Page 41 of Make Me Sin (Bad Habit 2)
“Yeah?”
There’s a pause. “It doesn’t always have to look good on paper.”
“What do you mean?”
He sighs. “Only that you can’t find love on a checklist of must-haves. You know: A good education; A stable, upwardly progressive career; A nice car; Good hair. It’s never that easy. Sometimes what looks like perfection is nothing more than a chocolate-dipped turd. And sometimes what you find in the gutter covered in mud that looks like a turd is really a diamond. A big old, chunky diamond that some other fool threw out because she couldn’t see that all it needed was a little TLC to make it shine.”
With a soft click, the line goes dead.
I lower the phone to my side. My breath catches; across the street, under the glow of a streetlamp, a man stands staring up at my window.
As he turns and walks away with a lowered head, he tightens the drawstring on his hoodie.
For two weeks, I hear nothing from either A.J. or Eric. I work, I hang out with the girls, I do my thing, trying not to obsess. I fail spectacularly at not obsessing. Those two weeks contain the longest nights I’ve ever spent. I could draw every crack and miniscule bump in my bedroom ceiling from memory.
Then one crisp morning I walk out to my car on my way to work, and someone has left something on my windshield, resting against the wiper.
It’s an origami bird, crafted from fine, pale blue linen paper.
I hold it in my hand, inspecting it. I remember making origami forms when I was a kid. I had a teacher, originally from Japan, who taught a class on the ancient art of paper sculpture. I could only ever make a crane, the simplest of beginner folds aside from a paper airplane.
This bird is no simple crane. What I’m holding in my hand is a work of art.
It’s three-dimensional, with an elegant body, layers of delicate feathers, even tiny feet. Whoever made it took painstaking care. I see no mistaken folds, no telltale creases where one was begun only to be abandoned for another, no blemishes on the paper at all.
It’s perfect.
I look up and around, hoping to find a clue as to who might have left it, but there’s no one looking back at me, just cars whizzing by and an old man walking his chubby beagle across the street.
I unlock the car and carefully set the beautiful paper bird on the passenger seat. On the drive to work, I glance at it frequently, half expecting it to open its wings and take flight.
The next week, there’s another bird on my windshield.
This one is even more elaborate than the first. It’s made of foil-backed paper, a rich violet on one side and reflective hot pink on the other, so the folds reveal layer over layer of lush color. Enraptured, I stare at it. I know for certain now the first wasn’t some kind of fluke.
These beautiful birds are meant for me.
I try to picture the hands that made such intricate, delicate things. I can only envision a woman’s hands, fine boned and elegant, deft and precise. Yet I know of no one, male or female, capable of such eccentric, whimsical artistry.
After the third week, and the third bird—this one an incredible canary yellow with black-and-white striped wings—I clear a shelf on the bookcase in my bedroom, and start a collection.
I also start trying to catch whoever is leaving them for me.
r /> Every day for the next two weeks, I get up early, before dawn. I wait, watching from the window. I know the birds can’t have been left out all night, or the paper would be damp with the night air. If not sodden, at least a bit limp, feathers and beaks wilting. It’s still spring in LA, and the nights are chilly. But the crispness of the paper belies the truth of the timing of their appearance: after sunrise, at least.
My surveillance fails utterly. The fourth bird appears on the windshield of my car when I take a two-minute bathroom break. The fifth, when I go to the kitchen to make myself a cup of tea.
Which can only mean one thing.
I’m being watched.
Yet I see no one. I see nothing out of the ordinary. I see normal life happening on the street below: cars, joggers, mothers with baby carriages, people on bikes.
I know who I want it to be. But whoever it is doesn’t wish to be seen, so he isn’t.
I don’t tell anyone about the birds, not even Kat or Grace. They’re my little secret, a locked treasure chest hidden away in my brain that only I can open and play with. Kat had said she learned that people keep secrets for all sorts of reasons: sad, selfish, dangerous. I don’t know about sad or selfish, but this little secret of mine definitely feels dangerous, as if by the mere act of not sharing with my best friends, I’ve taken the first step down a dark, uncharted road.
I don’t care. I’m no longer afraid of the dark.
