Streetlights glimmer every few yards, popping up between some of the hundreds of palm trees that line our path from Main Quad into town, so that we are constantly in and out of darkness. The breeze blows back my hair and I breathe in the air, which still smells like summer here, even though it’s late fall.

I feel so free. That’s what I really love about college. The freedom of it. And I don’t mean drinking or being allowed to have a boy in my room if I want to. Sure, that would be nice.

But I’m talking about not having to ask anyone when I want to leave the house. Not having anyone telling me it’s time for bed, or that I’m not allowed to have a doughnut at 1:00 a.m. if I want one. It’s a sort of happiness I didn’t know I was missing.

“Do you ever feel guilty?” Robbie breaks the silence. He veers off slightly into the empty road so that he’s riding next to me.

“About what?”

“Perfect10. Like, I’m not sure it’s the best thing for the world, you know, to have people rank each other. And we’re building it.”

“We’re making a dating app,” I say. He’s biking faster now, and although his breathing sounds totally normal, I’m struggling to keep up. “It’s not like we’re running an oil company or, like, killing puppies to make coats.”

He laughs, but not as fully as I hoped he would. It was more polite than anything. “I’m not saying we’re Cruella de Vil. Maybe we aren’t doing something that bad—I’m just not sure we’re doing something good, you know?”

I consider this as we reach an empty intersection and stop at the red light even though no one’s around. I’ve been so busy trying to make the app work properly that I haven’t thought about this sort of moral dilemma for the past few weeks. It felt like we kind of already made our decision when we pitched our project to Professor Thomas.

“Like...” Robbie says as the light turns green. He kicks off the ground and pedals forward. “What if we designed the app not so you end up with the ‘most desired person around,’ but, like, the best person for you? Those are probably different things, right? For different people?”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“So why don’t we help people find that?”

“Well, I feel like the competition is the thing that will keep people on the app, right? That will make them obsessed with it? If they find their soul mate and leave, we lose a customer.”

He laughs heartily this time, from his chest. But I wasn’t joking. “You sound like Braden.”

My stomach twists. That’s the last comparison I want to hear.