She was technically from Pocksey, but apparently the Scramblettes didn’t think that sounded alluring enough, so they’d opted for the town next door.
College: Columbia
That much was true, but she hated its Ivy League attitude. It sounded softer spoken aloud but looked prickly and pretentious written out.
Job: Finance
She was glad, at least, that they’d put “finance” rather than “investment banker.” It was slightly less abrasive, though the nuance would probably be lost.
She scrolled to keep reading the rest of her summary, but there was nothing more. Just like that, Rae had boiled herself—all her past achievements and failures, current hobbies and routines, future ambitions and uncertainties—down to just another profile that guys would spend two seconds—three if she was lucky—glancing at before deciding whether to swipe “like” or “next.”
It felt even worse than distilling herself into a one-page résumé.
She could hear her Indiana friends:Come on, Raelynn, you’re better than this.Everyone back home called her Raelynn. TheLynnhad fallen off once she’d stepped foot on Columbia’s campus in New York, seven years ago now.Raewas more city chic. But how much more of herself was she leaving behind as time went on?
She didn’t have the emotional capacity to debate this now, so she turned the music up and whispered or shouted, she couldn’t tell which, “Just publish it.”
Publish.The verb she longed to hear in reference to her poetry, now more depressingly affixed to her dating life.
Sprawled horizontal, Rae lifted the mug to her lips. It seemed Ellen had filled it with red wine after cutting their losses on the bottle of white. The wine trickled onto her robe in tacky red polka dots, wiping out all the gains she’d thought she’d made in her adult life. Without sitting up, Rae kept slurping and began swiping for her soul mate.
She had five years—1,825 days, she calculated—to close the husband deal before her thirtieth birthday, and there was no time to procrastinate.
CHAPTER TWO
THE DATING APP BAILOUT
“What do you think of this guy?” Rae asked Ellen, tilting her phone toward Ellen to display the profile ofNICK, 29.
They were lounging on the penthouse couch on a Friday night a couple weeks after Rae’s birthday. Rae was wearing her bathrobe, now wine stain–free thanks to a trip to the dry cleaner in a concerted midtwenties effort toinvest in myself.
Ellen was in an oversized T-shirt and boxers. Their heads were at opposite ends of the couch, legs bent at the knees and feet delicately resting beside each other’s ears. It was the most space-efficient posture they’d found, and they could hardly even smell each other’s reused socks over the lingering odor of the broccoli-and-beet scramblette they’d cooked for dinner. It hadn’t been their best egg invention to date, but they still considered it a success, since it hadn’t triggered the smoke detector.
Ellen broke eye contact with her own screen to look at Rae’s. “Definitely not,” she said, within nanoseconds. “No guys making peace signs in their photos. We’ve been over this.”
“But he doesn’t have a backwards hat or beer can,” Rae said. “Doesn’t that make it better?”
“Marginally. Next.”
Rae kept swiping suitors with one hand and snacking with the other, reaching into the family-sized bag of popcorn on the coffee table. Snack & Swipe—they’d patented the game, which had taken precedence over a night out with Sarah and Mina.
The dizzyingly large market size of eligible bachelors was addicting, and Rae had missed her subway stop multiple times on her commute to and from the office.
“What about him?” Rae asked Ellen, showingMIKE, 27.
“Next,” Ellen said. “He’s holding a dead fish.”
“What’s wrong with fishing?”
“There’s nothing wrong with fishing, there’s something wrong with using a four-foot-long dead trout to impress girls. It’s like he’s overcompensating for something.”
“You’re ruthless,” Rae said, taking notes in the spiral pad propped open on her lap.No dead fish, she added to the list, belowNo shirtless photos(“ego alert”),No inflatable swans(“party boy”),No tech entrepreneurs(“code for scam artist”), and the list went on. Rae hadn’t come across her ex’s profile yet, but if she did, she knew he’d fail on multiple criteria.
“I take my job as your dating app mentor very seriously,” Ellen said. She was well qualified for the role, with years of app experience under her belt, though even if Ellen had never swiped a single profile, Rae probably would have still consulted her just as much.
Ellen had had that effect on Rae since the first time they’d met on the street two years ago. Rae had been walking down Tenth Avenue one Saturday to pick up a prescription that had been sitting at the pharmacy for three weeks when she’d spotted a stylish brunette crossing at West Twenty-Ninth. The girl—Rae still thought of herself and her contemporaries as girls rather than women—lookedabout her age but far more put together, in heels and a camel trench coat with a chic black bag, her shiny dark hair pulled into a chignon, if that was the right word.
Rae had felt a surge of inadequacy at her own sloppy ponytail, sweatpants, and plastic grocery bag that was doubling as a purse.
