“It didn’t. More wine?”
Diane squinted at her suspiciously but accepted the refill. Crisis averted. Probably. Cassie quietly moved the quartz to the other side of the room while Diane returned to her swiping.
“The problem,” Diane continued, “is that all the good ones are taken. Or gay. Or takenandgay. Or they’re perfectly nice but there’s no spark. Remember sparks? I miss sparks. The last time I felt sparks was?—”
Her phone buzzed.
“Match,” she said, surprised. “Huh. I don’t remember swiping right on?—”
It buzzed again.
And again.
And then it didn’t stop buzzing.
“What the—” Diane stared at her screen as notification after notification cascaded down. “I have twelve new matches. Thirteen. Seventeen. Cassie, why do I haveseventeen new matches?”
“That seems like a lot.”
“Itisa lot! I’ve been on this app for six months and gotten maybe twenty matches total, and now—”She refreshed the screen. Her face went pale. “Twenty-three. Twenty-eight. Why are so many men suddenly interested in me?”
Luna’s ears perked up. “Oh dear.”
“What do you mean, ‘oh dear’?” Diane demanded. “What does the cat know that I don’t?”
“Many things. But specifically—” Luna looked at Cassie with an expression of feline amusement. “—I think your grounding crystal may have… grounded into the wrong thing.”
Cassie’s stomach dropped. “The quartz touched her phone.”
“And the quartz was charged with your energy. Which has been very… romantically satisfied lately.” Luna’s whiskers twitched. “Congratulations. You’ve accidentally enchanted your best friend’s dating profile.”
“WHAT?”
“I didn’t mean to! It was an accident!”
“EVERYTHING IS AN ACCIDENT WITH YOU.” Diane was scrolling frantically now, her face cycling through emotions Cassie couldn’t quite track. “Why is my app showing matches from—this can’t be right. This says I matched with someone in 1987. That’s not how apps work. That’s not howtimeworks.”
“Let me see.” Cassie grabbed the phone.
The Tinder interface looked normal at first glance. But the matches—there wereforty-three of them now, and climbing—weren’t behaving normally at all. Some of the profile photos were crisp and modern. Others had the grainy quality of old photographs. One appeared to be a Polaroid. Another was clearly a yearbook photo, complete with feathered hair and a powder-blue tuxedo.
“That’s Jimmy Kowalski,” Diane said faintly. “From high school. He took me to prom. In 1986.”
“Maybe he’s… also on Tinder?”
“He’sfifty-two. And married. And a grandfather.” Diane grabbed the phone back, scrolling with increasing horror. “And apparently eighteen again, according to this photo. Which is definitely his senior portrait. I remember it because he had that stupid earring his mom made him take out.”
A message notification popped up.
Jimmy K. says: Hey. Long time. Coffee?
Diane made a sound like a tea kettle reaching boiling point.
“Cassie.”
“Yes?”
“Why is my high school boyfriend messaging me through a dating app that didn’t exist when we dated?”
