The phone buzzed. 349. 350.
I threw it across the room. It hit the wall, bounced off my laundry pile—the one I’d been meaning to fold since last Tuesday—and landed face-up on the carpet, screen glowing, still buzzing.
Tequila looked at the phone. Looked at me. Looked at the phone again.
That seems like a you problem.
“Everything is a me problem. That’s the problem.”
That’s the spirit. Now feed me.
I’d fallenasleep in yesterday’s clothes—the good jeans, the orange sweater that Diane at work said made me look like a “sexy traffic cone” (she’d meant it as a compliment, I think), and one sock. I didn’t know where the other sock had gone. I suspected it had joined a witness protection program.
The phone hit 360 matches while I was brushing my teeth.
375 by the time I’d made coffee.
389 when I finally worked up the nerve to actually look at it again.
The photos were still wrong. Still impossible.
Last night, when I’d fled Cassie’s house with a possessed phone and a growing sense of dread, Jimmy Kowalski had been staring at me from my screen looking exactly like his senior portrait—eighteen years old, frosted tips, that stupid earring he’d thought made him look edgy. I’d told myself it was a glitch. That the app would reset overnight. That I’d wake up and everything would be normal and I could go to work at the winery and argue with Valentina about the harvest festival schedule like a regular person.
Jimmy was still there. Still eighteen. Still “online now.”
And he wasn’t alone.
The impossible matches had multiplied while I slept—not just men from my past looking weirdly young, but men from pasts I didn’t even recognize. A guy in a leisure suit with sideburns that belonged in a museum. Someone whose profile photo was literally a Polaroid. A man whose bio was written entirely in disco slang that I had to Google to understand.
Groovy lady, let’s boogie down to Lovetown. You bring the vibes, I’ll bring the 8-track.
What the actual hell.
My phone buzzed. 396. A new message notification:
Jimmy K: Hey! I’m in the neighborhood. Thought I’d stop by. Cool?
I stared at the message. In the neighborhood. Jimmy Kowalski. Who lived three states away. Who I hadn’t spoken to since we’d awkwardly slow-danced to “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” at prom and then never spoke again because we hadabsolutely nothing in common besides a shared zip code and a mutual appreciation for Aerosmith.
“What the f?—”
The doorbell rang.
I froze. Tequila’s ears swiveled toward the sound.
The doorbell rang again. Insistently. The way someone rings when they’re SURE you’re home and they’re not leaving until you answer.
You should probably get that.
“I should probably hide in the closet until I die.”
That seems excessive.
The doorbell rang a third time. Then a fourth. Then someone started knocking—a cheerful, rhythmic knock that I recognized somewhere deep in my lizard brain, in the part of me that still remembered leg warmers and Bon Jovi and the specific terror of a teenage boy showing up at your door with a corsage.
No.
No, no, no.
