Chapter 2
Maple
Convergence: Friendships, lifestyle, words of affirmation
Divergence: Texting style, conflict resolution, family plans
At the food truck near Danny’s apartment, he and Maple both order soyrizo tacos, and Danny pays.
Maple says, “That’s really considerate, but you didn’t have to.”
“Yeah.” Danny laughs to seem amenable. “Wait, what?”
“It’s cool if you eat meat,” Maple says. “You don’t have to abstain just because of me.”
“Oh. No, I’m a vegetarian.”
Now Maple laughs. “Wait,” she says. “Oh, actually? Sorry.”
“Do I seem like I wouldn’t be?”
“For sure,” Maple says.
Danny files this away for future inspection. He did not know he exuded carnivorousness. Just something to worry about!
So far, Danny and Maple have only messaged briefly in the app. Danny sent a tepid question asking if she missed Oregon—her profile said she was from Portland—and she responded:
Maple: Hi Danny! Want to just meet Thursday at 7-ish? I don’t think you can tell if someone is a fit until you meet in person, and I’m too busy for small talk (haha). I am friends with Gigi and she says you are a good person. Let me know!
Danny said he also hated small talk. That was a lie.
Why would he want to go on a date with a stranger?
That sounds terrible. What if she believes the world is a simulation?
What if her comfort show is The Big Bang Theory?
What if she asks Danny about his relationship with his mom?
What if their food never comes out and Danny makes a joke that the taco truck is going to give him abandonment issues and she says abandonment can be really serious, actually, so forgive her for not laughing, and then Danny has to say no, don’t worry, my mom left when I was twelve and I haven’t heard from her since?
What then, Maple? Maybe they should have figured this out over text.
They take their buzzers to a free picnic table, and Maple positions her extremely large tote bag on the seat next to her.
“So you work with Gigi’s fiancé?” Maple asks.
“Do you know Julian?”
Maple shakes her head. “But I’m curious about Pathos. I signed up because it’s related to my research.”
“Your research?”
“I’m finishing my PhD.”
Danny asks what she’s studying, but she’s distracted by something in her bag. She frowns and adjusts something. He assumes it’s her phone. He waits for an answer, but then a taxi and a Citi Bike collide in the bus lane. Both men start hurling profanities.
“Oh my god,” Maple says. “I hate this city. You get it.”
“Ha,” Danny says. “Wait, what?”
“I just mean, it’s no Portland. God, don’t you miss the trees? The mountains?”
The mountains? Where the bears are? “Totally,” Danny says.
Maple peers inside her bag again. Danny touches his phone in his pocket but doesn’t pull it out. He finds himself experiencing the date from outside of himself, as if he is narrating it in the future to whomever he is actually meant to be with.
“So, do you believe in soulmates?” Maple asks. She delivers this line clinically; there is no implication she believes Danny is hers.
Danny scratches his neck. “I mean. I’d like to.”
“Interesting.”
“Is that surprising?”
“Deeply,” she says.
A carnivorous, cynical man. Danny plans to throw away this shirt.
“Because of your app,” Maple says. “I’ve read about it. If you can measure your compatibility with anyone, surely you’d see plenty of people are equally compatible.”
“Well, it’s not really permanent compatibility so much as compatibility in a given moment.”
“And love at first sight? What’s your stance?”
“I think it’s a stretch,” Danny says. “Why? What do you think?”
“I believe more in love at first smell.”
“I don’t know that I’m particularly attracted to smells,” Danny says.
“You are. Everyone is. You just might not notice. Shh.”
He blinks.
“Not you.” She gestures to her bag. “I had to bring my prairie voles home from the lab for the long weekend.”
This is exactly the sort of thing one can preestablish during small talk.
“Yeah, no, sure,” Danny says. “I have a family of chipmunks in my backpack.”
“Do you want to meet them?”
This seems to be a rhetorical question. Maple sets the capacious tote on the table.
Danny looks inside and sees a gray plastic crate with two rodents.
While this is probably a health code violation, the prairie voles are essentially semispherical mice with nubbly tails.
There’s just no way around it. They are, like, so cute.
“Some people are weird about rodents,” Maple concedes.
“I’m more weird about bugs myself.”
“Mammalian bias,” Maple says. “Why are you weird about bugs?”
“Scuttly.”
“Prairie voles pair bond for life,” she says. “The soulmate thing—that’s what I’m doing for my PhD.”
“They’re soulmates? The prairie voles?”
“Depends how you define soulmate, but yeah, basically. They give each other all the happy brain chemicals. They’re not going to cheat on each other. No laws or religious doctrine required.”
“Does this mean you believe in soulmates?” Danny asks.
“Not in the, like, ‘our souls are split in two and we wander aimlessly looking for our other half’ way. It’s not predestined. It’s retroactive. I believe in inventing a soulmate.”
“Huh,” Danny says.
Maple sips her beer then sets it down again. “Look, my therapist says it’s really important that I start respecting my attachment style, and I think you’re probably too closed off and avoidant for me.”
“Really,” Danny says. Kyra, his last ex, thought he was anxious and needy. He tries not to take this as a win.
“So I think we won’t be seeing each other moving forward. Best of luck with life, though!”
He is relieved and disappointed when she walks away with her tacos.
Relieved that he will not have to send a “thanks but no thanks” text in three days.
Disappointed that he has been rejected. There is something especially scathing about being rejected by someone you did not want to ask out again in the first place.