanted Owen, really. But she couldn’t help the question that filled her mind as she forced her eyes toward a pigeon or an interesting cloud — why hadn’t he wanted her?

Finally, the couple had stopped showing up, and Nat could only assume they had moved into a new place together. Mixed with the relief was the hope that one day it would be her turn.

Now she realized that it had all happened over two years ago.