“No,” Rae said. “It’s a full boy ban.”
“He’s not a boy,” Ellen said. “He’s thirty-three.”
“He could still be a Peter Pan in men’s clothing,” Rae cautioned.
“I have a good feeling. Right here.” Ellen pointed to her toned abs and hop-skipped into the bathroom to start the shower.
“And it’s all thanks to you, Rae-bae,” Ellen called out over the running shower. She reappeared in the living room in a towel that barely skimmed the tops of her long legs. “I never would’ve paid him any attention if I still had the app. I got so used to relying on the matches on my screen that I stopped noticing people I met in real life.”
Rae grunted her best contrarian grunt. Even though she’d had the dating app for only eight weeks out of her twenty-five years, she struggled to remember how people ever met organically. Who actually struck up a conversation with a stranger in a coffee shop or yoga studio?
“I’ll ask if he has single friends for you,” Ellen said.
“No thanks. I’m detoxing.” But then, begrudgingly, “You should French braid your hair tonight. It looks very Michelin-star-esque.”
“Will you do it?” Ellen asked. “You’re way better at it than I am.”
It wasn’t true. Rae’s French braids were always off-center, with flyaway hairs. But a smile split her caffeinated lips. “If you insist.”
Ellen grinned and floated around the penthouse, waiting for the shower water to warm up. “What’s that?” she asked, peering into Rae’s coffee mug.
“Coffee cereal soup.”
Ellen took a slurp. “Very innovative,” she applauded. “Add it to the list of things we’ll patent. Right behind scramblettes and toilet naps.”
“And apparently not dating detoxes,” Rae said.
“You can own that patent,” Ellen declared, brown eyes bright with resurrected fairy tales. “I’ll take my tree pose prince.”
That night, Rae’s phone buzzed as she squeezed out one more dab of toothpaste from an empty tube. She considered this one of her more underrated talents and poetically pleasing as well—extending the life of a toothpaste tube that everyone else would have thrown in the trash days ago.
Perhaps she’d use it when she made her next dating app profile, under one of those cornyAn unusual skill I have is …prompts.
She checked her phone as she brushed her teeth, fearing it was from work and hoping it was from Ellen.
Rae had given Ellen strict instructions to send updates every twenty minutes, but it had been two hours and nothing yet. This indicated things with the Tree Pose Prince were probably going quite well, but Rae still felt left out, craving details to help her vicariously experience the date.
But the text was a number she didn’t have saved—a 203 area code.
Hi, Rae—this is Dustin. Sorry for the delay. I’ve been sick and lying low. Would you like to get tea after work on Wednesday?
Dustin.Her mind rummaged through mnemonic files until it finally landed on the acronym DDST—Dustin Duke Stock Trader. Yes, that was it. He’d gone to Duke and worked as a stock trader. That was all she recalled, but apparently she’d been impressed enough to give him her number, perhaps because he used perfect grammar.
She found him quickly from a Google search. The newly honed efficiency of her stalking skills impressed her. From the head shot on his LinkedIn profile, she could tell he was threshold-level attractive—curly black hair and one of those not-even-trying faces.
He was twenty-nine, a point in his favor, since it beat Ellen’s man-child cutoff (Rae was still two years his senior based on the gender-years math, but this seemed like a fine age gap). The Wall Street career was two points against him—she must have matched with him before she’d started diversifying her dating app portfolio away from finance bros.
The Greenwich, Connecticut hometown was also a con, given how rich and preppy the suburb was. But he earned two points back for a comment she found from one of his college professors describing him as “a creative visionary.”
Halfway down another rabbit hole, she found Dustin’s parents’ engagement announcement in theNew York Times, which spurred her to look for proof of her own parents’ wedding (no announcement, no photos) and then also their divorce (also nonexistent, according to the internet).
It added to the unpleasant feeling that there wasn’t much proof that her dad had really been her dad at all. He’d so easily waltzed off into his new life with a new wife—a woman he’d met on the internet and married a full two weeks after the divorce had been finalized—and twin stepdaughters who’d seemingly replaced Rae overnight. Her dad had invited her to “family Thanksgiving” the first couple years after he’d left, and she’d declined with teenage venom.
That was back when Rae was seventeen. Nowadays they caught up over dinner from time to time when her dad was traveling throughNew York on business, but Rae still refused to see his wife, which she figured was probably why he’d ignored Rae’s birthday this year. He seemed to be living under a dreamy delusion that sooner or later she would grow up and embrace her new mommy with proper decorum and delight. As this hadn’t happened yet, her dad went long and seemingly random spells where he disappeared on her, lashing out by withholding his love.
He always remembered Christmas, though. Every year he sent Rae a glossy card featuring his new family, cozied up on a beach somewhere. Rae wanted to interpret this as a sign that he was thinking of her at the holidays, but her heart felt it as a passive-aggressive message:Look how happy I am without you. If you weren’t so immature, you could be in this photo too.
Maybe it would be easier to forgive him if her mom were remarried too, but she’d been dating one dud after the next since the divorce, being dragged up and down by middle-aged boys who still hadn’t matured into men. Rae blamed her dad for casting her mom out into the murky waters of the fifty-plus dating pool. Nothing was ever black and white, but no matter which way you analyzed it, the divorce was mostly his fault, and Rae couldn’t stop resenting him even if she wanted to—which she didn’t, not yet.
