LITMIR.BIZ

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      “Hey, that was my glass,” her best friend said once the door was fully open.

      “No, it wasn’t,” Marsie said as she stepped inside and slipped off her shoes. “You’re still wearing lipstick. If this had been your glass, there would be lipstick on the rim.” She set her bag on the console table by Beck’s front door and dug out her laptop. It was a Lenovo laptop, because they came in orange and she liked orange. Maybe she should have a reason for this preference, like that it represented processing power or battery life. But she allowed herself one bit of silliness in her life, and her laptop color was it. Once her laptop was safely tucked under her arm, she took a long sip of the wine, then stopped to take a deep breath and let the alcohol warm her throat on the way down.

      When she looked up, her friend raised an eyebrow and nodded to the glass, which had a near perfect kiss of Beck’s pink lipstick staining the crystal. “You must have a lot on your mind,” Beck said.

      “I do.” Marsie took another drink. She needed the wine more than Beck did. “Do you need help with dinner?”

      Beck laughed softly and shook her head. “No. But you can pour me another glass of wine.”

      “In charge of booze. I can handle that tonight,” Marsie replied, taking another sip before following her friend into the kitchen.

      The kitchen smelled like a dream of garlic and tomatoes and pork as a pot burbled away on the stove. “You make the best food,” she said, sliding onto a bar stool. She minded her responsibilities though, pouring a glass of wine for her friend before adding more to the purloined glass. She was the checklist queen and knew that checklists worked best when you took care of the important stuff first.

      Beck filled up a big pot of water, put it on the stove and turned on the gas. She chuckled when she turned around to grab her wineglass. “You don’t want to wait until after dinner?” she asked, nodding toward Marsie’s open laptop and the printouts of her Excel spreadsheet on the counter.

      “As of five tonight, thirty men have looked at my profile, five have winked at me—whatever that means—and two have said, ‘Hey.’ Action is required.”

      “You could have written something in return.” Beck’s fingers trailed along her granite countertop as she came around the island and looked over Marsie’s shoulder. “You’re smart. You don’t need me every step of the way.”

      “Ha. You weren’t at the bar for the disastrous date I had the last time I tried this all by myself. Clearly, I can’t be trusted.”

      “That’s an n of one,” Beck said, mimicking one of Marsie’s favorite phrases, the thing she said whenever anyone tried to generalize to the entire population based on a small sample size.

      “Yeah, I know. But I don’t want to waste any more time kissing frogs. There has to be a prince for me out there somewhere.”

      “What’s this?” Beck pressed a finger on the printouts and glided the papers across the counter.

      “It’s my rubric,” Marsie replied, not glancing up from her laptop as she signed into her profile. “So I can score profiles and know who to reply to.”

      “Height, possible five points,” Beck read. “Education, possible ten points. Compatibility of television shows, possible two points. Attractiveness of profile picture—I like how you spelled out picture instead of writing ‘pic’—two points. Only two points?”

      Marsie looked up. “I either think the profile picture is attractive, has the possibility to be attractive, or isn’t at all attractive. So three options, zero, one and two.”

      “But isn’t attractiveness at least as important as height, which has five possible points.”

      “Oh—” Marsie waved her hand in the air, then went back to her computer “—the final grade is basically a weighted average. Height and attractiveness of profile picture equal out in the equation, though education stays more important.”

      “Right. How silly of me,” Beck said in that tone of voice she had when she thought Marsie had taken something too seriously.

      “Here.” Marsie turned her computer around with the spreadsheet pulled up. “I put desired traits across the top and names along the side. I was just going to total the scores, which is this cell,” she said, pointing the mouse at the correct spot on the screen. “I was planning on basing all my decisions on that total score, but I’m worried that someone could skew their results by getting full points in all the minor desirables and zero points on the major ones. Like all cute and good taste in television, but not the kind of education I want my life partner to have.”

      Marsie looked up to see if Beck was following her. Beck’s lips were pursed, so she was paying attention, but that was also a sign that she thought Marsie was being ridiculous. Which Marsie ignored. She’d spent a lot of time thinking about what she wanted out of a partner and creating an equation to match. Plus, the math was the interesting part. Filling out the profile, going on the dates...drudgery.

      “I created this equation here,” she said, moving the mouse to another cell, “to give me a better understanding of how someone scores, assuming they are high in the desirables that really matter to me, like education, and low in the desirables that don’t, like where they’ve traveled to in the past. If someone scores 70 or higher in either the total score or 7 or higher in the weighted average, I’ll wink at them or respond to an email. If they score 80 or 8, I’ll message them. Before I’ll agree to a date, their total score through all forms of interaction has to have reached 90 or 9.”

      “Your total scores are either 100 or 10? How’d you make that work?”

      Marsie felt the sheepish look that crossed her face. “I massaged the equations a little. I like the round numbers.” Then she shook off her embarrassment as if it were a light dusting of snow. She’d had fun creating the equations. Sitting at her desk in her favorite chair, her lamp making a spotlight on the pages spread out over the wood, and a cup of tea that had already cooled because she’d been too diverted by the math to stop to drink it. Flow, that feeling of being so involved in something that the rest of the world fell away.

      At the time, she hadn’t cared about how massaging the equation to force the round numbers would affect the validity of her system. It was her system, and she was going to be applying the equations equally to all of the men. Plus, she wasn’t handing her system into a professor to be graded. Beck was the only person who would see it. Sure, Beck made faces at Marsie’s silliness, but that’s what her friend called it: silliness. Like Marsie was just one of the girls.

      When the flow had stopped and Marsie had looked up from her scribbles, what she had wanted was someone to share her equations with.

      More silliness. Because if she’d had someone with whom to share her fun with spreadsheets, she wouldn’t need them in the first place.

      But she’d kept the pages because the man she fell in the love would want to see them. He’d be amused by them, maybe even offer suggestions on how to improve them. Comment on the way she’d labeled the charts. Laugh about how much she liked round numbers. It would be a romantic moment they would share over a bottle of Chianti and spaghetti with a spicy marinara sauce.

      No, maybe a grapefruity sauvignon blanc with fish tacos.

      Beck pointed her glass of wine at the laptop, bringing Marsie back to the task at hand. “So, if you’ve got all this math to figure out who to talk to, why and how, what do you need me for?”

      “The math will help me find the man, but you’re going to help me talk to him. I need help writing emails.” Not that Marsie couldn’t write. She could write persuasive articles full of graphs and charts and numbers, but writing a chatty, easygoing, get-to-know-you email would take her an hour a sentence.

      She didn’t have that kind of time.

      Beck laughed and pulled the computer toward her. “Okay, what’ve we got?”

      “Well,

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