Page 11 of The Seven Year Slip

“How long have you been here? Have you been watching me sleep? What kind of sick p—”

He interrupted me loudly, “All night. I mean—I didn’t watch yousleepall night. I was in the bedroom. I got dressed and came out here and saw you on the couch. My mom’s a friend of your aunt’s. She’s letting me sublet the apartment for the summer, and she said I might have a visitor.”

That made very little sense. “What?”

“Analea Collins,” he replied with that same confused hesitance. He began to reach for something in his back pocket. “Here, see—?”

“Don’t youdaremove,” I snapped, and he froze.

And slowly raised his hands again. “Okay... but I have a note?”

“Give it to me, then.”

“You told me—you told me not to move?”

I glared at him.

He cleared his throat. “You can reach for it. Back left pocket.”

“I’m not reaching foranything.”

He gave me an exasperated look.

Oh. Right. I told him not to move. “...Fine.” I carefully crept up to him and began to reach around to his back left pocket...

“And here we find the rare gentleman in the wild,” he began to narrate—in a really terrible Australian accent, by the way. “Careful. He must be approached cautiously so not to be easily startled...”

I glared at him.

He raised a single infuriating eyebrow.

I snatched the contents out of his back left pocket and quickly moved an arm’s length away from him. As I backed away, I recognized my aunt’s apartment key. I knew it was hers because it was on a little key chain she bought in the Milan airport years ago when we went after my high school graduation. I thought this key had been lost. And with it was a note, folded into the shape of a paper crane.

I unfolded it.

Iwan,

It’s so lovely that this could work out! Tell your mother hello for me and be sure to check the mailbox every day. If Mother and Fucker come by the window, donotopen it. They lie. I hope you enjoy New York—it’s quite lovely in the summers, albeit a bit hot. Ta-ta!

xoxo, AC

(P.S. If you see an elderly woman wandering the halls, please be a dear and send Miss Norris back to G6.)

(P.P.S. If my niece comes by, please tell Clementine you’ll be subletting from me this summer. Remind her about summers abroad.)

I stared at it for longer than I probably needed to. Even though I had countless birthday cards and Valentine’s cards and Christmas cards from her stashed in my jewelry box in the bedroom, seeing new words strung together in her looping script made my throat constrict anyway. Because I didn’t think I’d ever see any more combinations.

It was silly, I knew it was silly.

But it was a bit more of her than before that remained.

Summers abroad...

The stranger brought me out of my thoughts when he said, quite confidently, “Does everything make sense now?”

I set my jaw. “No, actually.”

His bravado faltered. “...No?”

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