Meet Cute

by Jennifer L. Armentrout

  “He’s a musician,” I said, remembering the instrument case. “Also, he looks good in a blue hoodie.”

  “Well,” Dad said, not doing a very good job at disguising his skepticism, “that’s romantic, I guess.”

  “Dad!” said Viv. “Don’t say ‘romantic.’”

  “Okay, why don’t you give me a list of approved words and phrases and I’ll just read from it like a script?”

  Viv brightened. “Really?”

  “No, Viv, seriously.” Mom passed the salad bowl her way. “You can’t write your father a script.” Then she added under her breath, “No matter how much we might want to sometimes.”

  “I’m a human, not an automaton.” Dad pretended to look hurt. “Besides, the concept of soul mates was invented by Hollywood for the sake of marketing romantic comedies.” Dad took a bite of pasta. “The idea that you have to meet someone in an adorable way in order for it to be meaningful is nonsensical. Your mom and I aren’t soul mates. Fate didn’t bring us together after some over-the-top series of missed connections. We met at the bar at Webster Hall.”

  “Excuse me?” Mom said. “Not soul mates?”

  “Dad.” Viv pushed the pasta away. “No one wants to hear about you and Mom and your gross love story.”

  I kind of did—strictly for research purposes, of course—but it looked like I was starting to lose the room, so I kept my mouth shut.

  — — — —

  On Monday, I commenced data-gathering mode.

  I catapulted out of bed the minute my alarm went off. I timed my morning routine down to the second.

  The train rolled in at a leisurely pace right at 7:12, and I had never loved it more than I did at that moment. I stepped through the doors, and speed-walked to the window I had been looking out the morning I first saw him.

  In case you’re wondering, I was taking notes on my phone along the way so I could record them in my data log when I got to school. Time. Conditions. Outside factors. So far, everything was going smoothly.

  And then—

  “Mmm, babe, you’re wearing that coconut lip stuff today.”

  The make-out couple was standing against my door! As usual, they were so engrossed in each others’ mouths that they didn’t even see me.

  “Excuse me—”

  “It tastes like vacation.”

  “Um, hi, can I—”

  More gross smacking noises.

  “HELLO THERE.” I was practically shouting. The make-out couple turned around and looked at me without saying anything. “I’m doing a school project and need to stand by this window. Do you mind?” The girl stared me down. It’s possible this wasn’t my finest idea.

  “What’s the project?” asked the boy.

  The train was rumbling along at this point, inching toward the bridge.

  “It’s kind of time sensitive,” I said. “If you’d just let me—”

  “If you don’t tell us,” the girl said slowly, “how are we supposed to know if we want to help you or not?”

  I clenched my hands into fists at my sides. Then I sucked it up and told them.

  The girl gave me the side-eye, but she nodded at the boy. Without a word, they stepped out of the way and let me have the window.

  “Thankthankyouthankyou!” I shouted in their faces as they walked down the train car. “I’ll bring you bagels tomorrow!”

  “I like everything!” the boy shouted back. There are pros and cons to seeing the same people on your morning commute.

  I took my place by the window as we journeyed from the darkness of the underground tunnel into the light.

  The sun was shining. I noted this in my phone. There was still a morning haze that hadn’t burned off yet, giving everything a sort of dreamy quality. I noted this, too. (The objective weather conditions, not the subjective dreaminess.)

  We were cresting the hill when a train barreled toward us from the Manhattan side. My heartbeat quickened. Was I going to see him again? Could it be possible I really was in love at first sight? And was I so starved for affection that a strange boy smiled at me and I thought he was my soul mate? Was this because my family didn’t like math?

  I was contemplating all this when I saw the boy who may or may not have been named Demetrius von Snufflemuffin for the second time.

  You know how they say that when you fall in love at first sight, the world kind of stops for a moment? Just as I was registering his dimples, and then the fact that he was wearing the same blue hoodie, my subway car came to a screeching halt. So did his.

  Ladies and gentlemen, we are being delayed due to a signal malfunction, we should be moving shortly . . .

  Demetrius shook his head. I rolled my eyes. He shook his fist at the heavens. I pretended to weep. He mimed knocking his head against the subway door, then fell down and out of sight.

  “Ew,” I said out loud, thinking of the many hundreds of strains of germs that blanket the subway. Last year, the New York Times published a study, and they found traces of the bubonic plague on some subway poles. Imagine what’s on the floor.

  The man standing next to me gave me a look. I gave him a look right back. You just can’t take any nonsense on the subway.

  When I looked out the window again, Demetrius was standing, writing something in a giant spiral-bound notebook.

  He held it up, and I squinted to see what it said.

  MADE YOU LOOK.

  I laughed out loud, then clapped my hand over my mouth. Demetrius grinned. He started to write something else, but before I could see what it said, my train jolted into motion and we were hurtling forward again, leaving Demetrius and his train in our wake.

  — — — —

  I couldn’t think about anything at school that day except Demetrius. (After I entered my notes into my data log, of course.) Here’s what I knew I about him so far:

  His hair was off-the-charts voluminous.

  He may or may not have owned only one hoodie (or had a closet full of blue hoodies).

  He played an instrument perfectly sized to strap to your back for a long subway commute.

  None of this was relevant to my research.

  On second thought, I entered it into my data log anyway, just in case Mr. Graff wanted to know.

  — — — —

  The next morning, I got up early, while it was still dark. I was out the door as the sky was just starting to glow.

  It was too early for the make-out couple. The man who gave me the dirty look yesterday wasn’t there, either. In fact, the train was kind of empty, except for a woman in scrubs who was clutching a coffee, her braids swept up in a high ponytail. It was quiet and kind of peaceful. I stood by the window and had a perfect view of the sun cresting over downtown Manhattan. The windows glittered with the sunrise.

  Not a bad way to start the day. I wondered, as I always do when I’m up early and see something beautiful I never get to see, if I should consider becoming a morning person.

  I didn’t see Demetrius von Snufflemuffin, but I didn’t expect to this morning, and that was the point.

  — — — —

  I decided to make the following day my late day, since I had free study first period and this was technically research for a school project. I slept in a little, luxuriating among the pillows after all the hard research I’d been doing. I took my time getting ready, ate a bowl of cereal while reading an actual print newspaper (my parents are into being analog), and even wore boots with a heel so that I would walk slower. The train was packed with men and women on their way to work. I pushed my way to my usual window but there was a man already leaning against it, and my bargaining potential was limited this morning as there was literally nowhere else for him to go. So I stood directly in front of him, and when we went over the bridge, I stood on my tiptoes to see over his shoulder. A train rolled by on the opposite track, but it was the wrong direction for most commuters this time of day, and the window I was looking for was empty.

  In AP Stats, we e
ach updated the class on our progress. Mr. Graff took notes and nodded along, asking questions and helping us fine-tune our data collection. I noted with satisfaction that I seemed to be ahead of a lot of the guys in my class. Take that, gender norms!

  When it was my turn to present, a hush fell over the room. The boys lost their minds when I told them I had seen Demetrius again.

  “I can’t believe you didn’t give him your number.” Matt had his head in his hands. “You could have held it up to the window!”

  “I didn’t think of that,” I realized. “But if my data is correct I should see him again the next time I’m on time for school. Maybe even tomorrow.”

  “That’s tempting fate,” Alex interjected.

  “It’s not fate! It’s math!”

  “Wait,” said Justin Wu, “why are we calling him Demetrius?”

  — — — —

  My last class of the day was studio art. Mom had made me sign up for it because she said I was too high-strung and doing something creative would help to soothe my overactive mind. Camila is in the class, too. It gives us a chance to catch up while we smear paint on a canvas.

  “Alex’s right,” she said, dipping her brush into a blob of hunter-green paint. “It’s fate.”

  “It’s not fate,” I countered. “It’s math.”

  “Why do you think you keep seeing him? Why do you think both of your trains stopped at the exact same time? It’s fate, I’m telling you.”

  “I’ll tell you why I keep seeing him. He goes to school in Brooklyn. I go to school in Manhattan. School starts at pretty much the same time every day no matter what school you go to. There are only a limited number of ways to cross between Brooklyn and Manhattan, and one of them is the Manhattan Bridge. See? The pool of variables keeps getting smaller and smaller. If you think about it, how could I not see him?”

  Camila eyed me. “This isn’t an SAT question. We’re talking about people. There’s room for human error. That number is meaningless, because it exists in a bubble. Human error, Sam. Real life is way more complicated than math.”

  “I respectfully beg to differ. It was a carefully orchestrated series of perfectly timed events that brought us together in the first place.”

  “Or,” she said, “it was the universe.”

  “Agree to disagree.”

  No one understands the purpose of mathematical integrity except for me. And Mr. Graff.

  Camila just smiled and smoothed black around the edges of the canvas. She’s actually amazing at studio art and will probably be a famous painter one day. I don’t know why she puts up with me taking this class with her.

  So far it’s done nothing to soothe my overactive mind.

  — — — —

  Over the next few weeks, I immersed myself in my research. I got fancy. I noted when it rained and the trains were slower than usual and people’s umbrellas made the floors slippery and treacherous. Or when I made the mistake of trying to open my Snapple while speedwalking down the street and I had to go back to get napkins, or when someone cut in front of me and I missed the 7:12 train by a fraction of a second and the conductor didn’t wait. I noted when there was track work, or the train had to reroute over the Q line. I calculated the odds of the same thing happening to him, this boy I didn’t know, at a different subway station, in a different borough, somewhere on the other side of this impossibly big city.

  My research was stacking up. I had pages and pages in a Word document saved on the cloud. An Excel sheet full of numbers.

  But here’s the thing:

  I hadn’t seen him again.

  I didn’t understand what was happening. I was doing everything right. My hypothesis was airtight. My math was on point.

  Maybe Camila was right. Maybe there was too much room for human error.

  Maybe it was the universe telling me it wasn’t meant to be.

  Maybe Demetrius von Snufflemuffin wasn’t ever supposed to be mine.

  Maybe we would go on like this, trains passing each other in the early morning sun (not when it rained, I noted), and he would continue to be Demetrius von Snufflemuffin, Mystery Boy. This instrument-playing, cute-message-writing, germ-resistant, navy-blue-hoodie-wearing dream boy of mine.

  But maybe it was for the best.

  If we did ever meet IRL, then he would become real. And all this perfect stuff I sort of knew about him would be all mixed up with imperfect stuff, the real stuff, the stuff no one wants to know. The stuff that would take him out of the early morning haze of my dreams and into the cold hard daylight of reality.

  — — — —

  I distracted myself by collecting the rest of my data.

  I worked on my poster. I made my spreadsheet pretty. I included graphs and even made some hilarious jokes about Mr. Graff’s name.

  And then, in the blink of an eye (I mean, it was fourteen days, but who’s counting?), there was only one week left. The paper was due Friday. All my research had to be complete by then. Five days to change the course of my life.

  Monday I was perfectly on time, but it rained and the 7:12 train arrived at 7:25.

  Tuesday my train was rerouted.

  Wednesday I ended up being late because Aviva decided to use Mom’s curling iron and filled the bathroom with burnt-hair smell.

  Thursday I saw him one more time. We both pressed our hands to the glass. I was hoping for something. Anything. Some kind of meaningful connection. Come on, train. If there was ever a time for you to stall unexpectedly, this is it. But I had no such luck. The trains went by too fast and we watched each other hurtle off into the distance.

  Good-bye, Demetrius, I thought.

  Friday the project was due and I was on time and the train was on time and everything lined up exactly right. But I didn’t see him at all.

  PART IV: ANALYSIS

  That was it. The whole thing was over.

  I was walking down the hall to AP Stats, about to turn in a killer final project worth fifty percent of my grade. To be honest, I’d never felt so good about a school project before in my life.

  So why was I so bummed?

  It was a stupid question, because I knew exactly why. I was hoping the numbers would prove that I could trust my weird feeling about this guy. That if I did my research and followed the trail of data, it would lead me to him, and we would meet, and I would know what it felt like to be in love. I would have my answer.

  Numbers don’t lie, even when the heart does.

  — — — —

  “Congratulations!” Mr. Graff was once again the most excited person in the room. “You’ve finished your first step in your future careers as mathematicians!” He was wearing a party hat. “Leave your final papers in a stack on my desk.”

  I dropped my paper in a stack with the others. It felt surreal. A month of my life, a month of dreaming and working and pinning my hopes on a person I didn’t even know, and now it was just another wad of printer paper stapled and shuffled in with fourteen others. It was a piece of me. A real piece. And it was gone.

  Next time a teacher asked for a topic with real-life applications, I was picking something with lower stakes.

  The boys in my class all wanted to know how my project had gone. They grilled me about the details. Did I see him again? Did we meet? Even Mr. Graff wanted to know. They asked for a sneak peek of the results.

  “You’ll just have to wait for my presentation on Monday,” I replied, cool as a cucumber. Everyone seemed kind of disappointed. You don’t know the half of it, I wanted to say.

  Over the weekend, it rained. Camila came over to do DIY projects and watch romantic comedies on Netflix. DIY projects are another thing Mom says will calm my overactive mind. She isn’t wrong. There’s something soothing about repurposing old jeans into something new and useful, so we went to town on denim with scissors as we watched You’ve Got Mail. Viv was sitting in the comfy chair playing on her phone. She didn’t look up, but I knew she was listening.

  �
�You see?” Camila said, pointing at the TV while she tore a strip of old denim to shreds. “They live in the same neighborhood and cross paths every day and it takes forever. But they do meet at the end of the movie.” She started braiding the strips together. “Everything connects eventually,” she said wisely. She’s been talking like that ever since she started watching Cosmos with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

  It rained and rained and rained, and I didn’t leave the apartment for two whole days. My new denim choker was a masterpiece.

  — — — —

  The sun came out for Presentation Day.

  I woke before the sun; I was leaving an extra hour to get to school in case anything went wrong. If I’d learned anything from taking obsessive notes about subway patterns this month, something inevitably would. Happily, my foresight paid off, since my train decided to go over the Q line that day.

  On the bridge, I watched the sun come up over the downtown Manhattan skyline, and even I had to admit how pretty it was and how lucky I was to be alive and to call this city my home, blah blah blah. Turning in the project had felt like the end of something, but maybe this presentation was only the beginning. Maybe I’d get an A, and go on to get a five on the AP exam, and get into MIT, and get a competitive academic scholarship, and this whole project really would be the beginning of my career as a statistician, as Mr. Graff would say, and—

  And that’s when, as dawn was breaking over the horizon, it dawned on me that I’d left my poster at home. Stats was the first class of the day, and I was the first presenter. Everyone wanted to know how my project had turned out. They made me go first.

  I checked my phone. It was 6:45. That was why I left extra time. Maybe Camila was right about human error after all.

  At Canal Street I got off and crossed over to the Brooklyn-bound side of the track. It was packed, which meant a train hadn’t come in a while, which meant something was wrong. My heart started to beat faster and my brain started to do that overactive thing it does, imagining the worst-case scenarios. I had all but convinced myself that the bridge had collapsed when a train pulled into the station, but it was an N train and the conductor was saying something and I could barely make out the words: “No Brooklyn-bound B or D train service . . . take the N to Atlantic and switch there for the B, D, Q, R, 2, 3, 4, and 5 trains . . .”