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Synopsis

Mira is a trust fund baby playing at making it on her own as a Brooklyn barista. When Benji, her tech startup boyfriend, dumps her out of the blue, she decides a little revenge vandalism is in order. Mira updates his entry on Verity, Benji's Wikipedia-style news aggregator, to say the two have become engaged. Hours later, he shows up at her place with an engagement ring. Chalk it up to coincidence, right?

Soon after, Benji's long-vanished co-founder Chandra shows up asking for Mira's help. She claims Verity can nudge unlikely events into really happening -- even change someone's mind. And Chandra insists that Verity -- and Mira's newly minted fiance -- can't be trusted.

Excerpt

Chapter 1

In the case of a sudden dumping, there are certain expectations about how to proceed.

Stick your spoon in a gallon of cookie dough ice cream. Bring on the chick-flicks and sob sessions with your besties. Cut up all the printed pics of the two of you together so you can burn a stack of his smirking faces in the flame of a candle. One of the candles he bought you. The ones scented like eucalyptus-mint, that he thought was so hot, and it gave you a sinus headache but you never complained because you loved him so much, and now you're sitting there with a headache and singed fingers and it isn't actually making anything better so you wonder why... why...

--Hang on, where was I?

Right, getting dumped. We'd actually been having a great night up until that part. We were cuddled up at my place watching a documentary on Tibetan architecture and eating Chinese take-out, right? I leaned in to nuzzle Benji's ear while the narrator droned on and on about murals and prayer wheels.

And then boom, like a switch had been flipped, he sat up straight as a wooden soldier and inched away from me. "This isn't working," he said.

I uncurled myself, frowning. "Oh, sorry, am I squishing you? Let me get--"

He wiped my offer away with a curt motion. "No, I mean us. We're not working."

I scrunched my nose up. "Not working? Like..."

"Like it's over, Mira. We are over."

"Wait, are you breaking up with me? Seriously?"

That's when Benji's face went all soft and compassionate, like there was any way he could be kind at this point short of taking it back. He leaned forward again and put his arm around me. "I'm getting so busy with the company lately... you know it's been bad, and it's going to get worse. I don't have time for a life. No time for you. And it's... not fair to you. You deserve better than this."

"I deserve--what? What are you talking about?" Prayer flags fluttered on TV, red and green and blue. My brain struggled to catch up with my ears. "Wait, who are you to decide what's fair for--"

"Listen, I know this is sudden, but--"

His stupid jerkface sympathy was too much to bear. "Get. Out." I said, quietly. Then, with a little more volume, "Get the HELL out of here."

He did. The door shut behind him a little louder than it needed to, leaving me with nothing to mark his passing but a table full of half-empty noodle cartons and soda bottles. I grabbed a bottle and hurled it at the closed door, imagining it smacking him right between the shoulder blades and shoving him onto his face in the hall. Instead, the cap came off mid-flight, the soda spattering in a wide arc across the room.

What a mess.

I was furious, but I didn't really know what to do with all of that righteous indignation. I turned off the documentary and stared at the blank television for a while. That didn't help much. But that's what those tried-and-true breakup rituals are for, right?

I grabbed my phone and dialed up Eli, my absolute bestest friend since grade school, but it went straight to voicemail. I shouldn't have been surprised; I could hardly reach him at all any more, much less enlist him for a little late-night shoulder sobbing. I texted him anyway, but without much hope.

Time to seek out the carbolicious comfort at the bottom of a pint of chocolate chip cookie dough swirl, then. I swung open my freezer. It held a sack of crushed ice, long melted into a single impenetrable lump; a sad scattering of kernels of corn; three nearly empty boxes of freezer-burned waffles; and, yes, a half-gallon of vanilla. When I pulled off the lid, though, there was nothing but half an inch of ice crystals at the bottom. Grrr.

I threw on a hoodie and trudged to the bodega, which as it turns out had closed eight minutes earlier. So I returned home empty-handed, muttering unflattering things about Benji and his timing, and grabbed a beer from the fridge instead. One of Benji's weird microbrew faves -- not even one I liked much -- but no helping it.

Next attempt: cinematic catharsis. I curled up on my sofa with a fleece blanket and tried to find something I wanted to watch. About four minutes into a classic Julia Roberts vehicle, I was seething with so much hot rage that I could've given the volcano of your choice a run for its money.

Action, then. Maybe a little symbolic destruction would help me feel better. It didn't take long to burn through all of my printed photos, all two of them, so I went to my phone and then laptop to get rid of the digitals, too, and absolutely purge every electron of the jerk from my life for good. When I was done, I just sat there, full of all this anger and no outlet for it.

That's how I wound up online reading Verity at one in the morning. Verity was Benji's company. If you asked him about it he'd start to lecture about crowdsourcing knowledge and breaking news and blah blah blah blabbity blah blah. Over time, I worked out that it was an online reference source crossed with a newspaper, something a little like Wikipedia, but bigger and deeper and scarier -- breaking news as it happened, information on ordinary people, real Big Brother stuff.

So what else was I going to do? I looked up Benji's page on Verity. There was a section on what a geek-society high-profile playboy he was, updated to say that he was newly single.

Huh, I thought. That was sure fast.

But let's back up and start at the beginning. His real name was Benjamin, natch. I started calling him Benji when we first met because of his big soft puppy-dog eyes. When I said it out loud he always gave me a funny half-smile like he couldn't decide if I was making fun of him or being cute, so he couldn't decide if he should be mad or mushy over it. He was a... actually, to start with, I had no idea what he was. His daily work seemed to involve flying to a lot of conferences and getting hundreds of comments on his blog, plus he spent a lot of time meeting people over coffee.

That's how I came into the picture. I'm a barista at Joes' Buzz, the best tiki-themed coffee shop in all of Brooklyn. Before Benji and I ever hooked up, he liked to come to my shop and pretend to work on his laptop when he was really just dicking around with the latest browser game. Once in a while he'd bring people in to schmooze over lattes and snickerdoodles.

And then one day the Goth-pale woman he was with -- someone at his company, I thought -- spilled her double-nonfat-sugar-free-pistachio-half-caf-no-foam-no-whip all over his white button-down. "Jesus!" he said, and stood there dripping helplessly. Would you believe she just stood looking at him with her mouth open? Didn't even hand him a napkin!

"At least it didn't fry your electronics," I said. "Come on into the back, I'll help you out." I happened to have a spare shirt in my bag, so I pulled him into the break room and let him change. Not that I'm such a big altruist or anything. I'd been planning to hit the gym later, and to be honest, giving him my baggy old tee was the perfect excuse to skip it. I couldn't let an opportunity like that go to waste.

He thanked me, and I think really looked at me for the first time. When you work in the service sector, a certain kind of person tends to look right through you, like you're some kind of tree or something. Apparently he liked what he saw, because the next thing I knew he said, "Hey, when's your shift over? I'll bring your shirt back and buy you a drink."

"Coffee?" I tried not to roll my eyes. It probably didn't work.

"Nah," he said. "How do you feel about sangria?"

What can I say? He was cute, and it's not like I had anything cooking on the back burner. I smiled and flipped my hair over my shoulder as I went back to my station. "Come back at nine." The rest, as they say, is history.

It didn't last six months.

So fast-forward, and there I am, freshly dumped, staring at this stupid web page telling me Benji was single again. And I just wasn't ready for the world to know yet. I wasn't even ready to know it yet myself. I held a swallow of beer in my mouth, letting the bubbles sting my tongue. I thought about me and Benji, and I won't kid, I started feeling pretty sorry for myself. I deserved better.

Hell, he'd said it himself, not two hours gone by. Like I wasn't competent to judge that on my own. Jerk.

The tiny blue edit button glowed in the corner of the screen, tempting me to hijack his bio. Ben had left himself logged into Verity on my computer at some point, I guess one of the times he'd forgotten his bag and had a work emergency to deal with. I could tell because he'd customized his "Submit" button to say "Make It So." Dork. But I was darkly amused when I realized it would look like he'd made the change himself, if anybody ever happened to check. I jabbed the button and made a teeny-tiny little alteration: "He is deeply in love with his new fiancée, Mira Newton."

Before I hit the button, I stared at the preview for a while. I didn't know why I'd written it. It wasn't true, of course. It had never been true, and it didn't look so likely going forward, either. But for a bit, seeing it written there in black on white made it seem possible, in a way it never had been before.

Me and Benji, we never had the marrying kind of relationship. We didn't even have a tell-your-parents kind of relationship. But the words glowing there started to fill my head up with tulle and white roses and violins playing Pachelbel's Canon in D and all the other sappy wedding crap I'd always told myself I was far too cynical to care about.

I hit "Make It So."

My laptop made a satisfying click when I snapped it shut. The afterimage of the words lingered on my retinas, then they were gone, just like Benji. I took one last swig from that beer, which had grown both warm and flat, and went to bed, hoping things would look better in the morning.

When I woke up, though, it definitely wasn't morning yet. I heard a rustling from my living room. My heart stomped around in my chest like it thought it might find someplace better to go. Burglar, I thought, or maybe rats. There in the dark, for just a minute, I second-guessed my decision not to live at the place my parents kept on Fifth. Principles be damned.

I fumbled for my phone with fingers made fat by adrenaline and dialed 911, worrying the whole time about the light from the screen leaking through the door. I kept my finger hovering over the send icon and put one ginger foot in front of the other to peek out and see what I could see.

The living room was aglow with candlelight. Not so much a burglar's M.O.

The hinges on my bedroom door squealed their way open. The candles lit up a mosaic of rose petals trailing off toward the living room and ending in a puddle on my coffee table. There was a little velvet box with a diamond-and-sapphire ring, poised in the middle of this mess of floral confetti. As I stared at this tableau in muzzy incomprehension, Benji stepped out of the kitchen. He held a mismatched pair of coffee mugs and a bottle of champagne. "I'm sorry," he said. "Marry me?"

My guts were still a roiling disaster of anxiety and rejection and anger. My mind tried to formulate the biggest telling-off I had ever performed in all my life. But while my brain was blankly trying to find a few words to fit together, my mouth sprang right into action. "Yes," it said.

So that's how me and Benji the Internet Star got engaged.

Copyright © 2015 by Andrea Phillips

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