Page 14 of The Build-a-Boyfriend Project

“Francine said nice things! And he’s told her that he wants to date, explore the city. He just doesn’t know how.”

“I’ve never even met Francine. How can I trust their opinion in men?”

“You could trust mine?” Patricia says to him.

Eli stares at his friend, gnawing softly on his bottom lip.

This isn’t what he wants. He’s spent the last few months coming to terms with his love life being over, the idea of finding someone new an impossible task that has kept him up until three in the morning, staring at his ceiling in a rolling fit of anxiety. Unless by some miracle Keith wanted to take him back.

And he thinks for a moment, considering all the possibilities. He hadn’t expected to fall in love at that party; how could he have? But deep down he knows that Patricia and Rose are right, no matter how badly he doesn’t want to admit it. If his job isn’t going anywhere, why shouldn’t his love life? At least this he can control. At least he can try.

He just wants to love French toast again.

“It’s just one date, and you don’t even have to like the guy,” Patricia tells him. “I just think it’ll be good for you to—”

“I’ll do it,” Eli says.

Maybe it’s the brownies talking, maybe it’s the hurt in his heart. More likely, it’s some weird chemical imbalance of both. But he weighs his options carefully. Even if he doesn’t like this Peter guy, he tried, and Patricia and Rose can’t lecture him about getting back out there. And if he does like him . . . maybe he’ll have made a friend?

Patricia seems surprised at the complete one-eighty. Eli doesn’t tell her that he is as well. “You . . . you will?”

Eli nods. “Set it up. Send me his number.”

“Oh . . . okay!” She smiles. “Okay, yeah. Let’s do it.”

It’s a bit anticlimactic; Patricia can’t exactly text Francine at ten o’clock at night to get a guy’s number. Leaving him with nothing to do except devour the milkshake that Rose brings back. Eventually, a movie is decided on, Rose and Patricia relaxing their “No Muppets” house rule because of Eli’s heartbreak. Not that it matters since Rose has to leave for the bathroom halfway in because she’s never properly taken care of her lactose intolerance.

The night goes on, and Patricia and Rose both eventually fall asleep on the couch, draped over each other while Eli stretches out on the ottoman, laughing to himself as the TV auto-plays The Great Muppet Caper after the original movie finishes.

He sees his phone out of the corner of his eye, the mustard-yellow case nearly glowing in the darkness of the apartment. He picks it up, opening Instagram again and going to Keith’s profile. He ignores the urge to watch Keith’s stories, knowing that his name would appear right at the top of Keith’s viewers. And there’s no way he would give Keith the satisfaction.

He scrolls past the rows of photos to just before they ended things, and even further than that. There are no photos of Eli; Keith always promised it was because of networking, which means nothing ever stopped him from tagging Michael, or their coworkers, or the celebrities that Keith got to meet.

It’s almost like Eli never existed.

He wants to imagine that Keith’s smile was brighter in the photos from last year, two years ago, back during his final year of college. He wants to claim that gleam in Keith’s eye for himself. But there’s truly no way of knowing.

Eli deletes Keith’s username from the search bar and sets his phone down, turning his attention back to the movie. He’s spent the last seven months convinced that romance isn’t for him, that he doesn’t want to date if it isn’t to win Keith back, even if he doesn’t believe in romance anymore, even if he thinks that his love life is done, that he lost the chance with the man he thought was the one.

At the very least, maybe he can get a free meal out of it.

Chapter Three

How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, dir. by Donald Petrie

Even after wrestling with his hair for an hour, Eli still isn’t happy with the results.

Maybe it’s a sign that this night is over before it even begins. How can a date possibly go right if he can’t even get his hair to cooperate?

“You’re making excuses.” He can hear his mother’s voice in his head. Well, it’s more a twisted combination of his mother, Patricia, Rose, and a little bit of Keith thrown in there for good measure. As if he couldn’t feel worse about himself.

And it annoys him to no end knowing that they’re all right.

He’s trying to achieve that perfect balance of looking both messy and neat all at once. Patricia calls it his Timothée Chal-ification. The curls had been one of the more unexpected changes from the testosterone; his once-wavy hair began to grow in tighter curls that he actually had to take care of and maintain if he wanted them to stay healthy. He’d listened to Patricia talk for hours about her own hair care, wrapping it at night, watching every video she sent his way about the proper shampoos, conditioners, masks, silk pillowcases.

“Dammit . . .” he whispers to himself as his hair continues to fall flat across his forehead.

He doesn’t have time for this. The day has been stressful enough already, fielding Michael’s potential cronyism hire and sitting in to conduct the interview for the job Eli had been promised. There’d been a moment halfway through when he considered sabotaging the entire thing, but he knew that wouldn’t get him anywhere he wanted to be.