True Love and Other Impossible Odds

by Christina Li

Genres: Young Adult

Synopsis

Inventing a formula to predict people’s perfect partners doesn’t equate to love in this contemporary YA novel that New York Times bestsellers Rachael Lippincott and Alyson Derrick call “honest, raw, and breathtakingly real.”

College freshman Grace Tang never meant to rewrite the rules of love. She came to college to move on from a grief-stricken senior year and to start anew. So she follows a predictable routine: Attend class, study, go home and visit her dad every weekend. She doesn’t leave any room in her life for outliers or anomalies.

Then, Grace comes up with an algorithm for her statistics class to pair students with their perfect romantic partners. Though some people are skeptical, like Julia, Grace’s prickly coworker, Grace is confident that her program will take all the drama out of relationships. That’s why she keeps trying to make things work with her match, a guy named Jamie. But as the semester goes on and she grows closer to Julia, Grace starts to question who she’s really attracted to.

In award-winning author Christina Li’s YA debut, Grace will have to make a choice between the tidy equations she knows will protect her from heartbreak or the possibility that true love doesn’t follow any formula.

 

Release date: May 14, 2024

Publisher: Quill Tree Books

Print pages: 397

Sample

One

“You’re supposed to just take personality quizzes,” my roommate Ava says from across the room. “Not take them apart from the inside out.”

I look up from where I’m sitting on my bed, tucked under a blanket. The uQuiz link that Ava sent in our roommate group chat is pulled up on my computer. “How does picking your favorite color tell you what city you’re supposed to live in?”

“It just works,” Ava says. She’s sprawled on the blue beanbag that takes up half our college dorm room. “You don’t question it. You trust the process. I took the quiz and it told me I was going to be living in New York. It pretty much manifested my future.”

“Oh, wait!” my roommate Ruhi says from her desk, looking up from annotating her reading. “That’s what I got, too.”

“Really? It’s decided,” Ava says, in a bright voice. “We’ll be living in New York after college. I’ll be a Broadway actress working three odd jobs on the side, and you’ll be a high-powered journalist working for the New York Times.”

Ruhi laughs. “Ava, we don’t even know what we’re eating for dinner tonight.”

“Mark it on that color-coded calendar of yours,” Ava says. “We’ll make it happen.”

Ruhi glances over. “Please tell us you’re joining us in New York.”

I click through to the quiz. “Ah. Nope. This gave me Seattle.”

“Aw,” Ava says. “The quiz separated us. I no longer believe in it.”

“But how does it decide?” I click back to look at my options. “It literally asked for my favorite color and Hozier quote. I mean, is there an algorithm? How are the questions weighted?” I scroll up. “Or this one. ‘Tell us your breakfast order and we’ll pair you up with your ideal Disney prince soul mate.’”

Ava emerges from the beanbag. “I have to take this.” She reaches for her computer and searches for the quiz. I lean over and watch her click through the options. Eggs Benedict. Orange juice.

“Oooh, Flynn Rider,” Ava says. “I’ll take it. Anything’s better than my current prospects.”

Ruhi closes her textbook. “The apps not doing it for you?”

“Ugh,” Ava says,

sinking back into the beanbag. “Don’t remind me of the cursed Leighton dating scene.”

I look up. “You went on a date?”

“Did I.” She shrugs out of her fluffy white cardigan and puts her curly shoulder-length red hair in a bun. Her energy constantly reminds me of Hana. My heart cinches at that thought. “It was last Saturday when you were home. We met at Coffee House. His messages were, I don’t know, decent? But then he shows up, like, twenty minutes late, and he tells me about how his congressman dad sucks and how he wants to pursue indie filmmaking. Then his friends come through and his voice goes five pitches lower and he basically ignores me the rest of the time.”

I grimace.

“Next date that goes south,” Ruhi says. “Text us and we’ll crash it. I’ll prep a contingency plan.”

“There won’t be another date.” Ava clutches her palms emphatically over her chest as if she’s making some kind of fervent vow. “I’m swearing off dates forever. I’m just dating myself at this point. Me, a mug of shitty Barefoot wine, some microwavable mozzarella sticks, and Love, Rosie on Friday nights.”

“Love, Rosie?” Ruhi says firmly, with her authoritative, high school debate champion voice. She crosses the room in long strides and takes Ava’s hands in hers. “That’s masochism, and we refuse to let it happen. At least let us watch it together.”

“It’s just—” Ava sighs. “I thought it would be easier? People always tell us that college is the best time to date someone because you’re surrounded by so many people your age. Yet I can’t find anyone to even cuddle and watch Halloween movies with. I wish it was as easy as taking a quiz.” She glances over at me. “Anyway. What did you get?”

I click through the last question. “Huh. Hercules.”

“A god,” Ava says in admiration. “Powerful.”

I look up. “What about you, Ruhi?”

She taps through on her phone. “Ooooh. Li Shang.”

“Ruhi wins,” Ava says. “Arjun’s got competition.”

Ruhi suppresses a small smile that comes up every time we mention her boyfriend. She tucks her long dark hair behind her ears. “Oh, no competition. I would take Li Shang any day. Arjun would understand.”

I glance at all three of our screens, scrutinizing the options. Ava and I had both picked pancakes but differed on the beverages. Ruhi had opted for a simpler breakfast of fruit and a bagel. There’s a pattern here. I just have to crack it.

Aha.

“We’ll be your Halloween dates,” Ruhi says to Ava. “Us and our imaginary Disney princes. You can pick the movie.”

“This sounds amazing,” Ava says. “This weekend?”

Ruhi looks over. “Stay the weekend for once? We’ll have movie night, and we might even take a trip to the pumpkin patch.”

My roommate looks so hopeful. I smile and shake my head, swallowing a knot in my throat. “I’ve got to go home. You two have fun, though.”

After weeks of practice, it isn’t that hard to say anymore. Even if the pumpkin patch does sound lovely.

“Oh.” Ruhi’s shoulders sink, but she doesn’t seem surprised. “Well, we’ll miss you.”

“I’ll be back Sunday.” I check my phone. “Shit. I have to go to class. I’m late.” I grab my coat and pause at the doorway. “I think it’s a simple tally.”

My roommates look up.

“Each option corresponds to a different result,” I say. “And then at the end you simply tally up whichever result got picked the most.” I point at my screen. “Bacon goes with Hercules. Orange juice, Flynn Rider.”

“And voilà,” Ava says, spreading her palms out. “Soul mates.”

“If only it were that easy.” I pull on my boots and run out the door.

 

The seats of my lecture are surprisingly full when I slip in five minutes late. It’s close to midterms, and students are actually showing up to class instead of just scrolling through the lesson slides and frantically cramming their textbook while hungover in bed. I’ve shown up to every class.

I’d worked to get in. Game Theory and Market Design is an upper-level mathematics elective class with intro-class prerequisites. Freshmen like me aren’t supposed to take it, but I’d wanted to graduate in three years and, through an appeal and the careful coaxing of the registrar’s office, I’d gotten it. I’d heard good things about the professor, too. Professor Rand is the mathematics department head, and he’s been teaching at Leighton for the past twenty-one years. Word is that a recommendation from him could all but guarantee a coveted summer math research position with a professor in the department. Which is what I want.

It’s interesting. We’ve talked about all sorts of strategy games: about zero-sum games that give one person what they

want at the expense of the other person’s total loss, or about probability and payout. We talk about psychology and political negotiations. The professor’s animated and gestures wildly with his hands. He teaches old-school, too, which means he covers the blackboard with nearly unreadable chalky text and half the work is to decipher it for our notes. On the board today is scrawled Market Design and Matching Algorithms.

“We have cooperative and noncooperative games.” Professor Rand runs his fingers through his wispy blond hair and crosses his arms. The shoulder pads of his suit jacket peak up. “Games that can be achieved by forming coalitions, and games that can be achieved by simple strategy alone. Like we’d mentioned last time, mathematicians and economists always thought that those two things were separate. But as it turns out, they came together to form the basis of market design.” He pauses. “And markets form the basis of a lot of the matching systems out there.”

My phone lights up with a notification. Hana’s posted a photo. Without thinking, I click on the notification. It’s a picture of Hana sitting on the beach, huddled close with two friends, their cheeks glowing from the golden light. She has her same goofy upturned smile, her hoodie pulled tight around her face.

I click out of it quickly and push my phone away.

“Markets are all around us,” Professor Rand continues once he reaches the end of the lecture slides. “Even systems that we think aren’t markets are, in fact, just a system of supply and demand. What are some examples that you found in the reading?”

People look around at each other, clearly not having done said reading. I have, but I rarely talk in class, to the point where I’m slightly worried about my participation grade. Someone in the front row thankfully raises their hand. “Matching doctors to residencies?”

“Yes, exactly,” Professor Rand says. “What else?”

There is a prolonged silence. I swallow and speak up. “By matching organ donors to receptors?”

“Precisely.” Professor Rand nods at me. “These are systems that can be complex but, with the correct bipartite matching algorithm, can save lives and place people with their perfect matches. Can I hear some other potential uses for a matching algorithm?”

The class is quiet. There’s the crinkle of a granola bar wrapper under a table.

Professor Rand crosses his arms. “What about marriages?”

Someone in the class snickers.

“It’s not that ridiculous, actually,” he says. “There was a study in the 1960s that applied the stability of matching to marriages. Within a group of men and women each person ranked their preferences for their ideal match. It was said that between couples, the matches would reach a stable state if no one had anything to gain by altering the matching. For example, someone might not get their first preference because their first preference has someone else they’d more prefer. But eventually, the matches achieve a stable equilibrium, and everyone is happy.” He straightens up and almost seems to look right at me. “This is hypothetical, of course. People don’t get married through an econ experiment. But it’s quite a straightforward example of what a stable-state matching system can look like.”

I think of the soul mate quiz my roommates and I were taking earlier. And now there’s a marriage matching algorithm. Today seems to have a theme.

Professor Rand sets down the nub of chalk and straightens up. “All right. Take-home midterm is in two weeks, and I hope you and your project groups all start thinking about your final projects this semester on a proposed original application of a game theory or market design concept to a real-life scenario. They’re not due for a while, but I want to know what you’re working on by the next two weeks or so, so get brainstorming. If anyone has any questions, my office hours are on Wednesday mornings at ten or by appointment.” He collects his lecture notes and shrugs on his coat and scarf. “Enjoy your weekend, everyone.”

I look around for the two seniors in the class who are supposed to be my project group mates, but one is rushing out the door and the other is long gone. I sigh and quickly send them a Google Calendar invite for this weekend. I double-check my schedule to make sure that I still have the time right with my next meeting. I pull up a picture of the campus map, even though it’s October

and I basically know my way around at this point. Campus consists of essentially five buildings and a scattering of dorms. One more thing today, and then I’m on my way home.

As I walk past the admin office to the campus library, double-triple-checking my application on my phone, tires screech around me, and I jump, narrowly missing a sideways bike collision.

The cyclist pushes his unruly hair out of his eyes as he leaps off. He’s wearing leg warmers and a thick jacket over shorts. I realize, surprisingly, that I recognize him as someone who’s in my math class—Set Theory, maybe?—but I can’t place a name. “Sorry,” he says, breathlessly, barely meeting my eyes. “Didn’t see you there. Are you good?”

“Oh, um.” I straighten up. “Yeah, I’m okay.”

“I really should have stopped sooner.” He pauses, glancing down. “Here, after you.”

I cross the street, and when I look back, he’s gone. I turn back toward the library, a tall Gothic structure with a gray brick facade. It’s kind of old-school and beautiful, actually. I enter the front doors and approach the reference desk. There’s a text from Ava in my chat with her and Ruhi. Safe trip home! We’ll miss you this weekend.

The same text she sends every weekend.

I put my phone away as someone across the atrium says, “Grace Tang?”

 

I sit in a stuffy back room behind the reference desk. Carts of old books surround us. The librarian who’s interviewing me is this small elderly white woman with short gray hair and a beige cardigan. Roberta, her name tag says. She peers down through her square purple glasses. “So, dear. Your previous working experience is . . . at a local recreation center. Is that right?”

“Yes,” I say. “I worked for a year.” I put on a hopeful smile. I don’t even know if I qualify to work in a library, seeing as the last book I really read was during senior year of high school. In truth, I’d wanted to get some kind of a research position, but then I realized that no one really took on first-semester freshmen for that. Then an email for a part-time student job at the library emerged from the chaos of the dorm email list.

“Got it,” she says, putting down my résumé. She purses her lips, with a look that I can’t decipher. “Hold on a second, let me just respond to this email real quick.” She types slowly, with her index finger. I glance up at the ceiling tiles. The heater rattles with drafts of recycled air.

Roberta looks over at me, and then at the résumé. “You’re good with Tuesday and Thursday afternoons? One to six?”

I nod in relief. I’d gotten it.

She offers me a smile. “Well, I’ll have you start next week, then. Training shouldn’t take long. I can explain the cataloging system and get you squared

away. The other student employees learned in no time.”

“Perfect. Thank you so much, Roberta.”

I get up. She hands me my résumé. “You’re from Woodward High?”

I nod. “Yeah. I’m local.”

“Must be nice for the parents,” Roberta says.

The résumé wrinkles in my hands. My voice only snags a bit as I answer. “Yeah. It is.”

“You have a good weekend, Grace.” She gives me a sweet smile.

“You, too.” I head back out into the library atrium. I pull my car keys out of my backpack, and then my phone. I text my dad, switching to the Mandarin keyboard.

快回到家了。

Home soon. On my way.

I zip my coat up and head out into the gathering cold. 

 

Two

Driving home from campus has become second nature. I venture out past the main quad with the tall, arched buildings. I pass the wrought-iron gate that they paraded us through the week of orientation, pointing out the pine insignia to each of us, the letters inscribed Leighton College. “Just wait until tulips come in the spring,” I hear the tour guides say all the time. That’s what this small liberal arts school tucked away in northern Vermont is known for. Tulip season, and also apparently its renowned English and creative writing program. A group of famous alum graduated in the ’80s in what Ruhi once mentioned as “Leighton’s shroomy artistic renaissance” and went in circles collecting book awards and cultivating generational indie movie fame.

When I first went through those gates during orientation, we were surrounded by thick, humid greenery that has since slowly receded into dappled gold and red. At last now, I turn onto the main road, which turns into a four-lane road, which merges onto the highway that takes me home. I switch on my headlights.

The radio plays some old James Bay song. It’s strange to listen to music in this car that used to be my mom’s. Ma always preferred silence because she said that distractions would lead to car accidents. On a second thought, I reach over and wind the knob down.

By now, I’ve gone home enough times that I know this drive will take, on average, twenty-nine minutes. I have memorized the exit numbers on the highway and the location of the shin-deep pothole, about a third of the way home. As I pass the foliage that lines the road, burnt orange folding into rust, I wonder if I can still name all the trees I used to with my dad. We’d made it a game on road trips. Eastern white pine. Norway spruce. Green ash. The Mandarin names surface with the English ones. 松树。I’d memorized them in my head in a list, looking for the leaves that I could discern as we passed by in a blur. “You’re better at this than my graduate students,” he’d tell me when I was little. My mom would sigh and ask why he chose to come all the way to this country for his geobiology PhD when trees and soil were everywhere. I pass some more forestry and try to scrounge up the Mandarin names, until I give up and take my exit.

As I drive, I feel myself morphing back into my high school self. I sit straighter. I spot a marker-made homecoming banner flapping on the corner of the town hall. Hana and I used to drive around that corner all the time coming home from school. Not that Hana and I went to homecoming, anyway. We bought pints of ice cream from the local grocery store and went to her house and watched movies while we speculated on which kids would host the after-parties and which of those kids would get busted. Homecoming seems like both yesterday and lifetimes ago. I pass the church that my mother used to go to, and I am fully home.

I pull up to my driveway. I sling my backpack over my shoulder and text Ba with my free hand. Before I even knock, the door opens.

“Xiǎoyàn,” he says, his nickname for me. 小燕。Little swallow, like the bird. My full name is 唐燕。 “Did you drive safe?”

“当然了,” I say. Of course.

“Remember to come to a full stop at those stop signs.”

And suddenly I am sixteen again, practicing driving with my father clenching the handle of the passenger side. “Yes, Ba,” I said. “I know.”

He nods and adjusts his thin-framed professor glasses and smooths his graying hair. “I made dinner. Beef noodles.”

I follow him to the table, where there are full bowls of beef noodle soup and a bowl of cucumber slices soaked in sugar and vinegar and a bit of sesame oil, one of my favorite snacks from when I was a kid. Those were Ba’s specialty. The noodles were Ma’s. I take a tentative sip. The beef soup is tepid, the spices overwhelming to the point where I almost cough. I eat a piece of cucumber, hearing the crisp crunch, the sweetness biting into the acid tang of the vinegar. “It’s good.”

His eyes light up. We sit at the table in silence. After a week of overhearing FIFA screaming matches through the wall at three in the morning from the frat-like boys next door and listening to Ava’s spot-on celebrity impressions and Ruhi’s late-night phone calls to her older sister, the lack of background noise is unnerving. A fine layer of dust settles on our words. I fiddle with my chopsticks.

He leans forward and clears his throat. “How is school?”

I crunch into my bite of cucumber. “Good,” I say. “Finally got a job.”

Ba raises an eyebrow. “Someone let you do research?”

I shake my head. The sugar sours into vinegar on my tongue. “I got a job at the library.”

“Okay.” He pauses. “How are classes?”

“Set Theory’s okay. I’m working on some homework tonight. And studying for a Game Theory take-home midterm.”

“This is the professor that can get you a summer research position, right?”

“Yep. Or recommend me for one, at least.”

He doesn’t press further. My dad was never the one who read up on my courses’ syllabi or the one who drove me to my math competitions. He just nods. “Good,” he says. “乖。That’s what I like to hear. She’d be proud of you. That’s why I want you home on the weekends. So you can eat nutritious meals and get a good night’s sleep. Not party like those wild college students.”

I could almost hear my mother through those words. Get enough sleep. Don’t be sneaking out or talking to people late at night like those other kids from your school do. Otherwise you’re going to get

wrinkles and get into trouble. Do you want that?

I glance down at the watery broth. “Yeah, of course.”

Let him think he’s taking care of me.

We retreat back into silence, punctuated by a few slurps. He reaches over and picks up the TV remote. I relax my shoulders. There is a Chinese rom-com playing. As the characters run in slow motion through the rain to dramatic music, I quietly finish my bowl of noodles.

After dinner, he migrates to the couch. I sit on the other end and pull up the assignments on my computer. I work on the first problem. Ba laughs at something funny the actors are saying to each other.

When the credits roll on the episode, I look up. “Ba?”

He tilts his chin absentmindedly toward me.

“How are you feeling these days?”

He doesn’t meet my eyes. “Don’t worry about me.”

“Are you getting out of the house? Taking walks?”

My dad doesn’t answer. And suddenly I’m watching my dad watch television but neither of us are paying attention to the screen. I pick my words carefully. “Have you been thinking about seeing someone? To talk to yet?”

He turns toward me. “Xiǎoyàn.”

I stop.

“I know some people from the university. I’m filling my time just fine.” He nods to the corner of the living room, where a digital piano appeared three weeks ago, something Ba rescued from one of his colleagues who was giving it away, along with a pile of weathered piano books. I hear him practicing it sometimes, very slowly. But the piano isn’t a person to talk to. Playing it is, in fact, the most solitary thing someone can do.

“Besides,” he says, “I should be taking care of you.”

I turn back to my homework. Under the lamplight, I stare at the question and try to visualize how the rotational symmetries would unfold. I lean back with a sigh. I text the math group chat that formed at the beginning of the year, where we helped each other brainstorm answers. I then realize that I’m probably exposing myself as a loser because, really, who would be working on a Set Theory problem set on a Friday night?

I don’t realize how much time has passed until I hear soft snoring on the couch. My father’s chin tips forward, his head nodding into his chest, his hands folded together. I go into his bedroom. I take a blanket from the edge of the bed. I carry the blanket to the living room and carefully drape it over him, trying not to wake him. His snores rumble through his chest. I grab the remote and turn the volume down.

I look around. I stack the bills carefully on the counter. There’s another stack of his own college students’ problem sets to grade. A red pen lies on top, uncapped. I cap it and go to my own room. Just then, my phone buzzes. A text from Ruhi appears, with a mirror picture of her and Ava. Ruhi’s dressed in a tight leather jacket that

her wavy black hair crests over, with perfect gold-tinted eye shadow that brings out her dark eyes. Ava’s wearing a cropped crochet sweater top, baggy jeans, and heeled boots, which marginally reduces the height difference between them both. I text back with three heart emojis. My loves 😊 So cute.

I turn my phone facedown. I’ll be asleep when the drunk I love you texts will pour in, the fuck we impulse bought a dozen doughnuts messages. The pang in my chest never eases up when I see those texts. It’s not that I miss parties that much—I’d gone to one at the beginning of the year and had beer sloshed onto my chest and practically had to catch someone falling from a table. But I miss my roommates. I miss hearing their voices overlap over one another. I immediately feel guilty for that thought. I want to be here. Ba wants me to be here.

I wonder what Hana’s doing this weekend.

In another world, I might be out there with her. Or I’m a state away at MIT. In that other world my mother is here instead of me. I turn back to my homework and mute my texts.

 

I always leave Sunday mornings. We bundle up and go on a walk after breakfast down the road and through the nearby park. The sunlight cuts through the red-gold trees and touches the tops of our heads. Church bells ring. Our shoes crunch over the leaves.

My father points at one of the trees. “Eastern white pine,” I say automatically. Trees that grow through the winter. He nods and folds his hands back in his pockets.

After lunch, I pack up my backpack.

“Come back next weekend?” he asks.

“Of course.” He nods in relief. “Don’t worry, Ba.”

And then I’m back in my car. My phone buzzes, and I see that someone has finally responded to my inane Friday-night homework question.

Jamie Anton: Check out page 35 of the Monday notes, it’s all there.

I lean back. I peek closer at his profile picture and realize that this was the guy that almost ran me over with a bike on Friday. And yet now he’s saving my ass. I type, thanks, I appreciate it.

I turn the radio on and turn onto the road. I pass the homecoming banner again. At the light, I impulsively take a left and head for the town center. I pull up to the small ice-cream shop on the corner, and I head in. I walk up to the register. I used to get iced lemonades in the summer here with Hana. The kid up front looks no older than a sophomore. His hat’s too big on him. “Fifteen percent homecoming weekend discount for students,” he says, hand outstretched for a school ID.

I shake my head and smile. “Just graduated. I want a cookie dough single cone, please.”

He scoops up a hefty ball and lopsidedly lands it on the cone. I eat every single bite in my car until there is nothing but the tip of the cone with the melted ice cream inside. I tilt it back, feeling the cone crunch between my teeth. And then I turn the car back onto the road. Two lanes become four, and the road merges into the highway. My shoulders relax, my stomach contracting around my cold ice cream. High School Grace once again morphs back into College Grace. I take the exit and drive back toward the place where I can pretend like I’m not coming from a home that doesn’t really feel like home anymore. ...