Page 27 of Swiped

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?

Tracy’s gaze sharpened into a cold calculation of Nat’s silence, even as she maintained her megawatt smile. “You good, Nat?”

Jo hurried over, yanking Justin along by his hand. His leather slides slapped against the ground like distortions of his sister’s heel clicks. “Ow,” he said, ever so gently.

“She’s just taking her time sorting through everyone!” said Jo, matching Tracy’s perky urgency note-for-note. She gave an open-mouthed laugh. “There’s just so many guys!”

Tracy rolled her eyes. “Oh girl, tell me about it. Every time I open up my messages, it’s just—” She waved her long brown hands in her face like slapping away a swarm of flies — “so many dicks .”

Justin raised his eyebrows in approval. Jo laughed again, loudly, and kicked the toe of Nat’s shoe. “Right, boss?”

“Totally!” cried Nat, springing to life. “Tell me about it!” She clapped her palms in a single loud smack in front of her chest with a smile. “What am I gonna do with all these dicks?”

Jo’s eyes sparkled at her, and Nat couldn’t help but feel a twinge of their old connection. She shook it off. Jo was just doing her job because their fates were intertwined at the moment.

Tracy’s laugh faded, and her symmetrical face grew serious. “Listen, Nat, I like you and I like your app.” She smiled again. “And my bosses like the sponsorship opportunity at play here. So, let’s be real for a second, OK?”

“Sure?” Nat swallowed her rising panic. She met Jo’s eyes again with a silent plea for help. Despite everything, leaning on her was an instinct, plus she didn’t have anyone else to turn to.

Tracy shooed V away and wrapped Nat in a hug that was more like a huddle. “Are you on something right now? Microdosing without the ‘micro’ part? Because I can work with that.”

Jo wedged the shoulder of her navy blazer into the huddle. “She’s just excited!” She gestured to Justin for assistance.

“Yeah,” he said. Stretching his arm around Nat as his stack of beaded bracelets rattled in her ear. “Who wouldn’t be excited to share intimate details of their personal life on the internet?”

“Right.” Tracy beamed, but her eyes were sharp. “It’s an amazing opportunity, for sure.”

Nat grinned too, which didn’t seem to soothe anyone’s nerves inside the huddle. The silence seemed to thicken around her like a wool sweater. She felt a drip of sweat slide down the small of her back.

“Well, maybe have a cup of coffee or something before Rami gets here,” said Tracy with a sigh. “I’m gonna be honest, our numbers are showing that he’s way more likeable.”

At that, Nat gasped. Now the wool sweater was wrapped around her neck, and something was pulling it tighter.

“Yeah, our audience is misogynist trash,” said Tracy, in the tone of a barista announcing she’s all out of croissants for the day.

“The internet, right?” She sighed. “The list of requirements to simply be allowed to exist as a woman are just . . .” She trailed off and blinked her eyes wide. “So much.”

Nat muttered in agreement while her mind raced ahead of Tracy’s words — the list of requirements .

Maybe all this experiment would prove was that she was a hateable ogre, some doomed monster knocking down condos with her tail while she was just trying to walk across the street for an iced coffee — but if Nat knew nothing else, she knew about running data experiments, and there was one variable she hadn’t yet tried.

She eyed the door back into her office and checked the giant digital clock ticking down by the cameras. Yes, she had only one option left to save herself in this ridiculous stunt, but she also still had time to pull it off. “I’ll be right back!” she called over her shoulder as she ran inside.

* * *

Nat’s fingers banged on her laptop keys so loudly that she didn’t hear Justin and Jo follow her into the office.

First, she went into BeTwo’s God Mode, the all-access portal she used to change the code — or look at every user and run them through her own personal set of finely-tuned filters every night on her couch.

But now she wasn’t just observing from her wine-laden, pajamaed perch; she was churning around in the app like everyone else.

She copied the filters from her last couch search, the digital embodiment of her wish list, and clicked into her user account. Within seconds, she applied every last filter to her profile. Now the wish list was live. Now she would only see men who matched it.

Then she opened her profile and started editing.

Justin cleared his throat.

“Hey, lady,” said Jo in the kind of whisper one might use when coddling a Jenga block. “Whatcha doin’?”

“I’m fixing it,” said Nat, not looking up from her screen. “Or burning it down. I guess we’ll find out.”

“Not super jazzed to hear that,” said Jo with barely restrained panic in her voice.

Justin sat down next to Nat. “Fixing what?”

“My profile.” Nat leaned back and cracked her neck before going back to her keyboard.

“All my info was fake, so of course I wasn’t meeting anyone that I’d be compatible with.

” She shook her head in the electronic glow.

“I mean, it’s so obvious! If I put in real answers to these questions, and search based on the things I’m actually looking for, then I’ll meet someone who I actually like.

” She laughed and pried her eyes from her screen to glance at the twins. “I mean, what was I thinking?”

“It kinda seemed like maybe you wanted to make sure that you wouldn’t meet anyone who would really be a viable match,” said Justin in his breathy monotone. “Classic self-sabotage.”

“What? No!” Jo laughed, her manic energy back in full force. “That’s not what happened!”

Nat clicked around on her screen, unfazed. “It was smart to try and give the algorithm what it wants to win this thing, but I forgot that I was the one who designed the algorithm!”

“You did?” asked Jo.

“I’m not following,” Justin added.

Nat scowled. “Obviously I didn’t actually forget. What I mean is that I was too worried about the turkeys.”

“Should we cancel this, maybe?” squeaked Jo.

“Absolutely not!” Nat snapped her laptop shut and stood.

“No one likes me, right? The guys on my app, the BuzzFill audience, my—” She bit her words back as she met Jo’s wide eyes.

“No one. But you know who does like me?” Nat shook her curls.

“Me. I like me. And I have to trust myself, or the algorithm I built, to be able to handle me.”

Justin raised his thick eyebrows. “That’s kinda beautiful, boss.”

Jo bit her manicured nails. “I don’t know if we should change strategies this late in the game.”