Your Dimension Or Mine? (3 page)

“These are the sites my friends used. Join them. I will want weekly updates!”

Before Ari could agree or disagree, Jane was out the door.

Chuckling, Cory walked over and looked at the list. “Well-known sites. You might as well do it, Ari. This should keep Jane at bay, plus who knows, maybe you will meet someone.”

Ari smiled to herself. Cory was always sure to use gender-neutral comments when referring to someone she might end up with, unsure of whether she was hetero or homosexual. Except for one crazy night in college, Ari definitely liked guys. But she appreciated her sister’s thoughtfulness anyway.

“Okay, I will give it a try. It’s better than another Jay—WAIT!” Ari rose and ran to the door, opening it and yelling, “Jane! You still owe me for that date!” Jane had promised to reimburse her the $42.49 for that horrible meal with Jay.

“Good luck with that,” Cory chuckled, hugged her sister and left, running swiftly through the raindrops to her car.

Closing the door, Ari went back into the living room and grabbed the cookie jar, taking it back into the kitchen, where she placed it in its spot to the left of the oven. After stuffing the paper in the pocket of her robe, she washed the cups and placed them on the counter to dry. Then, after going back into the living room and curling up in her chair, she pulled out the list.

“Oops.” Looking down she saw her pocket was wet. She must have leaned up against the counter. Now the letters on the paper were wiggly and out of focus. Some she could make out. Matchinone.com. Yes, she had heard of that one. OKdate. Sounded boring, but she could check it out. The third one though was hard to make out. The name was a blue blur, but the description next to it was somewhat legible.
for the… dimension…ability.

Chuckling, she set the piece of paper by her computer and went to bed. There was plenty of time in the morning to set up a few online profiles to placate her crazy sister.

****

The next morning proved to be another rainy one. “Geez! Come on Ma Nature! It’s winter!” Sighing, Ari pulled herself out of bed and went through her normal morning rituals, except she did not go running. Running down by the park was one of her favorite things to do. Just not in the rain. She was lucky she wasn’t sick from walking home the day before, and she was not one to press her luck.

Without the run, her shower, breakfast, and running through the channels only to find nothing was on took a lot less time than normal. That left nothing to do except read or go on the computer. Glancing at the little piece of paper, she thought it would be a good time to get that out of the way and turned on her laptop.

In the time it took her to get a cup of hot cider, her computer was up and running and already notifying her she had new emails. Unsurprising, five were spam, and only one was something she wanted to look at. She ended up surfing through her favorite online shoe store before she remembered the whole online dating thing.

“Oh, right. Okay, let’s see what this whole thing is about.”

It turned out to be a lot more complicated than she expected. Just filling out a profile was a monumental task, and she had to do one for each site? This would take forever. Grumbling through each question, she forced herself through the Matchinone and OKdate profile screens. She uploaded the same photo on both, an image taken the year before when she and two other women from the library went to San Diego for Labor Day weekend. She looked at the photo critically. It wasn’t the best photo she had ever taken, but she was smiling at least.

Ari wasn’t one of those girls who looked down on their looks. She thought she was pretty enough, with her shoulder-length blonde hair and hazel eyes, though she didn’t think that counted for much. She still didn’t attract the right sort of men. After four hours of mind-numbing entries, she elected to do the other site later. She needed food.

The rest of the afternoon, she spent doing the simple things: grocery shopping, a wax job, getting a juice drink at the mall. After she got home and made her dinner, it was only six and with nothing else to do, she went back to the computer to create a profile at the unknown dating site. She considered calling Jane to ask but figured she would look up the description first. It made no sense to her, so she typed it into a search engine.

dating dimension ability

She received over thirty-four million responses of which the first real one was titled
Does Penis Size Really Matter?
“Yes,” she snickered conversationally as she looked through the results trying to find a dating site. Fourth and fifth down were two site listings for eCongruence, which sounded rather cheesy to her. As she went on to the second page of results, something on the right caught her eye.

Interdimensional Dating Service

For the discriminating single

Not for everyone

Interdimensional? Now that sounded like it might fit the bill! And they sounded snooty which Jane would correlate with upscale intellectual. Smiling because she had been able to find the site herself, she clicked the link and waited for it to load. To her surprise, the screen flickered three times before the site popped up. “Well that was weird.” She looked out her front window, wondering if there was a power outage coming. It was not unheard of in her building.

The site was laid out rather simply, so she figured the profile questionnaire would not take as long as the others. Looking through their front page, she was amused at some of the usernames and pictures. The faces did not look quite right, as if they were slightly out of focus, but then the images were so tiny it was hard to see anything. And the usernames? On the other sites, she had seen usernames like
waiting4you
and
NeedUNow
. Here they seemed to want to be funny. One was called
DifferentiallyOrdinary
and another
CoordinationallyBlatant
. Maybe this site was more for people like her.

Humming to herself, she clicked the link that said
SignUp
and came to a regular information page. She filled in her email address, description, photo, as well as a small history about herself, and clicked to the next page. At the top, it read
3 of 12 pages
. “Twelve pages? Ewww.” Well, she was already in, she should probably continue.

Deciding wine would help, she went into the kitchen and poured herself a glass of her favorite red, electing to bring the bottle back in with her, just in case. After taking a sip, she sighed and sat down. “Whoever decided to make a wine that has a hint of chocolate was brilliant.” After taking two more large sips, she went back to the profile. The questions were worded strangely. She wondered if the site was created by someone for whom English was not their first language.

For if you had a choice, what hair on top of head would you like?

“I would prefer there would be hair,” she chuckled aloud.

The question was multiple choice, and the answers were even more odd than the question.

Tough

Wiry

Cotton-ized

Shriveled

Bear

“This has got to be a joke.” There was a microscopic picture next to each word, which gave her an indication of what they were talking about. Tough was short and straight, Wiry was sticking up, Cotton-ized looked like an afro, while Shriveled didn’t make any sense whatsoever. Bear, however, meant bald. “Why didn’t they use bare?” Maybe this wasn’t for the intellectual. Finishing her wine, she poured another glass and, after marking
Tough
, went on to the next question.

What body type you prefer?

Two arm

Four arm

Two leg

Four leg

One head

Two head

A snort escaped her lips at the images. They showed a stick drawing of someone with four arms, four legs, and two heads. Chugging the rest of her wine, she ploughed on.

By the seventh page when enough alcohol infiltrated her system, the questions started to make sense.

Do you handle change well?

Yes,
she marked quickly, unsure if it was the truth but too buzzed to care.

An interdimensional shift can cause mood swings. Would this bother you?

“No.” She snickered as she clicked the button. No doubt the oddness of these questions was due to her drinking. Tomorrow when she woke up, they wouldn’t be nearly as funny.

For over an hour, she answered their questions, laughing constantly. When the screen popped up
Complete,
she was almost disappointed. Feeling tipsy and yawning like crazy, she turned off her computer and went to bed. Maybe tomorrow the weather would be nice enough so she could run off the alcohol. That would work, she thought as she drifted into a sleep filled with men who had multiple arms, legs, and other appendages.

Chapter Three -
Interdimensional Dating Service

Somebody was pounding on her head. Groaning, Ari tried to open her eyes only to find that her eyelids seemed sealed shut. Cautiously, she reached out with her left hand, trailing her fingers across soft cotton sheets. When they reached open air, she stretched further until coming into contact with a smooth surface. Letting her fingers continue, she ran up what she assumed was a leg until she reached the top of what was undoubtedly her side table. The moment her hand made contact with the shot glass Cory bought her the last time she went to Vegas, she knew where she was.

“I’m definitely in my own bed,” she murmured, wincing as each word pounded against her brain. Ouch! Memories came to her, opaque and clouded with some sort of fog. Dating services. Wine…drunk…hangover.

Groaning again, she rolled over and buried her head into her pillow. Why had she drunk so much? She hadn’t done that since the day she received her bachelor’s degree. Now she was glad she had not been able to open her eyes. That was a level of pain she did not want to add to her already overwhelming headache.

Bam! Bam! Bam!

“Ow!” she yelped, accidentally opening her eyes, which made the pain so much worse. “No!” she cried as she closed them again. Why was someone pounding on her door at what must be an unreasonable hour?

The pounding continued until she crawled out of bed and made her way toward it. Using her hands to guide her, she finally found the door. Opening it with a jerk, she spat, “Stop that!”

“You look like hell.” The amusement in her friend Denise’s voice made her growl. “Hungover, huh? Well, stick out your hand. I’ve brought a lifesaver.”

Blindly reaching out, hope sprang up as a warm cup touched her hands, spreading its warmth at the knowledge about what must be inside.

“Back up a step so I can close the door. It’s so sunny, it would probably kill you if you opened your eyes.”

Ari backed up two steps, then brought the cup to her mouth and sipped. “Mmm,” she moaned as the chocolate and espresso passed her lips. “How did you know I would need this?”

Snickering, Denise grabbed her elbow, leading her to her favorite chair. “A little fairy told me. Now sit and rehumanize.”

Sitting back, Ari sipped at the wonderful concoction, aware when the banging let up a little in her head. Cautiously, she blinked her eyes. The room was dark which helped tremendously. Looking around, her eyes fell on a blurry version of her friend, sitting across from her holding a bottle.

“A bit early to be drinking, isn’t it?”

Chuckling, Denise put the bottle down. “Considering this was sitting by your computer, I assume you drink blogged last night?”

Frowning, Ari tried to remember. “I don’t think so. I remember laughing a lot, though, so who knows?”

A small smile came to her lips as she remembered her first few blogging attempts back in college. They were considered dull, boring, blasé, until she got drunk one night after a bad Jane-date. When she was drunk her filter did not exist, and what spewed out was as real as it could get. Her drink-blogging became a campus hit.

“Wait! I remember. I was filling out an online dating profile.”

“And that made you laugh? I tried that once. Made me want to pull my hair out.”

Chuckling as she started to feel human again, Ari nodded. “I got an agreement from Jane that if I joined three online dating sites and kept up with them she would stop dive-bomb dating me.”

“Oh! Do you think she will actually keep to that agreement?”

“I hope so. She has such bad taste.”

They chatted for an hour and by the time Denise left, Ari was able to open the blinds without wincing too badly.

After a long hot shower, she pulled on a pair of jeans and a sweater before turning on her computer. While it started up, she rifled through her fridge and freezer, trying to decide on lunch. She was so intent on her task that when her computer dinged to announce new emails, she jumped.

Laughing at her own nervousness, she closed the fridge, grabbed some crackers, and went back to the living room. Sitting on her desk chair, she put the crackers down and pulled up her email account. It took several seconds for the number of new emails to hit her.

“One hundred and fifty-seven? I’ve never received that many emails total in this account!” Sure, she was being spammed, she opened her inbox.

“Oh.”

Only seven were spam messages, the rest were notifications from the three dating services. Some were notices that she was “liked.” Whatever that meant. Others seemed to advertise guys she might like. Then, there were the messages from men.

Well, she hadn’t gotten a master’s degree in library science for nothing. Setting up new folders and rules, soon the emails were separated and catalogued. Now she could focus on what was important. Her eyes drifted to the trash making her snicker. “If I do that, Jane will find out and set me up with another loser.

“That reminds me.”

Opening up a new message, she quickly sent an email off to her sister.

Jane,

Hope you are having a lovely Sunday. I am looking at 150 messages from three different dating sites. That should cover at least a couple months.

Just as a reminder, you still owe me the money for Jay.

See you Friday!

Ari

Snickering at the disgruntled expression that would most likely appear on her sister’s face when she read it, she looked once again at the messages. Methodically, she went through each one, deleting the uninteresting ones, blocking the losers, and sighing at the tenth time she saw the same opening line. When she got to the last email and hit delete, she was exhausted. Looking at the clock, she could not believe she had just lost four hours.