Page 37
“Your questions for me?” she asks. “And then what? We swap them?”
“Then we ask each other the questions and we have to answer truthfully.”
She stares at me, and our gazes lock. I can see a million questions running through her head, and I want to hear them all, all at once. “And you’ve brought me to a heavily populated area because…I’m going to get offended and you want witnesses?”
I chuckle. “You’ll see. Trust the process.”
She glances down at the paper and then back at me. “And I can ask anything I want?”
I shrug. “Anything.”
“And you have to answer honestly?”
“Absolutely. And it works the same the other way around.”
She glances around at the passengers coming and going through the terminal. Every section of New York is represented—young, old, gay, straight, rich, poor, men, women, and everything in between. It’s impossible to feel like an outsider here. This is inside New York.
I want to see inside Avril’s brain.
Avril sighs and takes the paper and pencil. “Don’t look.”
She rolls her lips together as she thinks about what she’s going to ask me, and I can’t help but stare at her. She’s so focused on what she’s doing, so completely into it, and my heart lifts in my chest. I like that she’s participating. Okay, she’s being a bit of a grouch about it, but at least she’s doing it.
“And I have to fold them into triangles?” she asks, eyeing my handful.
I shake my head. “Nope. I was just president of the origami club at university.”
“Really?” she asks.
I shake my head. “No, I might like train stations, but I’m not an origami geek.”
She smiles, and I feel it in the tips of my fingers as they buzz with a need to touch her. But I resist.
Diligently, she notes down various things on the paper, rips them off, and then folds them up, in a higgledy-piggledy way.
“I have six,” she says.
“Me too,” I reply.
She nods. “I know. I counted. That’s why I did six.” She sounds suspicious, like I’m arranging some kind of ambush that she has to be prepared for.
“Great. Let’s go.”
“Where to?”
I don’t answer her, but take her hand again and start walking.
She looks up. “I always forget how pretty it is in here.”
“You know that ceiling is painted backwards, right?” I ask her.
“What do you mean backwards?”
“It’s a star map. Not as you’d see the stars from Earth, but as you’d see them from Heaven.”
“Really?” she asks, slowing down to take in more of the ceiling. “Was it deliberate?”
“No one knows,” I say.
