Page 33 of The Incredible Kindness of Paper

Chloe

Chloe had one of those alarms that slowly brightened the room ten minutes before you were supposed to wake up. She had read that it mimicked the sunrise and therefore allowed your body to rouse more naturally, rather than all at once to a blaring siren blast. It usually worked well.

Unless she happened to be face-to-face with the alarm clock when the light flicked on. Then it might as well be an industrial floodlight beaming straight at her eyes.

“Ah! I’m awake, I’m awake!” Chloe said, because today was one of those mornings where she’d unfortunately ended up in the exact wrong position. She scrunched her eyes closed and fumbled for the button to dim the alarm’s light, knocking off the stack of books on her nightstand in the process.

Still, Chloe groaned when dimness had been restored to her room, and she flopped back into bed, rolling over so she could curl up away from the offendingly bright clock.

Her face smooshed against a piece of paper.

“Mrph…” Chloe plucked it from the pillow.

It was a yellow paper rose, but not a crisp new one.

This one was soft from wear, its surface a little fuzzy from being touched a lot, almost like a piece of paper that had gone through the wash.

Maybe it had, tucked away in someone’s pocket and then air-dried.

No, wait… Is that a ketchup stain?

“Ew!” Chloe threw the origami flower onto the carpet.

But a few seconds later, she crawled to the edge of her bed and looked over the side. This wasn’t just any paper rose; it was the one with gold foil stripes that had come back to her before.

“How…?”

She was fully awake now, and she swooped her arm down to pick the flower back up. Chloe avoided touching the ketchup stain as she unfolded it. Indeed, it contained the previous messages.

Sometimes wishing can make a dream come true.

I guarantee it ABSOLUTELY does not.

I respectfully disagree, and I’m willing to bet you on it.

Name your wager. Because the odds are against you.

“It’s the same person who wrote the first message,” she said in awe. The ink was different, but the handwriting was the same. It was like having a cynical pen pal, but with origami flowers instead of regular stationery and pen.

But how was this happening? All the other roses behaved as you would expect paper to behave. They got passed hand to hand; they didn’t just up and travel on their own.

Oh god. Unless this person had gotten into the apartment.

Chloe dropped the paper rose again and rolled across the mattress, away from it. The first time this flower had come back to her, it was on the kitchen table. And this time, it had been in her bed.

She hugged her knees to her chest, shaking. What kind of awful, depraved person would do this? And was it someone she knew, someone who had been by the tables in Central Park and seen her, and then what? Followed her home?

Chloe dry-heaved, her stomach churning.

She needed to call the police. Where was her phone?

Out in the kitchen. Chloe kept it out of her bedroom so she wouldn’t stay up for hours mindlessly scrolling.

She staggered to her feet, legs threatening to give out beneath her as she hurried to the kitchen.

As Chloe grabbed her phone off the counter, she remembered that Becca had set up security cameras in a few strategic places around the apartment.

There would be footage of whoever had done this.

Not in Chloe’s bedroom, but of the flower being put on the kitchen table the first time, as well as anyone entering and exiting the apartment.

Chloe had never been more grateful for Becca’s uptight desire to control the fine details of their lives.

Chloe opened the security camera app. Whoever put that flower on her bed must have come in while she was sleeping. An ice-cold chill shivered up her spine.

She watched the front door camera’s footage at high speed from the moment she came home until right now.

No one had entered or exited.

What?

Becca had already been home by the time Chloe arrived yesterday evening, and they had locked the door with the dead bolt. Chloe watched the footage again and confirmed that the front door had stayed closed the whole time.

Is there someone in the apartment with us? Panic knifed through Chloe’s chest.

But that would be impossible. Their apartment was barely bigger than two closets. And with all of Becca’s plastic organizational bins—neatly labeled with everything either of them owned—there was zero space for anyone to hide.

Chloe chewed on her lip as she clicked on the footage from the first time the paper rose had returned a little more than a week ago.

That would be camera 2, the one Becca had set up on the counter to face their small dining table and the three-foot strip of space the landlord called a “living room.”

That evening, Becca had lectured Chloe about the origami flowers taking up the entire table. But when Chloe watched the film from that part of the night, she noticed that the crumpled-up rose was already there. Chloe hadn’t noticed it then, but it must have appeared earlier.

She started watching from an earlier part of the day. Chloe watched herself pack up in the morning, choosing which paper flowers to put into her basket and take to Central Park. There was no crumpled rose on the table.

But then, in the middle of the afternoon, it appeared.

She gasped.

Chloe backed up the footage by a minute.

No rose.

Then out of nowhere, it appeared.

“What in the world…?”

She watched it five more times, then cross-checked camera 1’s front door footage for the same time period.

Again, no one had entered or exited the apartment. There hadn’t been an intruder. Thank god.

But how was this happening?

Chloe ran back to her room and cradled the origami rose in her cupped hands.

“Who are you?” she asked, as if the paper could tell her who the person on the other side of the notes was.

Sometimes wishing can make a dream come true.

I guarantee it ABSOLUTELY does not.

I respectfully disagree, and I’m willing to bet you on it.

Name your wager. Because the odds are against you.

Chloe felt the heaviness behind the words.

Whoever had written this, they weren’t just skeptical. There was also the weight of sadness, like something had broken them in the past to make them this way.

Maybe there was a reason this was happening now, with this flower, and whoever was writing to her.

“However it’s happening, this person needs me,” Chloe said, not egotistically, but in the sense that the entire point of her paper flowers was to lift the spirits of those who felt lonely or despondent.

So she picked up a pen, but there wasn’t much space left in the original rose. Could she make a new one? Would it be able to make its way back to her correspondent?

Then again, there was no guarantee that even the original rose would return again if Chloe wrote on it.

She went out to the kitchen table and chose a new square of paper, but with the same gold-foil-striped pattern as the first.

Back in her bedroom, she laid the first note next to the clean piece of paper.

Name your wager. Because the odds are against you, he had written.

(Chloe didn’t know why, but she had a gut feeling that it was a he on the other side of this note.

Maybe it was the force with which the pen had been pressed to the paper, or maybe it was the choice of words.

But it didn’t really matter, because her only goal was to help people be a little more hopeful, a tiny bit happier.)

Still, she couldn’t write an essay, because she wanted to make sure he had room to write back. So she said:

I can’t promise that wishes always come true. But I believe they can, and I would be willing to bet my heart on that—because if there is anything worth wishing for, it’s a happily ever after.

She signed it with her heart-shaped rosebud, then folded it into a new origami flower.

Then she stared at it sitting on her desk, not sure what to do next.

She still wasn’t sure how this worked, so she tried to project her well-wishes into the paper and then she said, “Go out and find him, I guess?”

When she returned to her room after breakfast, the first gold-striped flower was still on her desk, but the second, new one had vanished.