A/N: This is my entry for the ChickLit Millenial Cupid contest, which was such a fun prompt! The word count is 989.

----------

No matter how many times I entered the sixth-form common room to find several dozen teenagers glued to their phones, the sight never failed to awe me.

Under normal circumstances, it would have been a pretty normal occurrence – I mean, I spent just as much time during my free periods procrastinating on social media as the next person.

But the app currently taking the school by storm was a brand-new matchmaking app.

And I was the coder behind it.

Peeking around the room from behind the sanctuary of my laptop, I imagined the reaction were people ever to discover that Violet May was the creator of their beloved MatchBot. Thinking of it made me want to puke; the very nature of MatchBot's spunky personality was the polar opposite of my painfully shy true self.

The idea had come about after hearing one-too-many disastrous Tinder date stories. To me, the idea of simply "swiping right" to determine a potential match was ridiculous, and unlikely to ever produce something serious.

Enter: MatchBot, your personal matchmaking AI. My firm belief was that people were more likely to be honest about their romantic preferences when actually speaking them out loud, rather than typing them into a box as with most dating sites. With MatchBot, you chatted to a customisable AI about what you'd like in a partner – which MatchBot's machine learning algorithm then used to match you with another compatible user.

It was my greatest coding achievement – far more hours had gone into it than my Computing coursework – but I'd not quite anticipated the level of hype it would generate when I'd released it last week. I had chickened out of revealing I was the creator, figuring I'd wait until I could gauge the app's success.

From the tell-tale pings of several phones alerting their owners of a new match, it was safe to say the app was a hit – but the more time that passed, the more I enjoyed the anonymity. The quiet pride as I watched a roomful of people using and loving my creation was more than enough for me. Being cowardly had absolutely nothing to do with it.

"Remind me why I decided to take Chemistry again?"

Without so much as a word of greeting, my best friend flopped down in the empty chair beside me, his rucksack hitting the table with an audible thud.

I shut my laptop – Theo also took Computing, and therefore was one of the only people in the room for whom the MatchBot code I'd been working on would actually be decipherable.

"Because you refused to listen to your best friend, who warned you how much it would suck," I quipped.

"Touché."

Theo rummaged in his bag, producing a number of terrifying-looking worksheets about molecular structure. My terror must have been visible, though, because next minute they were being stuffed back into the murky depths of the rucksack, to be lost amongst the random pens, half-eaten packets of custard creams and whatever other horrors lurked in there.

"You're right," said Theo, "I think the double period of Chemistry was enough torture for one day. Want to work on our Computing coursework instead?"

It was a mistake, okay? A momentary lapse of concentration and sanity. It was the sort of thing that could have happened to anyone – and definitely the sort of thing to happen to me whenever I was in Theo's vicinity.

Basically, what happened is this: I opened the laptop screen.

The screen could have only been visible for about two seconds – but that was enough. With a sharp intake of breath, Theo leant eagerly in, eyes roving the neat lines of Java spanning the page.

There was an excruciating silence as Theo read. Hopes of being able to explain it away vanished as I chanced a look at the code I'd been working on, where several references to the object MatchBot appeared. I found myself cursing our Computing teacher and his repeated lectures on coding etiquette: Make sure everything is laid out clearly, so that another programmer can understand what your code is doing. A great idea, in theory; not so much when it led to the divulgence of your deepest secret.

"It's you," murmured Theo, eyes never leaving my laptop screen. "All those times we've speculated about the creator of MatchBot – and it's you!"

"I'm so sorry for not telling you. I just..."

But Theo's frame had suddenly grown rigid – and as I followed his gaze, I realised why.

And pretty much wanted to die there and then.

It was a bug. A deliberate bug, put there by me, even as I knew I had no right to play Cupid. That was the AI's job, after all – but when personal feelings came into play, following the rules didn't seem so important.

"What is this?"

Theo's voice was quiet, yet it pierced me to my very soul. Drinking in his dumbstruck expression, a fresh wave of guilt washed over me as I realised what a dick move it had been.

"It's a bug," I whispered. "I put in a bug – so that you wouldn't get matched."

Say something! I screamed internally, searching his unreadable expression with anguish.

"Why?"

That one word gave nothing away; offering no inclination of how he felt. My guess was furious – but regardless, I knew I owed him the truth.

"I didn't like the thought of you being matched with someone else," I said, heat blazing in my cheeks. "And I realised it was because – because I wanted to be your match."

"Oh. Well, you didn't really need to worry about that."

"Huh?"

Theo grinned crookedly.

"Violet, I don't need any kind of Cupid – virtual, mythical, or otherwise – to find my match for me. As far as I'm concerned, I've already found her – and she's sitting right in front of me."