Page 31 of Swiped

Nat tapped open the message from Thom with shaky hands. After reading it no less than seven times, she felt confident in saying that his message was original, witty, and sincere — and he’d asked if she wanted to meet up for a drink right off the bat.

She clicked on his profile.

He was English, an interior architect for a prestigious firm that had brought him to San Francisco, six foot three, looking for marriage, a non-smoker, tanned in a way that seemed healthy without seeming vain, a cat lover, religiously and politically aligned with Nat, strawberry blond, capable of referencing literature without getting it wrong or coming off as an elitist, lean with a long, swimmer’s body .

. . the list went on, and so did Thom’s perfection.

But Nat didn’t really need to verify that Thom had all the qualities on the list — her algorithm had already done that for her.

Nat looked at Pixel with wide eyes. “Holy shit,” she said.

The cat blinked back at her and yawned.

The glowing green dot by Thom’s username shone at her like a shot of adrenaline to her heart.

She took another swallow of her wine and perched on the bed.

Obviously, it would be better to write him back now, while he was still online.

That way, she was more likely to get a response back right away and not have to spend the night in a kind of sleepless torture, writing and rewriting messages in her mind.

She sat down and opened up a reply message. If he were online and watching his messages, then he would be seeing her typing bubbles. No going back now.

Nat: Hey Thom, nice to meet you! Sure a drink sometime would be good!

She hit SEND and immediately stood back up. She shrugged to her own reflection. Was that good? Was that bad? If this was her ninety-nine percent soulmate, could anything she say ever really be bad?

Her phone pinged with his reply.

Thom: Brilliant. How about Saturday?

She sat back down. Pixel gave her a dirty look and jumped off the bed. That was practically a week away, but she couldn’t exactly suggest an earlier meetup, right? She didn’t want to seem desperate.

She typed her reply.

Nat: Perfect!

Thom: So glad to hear it. I’ll send you some options tomorrow.

Sweet dreams

Thom’s green dot vanished beside his name, and she felt herself exhale as if every cell of her body had been holding its breath.

She thumbed over to his profile pictures.

If he was her perfect match, shouldn’t she be seeing sparkles in her vision or hearing angelic choirs in her head as she gazed at the image of him leaning against a bookshelf in a lavender hoodie?

She scrolled through the picture of him wearing wayfarers and laughing into the sun in front of the Golden Gate Bridge.

She paused on the picture of him in a soccer jersey — or “football” to him, she realized — his face flushed and his blond hair flattened into sweaty curls around his high cheekbones.

He was undeniably hot, but she felt about as many sparkles as she did during a Google Image search.

The ninety-nine percent match number blinked and twirled inside its heart icon in the corner of her screen.

She had allowed Justin to indulge himself on this animation because she knew that achieving this high of a match was very unlikely to happen, so if this was the one corner of BeTwo that sparkled and gyrated outside of her preferred clean aesthetic, it was also a corner very few people would ever see.

Except she was seeing it now. With Thom. And her actual self.

Ninety-nine percent.

Maybe a finely-tuned algorithmic output was the new seeing sparkles. Maybe her lizard brain just hadn’t caught up with her coding brain to feel the dopamine rush of a genuine connection delivered on the wings of a hundred data points.

Maybe Thom would actually like her.

Nat looked at herself again in the mirror. She saw a very tired and terrified woman staring back at her, who also desperately needed to go shopping.

* * *

It was a store Nat had walked past many times, but never been brave enough to venture inside.

Marked by black-and-white polka dot awnings and a telltale crowd of variably patient male partners waiting outside, Milieu was the best boutique in the city, packed to the gills with everything from the trendiest new denim silhouettes to timeless knits, cocktail dresses, gemstone rings, and almost literally everything in between.

As soon as Nat stood in the entryway, she felt claustrophobic.

Circular racks of clothes were jammed with so many hangers that it seemed to defy the laws of physics.

How much weight could a metal tripod possibly support?

Every inch of wall space was lined with racks of tops, bottoms, and dresses, all arranged by a logic that Nat could not discern but was deeply intimidated by.

Women squeezed themselves around the stuffed racks and towering piles of denim and shoeboxes.

By their defensive postures and intense focus, Nat got the sense that every woman in the store was locked in battle against each other.

She could see that more than a few of them were sweating.

A thirty-something in athleisure approached a teeming display of dresses and actually stretched her biceps for mobility, and also maybe violence, before pushing apart the frilly fabrics to clear a browsing space with an audible grunt and a pterodactyl-like screech of the metal hangers.

With rising horror, Nat realized that this was only the downstairs portion of the store.

She scooted toward a rack of what appeared to be regular, cotton long-sleeve tops in a full rainbow of colors — a non-terrifying starting place!

Another woman was already flipping through the shirts, snapping the hangers aside with daunting speed as she looked through heavily mascaraed eyes.

As Nat reached for a pale blue popover, the woman’s face shot up, and she glared at Nat with distinctly territorial vibes.

The woman shifted her oversized tote purse toward Nat, twisting her back to take up more space and hunching over her spot on the rack like a student covering up their test answers.

It was the shopping equivalent of a cat hissing.

Nat stepped away and moved to the denim wall.

Suddenly, she felt self-conscious of her current leggings and chunky sweater outfit, even though she’d worn it at least once a week for years.

Although she had no idea what she wanted to wear on her date with Thom, she was deeply sure that nothing she already owned would be right for it.

She couldn’t remember the last time she had bought an outfit for a social event of any kind, let alone for a date.

She knew that, as far as bodies went, hers was decently OK-looking, and she could always fall back on the reality that she did, in fact, have breasts.

But she’d always relied on her friends to help her pick out clothes, or at the very least, she had simply bought things that she thought had looked good on Sara or Jo.

Now, though, she had to do this alone. Sara had never confirmed an answer on Nat’s offer to help her with rent, and she’d gone to her room by the time Nat emerged from messaging Thom that night.

Nat wasn’t eager to rock the boat when it seemed like her friendship with Sara was the one relatively normal thing in her life at the moment, so she hadn’t brought it up again, either.

With a pang, she realized that she’d never heard whether Sara had gotten the job at her salon or not.

That meant Sara hadn’t bothered to tell her, and also that Nat hadn’t bothered to ask.

Both were bad signs. This contest was sucking away her soul . . . which was why she had to win it.

She ran her fingers over a stack of dark jeans that were folded with origami-like precision.

She did at least know that jeans were probably not what she should go with for a cute date, but she also figured maybe she could start in her comfort zone and work her way into trying on clothes with patterns and pleats and maybe even ruffles, if those were a thing?

A lanky and lean woman, also in running clothes, strode up beside her at the denim wall. Nat tried to stand taller and make herself appear even larger than her five-foot-eight height. Welcome to the jungle, baby. You’re gonna die if you take my ten percent off, size M, high-waisted flares.

Without so much as a glance at Nat, the runner grabbed a single pair of white, wide-leg crops in one rapid motion and headed toward the staircase.

Nat balked. She hadn’t even looked at the stack of off-white crops right next to the white stack, or even glanced at a size tag!

And yet this woman had somehow already found an item and was heading up to take on the next level of this sartorial Tetris?

Nat grabbed the same pair of jeans, no matter that the prospect of white denim terrified her and the pants were three sizes too small for her. If there was some kind of hack going on here, she needed to know what it was. She followed the runner up the paisley-carpeted steps.

Upstairs, there was a long line of about a dozen women waiting for one of the velvet-curtained dressing stalls.

All of them heaved colorful piles of clothes to try on, battle-weary expressions drooping under their beachy waves — and yet the runner held a single item as she smacked gum and scrolled blithely on her phone.

What was her secret? Store employees, all in their twenties and in impeccably original combinations of clothing, hairstyles, and makeup, buzzed around the dressing stalls like gorgeous bee-butterfly hybrids.

Nat tapped the tall runner on the shoulder and gestured to the white jeans they were both holding. “Excuse me, um, nice choice!”