Total pages in book: 89
Estimated words: 80699 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 403(@200wpm)___ 323(@250wpm)___ 269(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 80699 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 403(@200wpm)___ 323(@250wpm)___ 269(@300wpm)
Everything about Selecta Arrangements seemed to want me to think that the guys I would have the chance to date in LA would make the men of Harristown look like precisely the immature schoolboys I had found at the meet-and-greet. The price of the upgrade, though, seemed to have just reared its head.
More intimate moments.
I didn’t have to have a college degree to understand a good deal more about Selecta Arrangements than I had before, just from those three words, as delicately as the AI had put them. These busy, successful men would expect to be well rewarded for showing a girl what LA has to offer, in the only coin a young woman in my position truly possessed.
Well, I supposed, that represented one way to get it over with.
Submit profile?
I tapped yes.
Great news, Leah! Your profile’s been approved, and potential platinum-level sponsors are already looking at it. You’ll be getting private messages soon, we promise—in the meantime, why not check out the official Selecta Arrangements forums to see what other girls are saying about the program, and what tips they have to offer for making that perfect arrangement?
I tapped that button, too. Official forum, scrubbed of anything negative, obviously, I thought as the message boards came up on my screen. There had to be unofficial forums, too—just like for the New Modesty. Despite myself, I started to feel the tug of curiosity.
Here was another system to game: I had gotten two weeks of free living out of Harristown. Surely LA would treat me at least as well.
“Leah Rundin?” a woman’s voice asked from the doorway. I looked up to see a bus driver who had just entered the lobby. She had already crossed half the distance to me, the only person there, her attention on the luggage that had probably already informed her of my being the passenger she sought.
“That’s me,” I said, putting my phone away and rising to grab my bags.
“I’ll get those for you,” the woman said. “Platinum-level thing. You can go ahead and get on the bus.”
I could get used to this, I thought as I walked out to the bus with the vivid red, whooshy Selecta Lines Deluxe logo on the side. A private jet would have suited me better, I decided, but a luxury bus would make a good start anyway.
As the smooth-riding vehicle made its way from the flatlands of the Midwest up and through the Rockies, I alternated my time between gawking at the scenery from my plush seat and scrolling through page after page of posts from girls in the program I quickly learned to abbreviate SA. I started with the official forums.
Keep it positive, girls!
That post, the top pinned one on the General Discussion forum, had thousands of replies from associate members. It took me a moment to remember that girls like me were only associate members of SA. The real members of the program were the sponsors: the men who paid Selecta for the privilege of messaging the young women whose profiles must, I saw, number similarly in the thousands.
If that thought hadn’t already made my heart sink a little despite the gorgeous mountain scenery, the posts in the Keep it positive, girls! thread would definitely have done the trick.
The original post didn’t do that; it was the replies that gave me pause as to whether I’d just made a terrible decision. The original post, if it were real, came from an associate member whose story alternately scared, fascinated, and encouraged me—and finally, I had to admit, moved me a little bit too.
I don’t want to gloat or anything, a girl called AZHotty had written a little more than a year ago, but I do want to help y’all stay positive even when this SA thing doesn’t seem to be working out. When I first got into the program, I had like four or five dates a week with economy and moderate guys.
Those terms puzzled me: I had to go to the FAQ section of the SA app to learn that sponsors came in ‘flavors’ as the app called them—economic rankings, more like, I quickly realized, depending on how much a guy said he intended to spend on his ‘Selecta Arrangements lifestyle.’ Economy, Moderate, Comfort, and Luxury.
I also learned that as an associate member, if I found a sponsor he would give me a monthly allowance, in line with the financial flavor he had chosen. That made me blush, but at the same time it helped me understand the appeal to both sides of the equation, struggling young woman and wealthy man.
True, according to the standards I had learned, growing up in a more-or-less traditional family, girls shouldn’t even think about taking money on such terms. But how did it differ, really, from the New Modesty—or even from traditional dating, where the guy paid for dinner and expected to get ‘intimacy’ to use the term all the associate members used on the forums?