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crept up my neck when he smiled. I needed to regain control of this conversation before Zac could see how flustered he had made me. I sat up, holding my shoulders back, and aligned my pencil on the tabletop evenly parallel with the edge of my notebook, restoring some small amount of order to the mess Zac had made of our booth. “You wish,” I told him.
     Zac thumped my knuckles with his pen again, smiling as he tapped out the internal beat in his head on my skin. “No one is that disconnected from the rest of society. Everyone needs love and so...” He waved one hand in a big flourish toward our business notebook. “Tada! Everyone needs matchmakers.”
    Tingles reverberated through my hand where he’d tapped. I clasped my other hand on top of it, rubbing hard to make the tingling go away. “Not everyone. I’m not naive enough to confuse scientific fact with these made up ideas of spiritual bonds.”
    “Oh, really?” Zac laughed a bit as he leaned across the table, his face only inches from mine. “And what exactly does science tell you about love?”
    He was so close I could see the golden flecks in his dark brown eyes. A barely visible mole rested under his left eye and light peach fuzz dotted his upper lip. I swallowed and recited the words that years of reading medical books had ingrained into my mind. “Love is a form of pleasure. Pleasure is caused by the release of endorphins. The things we believe make a person attractive are based on pheromones. You respond positively to someone whose pheromones are compatible with your own, making you think you’re falling in love. But it’s all in your head. Literally.”
    Now Zac grinned wide and flicked his pen lightly across my nose. “You’re like a walking medical book. You have it all figured out, don’t you?” His dark eyes stared levelly at me and a small smile curled one corner of his lips, as if he knew what I’d say already and yet still didn’t believe me.
    Not everything. I hadn’t even begun to figure him out.
    “I know enough to keep myself from becoming easily fooled by simple biology.” I stared at him for a long time, silently daring him to argue or try to convince me otherwise. But he didn’t. He stared back, also silent, until the flush creeping up my face made me finally break our gaze.
    I took a sip of my drink to wet my suddenly parched throat, then said, “I still say matchmaking is a scam, but if you think it’s a good idea, then whatever. It’s fine, as long as I get an A.”
    My last hope was that Mr. Freeman would object to it and make us come up with something else.

Chapter 5
     
    “Okay, then,” Hannah Cohen said, banging her gavel on the desk. “It’s settled. The profits from the Spring Yard Sale will benefit the local animal shelter. I’m certain the dogs and cats will be very grateful for the food our money can buy.”
    Molly leaned back from her seat on the other side of Hannah to make a face and bob her head around, imitating the way Hannah spoke during junior class council meetings. I coughed to smother my laugh. Hannah took her job as junior class president way too seriously and always got an ever haughtier attitude than usual during the meetings we had once a month.
    But as vice president, laughing wasn’t exactly the best example to set for the rest of our members. Even if Molly’s imitation was dead on and totally hilarious.
    Hannah glanced at me quickly before tossing her hair back and saying, “Any new business?”
    Natalie Spinelli, a.k.a. Hannah’s sidekick, raised her hand. “I’d like to make a motion to discuss this year’s class king and queen.”
    The feet of Molly’s chair hit the tile floor with a loud thump as she straightened in her seat. “What’s to discuss? The class king and queen is an archaic ritual that should have been abolished twenty years ago. Are we seriously still stuck on popularity contests in this school? Am I mistaken or is this not the twenty-first century?”
    A few