Chapter 1
from crash course
Chapter One: Finn
“And that is, hand to the Almighty, what happened,” Taylor said, putting one hand on his heart and lifting the other.
“For he cannot tell a lie,” Jason added somberly, causing a round of laughter to erupt from our usual booth.
Greg scratched his chin. “See, I’m not imagining Harrison standing in the trees, looking at his watch, tapping his foot, waiting for the damned eclipse to start.”
Taylor gasped and grabbed a fistful of his shirt over his heart, as if he were about to fall over. “How dare you?” He swung to Harrison. “Is that true? Were you engineering the most romantic moment of my life?”
Harrison shook his head. “I would never. Even if it’s a really good idea. But it was an accident.” He crossed his heart.
Harrison had a penchant for theatrics that we got to know briefly before the summer break.
He’d gone to Thailand with Taylor soon after the semester was over, and we hadn’t seen either of them until tonight.
They’d gone all through Southeast Asia over the course of a month, flown around China throughout last July, and topped it off with a detailed exploration in Japan.
Yet of all the stories Taylor could have been telling us, he decided we were overdue for the reprise of the eclipse.
“And before anyone says it,” Taylor added, rolling his eyes at Jason. “Bennet wasn’t here the last time I told this story.” He bowed a little to Jason’s boyfriend. “You’re welcome.”
“It’s very romantic,” Bennet agreed, glancing at Jason lovingly.
Taylor looked appropriately vindicated.
Not that it wasn’t sweet. People fell in love and had cute things to say all the time. It was always sweet, even when it wasn’t an over-the-top, I’ll-make-the-sun-go-out-for-you sort of affair.
And no, I wasn’t jealous. I couldn’t be happier for my friends.
Jealousy had nothing to do with the way I held this smile on my face until it hurt.
Or with thinking about how I’d come out before any of them, started dating, and never had anyone fall in love with me a tenth as strongly as Bennet had fallen for Jason or Harrison for Taylor.
Okay, maybe I was a little jealous, but it was benign.
“It could be done by design, though,” Taylor said, eyes narrowing as he began to concoct a plan. He turned to Harrison. “Don’t you think so?”
Harrison nodded with his usual confidence. “Oh, sure. A little bit of planning, some engineering, and a few theater tricks would do the job.”
“We could do that,” Taylor said.
“Do what?” Jason asked casually.
“Engineer the most romantic story ever told,” Taylor replied.
His eyes had that gleeful glimmer in them that emerged whenever he discovered a shiny new obsession.
“Think about it, we could match one of our token singles with their soulmate. Imagine the consequences!” he cried like a megalomaniac who just devised a hostile takeover.
“It would change the course of their lives.”
“For the better,” Harrison pointed out.
“What?” Taylor looked at him. “Oh. Right. Yes, obviously, we wouldn’t do anything bad.”
“Do you ever rest?” Greg asked. “Like, seriously, do you ever just kick back and enjoy a good thing, T? You’re like a dog chasing a wheel.”
“No, my friend,” Taylor said sagely. “I am a dog who catches the wheel, gets into the car, and drives off into the sunset.”
Greg shrugged. “I say this is a terrible idea. You can’t just mess with people’s lives like that.”
I glanced at Greg, whose bushy eyebrows were creasing the space between them as his frown deepened.
“How’s that any different from sending a poor, unsuspecting guy on a dating dare, and then having him pretty much married within three months?” asked Taylor.
“That was voluntary,” Greg said.
Bennet lifted a finger. “This would be voluntary, too.”
“Not you, too,” Greg said, lifting his hands in defeat.
My heart was beginning to beat a little faster, its thumping loud in my ears, starting to drown out all other sounds. When I next looked at Greg, he was sinking in his chair.
“I’m not doing it,” he said. “I’m perfectly happy being single and having a little thing you assholes never heard of. It’s called free will.”
Taylor snorted. “Haven’t you heard? We all live in a simulation.”
“There’s no way to test that hypothesis,” Greg said, raising a threatening finger.
“So touchy,” Jason teased him. He turned to everyone else. “What are we thinking? Setting up Greg with someone?”
My stomach dropped. Had I turned invisible?
“No,” Greg said. “Seriously, I’m not going to cooperate. If you set me up with any of the girls you know, they’ll hate you forever. I’ll be the worst date of their lives.”
“Bullshit,” Taylor said.
Greg leaned in. “I will talk about crypto all night long,” he said.
“Not crypto!” Taylor gasped.
“Oh yes. And I’ll offer to show them my collection of NFTs. And I’ll say that Animal Farm is my favorite book, but for all the wrong reasons,” Greg said, leaning back again now that he had effectively won this argument. “And I won’t listen for a second.”
Taylor cringed and looked at Jason for help. “I wouldn’t push any girl I know into this horror. The guy’s a lost cause. Totally undatable.”
The silence settled around the booth, and I felt like my tongue was stuck to the roof of my mouth.
I wasn’t going to be the guy who volunteered.
It would stink of desperation. And I wasn’t desperate, I swear.
I wanted to have that big romance before I graduated, but I wasn’t going to raise my hand and ask my friends to set me up.
But then, in their defeat, all my friends began to lift their heads. One by one, each looked at me the way a shark looked at a nice, swinging leg in the sea. Maybe not the nicest way to put it, but they looked hungry.
Fear bolted through me, and I almost had a moment of clarity. I almost saw all the ways in which this could go terribly wrong.
Then again, I’d spent the last three years waiting for that romance to happen to me. And I watched all my willing friends throw themselves into it without flinching.
It wasn’t going to happen on its own.
So, I gave a little shrug and said, “I’ll do it.”
“Oh, we know,” Taylor said, his voice low and almost threatening with the barely contained excitement.
“We aren’t asking,” Jason said, his eyes focused on me.
“We’re setting you up,” Harrison said.
Bennet’s eyes narrowed as he moved closer. “We’re going to need a flowchart. And a corkboard.”
“Why a…?” Jason tried to ask.
Bennet stopped him with a raised hand, declaring, “I need a corkboard.”
“You got it, babe,” Jason assured him with a good dose of fear.
A hand fell on my shoulder, giving me a squeeze. Greg leaned closer to me. “This is a terrible idea,” he said.
Some part of me recognized just how prophetic these words were. Only, the idea of handing over my fate to someone else was so, so tempting after I’d squandered all chances for three consecutive years. If I couldn’t get my life together, maybe a bunch of scheming, fun-chasing friends could.
It was a terrible idea. But it was the best idea on the table.
***
It took three days for the corkboard to show up in the common room of Beta Epsilon Lambda house.
It was a rather large one, brought into the house in pieces, and assembled over an entire evening.
It sat in a wooden frame with a skeleton holding it up on small wheels, and it was flippable, revealing a totally blank corkboard behind it.
I came downstairs and found all of them sitting on the sofas that were scattered around the living room.
The board was empty save for a single, letter-sized photograph of me taken last year at our cookout.
Three photos were taken of me that day, and my friends picked the only one where I had blinked at the moment the shutter clicked.
My mouth was open as I was trying to say something.
Greg’s words came back to me when I saw their choice of the photo. This is a terrible idea. They rang truer now.
Elsewhere on the board, there was a cluster of red-headed pins and red strings.
Several pins were in Taylor’s mouth as he tied the red string to the one pin holding the photo in the middle.
Jason brought another photo to the board. This one was a blank sheet of paper with only a large, blocky question mark in the middle.
“Yes, right there,” Taylor said through the pins he held with his teeth.
Jason attached the question mark to the board, and Taylor connected the two pins with the string.
“There you are,” said Harrison, turning to look at me.
I carefully stepped closer to the board and looked at it in horror. “It looks like I killed someone and you can’t find the body.”
“Don’t worry about what it looks like,” Jason said.
Taylor took the pins out of his mouth and planted them randomly on the left side of the board, stretching pieces of red string between my photo and each empty pin. “I’m sure it’ll look just fine to whoever you bring over.”
That part hadn’t even crossed my mind. “We are hiding this thing if I bring someone over,” I said.
“Sure,” Taylor agreed. “And maybe he or she will find it in the middle of the night by accident. I’m sure it’ll make sense.”
“What’s the actual plan?” I asked, sitting on the edge of a sofa that faced the one where Harrison and Bennet were sitting.
Bennet sighed. “I’m working on a point system so that we can calculate the statistical probability of success for each of our candidates based on whatever biographical information we have.
And I’ve read several romance novels Harrison recommended so I could devise a sound ranking list of scenarios with statistical likelihood of landing you a romantic date. ”
“What have you got so far?” Taylor asked, reminding me of a sports bookie from the seventies or the eighties.
Bennet looked through a clipboard, flipping pages over its upper edge. “If we’re willing to wait for it, the best odds are to get Finn stranded with a potential date in a mountain cabin during a blizzard.”