Okay, she’d gone a little crazy with the tape. She’d tried to use the three pieces he’d recommended in his tutorial, but they’d ended up being very long pieces. Wrapped around the entire present, mummy-style.
He finally ripped the paper off to reveal a handheld random number generator device that she’d found online. It looked like a small plastic calculator and had inputs for the bottom and top numbers in your range and then a button to push to generate the random number onto a small screen. The shipping had cost more than the product itself, which didn’t give her a lot of faith in its potential longevity, but she hoped he liked it nonetheless.
“In case you ever want to try my method of to-do lists,” she said. “Or replay our game, not that I remember what all the numbers stood for.”
Asa reached around her to pull open his desk drawer, sliding a few papers aside until he came out with a folded, yellow lined sheet, the top edge torn from a mini legal pad.
“Number one,” he read, “ask me anything. Number two, my favorite blank is. Number three, I dare you to . . .”
She grabbed the paper from him to read the rest. “You kept this?”
“Of course,” he said, rummaging through the drawer to pull out another sheet of paper. This one had a word bubble on it that said I’m getting a strong “A” vibe . . . Asa? Ass? It took Lauren a minute to register her own handwriting, to remember that she’d left this message on the fridge the first time she’d ever visited the house.
“Oh my god,” she said, groaning. “I can’t believe I wrote that.”
“I did get you to call that Rick Astley hotline that one April Fool’s,” he said. “So I can’t blame you for thinking I was an ass.”
It had been the April after she’d started at Cold World, and although she’d heard rumors of a few pranks in the past, she figured that she’d be immune from them as a newish member of the office staff. So she’d been totally unsuspecting when Asa came into her office with a Post-it note with a number written on it, saying that Rick “something” had called with a billing question, and could she call him back? She’d thought it was odd that he would’ve fielded the phone call, and had been annoyed when he stood in her office while she picked up the phone, assuming he somehow didn’t trust her to do it.
“I just got hold music,” she’d said after hanging up. “What did you say he was calling about?”
“What was the hold music?”
It had struck her as the most asinine question, but she started describing it as the “never gonna give you up” song, until it dawned on her what he’d done. At the time, she’d been more focused on her own embarrassment at having fallen for it, her own mild irritation at the wasted time. It was so funny how getting to know someone could cast all prior interactions in a completely different light, how clearly now she could see it as a very benign prank, done more to make her feel included than to single her out.
“Okay,” Asa said now, pulling a large, flat rectangle from his closet. It was wrapped in metallic blue paper with tiny silver snowflakes, To: and From: filled out in black Sharpie. It looked like a picture frame, just from the ridge around the edge, slightly raised above the flat expanse of the middle. But a picture of what?
She slid her fingernail carefully under the seam of the tape, peeling back the wrapping paper to reveal the framed art underneath. Her first impression was of all the flowers—drawn on curlicue vines around the edges, filling in the spaces in between. And even inside the small ovals placed in three perfect circles, nested inside one another. It took her a second to register that the picture frame appeared to have originally been one of those dated ones meant to showcase school pictures—the soft green of the background had been painted with enough transparency that she could still see the script underneath each oval, starting at the top and moving clockwise. Kindergarten. First grade. Second grade.
In the first-grade one, he’d drawn a rose, blooming until half the petals were outside the outline of the oval. In second grade, a lotus. Third grade, a pair of violets, so vibrantly purple she could see where he’d pressed down with a colored pencil to build up the pigment. And in fourth grade, an iris, simple and tall.
“I found the frame with the mat while thrift shopping with Elliot. It made me think about what you’d said, about not having any school pictures, and I thought . . .” He broke off, reaching up to cradle her face and brush away the tears she was only dimly aware were starting to fill up her eyes.