Ten Girls to Watch by Charity Shumway Page B

she’d won just about every computery competition you could think of and was also a softball star.
    I’d also done a little extra research on TheOne.com in anticipation of meeting Rachel, and the articles I’d browsed made three things clear: (1) TheOne was far and away the web’s most popular dating website, beating out Meet.com by more than a million users (largely, I wager, because of Meet’s unfortunate homophone); (2) Rachel Link was rolling in dough as a result, evidenced not only by the feature I found in Fine Living Decor on her faux home-on-the-range manse in Dallas and her so-shiny-it-looked-slippery pied-à-terre in San Francisco but also by the no. 3 listing I found for her in GRID ’s “Where the Money’s at on the Web” rankings; and (3) as I had already been well aware, liberals of all stripes—in particular liberals who wrote for magazines, newspapers, blogs, television, or radio—loved to hate her because of TheOne’s old-school matching style. Interracial dating? Interclass dating? Homosexuals? All rabble-rousing nonsense in the world of TheOne.
    Dinner was at Robert’s place, and Robert lived in a fancy building near Columbus Circle with not one but two, sometimes three, white-gloved doormen. I’d never once had to turn the revolving door that led to the oh-so-elegant lobby thanks to said doormen. I’m just lazy and germ-phobic enough that I’m often a revolving-door freeloader, letting the folks in front of and behind me do the real pushing, but having a formal pusher so I didn’t have to go through the pretense of leaning into the push bar? Now that was something.
    But there’s also something weird about doormen, other than the weirdness of having people to wait on you—they remember you. And I knew that all three men on duty that day knew that not so many months ago, I’d been spending night after night in Robert’s apartment. And that I had then stopped spending nights. And now Lily was spending nights. And now Lily and I were both arriving. Plus some other chick. I smiled somewhat grimly when they said hello and tried to pretend I wasn’t pained. Undoubtedly they’d brand Robert a Lothario and give him high fives later. The female role in such dramas is much less flattering.
    After one of the doormen called up and gave me the go-ahead, I took the elevator up to the seventh floor. When Robert’s parents bought the apartment for him, he’d earnestly explained their bargain-hunting prowess: “I get the exact same service as the guy who lives in the twenty-million-dollar penthouse, but the price goes down a few million every floor. It’s really an unbeatable deal.” This was while I was staying with him and apartment hunting, with a negative budget. The bargains I was looking at were more like “Who needs a pesky window in their bedroom?” or “Not exactly a bedroom, but the ladder is sturdy, the crawl space fits a mattress, and you can almost sit up without hitting your head on the ceiling.” The moderately wretched though to-my-standards livable apartment I finally found cost less than Robert’s parking space.
    Outside the door of 7C, I adjusted my dress, a simple black sheath that no one would think much of, except Robert had said I looked beautiful in it every time I’d ever worn it. Lily opened the door a mere second after I knocked. “Perfect timing!” she said, kissing me on both cheeks. She smelled like perfume. Not the sort of lightweight perfume I dared to wear. Something muskier, woodsier. It gave her a gravitas and sexiness I resented. “Robert is just finishing up in the kitchen, and Rachel already arrived. Don’t worry, she just got here. She’s freshening up.” Her delivery was so breezy and comfortable, her lines delivered like we were best friends, and like a forensics team wouldn’t turn up many more of my fingerprints in the apartment than hers.
    Despite the fact that the knot in my stomach—which had been present since the day I first learned