Ten Girls to Watch by Charity Shumway

who confused outright assault with coy banter. Akin to my problem of slight meanness in place of real flirting, but a much more virulent form of the disease.
    “The way the parties are designed is the fourth pillar of our success,” Rachel said. “We work very hard to get the right group of people at each party.”
    “So it’s a program you wrote that matches certain characteristics?” Lily asked, trying to keep things on course.
    “We’re always refining the program, but the honest truth is that it’s a lot easier to predict compatibility than people think. People who are similarly attractive are more likely to be compatible. People whose parents are still married are more likely to be good matches for other people whose parents are still married. People with similar incomes are more likely to be compatible, as are people whose parents had similar incomes when they were growing up. The list goes on and on. TheOne team did a lot of research, and we built it into our reviewing system, and that’s how we decide who gets invited to what party. As I mentioned, we’ve been refining the system, so now every party has a few wild cards.”
    I winced inside as she went through her list. It sounded like I was supposed to move home and marry one of my second cousins. And even though I’d diagnosed the troubles between me and Robert on dozens of occasions, I hated hearing our compatibility so publicly condemned. And hearing his and Lily’s so publicly affirmed. And seeing it so blatantly affirmed as well. They just seemed so natural together. Like I’d never even existed.
    “Let’s look at you two, for instance,” Rachel said, gesturing toward Lily and Robert. My heart seized. Really? Was she going to say it all out loud?
    Robert at least had the sense to intervene.
    “Wait, I have a much better idea,” Robert said. “Let’s look at Dawn.”
    That wasn’t exactly the intervention I had hoped for.
    “Hold on, wait a second here, how did I get involved in all this?” I protested, panic clomping through me. “I’m an innocent bystander. My only role here is journalistic.”
    “We could look at you, Rachel, that could be fun,” Lily said divertingly. Maybe Lily would be spared some discomfort of her own if we skipped analyzing me, but I was still grateful.
    “Fine,” Rachel said, ignoring both me and Lily. “Let’s look at Dawn.”
    “Please don’t make me go down the list and answer all of The One’s questions. I can tell you that I’ve stayed in my apartment in Brooklyn for all my recent vacations.”
    “I’m going to guess a few other details,” Rachel began. “Ivy League degree, creative professional, income—not high.”
    Ouch. And true.
    “Parents . . . divorced? Not originally from New York.”
    I silently grimaced my assent. Was everything about me really that obvious? Did I reek of broken home and redneck America?
    “So let me tell you who would most likely be at your party,” Rachel continued. “It’d be men in the twenty-five-to-twenty-nine range. Well educated, either in somewhat creative fields or who score high in other ‘humanist’ areas like significant book ownership or playing instruments, things like that. They’d be decent looking. And to compensate for the fact that you’re a redhead and that there’s a significant minority of men who say no redheads, we’d tilt the ratio and throw in an extra man or two.”
    How generous. She said all this without even a hint of a pause, making it clear that categorization better than “decent looking” hadn’t even flickered across her imagination, nor had much concern for the potential thwack to my feelings from her “no redheads” comment. You had to give it up to her for not mincing words, though. I felt myself slouching.
    “And there’d be a lot of midwesterner-gone-east types,” she continued. “Nice guys, middle-class families, that sort of thing. And then we’d throw in a few wild cards. A few well-educated folks from