Playing Cupid

by Jenny Meyerhoff

  I wagged my finger at him. “Just think of how exciting it will be when you walk to the archer and see your match.”

  “I can see her right now,” Logan said.

  I looked over my shoulder, panicked, because if Emily was in the hallway, then something bad must have happened at our table. But no one was in the hallway. It was empty. I looked back at Logan, my eyebrows squeezing in confusion.

  He was looking at my chin. “Clara,” he said. “Will you go out with me?”

  “What?” What was Logan saying? Did he want me to walk him to the archer? Was he nervous about seeing Emily alone? Maybe they really were just like each other.

  “I don’t want to wait until after school to ask you,” he said. “I like you. Will you go out with me?”

  I blinked a bunch of times. “You like me?”

  He punched me on the shoulder. “Duh!”

  My ears were hearing Logan’s words, but my brain did not understand. How could he like me? He practically told me he liked Emily the other day at the basketball game. “Don’t you mean Emily? You like Emily. I know you do. She’s your match. Are you saying you want me to ask her for you?”

  Logan wrinkled his nose. “Emily? Uh-uh. She’s nice, I guess, but she’s a little boring.”

  I opened my mouth to say something else, but all my words disappeared. I just stood and stared at him openmouthed like a dead fish.

  “So, do you want to go out or not?” Logan asked me again.

  Finally my words came back to me.

  “N-no,” I stammered. Then I tried to be a little nicer. “Sorry.”

  “No?” He looked at me wide-eyed, like he couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

  “I like you as a friend,” I explained. “I could never think of you as more than that. I’m not interested in going out with anyone.” I shook my head back and forth really fast to help make my point.

  “But you totally made it seem like you liked me,” he said. “You did like me. I know it.” Logan was staring at me and shaking his head, like he thought I was speaking gibberish.

  I wanted to shake him, make him understand. It was a simple mistake. “This was just a mix-up. I honestly thought you liked Emily.”

  “And I thought you liked me. I saw you putting notes on my locker.”

  “That was for Emily!” I threw my hands up into the air. This was a disaster. No one would trust my matchmaking business if they found out about this. And Emily. Would she hate me for convincing her to like Logan? And if Emily hated me, how would Alivia feel? Would she let me hang out with her anymore?

  The bell rang, and students started filing into the hallway, opening their lockers and crowding around me and Logan.

  “I know you liked me!” Logan grabbed the Claragram and crumpled it in his fist, then he dropped it on the floor at my feet and stormed off, leaving me to clean up the glittery mess.

  I spent the rest of the day avoiding Emily, Alivia, and everyone I could. I didn’t even help with Cupid Clara at lunchtime. I told Emily I had to catch up on homework, but instead I hid in the bathroom. Just like Old Clara used to do when Sofia was home sick.

  When the final bell rang, I couldn’t put it off any longer. After school, I met Emily by the mural of the Austen Archer.

  “I’m so sorry!” I said when I was standing close enough that no one would overhear. “There was a big misunderstanding.” I explained how Logan thought the notes were from me, so that’s who he decided to like. “Please don’t be mad at me,” I said. “I’ll find you an even better match. I promise.”

  “It’s okay.” Emily hugged me and then gave me a sweet dimply smile. “Of course he liked you. Who wouldn’t like you? I bet every guy in the school likes you.”

  “Now you’re being crazy,” I said, shaking my head at her, but feeling my chest expanding with relief. I was so glad Emily didn’t hate me for my mistake. “Anyway, I’m not interested in finding a guy for myself.”

  “Really?” Emily and I walked down the hall and out the door in the cold wintery afternoon. “You don’t like anyone?” she asked just before we each headed our separate ways home.

  “Nope.” I shook my head. “I don’t really believe in that kind of stuff.”

  Emily blinked her eyes in confusion, like she didn’t understand what I meant.

  “It’s no big deal,” I told her. “I prefer making the matches anyway.”

  As I walked to my house, I thought about the red folder filled with new questionnaires in my backpack. Even though Mateo hadn’t come through on his promise to get his friends to fill out the questionnaires, I still had about forty new forms to go through over the weekend. I would get to make a lot of matches.

  Hopefully Logan would forget about my goof by Monday. It’s not as if he’d want to tell everyone the whole story either. He was probably almost as embarrassed as I was. Cupid Clara had about a dozen other matches in the works already. As long as Logan didn’t tell anyone about my matchmaking mix-up, Cupid Clara would be fine.

  On Saturday night, Emily came to my house for a sleepover. Alivia was having another one of her boy-girl parties, but I told her I had a family thing to do and Emily told her she didn’t feel well. Normally I would have thought it was a terrible idea to miss one of Alivia’s parties, but Alivia had been acting a little out of sorts lately and Logan was going to be there. I didn’t want to face him so soon after my mistake.

  Papi let Emily and me order pizza, and he went into his office, so we had the whole living room to ourselves.

  “Okay,” I said, pulling out the big box of Cupid Clara questionnaires, “let’s see if there is someone better in there for you.”

  I never should have matched Logan and Emily. I’d known they weren’t right for each other, and I should have trusted my gut. I blushed when I remembered Joey had been right about Logan. I hadn’t wanted to listen.

  Emily took a bite of pizza and let the gooey cheese stretch for a while before she snapped it off. “I don’t know,” she said when she finished chewing. “Let’s just make the best matches we can. If we don’t find someone for me, I’ll be okay. Maybe I’ll follow your lead and decide not to like anyone at all.”

  I studied Emily’s face to see if she really meant it. There wasn’t anything wrong with not liking anyone, of course. But Emily wanted to like someone. I could tell. Still, I didn’t want to get her hopes up for nothing. This time I wasn’t going to encourage her until I’d found her the perfect match.

  “Okay,” I said, dumping all the questionnaires out on the dining room table. “Let’s get matching.”

  Emily and I started sorting through each of the questionnaires one by one. Emily would read me the answers, and I would input the data onto a spreadsheet on my computer. That made it easier to see all the people who had similar answers. I noticed lots of potential couples as we went along, but I wanted to wait until all the questionnaires were recorded before we started making any official matches.

  “Okay, who’s next?” I asked Emily, clicking on a new field on my spreadsheet.

  Emily picked up the next questionnaire from the pile, unfolded it, then said, “Oh my gosh.” She put both hands over her mouth and shook her head. “This is so sweet.”

  “What?” I asked, leaning closer to peer over her shoulder. She held the paper out of sight.

  “I don’t know if you’re going to like it,” she said.

  “What is it?” I asked, starting to get exasperated.

  “Just remember it’s sweet. And it’s fun.” Emily handed me the paper. It was a Cupid Clara questionnaire. Then I looked more closely.

  When I finally put the questionnaire down, Emily was staring at me with a dreamy expression in her eyes. “That was awesome!” she said. “I wish a guy would write that for me.”

  Aha! I knew she was lying about not wanting a boyfriend. But that was beside the point. “I guess it was pretty cute, but I’m still not interested,” I said, even though my heart was pounding.

  “How can you
say that? You don’t even know who wrote it!” She threw her hands up in the air. “Wait a minute. Do you know who wrote it?”

  I shook my head. “But this isn’t the first note I’ve gotten. I—I think I have a secret admirer.” I blushed and told Emily all about the note in my locker and the smushed package of peanut butter cups.

  “You are so lucky!” she squealed. “We have to try to figure out who it is.”

  I folded the paper back up and tossed it to the other side of the table. “We definitely don’t have to figure out who wrote it. What we have to do is finish making all our matches.” I pointed at the stack of papers in front of Emily. “Let’s get back to work.”

  She made a little saluting motion with her hand. Then she smacked her palm on her forehead. “Wait. What if it was from Logan? What if he still wants to go out with you, and he’s trying to prove to you that you guys would be a great match?”

  “It’s not Logan,” I said, pointing at the papers again. “Work.”

  “But how do you know?” she asked. “It could definitely be from Logan. Do you still have his other questionnaire so we could compare the handwriting?”

  I sighed when I remembered that I’d actually given him two questionnaires, so I started digging through my folder for Logan’s real questionnaire. Emily went to the other side of the table and grabbed the secret admirer paper. When we put them side by side, the results were inconclusive. Whoever the secret admirer was, he’d written super neatly. It was impossible to tell if the same person had written both.

  Seeing Logan’s questionnaire again, though, I was reminded that his favorite dessert was Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. Which was what my secret admirer put on his questionnaire—and what he had left for me in my locker.

  “Don’t those Ps look the same? I really think this could be from Logan,” Emily said.

  “It’s not from Logan because I don’t want it to be from Logan!” I finally said, my voice rising a little louder than I’d intended it to.

  “What’s not from Logan?” Papi asked. I spun around and saw him standing in the kitchen making himself a cup of coffee. My palms began to sweat. How long had he been listening. “Who’s Logan?”

  Emily put her hand over her mouth to hide her giggles. But to me, this was no laughing matter. “Logan is some kid who goes to our school, Papi. You don’t know him.”

  Papi dropped a cinnamon stick into his mug. “So what did he give you?”

  “Nothing! We were just trying to figure out who wrote this one questionnaire,” I told him. “The writing’s really messy.”

  Papi looked at me like he didn’t believe me. Then he said, “Mami called me again. She’s waiting.”

  My eyes darted to Emily. She knew my parents were divorced, but she didn’t know the whole story of how my mother had left me with Papi so she could figure out her life. “Can we talk about this later?” I said through clenched teeth.

  “Okay. Good night.” Papi blew on his coffee and took a sip. “In bed by eleven.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “Good night, Mr. Martinez,” Emily called out.

  When my dad was gone, Emily and I turned back to each other awkwardly.

  “Your dad is so young,” she said. “He looks like a movie star.”

  “He and my mom got married when he was twenty-two,” I told her. “It was right after Papi graduated from college. She was only twenty. They had me a year later.”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever seen your mom around,” she said softly.

  “She lives in Texas,” I told her, then suddenly I wanted to tell her everything. Or at least part of everything. “That’s where her family’s from. She moved back there when I was eight so that she could go to college. Now she’s a nurse.”

  “Whoa.” Emily blinked a couple times. “I can’t imagine living so far away from my mom. Do you miss her?”

  I shook my head. “I talk to her every week and visit her for a month in the summer.” When she’d first left to go live near her mother and brothers and sisters, she’d been very unhappy, she told me. She was trying to figure out who she was and what she wanted to do. For some reason, that meant she couldn’t talk to me or Papi at all. For one whole year. Then she went back to school, and she called us up and said she wanted to be part of our lives again. By then, I was used to living without her. She was my mother, but no matter what Papi called her, she’d never be my mami again.

  Monday morning, I arrived at school early, ready to put the whole Logan mix-up behind me. From all the new questionnaires I’d collected on Friday, I had eighteen Claragrams to pass out. Even without my original couple of Emily and Logan, lots of people were interested in finding their matches.

  I headed over to my table, and changed the sign so it read TOTAL MATCHES SO FAR: 34.

  I couldn’t wait to see how many more people had signed up. Then I stopped short.

  Logan was standing next to our table. For a second, I thought maybe he’d decided that he did like Emily after all. But when I got a little closer, I could see that Emily had her nose buried in her phone, and Logan was actually standing at Alivia and Danielle’s table. My stomach wobbled nervously. But maybe he was just there for the mini muffins.

  “Hey, Em. What’s up?” I said, plunking my backpack down next to my chair and pointing my eyebrows toward Logan.

  Emily didn’t look up from her phone, so she didn’t realize what I was actually asking.

  “I bought that game those kids who used to sit next to us made,” Emily told me. “It’s called Hoppy Frog, and I can’t stop playing it!”

  “Cool,” I said, looking at her screen over her shoulder. A little green frog was hopping across a pond catching flies. Then it missed a lily pad and fell in the water. Game over.

  “We made so many matches this weekend!” I told her. I spread all my Claragrams on the table in front of me. “Look what I did yesterday!”

  “That’s awesome,” Emily said, beaming.

  “I guess some people need help finding someone to like,” I heard Logan say behind me. His voice was loud enough for me to hear it, and I was pretty sure that was on purpose. He obviously wasn’t going to let me forget my tiny mistake.

  “Not us,” Alivia said.

  Us? Alivia liked Logan? Was he the boy she’d been crushing on? No wonder she’d been upset. I wanted to turn my head and look, but I didn’t want to seem like I was eavesdropping. I looked at Emily instead. Her whole face was pinker than cotton candy, but she kept her eyes focused on her game.

  “Luckily I don’t need a Cupid,” Logan added. “I like a girl who just comes up to you and asks you to go out.” I heard a shuffling noise, and then Logan said in a much quieter voice, “Ow! What was that for?”

  Alivia whispered something back at him, but she clearly didn’t want me to hear because her voice was way too quiet.

  I was happy for them, but I didn’t want Emily to feel bad. I scooped all the Claragrams into a pile and handed them to Emily. “I’ll watch the store today. Why don’t you go pass these out? Here’s the list of locker numbers.”

  Emily took the Claragrams and walked off holding them in one hand and playing Hoppy Frog with the other. She almost ran smack into Mateo. He saw her coming, though, and did a funny twirl spin to avoid her. Then he darted back over to Cupid Clara and rested both hands on the table.

  “Finally here to sign up?” I asked him. “I thought you were going to bring all your friends.”

  “What?” Mateo looked confused at first, then he remembered. “Oh, sorry. I forgot. I’ll do that later.” He looked both ways, then leaned closer and lowered his voice. “Did you hear about Holy Cross?”

  I could practically feel Alivia leaning closer too, to try to hear what Mateo was saying.

  I shook my head. “What about it?”

  “Their whole school was flooded when that pipe burst last week. They’re trying to fix it now, and all the kids get to stay home from school this week. But if they can’t fix it after that,
they might send the kids here until the school is fixed.”

  My head went fuzzy at Mateo’s words. I felt like I had seashells pressed up against either ear, the sound of my blood whooshing around my head growing louder and louder as my heart beat faster and faster. The kids from Holy Cross? Coming to my new school?

  “All of them?” I asked. My voice came out strangely high and squeaky.

  Mateo shook his head. “Some of them would go to St. Norbert’s, but it’s kind of far, so some of them would come here. But only if they can’t fix the school.”

  Please not Sofia, I thought. Please let Sofia go to St. Norbert’s.

  “Do you think Sofia would come here?” he whispered.

  My eyes flew up to his. Why would he ask me that? Sometimes it seemed like Mateo wanted to be my friend, but sometimes it seemed like he wanted to torment me.

  “What are you guys talking about?” Alivia called from her table.

  “Nothing,” Mateo and I both said at the same time.

  Weird. If Mateo wanted to tease me, he sure didn’t want anyone else to know about it.

  “Are you guys talking about Holy Cross?” Alivia straightened her platter of mini cinnamon rolls. I noticed she seemed to have a lot more treats today. Her tabletop was full, and under the table were several more boxes filled with cookies and brownies. “When I was on a cruise over break, I met a guy who goes there,” Alivia told us. “His name is T. J., do you know him?”

  My heart started pounding. Had T. J. told Alivia about me?

  “Everybody knows everybody at Holy Cross,” Mateo said. “It’s a small school.”

  This conversation was starting to get dangerously close to my past.

  “Sorry,” I said to Mateo, “but I need to get back to work. Nobody’s turned in a questionnaire or requested my matchmaking help this whole morning. I think they think I’m busy or something.”

  Mateo looked surprised that I was asking him to leave. But did he really think I’d want to reminisce about the bad old days?

  “I still really need your advice,” he whispered.