He asked her out with, of all things, a piece of string.

Or rather, five pieces of string, deposited on her desk over a week. She didn’t find out until long after how they’d gotten onto her desk in the first place.

She thought the first one, a heart made of a two-inch snip of thread, had been a rare thoughtful gift from her brother. When questioned, he’d asked her politely if she was crazy.

Not her brother, then.

It was followed the next day by a simple picture of a sun, draped in vibrant orange thread across one of her papers. In the mail that afternoon was a panorama of a mountain range, silhouetted against a gorgeous sunset. A tree appeared on Tuesday, artfully done for string art. Leaning against her door when she went outside was a package, which contained a black and white photo of a forest.

She woke up the next day to find eleven translations of “love” written in string on the bare glass of her desk, which was too much. She went downstairs and startled her parents at the breakfast table by demanding if they were pranking her.

She went back upstairs without breakfast, wondering if somebody could have broken in through her bedroom window. It didn’t look like it, but she put her father’s old baseball bat beside her bed anyways, and for the first time she locked her window before going to bed.

The next morning, there was a landscape, intricately crafted in what looked like more colors of string than the average art store stocked. It was in an elegant, simple box frame, and she almost hung it on her wall before remembering that it was probably a gift from a stalker.

She woke up at five on Friday and checked her desk—nothing. She sat idly on her bed, the bat close to her hand, and waited while her eyes adjusted to the dark of early morning. She read a book, stretched, listened to music, did homework, waited. And at seven, her door opened with a faint squeak—

And in came her brother.

She almost hit him with the bat anyways, just for sneaking into her room. But somehow she couldn’t imagine her brother framing photos for her, leaving her string pictures. She put down the bat, rolling her eyes, and grabbed the envelope in his hand as she shooed him out. The look on his face said You’ll thank me, and he grinned as she shut the door after him.

She opened the envelope, and inside was a card, its words written in string carefully glued to the paper.

I’m not going to string you along anymore: will you go out with me? -Adam
(And if you say no just because of that pun, I will totally understand.)

She couldn’t help it—she burst into laughter. Her brother rapped on her door and said, his voice muffled, “See? It was for your own good.” and she heard his footsteps going across the hall to his own room. When she managed to calm down, she called Adam.

“You’re insane,” she told him, laughing all over again. “Yes.”