The dating profile with only group photos
Every picture on his dating profile had at least four other people in it, and he was never the one in front. Then a match asked which one he was, and hopefully guessed his best friend.
This is a composite story. Names and personal details are invented and combined from real experiences people in this community have shared.
Personal experiences are individual and aren’t medical advice. Talk to a qualified professional about your own health.
"Okay, I have to ask," the message said. "Which one are you? Please say the guy in the blue hat."
Caleb Pryce read it on his lunch break, sitting on the tailgate of a city bucket truck under a honey locust he'd spent the morning pruning, and the turkey sandwich in his hand turned to cardboard.
The guy in the blue hat was Rafi, his best friend since seventh grade, who had a jaw like a cereal box and a fiancée. Caleb was the one in the back row of the softball photo, behind Rafi's shoulder, mostly beard.
He typed haha no, back row, and deleted it. He typed the tall one, which narrowed it down to four people, and deleted that too. A few days later the app told him the match had expired.
The crowd
He was thirty-four and an arborist for the city, which meant he spent his days forty feet up in a harness deciding which limbs a tree could live without. He was good at it. He could look at a scarred old oak and tell you what had gone wrong with it a decade ago. He had an elderly basset hound named Walter, a younger sister who called every Sunday to review his life choices, and a thick brown beard he had worn since he was twenty.
The beard was not a style. It was a curtain. Under it, along both cheeks and down his jaw, were the scars from the acne that had moved in when he was fifteen and left at twenty-two: pitted and uneven, like the dimples on a golf ball when the light hit them sideways. His beard trimmer lived on the longest guard, the seven, and on bad weeks he didn't trim at all.
His dating profile had six photos. In the first he was one of nine guys in matching green shirts, the Stump Grinders, Parks Department softball, second place. In the second, a cousin's wedding, he was at the far end of a row of groomsmen, half cut off by the frame. In the third he was a shape on a dock behind four people holding up fish. There was also a Halloween photo in which he was, with some intent, a bear.
His sister Bea had looked at the profile once over his shoulder and said, "This isn't a dating profile. It's a word search."
The rules
He had rules about cameras the way he had rules about climbing. Stand in the back. Stand behind someone taller, which at six-two meant standing behind a hat. Turn your face a little to the left, where the beard grew thickest. Never be the person someone crops the picture down to. When the local news came to film the city taking down a huge old sycamore, he let his supervisor do the interview and stayed up in the canopy, a hard hat and a chainsaw and nothing else.
He knew the advice. Every friend who'd ever used the apps said the same thing: one clear photo of your face, by yourself, near the top. He'd heard it and understood it and thought, sure, if you have a face like Rafi's.
After the blue hat
What got to him wasn't that she'd guessed wrong. It was how hopeful she'd sounded while she guessed. He kept hearing it that week, up in the trees, in that quiet you only get forty feet off the ground.
On Sunday Bea called, and he told her, which he hadn't planned to do. For once she didn't say anything smart. Then she said, "Okay. What would actually have to be true for you to post one picture of just you?"
It turned out to be a list, and none of it was quick.
He saw a dermatologist for the first time since he was a teenager, a woman who studied his jaw under a bright lamp without flinching and explained that scars were a long game, measured in months and a series of appointments, and that she could promise him better skin, not new skin. He started wearing sunscreen, which he had somehow never done despite working outside every day of his adult life, because she pointed out that the uneven color was half of what he was hiding. He stopped picking at his jaw in the truck mirror at red lights. He went to bed at nine-thirty, because it turned out nobody was stopping him. He read, for a long time and with a lot of suspicion, about what else was out there, and ignored most of it.
Bea texted him a story about a pharmacist who spent six years ducking out of group photos. This is you with less flannel, she wrote. He didn't reply. He did read the whole thing on the tailgate, and then sat there a while before he started the truck.
Over the winter his skin evened out slowly, the way a good pruning cut closes. You never see it happen. You just notice one day that it has. The scars were still there, but quieter. He moved the trimmer down to the five, then the three, and caught himself looking in the bathroom mirror for longer than it took to find his toothbrush.
One photo
Bea took it in April, at work, because he refused to pose anywhere else. He was on the ground for once, harness still on, helmet under his arm, squinting into the sun beside a big mottled trunk. He was laughing, because she'd told him to look like a man who loves trees, and he'd said, "I am a man who loves trees."
He put it first. He deleted the bear.
Three days later a woman named Carmen sent him a message. It didn't ask which one he was.
"Is that a sycamore behind you?"
"London plane," he typed. "Close, though."
Then he put the phone in his chest pocket, clipped back in, and went up the tree.