It started like it always does. Girl meets boy, girl watches boy for weeks, girl maps out forty-seven possible conversation starters including a list of boy’s preferred hobbies and salutations in eight different languages.
“Hola!” Mallory finally said. She did not speak Spanish. “Huh?” Todd replied.
Mallory stared in silence. Did he just not hear her, or was it possible that a full-grown human adult had never heard the word “hola” before? Todd was not a smart man, this everyone knew. But it wasn’t his brain that Mallory was interested in. It was his symmetrical face shapes, which made her tummy feel swirly, and his hair, which smelled of a manly man’s shampoo, like “Graphite” or “Barbell.”
It was around this time that Todd noticed she hadn’t responded in almost three full minutes. “Are you having a stroke?” he asked.
Mallory’s body began to reject the conversation entirely. It was as if all of her sweat glands had emptied their proverbial bowels and had drenched her in some sort of perspiratory sewage. The thought of this only made her sweat more.
“No, are you having a stroke?” she countered, losing it. “I don’t think so,” Todd replied.
“Great, then both of our brains’ blood supplies are functioning properly,” she said, regrettably.
“Okay.”
“Okay.”
Mallory saluted him for some reason and then marched back to her cubicle to vomit. She had been training for this moment for months, and now it was all over. She thought she might as well delete all nine dating apps off of her phone and start writing in “no” when forms asked her to list her sex. She was 26, after all. It was almost time to start digging an unmarked grave next to her grandma’s. But as she sat on the bouncy blue ball she used instead of a desk chair, she remembered that there was always another option.
Before she could second guess herself, Mallory was standing outside of a nondescript metal door stuck between a magazine stand and a beauty parlor. A small sign above the peephole read, “Serendipity, Inc.”
Mallory knocked in a practiced pattern. Short, long, short short. Long, long, long. Short, short, short, long. Short. A surly man dressed in a striped vest and a boater hat answered the door holding a harmonica. He blew one note into the harmonica, looked both ways to make sure the coast was clear, and then yanked Mallory across the threshold.
Inside, the offices of Serendipity, Inc. were bustling. Employees in various occupational get-ups bobbed and weaved through a bullpen: stock traders, bodega owners, Subway sandwich artists, theater ushers, cops, lady cops. Rotary landlines rang off the hook from every desk. A woman dressed as a Starbucks barista was berating a man dressed as a ham salesman, aggressively telling him that “ham salesman” was not a believable choice of profession.
Meanwhile, a young woman was sitting alone in the corner, sobbing uncontrollably. It wasn’t even noon.
After a brief wait, Mallory sat down with Rose, the Matchmaker assigned to her case, a frizzy woman with a voice that made Mallory’s throat itchy. Rose pulled out a month-to-month contract, which Mallory found to be convenient and accommodating if not a tad pessimistic.
“Phase One is research week,” Rose stated, rote. “We’ll watch Todd and look for any windows of opportunity or weaknesses in his routine.”
“Weaknesses?” Mallory asked.
But Rose didn’t respond. “You should receive your first meet cute with Todd in approximately seven to ten business days.” With that, she hammered a large rubber stamp of a heart across the middle of Mallory’s contract. “Prepare to be linked by Serendipity, Inc.” she said. She then added, “Marketing would like me to ask you how you feel about that slogan on a scale from one to ten.”
Seven days later, Serendipity had all the intel it needed from Todd. How he liked his whiskey, how his relationship with his mother was, and where he went rock climbing: on the rocks, also on the rocks, and just in a climbing gym, actually.
Then began Phase Two. They attempted all the tried-and-true hits. Mix up Todd and Mallory’s mochas at his neighborhood coffee spot. Tell all the cabs in Meatpacking to ignore Todd until he’s forced to carpool with Mallory. Pickpocket Todd at the corner market and plant Mallory behind him at the checkout, patiently waiting to offer to cover his Glacier Freeze Gatorades. Nothing stuck.
Mallory had to sign a waiver stating that the situation wasn’t in her hands anymore. It was in the hands of Fate and Destiny and Chance, the actor dressed as a construction worker. Chance created a maze of orange traffic cones to send Todd’s jogging route on a detour right past Mallory’s apartment. He even hired a trained Shih Tzu for Mallory to walk in a ten-foot radius around her apartment until he passed by. Around sunset, Todd finally appeared.
“Todd, is that you? It’s Mallory!” she yelled. “From work!” she added.
Fear flashed across Todd’s symmetrical eyes. He pretended to be on a work call. “Those stocks sound all business to me,” he said.
“What’re the odds?” Mallory pressed. “In a place like New York? It’s almost like the city keeps bringing us together!”
“Are you stalking me?” Todd said, forgetting about his pretend call.
“Of course not!” Mallory said, laughing too loudly. She was sweating again. “Then what is this?” Todd asked.
“Serendipity!” Mallory beamed.
Todd put his AirPods back into his perfectly round ear holes, hopped over a traffic cone, and jogged away, glancing back over his shoulder every few seconds.
Nobody told Mallory Phase Two would be easy. Rose insisted that this kind of resistance was not unusual. As Rose took a long, dramatic drag from a long, dramatic cigarette, Mallory wondered if she had always been wearing an eyepatch.
“There’s always Phase Three,” Rose said. “Phase Three?” Mallory asked.
Rose leaned forward and told Mallory about the time they got a woman named Chloe fired from her job at an antiques store after orchestrating an elaborate trip and fall into a client, shattering his grandfather’s urn.
“I’m so, so, sorry,” Chloe sobbed, as she dusted ashes off of her dress. “I’m never clumsy. It’s why I got into antiquing in the first place!”
But the job was done. They were engaged the following week.
Before that, they burned a man named Harrison’s house to the ground. He had refused to return a client’s calls, so the arsonists planted a burner and the client’s phone number in his pocket. Without fail, he called her up.
“Could I come over, just until I can sort out my insurance options?” Harrison said. “I know it’s a lot to ask, but I don’t have anyone else’s number.”
They’ve been together for six years and counting.
“Nicole was a real project,” Rose said. They chloroformed her and dropped her off in an undisclosed location. But after a day’s hike back into civilization, Nicole stumbled upon a roadside gas station.
“Water. Please. I need water,” Nicole muttered. “Phil? Is that you?” It was. The rest was history.
Mallory smiled and pulled out her debit card.
A week later, Todd was riding his bike home from leg day. Two blocks from his apartment, one of Serendipity’s hired cabs sped around the corner and connected, sending Todd flying across two lanes of traffic. The driver, a senior employee named Manny, barrel-rolled out of the smoking taxi and sprinted to a safe house, exactly as he’s trained to do.
That was Mallory’s cue. Her pits were drenched.
“Todd? Todd! I saw the whole thing! Thank god I was nearby!”
She ran up to Todd, he and his bike now crumpled on the pavement. He was supposed to have minor injuries, but what he had could only be described as major.
“Todd?” Mallory said, horrified.
“Mallory?” Todd whispered calmly. Except it was more like a scream, and it wasn’t calm at all. “Get the hell away from me! Call an ambulance!”
“Well, which is it, Todd?” Mallory said. “Because 9-1-1 would probably want me nearby in case you need mouth-to-mouth or whatever.”
“Help… me…”
Those were Todd’s last words before he fell into the coma. Mallory debated hanging around the hospital to be the first person he laid eyes on when he woke up, but that felt like a little much. His facial symmetry was all jacked up now, and the whole thing was starting to make her tummy feel swirly in a bad way. She broke her contract with Rose later that evening and hasn’t been back to Serendipity since.
Last week, Mallory started dating a man named Greg. She likes him because he asked for her number even though she snapped her heel and fell into an open manhole right in front of him like a total klutz.
“It’s just nice to be in a relationship that’s actually real again.”
