The Dating Game

by Kiley Roache

  Sara is stalking a group of three headed toward the exit, yelling her high school GPA as the door swings shut in her face. She turns on her heel, her shoulders falling.

  I stand in the aisle, mystified.

  Braden, who has taken a seat in one of the last rows, looks up from his phone, “Well, I guess it’s just us then.”

  Chapter Two

  Braden

  I stand slowly and make my way toward the other guy. The hot blonde is charging toward us, crossing half the auditorium in the time it takes me to move past a couple of rows.

  “Sara Jones,” she says, sticking out her hand for a firm shake as if this is a job interview. I half smile in return, unable to tell yet if she is overenthusiastic but tolerable, or going to be a real pain in the ass.

  She pivots to the other kid, who seems rattled by her wall of energy. “Robbie,” he responds quietly. He is broad shouldered, and definitely over 6’, since he’s significantly taller than me, and I’m exactly 5’ 10 and 3/4”.

  I straighten my posture, not wanting to lose any height to slouching.

  “All right then, looks like we’re a team.” She punctuates her sentence with a sharp nod and a smile.

  I roll my eyes. As if we aren’t the intellectual equivalent of the last kids picked in gym.

  She pulls something out of her Longchamp bag and thrusts it into my hand. I turn it over. An honest-to-god business card.

  Sara Jones.

  Co-Founder: EduConnect.

  “EduConnect?” I look at her, studying her face closely.

  “My school used that,” Robbie says, taking a card as well.

  “Half the schools in California do,” I mumble, looking back at the card. I read an article awhile back about the students in some place in the Midwest, Wisconsin or Minnesota or something, who quadrupled the efficiency of their high school’s software system, then refused to sell their work, instead donating it to every school in the country. My father sent me the article. Asked why he was paying so much for my private school education when public school kids were doing that. Public school kids like my new partner, it seems.

  Sara shrugs. “I was sick of how inefficient my school’s online grading system was, so I helped fix it.”

  “You got some game,” I say, shoving the card in my pocket.

  “I uh...” She blinks at me for a second. “Thanks.”

  She blushes and averts her gaze to the small pink notebook in her hand. She flips it open. “I think we should get brainstorming as soon as possible. I could schedule an ideation session for later in the week? I think we need like three packages of sticky notes?” She pauses, her pen resting above the page. A drop of ink falls, staining the otherwise immaculate paper. “Yeah.” She scribbles something. “Three hundred or so is enough for the ideation stage. We—Shit, we also need to decide on a scheme for color coding...” She continues to scribble away.

  “Ideation?” Robbie turns to me.

  I shrug, I have no goddamn idea.

  Sara’s head snaps up. “Ideation,” she says. “You know? Like, the creation of ideas. In the design thinking process.”

  “Sorry, babe, I don’t speak tech buzzword.” I shrug.

  She wrinkles her nose. “Whatever you call it, we need a plan of attack.” She pauses. “A structure for development.”

  “Don’t we need an idea first?” Robbie asks. “Like, how can we have a strategy for growing something when we don’t know what it is yet?”

  She looks from him to me, but I just grunt in agreement. He’s making more sense than she is. She’s making up words, for God’s sake.

  “We can’t just wait around,” she says. “There has to be a strategy we can use, some sort of technique. To optimize the creative process.”

  I brush my hand across my face so she can’t see me laughing. “Isn’t that the point? That you can’t optimize it—isn’t that what makes it creative?”

  Her mouth freezes in a little O and her pen hovers.

  I decide I’m done with this for today. I shove past her as I start up the aisle, my footsteps echoing in the now-empty auditorium.

  “Wait, where are you going?” I hear the clacking sound of her shoes behind me.

  “To take a nap!” I yell over my shoulder. “I’m hungover as fuck.”

  “What! You can’t just—”

  “You’re cute, Blondie, but you’ve got to learn to calm down.” I don’t look back as I push through the door.

  She releases a noise that barely sounds human. But before she can continue, there is the sound of the latch clicking.

  * * *

  I walk from Main Quad back to the more residential part of campus. I enter my dorm with headphones on, avoiding small talk with the nerds playing some sort of dragon and princess game in the lobby.

  The generic dorm furniture, some sort of cheap wood covered in a plastic-y coating meant to make it look like slightly less cheap wood, is still piled up outside my room. A bright yellow notice has been taped to it, letting me know I will be fined if it’s still in the hallway by a certain time tomorrow. I crumple the note and push open my door. I toss the paper onto my new desk, and it slides across the stainless steel.

  It’s almost noon. Which means it’s three in New York. And eight in London. I sigh. I really don’t like calling my parents when I’m still struggling to think through the remnants of last night’s booze, but if I don’t soon, I’ll be in much more trouble.

  I climb onto my bed, its ridiculous thread count beige linens wasted on a captain’s height twin extra long mattress. I try to get comfortable, rearranging the white and tan throw pillows, which are covered with embroidery and anything but cozy, but with this hangover it’s no use—it feels like someone is stabbing me with no less than three tiny knives. I pull out my headphones with a click and dial.

  “Hey sweetie!” my mother sings over the phone. “Give me one second, I’ll patch in your father...”

  I clear my throat as the dial tone sounds again. I picture the sound bouncing across a map, from a California dorm room to a sitting room in Hyde Park, and then ringing in a busy office on Wall Street.

  “Hart and Smith,” the voice of one of my father’s many assistants says over the phone. I used to know their names, when I was six and would come visit his office, dragging Matchbox cars across grand windows, pretending they were driving along the streets of downtown Manhattan so far below. But then came boarding school for me, and his promotions that meant there was a rotating team of high-heeled blondes when I came by his office once a year.

  “Hi, yes, this is Marcy. His wife. I’m on with our son, Braden. He should be expecting the call, if you wouldn’t mind patching us through?”

  “One moment,” her voice singsongs. The phone rings again. I stare at the cracked ceiling, the one part of the dorm room that my mother couldn’t replace.

  She does this every time. The furniture thing.

  I don’t want it to look like a dorm, I want it to look like your home, she said. Like I had any conception of what a stable home was.

  “Hello.” My father sounds tired, as usual.

  “Hi, Dad.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Nothing, I, uh, just got to school yesterday and wanted to call.” I reach for the string hanging from the blinds covering my small, square window. “Sorry to call you at work. Mom’s in London so...”

  “Hey there!” my mother interjects.

  “...I didn’t want to wait until it was too late.”

  “Right, of course,” my father says. There is the mumbled sound of someone talking in the background and then he says, “Yes, as long as we have it before five.”

  I wait for him to return his focus to the call, knowing better than to try to talk over whatever is happening in New York.

  “Did you get moved in all right?” he a
sks. “How were the new movers?”

  “Fine.” I sigh. “They still need to come back to pick up the old furniture and bring it to storage though. They were supposed to this morning while I was at class, but it’s still here.”

  “God,” my mother says. “It’s as if nothing can get done without ten follow-up calls. I’ll have Katherine ring them tomorrow.”

  “I don’t need your assistant to do it. I can call my own moving people.” I scoff. “Jesus, I’ve been in boarding school since I was nine—I think I’ve got it.”

  “Braden,” my father says. “Don’t be rude to your mother. She’s just trying to help.”

  I exhale and lie back on my West Elm pillows. “Sorry, Mom,” I mumble.

  My father might as well have been scolding me for pouting about not getting a cookie until after dinner. Going to boarding school somehow means both growing up at hyper speed and never growing up at all. On one hand, you have immense freedom at an early age. But at the same time, your parents haven’t interacted with you day-to-day since you were a child, and when you do talk to them, a lot of those old mannerisms still remain. They don’t know how to parent a teenager, so they offer some sort of combination of parenting for a ten-year-old and for a thirty-year-old.

  “You better behave yourself out there,” my father says. “I do not want a repeat of last time.”

  I make a small sound in the affirmative, my throat suddenly too dry to form words. I should’ve known those sort of threats wouldn’t have been left behind in high school. That he would never let me forget that, despite all the privileges I’d been given, I was still dumb enough to be caught drinking in my high school dorm. And that the only reason I wasn’t expelled like the other kids with me that day was that my father, in addition to all the tuition he’d paid, made a six-figure donation to the school. He’ll never let me forget that, if I misstep again—get in trouble for partying or fail a class—I will not get off so easy.

  “How are your classes?” my mom asks, always one to avoid confrontation at all costs.

  “Okay.” I clear my throat. “I’ve only been to the Dustin Thomas one so far, and it is a little rough.” I sit up. “Get this, it’s the first day and he wants us to pitch in a few weeks. I’m one of only three freshmen, so of course all the grad students cliqued up. I’m stuck with kids whose greatest stress in life has probably been who will make homecoming court—”

  “Well then, you’ll just have to lead.” My father cuts me off. “I don’t want to hear it. You know when I first started my company, it’s not like we were nabbing the finest natural talent of the corporate world. I had to make do with people who didn’t know anything about business. You just have to find the untapped potential, the unpolished drive, and teach those people how to work. As long as people have the right leader, you can bring out potential you never would have known was possible...”

  I roll my eyes. I don’t have time for the spiel my dad gives at charity luncheons and leadership conferences full of hungry MBAs across the country, pretending he didn’t work in a simpler time. When he started out, oil technology was a pretty safe bet—and yes, he did a lot to make it more efficient, but it’s not like he invented the idea that, hey, people might need gasoline.

  “...it’s about hard work and dedication, son...”

  By this point, I can practically mouth along to the words of the speech. My father has a strict understanding of the type of success his child should achieve, and how it should be achieved.

  My phone buzzes against my face. I glance down to see a banner alert for an email from Sara Jones. It’s a When2Meet request.

  I put the phone back to my ear, but my father hasn’t noticed I was distracted. I close my eyes as he rambles on.

  Sometimes I wish I had the type of parents who encouraged me to try my best and told me it would all be okay. Who dropped me off at college themselves. A mother who tried to hand me my stuffed animal that I told her I wouldn’t need but was a little glad she brought anyway. A father who patted me on the back, trying not to cry as he called me young man and wondered who would play catch with him on Saturdays now.

  But if that were my reality, would it have still been Warren I was moving to?

  He continues. “...identify a problem, brainstorm solutions, test, evaluate, repeat...”

  I know they’ve given me opportunities most parents only dream of supplying their child. The fancy schools, camps every summer at elite universities, travel sports teams, trips to major world capitals and exotic islands. But sometimes I wish they could’ve just given me their time instead.

  The international boarding schools and multiple vacation houses were great. But it would be nice to have a home to be homesick for. One house and one school and one place I am from. Now I’m left just feeling sick.

  By the time the call winds down, ending with my mom demanding I call once a week and not-so-jokingly insisting that my dad do the same, I am ready to be alone with my thoughts. My skin feels itchy from the inside out.

  I hang up and am staring at the dark-screened phone in my hand when it buzzes for the second time. Please respond ASAP, the subject line of Sara’s second email reads.

  “Jesus.” I toss my phone aside and pull one of the extra throw pillows over my face.

  Chapter Three

  Sara

  Only 5 percent of Silicon Valley start-ups are run by women.

  I read this statistic in a TechCrunch article last year, but it’s all I can think about when I walk into my Advanced Computer Science lecture, and am greeted by an auditorium full of men—most of them white—many of them in hoodies and sipping overpriced energy drinks.

  The harsh, industrial cleaner smell that seems to permeate the engineering quad burns my nose as I make my way down the aisle. I sit alone in the first row and slide my laptop out of the polka-dot Kate Spade case my little sister got me for high school graduation.

  Class won’t start for another five minutes, but many people are already coding away. The click of fingers hitting keys is sometimes interrupted by chatter as the boys talk amongst themselves. No one talks to me.

  I check my email. Robbie responded already, saying how nice it was to meet me and thanking me for setting up the When2Meet. He seems nice. I friended him on Facebook, and it turns out he lives in my dorm too! I’d feel bad I never met him before, but with three hundred students, there are plenty of people in Dawson hall that have yet to cross paths.

  I send back a smiley face emoji.

  Braden, on the other hand, has completely ignored my message. I can already tell he’s gonna be one of those project partners. The ones that expect the work to be done but do none of it themselves. Not to mention way he talked to me today—calling me babe and making fun of design thinking. What a piece of work.

  The door near the front of the room swings open, and a girl with a heart-shaped face walks through. She has glowing brown skin, big curly hair and fierce eyes lined with charcoal makeup. Even in the terrible florescent light of the classroom, the highlighter across her cheekbones shimmers.

  Around me, the chattering fades, and guys look up from their screens to gawk at her, their mouths hanging open. The girl sips the iced Venti Starbucks in her hand and doesn’t look at any of them as she walks over and settles into the seat behind me.

  I want to talk to her, but she is just so cool. I glance over my shoulder, reaching up to scratch my head so that I can half hide behind my arm. She’s leaning back in her chair, her legs propped up on the back of the empty seat next to me. She is wearing light-washed ripped jeans and Gucci sneakers and looks like she could be on the cover of a magazine, or at the top of my Instagram Discover, an influencer with thousands of likes, more than she fits in the fashion wasteland that is the Computer Science building. She unfolds her computer on her lap, the back of which features a sticker for Instafriend and another that says Code-Blooded Bitch in swirling
pink writing. I want so badly to be her friend. I want so badly to be her.

  My stomach tightens and I turn back to my own screen. I have no idea what I could possibly say to this girl that might impress her. I don’t know why she’d want be friends with me.

  Our professor shuffles in, clicks on the PowerPoint and starts class at the hour on the dot. And just like that, my anxiety fades and is replaced with dull sadness. I lost my chance.

  I type along in OneNote as the professor makes his way through an introduction to machine learning. I raise my hand for every question—I did all the reading assigned over the weekend and this lesson is straight from those pages—but am called on only once. He does pick me to make sure the attendance sheet makes it all around the room, though.

  He ends a few minutes early, and I am still saving my notes when someone taps my shoulder.

  I turn around, and the smell of vanilla tickles my nose. Cool Girl smiles at me. “Hey,” she says.

  “Hi!” My voice is too high.

  “You a freshman?”

  “Uh, yeah.” I tuck a piece of hair behind my ear.

  “Thought so. At this point I know most of the girls in the program. All twelve of them.” She rolls her eyes. “I’m Yaz. Sophomore.”

  “Sara. No h.” Right after I say it, I regret it. Like she cares.

  But she seems amused. “Yeah, this is not how you spell my name either.” She holds up the Starbucks cup that says Jazz in Sharpie.

  I laugh. Not sure what else to say but not wanting this conversation to end, I point to the sticker on her laptop. “Did you work there?” It might be awkward to ask, but I can’t help but wonder. I am addicted to that damn app.

  “Oh, uh, yeah.” She glances at her computer, like she forgot the giant advertisement was there. “I would not recommend it.” She shakes her head, closing the laptop and slipping it into her bag.