“You didn’t!”
“I did. I signed you up.”
“After I told you not to!” Ella smacked her on the arm with the clipboard she was carrying.
“Ow! I’m tell ing the principal!”
“You do that and I’ll tell him you’re impersonating me online for the purposes of dating. I won’t even get detention monitor duty.” Ella sighed. “Why’d you do that?”
“There were some pretty hot guys on that website. I was checking out some of the profiles.”
“Serena, that’s just the bait they use to hook you in. Take my name off the site right now, there’s no way I’m paying for that.”
“You don’t have to pay, it’s a free site. It’s like a social networking site, just dating.”
“With people supposedly from the future.”
“That too. But you’ve already got a bunch of potential matches and some of them have already sent you invitations to chat. There are some pretty hot ones on your list. I’m half tempted to sign up myself.”
“You should have.” Ella shook her head. “And ‘chats’?”
“Yeah, they send you a list of people you would be compatible with and then you can read their profiles. If you think they’re someone you’d like to get to know better, you can request a chat. If they accept, you can instant message each other on the website. And if they’re not interested, you can’t message them again. It’s a good system actually, so you don’t keep getting requests from losers you’re not interested in. I’ve already picked out some of the better prospects for you.”
“You’re too kind.”
Curiosity was working its way into Ella despite her many reservations. “Hot guys, huh?”
Serena nodded with a smile. “Really hot.”
“And they requested to talk to me?”
“Sure did.”
“You didn’t put up someone else’s picture on my profile or claim I’m a celebrity or something?”
“Nope. You’re a school teacher who would enjoy a quiet evening at home with a special someone, and the collected works of William Shakespeare.”
“And the future guys?”
“Actually, none of them seem to be buying into the site’s sci-fistuff, either. They’re just talking about being law professors or enjoying writing poetry. The usual dating website stuff. No one’s talking about fighting the glow-worms from planet Neptune or anything crazy like that.” Serena grinned at her. “Come on. You know you want to at least take a peek at who’s interested.”
They snuck back to Serena’s classroom and fired up her computer.
“The firewall better let me through . . . ah, success!” Serena crowed as she got back to the website and entered Ella’s info on the log-in page. “I set you up a separate email address so all of your Future Date emails go through there. I didn’t figure you wanted to use the school’s address for that.”
“And you figured I wouldn’t find out as fast.”
“That too. Now, I wrote down your log-in information. You know, in case you were interested.” She gave Ella an innocent smile and passed her a slip of paper. “You can access your information either through the links the website sends you in the emails or on the actual site.” She clicked a page labelled “Requests”. “And here are the guys that are interested.” She moved so Ella could sit down and scroll through.
Ella clicked through the requests, each with the picture of a smiling, handsome man next to it. If you clicked on the picture, it brought up each man’s profile page. Ella followed the links. There was a college professor, an artist, a professional athlete, a dentist, a therapist, a car salesman, a banker, a mechanic, a ranch hand, a police officer and a journalist interested in her. They all ranged in age from twenty-five to forty, single and divorced, with hometowns listed all over the country.
“A lot better fish than any usual website, huh?” Serena said, pointing out a few of her favourites. “And your profile’s been up less than a week. Their system’s still computing matches.”
“Why are all of these hot guys single? And wanting to talk to me?” Ella shook her head. “It’s got to be a scam. It’s probably to get money out of desperate women looking for love.”
“So don’t send them money. Just talk to him. Or him.” Serena pointed at two different profiles. “Or him.”
“No, if I’d talk to anyone on this crazy website, it’d be . . .” Ella scrolled over and clicked on one of the profiles. “Him.” It was a picture of a man with close-cropped dark hair and serious blue eyes, with what looked like a park in the background of the photo.
