Free Playing With Matches by Suri Rosen

searching for his Leah Resnick. I may have blown it with Ben, but I now had a second chance.
    I scrolled through the messages and counted thirty-three people. I set up a table in Word with separate columns for men (nineteen), women (fourteen), age, and preferences.
    I wasn’t quite sure of what to do next. There were ten men in their mid to late twenties. Excellent. I carefully examined their letters. Were they financially stable? Polished? Good-looking? Normal?
    I considered establishing a Nerd Index for the really challenging cases from a scale of one to five. A one would go to a person who appeared normal and had only slightly annoying habits like inappropriate laughter. A five would apply to someone with mastery of Klingon or an addiction to the Weather Channel.
    I studied the emails of the ten men but without CliffsNotes to interpret what they were really saying, I wasn’t certain what kind of people they were. If someone describes himself as good-looking, is that less reliable than “others say that I’m good-looking”? It seemed that more of the men were concerned with physical appearances than women. Was that a coincidence?
    Aaron was a math person, so he and Leah had the sciencey thing in common. She’d done her first undergraduate degree in chemistry, thinking she’d become a pharmacist, but decided that she preferred working directly with patients. Daniel was quirky, but he sounded solid. There really wasn’t an ideal mate for Leah. She was fragile now. One bad date and she’d be more discouraged. Can you really take two less ideally matched people and make it work? Maybe Tamara and Jeremy really were just a lucky accident. Most people present themselves as perfect, although my clients, for whatever reasons, trusted me with their flaws.
    That’s when I got the idea.
    I’d do a practice match! Try to assist some of the souls who were begging for my help. And then I’d really know what I was doing. Two names jumped out at me, Ilana and George Clooney. He was a real catch. At thirty-two, she was slightly older than his preferred age range, but I didn’t think it was that important. She was cute and he was good-looking. She was close with her grandfather and was a giving person.
    I clicked onto George’s email again and it definitely looked like a match. My mom always said that some people had the knack for making a match, and it looked like I might possibly be one of those people after all.
    “What are you doing?” a voice said behind my shoulder.
    I spun around in my chair. Leah stood behind me in a grey sweat top and a long slinky skirt that hugged her slender frame.
    “I, I, I’m working on a paper.” My heart pounded as I maniacally tapped the sign-out button on the Matchmaven account. “I thought you were at work at the hospice.”
    “I changed shifts,” she said. “Can I get the computer for a second? I need the printer.”
    “Sure.” I nodded. “Let me just exit.”
    The email account finally closed, bringing up MazelTovNation. I glanced at the most recent announcements.
    Jeremy Koenig and Tamara Greenberg were engaged!
    “Yes!” I said as I punched the air.
    It was too late. Leah’s face fell. “I didn’t know you were so close to Jeremy.” My mouth gaped open. Think fast!
    “He just seems. I don’t know. Um, lonely?”
    Leah stared down at her hands.
    “He’s so nerdy, you know what I mean?” I babbled. “Like who was going to want to marry him? It seemed so hopeless.”
    “Then there really isn’t much hope for the rest of us,” she said in a quiet voice.
    “But Leah you’re so awesome —”
    “Rain, don’t.”
    I swallowed as I exited MazelTovNation and the Word document with the list of names popped up.
    No time to save it anywhere. My heart pounded as I closed the document with all the work that went into it. If only I could have closed down all the mistakes that had brought me here.
    Do you want to save the changes? it asked.
    No, not really.
    Not at