Meet Cute

by Jennifer L. Armentrout

  Raden couldn’t even imagine. He felt unshed tears tightening in his throat. “But why is it on a data chip?” he asked. “I mean, haven’t you uploaded it to the cloud?”

  “The cloud? Where anyone with half a brain could hack it?” Alexa repeated, as if she’d personally hacked multiple things from the cloud, which for all Raden knew she had. “Everyone knows the only really safe way to protect something is to keep it on a hard drive, locally, and then keep the hard drive with you at all times.” Raden wasn’t at all sure that everyone knew that, but it didn’t seem right to argue. “Are you going to sell this program, when you’re done with it?”

  “Of course not. I would never try to make money off grieving people.” Alexa took a step back, and her eyes were fierce in the golden light of the streetlamps. “When it’s finished, I’m putting it online, for free.”

  “Then we’ll get it back,” Raden said, and for the first time that night, he felt certain of it. Now that he understood, he would go to the ends of the earth to get that phone, if need be.

  “By the way,” he added, because he felt suddenly desperate for Alexa to smile, “Journey is my favorite, too.”

  ALEXA

  Alexa took another sip of her pomegranate iced tea and glanced around the Starbucks, which was the same as every other Starbucks the world over; the same harried people rushing in and out, their eyes glued to their phone screens. She still felt a little embarrassed for the way she’d unloaded on Raden. She hadn’t even told her parents about her software program. But Raden had taken it all in stride, with a calm determination that softened the edges of her fear. She would find her data chip, because she had to, and that was that.

  Raden shifted next to her, drinking his own pomegranate tea. Alexa had been surprised when he’d ordered the same unusual drink as her, but after all, they were ninety-nine percent compatible. On the table next to her, his phone was plugged into her recharging dock.

  “I want to see your photos. In real life. Can I buy one?” she asked, voicing her thoughts aloud.

  He smiled. “You’d be my first real customer.”

  “But they’re so good!”

  Raden’s eyes were very warm and very serious. “No one wants to hang art like that anymore. All they want are little square-shaped selfies they can post online.”

  “I’m sorry.” Alexa thought of the bare walls of her dorm room and winced. They suddenly felt cold and austere, and impersonal.

  At least she wasn’t guilty of posting the selfies that Raden clearly resented so much. No, that had always been Claire’s thing.

  She glanced down at his phone. The charge had jumped up to three percent. And the blue dot was back—much closer than before.

  “Come on!” she exclaimed, and pulled Raden abruptly to his feet.

  RADEN

  The touch of Alexa’s hand sent a shock up Raden’s nerves, like a jolt of electricity, as he hurried after her out the door.

  It had started to snow. The snow fell like a light dusting of sugar over everything, blanketing the city in a still, white enchantment. It froze in tiny clumps on Alexa’s hair, thickening her eyelashes.

  “This way!” She ran forward into the wind. Her ponytail whipped behind her like a snow-flecked banner.

  “Did you ever make snow monkeys when you were a kid?” Raden asked as they came to a stop at an intersection.

  “Don’t you mean snow angels?”

  “In my family we did snow monkeys.” Raden lifted one foot and tilted his head, looping his arms in an exaggerated pose to demonstrate. “My older brother made it up, and from then on it was always snow monkeys. My parents even gave us banana peels to make it realistic.”

  “Claire and I used to run outside and try to catch the snowflakes on our tongue. She liked to say that the snow was magic, and if I caught a perfect snowflake, my wish would come true.” Alexa smiled wistfully at the memory. Her breath came in visible puffs against the cold night air.

  Raden loved the thought of Alexa believing in magic. He wanted to ask what she’d wished for—what she wished for right now.

  The light turned green, and she rose impatiently onto her toes. He took a step closer before she could run off again. “Wait,” he breathed, and reached a hand toward her face.

  ALEXA

  Gently, Raden tucked her hair behind her ear. Alexa’s breath caught, as if she’d climbed up a mountain and the air was suddenly dangerously thin.

  And then he reached behind him for his camera and took a picture.

  “The way the light hits you . . . this is incredible,” he murmured.

  The moment his picture was done, she took off running across the street again. Of course it was the light that he found beautiful. Not her. Stupid, stupid to think that he’d been about to kiss her. She focused all her energies on that blue dot, which was so close now, just around the corner.

  She came to a halt outside a divey restaurant, Jersey’s Finest Tacos handpainted on the sign outside. Whoever had her phone must be in there. Alexa kicked open the door, not waiting for Raden, though she could hear his footsteps in pursuit.

  Right away she saw her driver, the same one who’d congratulated her on joining Click: He was in line for a freaking taco, her phone in its plain red case clutched in his hands.

  “Oh my God,” Raden said behind her, with a strangled laugh. “Is he about to trade your phone for a taco?”

  The driver caught sight of Alexa and smiled proudly. “It’s you! I have your phone!” he announced, as if she didn’t already know. He took in Raden standing next to her, and grinned even wider. “Is this your Click date?”

  See! She could almost hear Claire exclaiming in triumph. I told you that magical things happen on the first snow day!

  Alexa barely managed a “thank you” as she reached for her phone. She popped out the data chip and held it tight in her hand, so tight that the plastic pressed angrily into her skin. Then she turned back to Raden. “Thank you for helping me get this back. I’m sorry that our date was ruined.” She let out a breath. “I’m sure you have other girls that you’ve Clicked with, but maybe we could . . .”

  Her phone kept buzzing nonstop. Alexa glanced down impatiently, and the first thing she saw was a long string of messages from Click. But they didn’t make sense.

  She let her eyes skim over the first few, and felt a sudden, awful twist in her stomach. No, she thought, it can’t be.

  She was supposed to be on a different date tonight, with someone else. Not Raden. Since Click thought she was already on that date, it had opened a chat room for her and her guy, who’d sent a lot of “where are you???” messages. She swiped over to look at his full profile, which was now visible. His name was Kevin. He was at Harvard for mechanical engineering—God, had he come all the way from Boston, just for her? He looked nice, and pleasant. Not to mention boring.

  She glanced up at Raden. “You didn’t know that you were on the wrong date?” It came out like a croak.

  “Yeah. I messaged her when we were on the train, to cancel.”

  Alexa nodded, swallowing the urge to cry. She didn’t fully understand why she was so upset, except that she’d believed that she and Raden belonged together, the way she’d believed in magic when she was a child; with a blind, unquestioning faith. They’d ordered the same drink at Starbucks, had the same favorite song! She’d thought that was proof of their compatibility, of Click’s genius at work—but it was just coincidence, just random noise in that endless sea of data.

  They hadn’t Clicked. Raden wasn’t in her top one percent of statistical romantic matches; he wasn’t anything at all to her, just a stranger who’d been unlucky enough to meet her at a bar, and get roped into a quest for her data chip.

  She should have known, should have realized they were so logically improbable together. And yet.

  “I’m sorry,” Alexa said shakily. She would never have asked him to stand someone up, if she’d known.

  “I’m not.” Raden grinned. “Like I said
, spontaneity leads to good things.”

  Her heart began to skip in her chest. “I just thought we’d Clicked . . .” she trailed off, and Raden laughed, as if she’d told a joke.

  “Alexa. We did click. We don’t need permission from an algorithm for that.”

  Her pulse became even more erratic, her chest tightening in a confused mess of feelings. She felt painfully aware of everything—the data chip in her hand, the cold flecks of snow in her hair, the liquid intensity of Raden’s eyes. It was as if she were feeling everything for the first time: the way she’d felt after her first kiss, or after she’d built her first working computer program. As if the entire world was raw and new and bursting with possibility.

  Raden leaned in and lightly tucked her hair behind her ear, again. But this time he lowered his lips to hers.

  This was how it should feel, she realized, as the kiss deepened and the world seemed to fall silent. She rose up on tiptoe, her blood pounding with a wild, furious joy.

  When he finally stepped away, she felt a little dizzy. “So,” Raden said, holding out a hand, “now that we’ve found your phone, I’d like to go on a date. Can I interest you in a taco?”

  Alexa took his hand, trying her best to ignore the cabdriver, who was giving them an unironic thumbs-up in the corner.

  “I’d love a taco,” she declared, and grinned. “I hear they’re Jersey’s finest.”

  The Intern

  — — — — — —

  SARA SHEPARD

  “UH, HEY, CLARA.” My boss, Grayson, leaned his tattooed arms on my desk. “I have a favor to ask. But if you don’t want to do it, I totally understand.”

  I sat up straighter. “I’ll do it.”

  He looked skeptical. “I haven’t told you what it is yet.”

  It was my second week interning at V, and I still didn’t know what I was doing there. Everyone at the record label was constantly in a state of panic about everything—how the new soap in the bathroom wasn’t organic, the ineptitude of band managers, some mysterious metric called “Spotify streams.” My first day, Grayson had pointed to a couch near the assistant’s desk and said, “Just sit there for now.” I was given a stack of Rolling Stones to read. Four days passed like that. Grayson had promoted me to my own desk, finally, but I’d received no tasks yet. So I’d completed three New York Times Sunday crosswords. I composed endless drafts of e-mails to my best friend, Soledad, but I kept deleting them because they sounded so distant and impersonal. Oh, and I hid out in the bathroom a lot, though conversations stopped whenever I walked in. I’m not going to tell my father that you hate his shitty record label, I wanted to scream at the congregating girls, the marketing managers and assistant publicists and junior art directors. And by the way, he’s not such a god. He watches Netflix on the toilet. He overuses the word utilize.

  “So we’ve got a singer-songwriter in town.” Grayson fiddled with the button on his collar. His shirt had little dancing skeletons on it—not Grateful Dead skeletons, all top hats and joy, but bony, ugly things that I could picture doing hostile business takeovers and voting unanimously to test their products on animals. These were skeletons with whom my father commingled. “His name is Phineas Cleary. Really amazing guy. He’s been traveling the U.S. for weeks for his album. But with so many other bands here for the festival, we’re kind of strapped. You can say no—but, well, he really wants to see a psychic this afternoon, and I’m wondering if you could take him.”

  I blinked. “Wait, what?”

  He held up his hands. “Just take him wherever. There’s got to be one in the East Village, right? But seriously, I can find someone else. Just say the word.”

  I sat up straighter. “No, I’ll do it.”

  Two minutes later, after I finally convinced Grayson I was capable, I called Hexa, my old French tutor. After we finished our lessons on irregular verbs or whatever, she’d read my tarot cards. She didn’t even need a guidebook like Soledad. Of course she knew of a psychic. “Best one in town,” Hexa said. “I’ll pull some strings, get you in today. And by the way, are you hanging in there? I know you must miss her. I know it must be so hard. If you ever need anyone—”

  “I have to go,” I interrupted, hanging up before she could go there.

  I glanced around and noticed a marketing girl staring at me. As soon as our eyes met, she looked hurriedly away, pretending to be engrossed in her computer. I flushed. So what if I was a leper at V? I didn’t want to be there, either. When my father suggested—no, mandated—that I work this summer, I thought he’d stick me in the company’s legal department. I saw myself filing papers in a dark back room, ordering stuff on Shopbop on the company credit card, feeding organic popcorn to the birds during lunch. It didn’t sound so bad. But then he put me at his record label. Not that he had any clue, but my favorite Pandora channels were Gregorian Chants, people whispering, and sappy songs from the eighties my mother used to love—John Mellencamp, Bryan Adams. I knew every line of “Run to You.”

  Still, that didn’t mean I wanted to be an outright failure. I was going to show everyone. I was going to kick this psychic thing right in its psychic ass.

  — — — —

  Two hours later, I stood on a nondescript block on the Upper West Side. A child squatted on the sidewalk across the street, drawing swirls with chalk. Nannies, chattering away on their phones, pushed complicated baby strollers. Three identical curly-coated dogs went after the same chicken bone in the gutter.

  My phone buzzed. Grayson. Just checking in. Call if there are problems.

  I looked up and down the street, avenue to avenue. I didn’t have a very good idea of who I was looking for. According to Google, Phineas Cleary was eighteen years old, only a year older than I was. He had two albums out: Feints and Only Then. The pictures of him online were blurry renderings—arched neck, hair over the face, zigzagging stage lights. Fans commented that his music was “moody” and “dark” and “like a punch to the gut.”

  “Clara?”

  A tall guy had materialized in front of me. He had a yellow-and-maroon scarf wrapped around his neck—very Harry Potter. His wild, thick, blue-black hair was cut in choppy peaks that ended at his pointy chin, and his wide-set brown eyes were framed with the longest lashes I’d ever seen. His expression—an appealing mix of awkwardness, cleverness, and kindness—reminded me of L, the detective from Death Note, an anime I was obsessed with when I was in middle school. I’d had a love-hate with L because he battled against a guy who tried to play God, but now I understood why L was so determined. No matter how much any one of us wanted to play God, no matter how much we wished it were possible, the world wasn’t supposed to be in the hands of just one person.

  “Are you Clara?” The guy’s voice was midrange, raspy, and heavily accented. When I nodded, he thrust out his hand. “Grand. I’m Phineas.”

  We shook. His hand was warm and soft. The tips of his fingers were callused from guitar playing. His jubilance surprised me. I was expecting a storm cloud over this guy’s head. A leering crow on his shoulder.

  “So are you new to V?” Phineas asked, studying me carefully.

  “Uh, sort of.” I caught sight of my reflection in a car window and winced. My hair was a snarled mess. My eyeliner was a little smudgy. I was wearing one of my mother’s Alexander McQueen dresses, a floor-sweeping maxi with delicate roses embroidered into the silk. I intended to wear everything from my mother’s closet this summer. My father had been so quick to bring in cleaners, to haul everything to a charity auction, but I’d managed to stash a few items away.

  “Where did you work before this?” Phineas asked.

  “Nowhere, really.” I wanted to kick myself. I totally screamed high school student. The thing I should have said, which would make me look older and more sophisticated, was that I’d been at NYU. Studying or whatever. What else did people do in college? My cousin, who went to NYU, took a lot of pictures of his privates and posted them on Snapchat. My other cousin went to
UVA and got arrested for jumping out a window onto the hood of a police car.

  I awkwardly pointed at the brownstone. “So, um, this is the place.”

  “Ah.” He pushed his hands into his pockets and stared at the building. “Interesting.”

  “My friend says he’s the best.”

  Someone buzzed us up. There was chipped paint on the walls. A unicycle leaned against the mailboxes. The elevator had one of those pull-across grates that always made me feel like I was in a Hitchcock movie. A man in a white tee, jeans, and socks answered the door of apartment 4B. I felt disappointed—weren’t psychics more ostentatious? But Phineas smiled and offered his hand.

  “I’m Dan,” the psychic said, leading us into the apartment. It was bare except for a futon couch and a small overturned trunk that served as a coffee table. My phone buzzed again. Another text from Grayson. I silenced it. “You can come right through here.” Dan gestured to a small door off to the right, then looked back at me. “You too?”

  “Yes, come for a reading,” Phineas said. “My treat.”

  “Oh, no.” I backed away. “I’m fine.”

  Dan narrowed his eyes. He hadn’t shaved in a couple days. “Are you sure? You could use my help.”

  “I’m fine,” I repeated a little more forcefully.

  Dan’s face softened. “Well. It’s obvious you’re suffering a great deal from what happened.”

  “Nothing happened!” The words lodged in my throat, nearly choking me.

  Dan didn’t seem to hear. “But just know that someday, you’ll be okay. You’ll be yourself again. I already see it.”

  My whole face went hot. A few hideous beats passed. I could feel Phineas staring at me. After what seemed like ten years, I smiled as though clueless, shrugged my shoulders, and plopped down on the couch. “Do your thing. I’ll be right here.”