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Below the photo, the specs.
Name: Leah R.
Age: 19
Build: Athletic
Damn straight: I didn’t run three times a week to wind up in theSkinnycategory—the New Modesty Authority had actually made me submit the feed from my fitness app to earn a place inAthletic.
Who I am and what I’m looking for:
I saw that they’d taken the statement from my New Modesty profile, and I winced as I looked over it.
I’m just a small-town girl. You know, the kind who doesn’t mind dressing up but who’s more comfortable in her blue jeans. I did pretty well in high school, but I wanted to start living, and I grew up thinking that began with a stable home.
It could have been written by an AI. I’d actually copied it almost verbatim from the website where I’d found the stories of the girls who claimed to have gamed the system.
I clicked the edit button. The ever-helpful app gave me another pop-up, confirming what I already suspected:Girls like you in the Selecta Arrangements program tend to get the best results when they convey a readiness to please their potential sponsors.
“You don’t know me,” I told the app, sort of hoping someone at Selecta would actually hear my scornful tone.
I typedI’m.
To my surprise, the app responded with yet another pop-up.
You’re eligible for platinum-level sponsorship. I can write a profile for you to review and edit, if you’d like.
Frowning, I tapped yes.
CHAPTER2
Leah
Hi! I’m Leah!the app wrote, each word appearing as if a real person were typing them on a keyboard.I know you’re busy, so I won’t waste your time.
Okay, I supposed that made sense. It seemed like Selecta Arrangements catered to successful men. I had no objections, especially if the successful men liked to buy presents for the girls they dated.
I like puppies and rainbows, obviously. I also read heady sci-fi and watch true crime shows. So, you know: a range of interests.
I tried hard not to be impressed by what the AI had come up with. I found it difficult, though, not to credit it with having managed to reduce my principal interests into three quick sentences.
I’m a small town girl, and I’m so excited to see what LA has to offer. I’m looking for a guy who can show me the best parts of the city, then take me back to my place for some more intimate moments.
“Whoa whoa whoa,” I told whoever might be lurking out in cyberspace, covertly listening to my phone’s mic. My face had gone red.
I had no illusions that the New Modesty didn’t have to do with sex. The websites I had consulted had made it clear that if you wanted to keep the subsidy past the six-month mark, you would almost certainly have to sleep with a guy. I had of course naively assumed that I would meet someone to whom I felt at least mildly attracted, a man with whom I could, you know, get it over with.
I didn’t think of myself as a virgin, because that seemed like a stupid way to talk about a young woman who didn’t care very much about sex and romantic love. At least not the way it looked in the movies. Technically, I guessed, I was indeed a virgin. Worse, I blushed at sex scenes, and fast-forwarded them when I watched TV alone.
Really, I just wanted not to have to worry about it; I supposed that represented an important reason I had signed up for the New Modesty. A program that seemed designed to help me get it over with without thinking about it, even one that told me flat out that I should end up married if everything went according to plan, didn’t seem too bad of a proposition. The problem had come in the form of the losers I had actually met in Harristown.
Everything about Selecta Arrangements seemed to want me to think that the guys I would have the chance to date in LA would make the men of Harristown look like precisely the immature schoolboys I had found at the meet-and-greet. The price of the upgrade, though, seemed to have just reared its head.
More intimate moments.
I didn’t have to have a college degree to understand a good deal more about Selecta Arrangements than I had before, just from those three words, as delicately as the AI had put them. These busy, successful men would expect to be well rewarded for showing a girlwhat LA has to offer, in the only coin a young woman in my position truly possessed.
Well, I supposed, that represented one way to get it over with.
