Mystery Month

My brother drops me off at midnight after a late dinner at our cousin's. As I'm unlocking the main entrance to my apartment, my name jumps out at me. There, propped in the entryway window, are five brightly-colored businesscards emblazoned with my name, address, email, and job title: "International Scholar & Social Coordinator." Awww, my roommate Ilina must've printed them for me. What a sweet girl! That is, until I get inside and look at them more closely. They were printed from the free businesscard site VistaPrint, which many of my friends and I have used in the past. But the back says Vistaprint.co.uk. U.K. What?!

Then I remember: my American friend Esther had been visiting Chicago, on break from getting her Master's degree in London. She'd forgotten to give me a present for a friend, so mailed it from her parents' suburban home. She must have been in cahoots with my roomies, asking them to open the box and put the businesscards in the front window to surprise me. Yes, that's it.

I go to sleep after writing enthusiastically in my journal about the cards.

Next morning, I'm briskly walking to work down my residential street when I see something white covering the sidewalk up ahead. No, not all white--some have color. Little rectangles. Little colored rectangles. Oh my god---it's ALL OF MY BUSINESS CARDS. 300 of them scattered for half a block on the sidewalk, as if someone was scattering cards onto concrete instead of seeds into earth.

This is profoundly disturbing. What the hell is going on? The stupid postal worker must have left Esther's package out front and someone took the box, opening it to find the present (which they stole) and the cards (which they threw on the ground, disgruntled). I go to work in a cloud. All of my personal information--my private email, my cell phone--is lying out on the sidewalk, visible to everyone who walks down the street.

I try to clear things up by sending a few emails. None of my three roommates had put the cards in the window--it was certainly one of our neighbors, recognizing the address as that of our building. From Esther, back in London: She'd never had any business cards printed. The package is waiting for me at the Post Office to pick up. What?!? Then who did it?

After spending half an hour after work picking up the cards off the sidewalk, I puzzle through it with my roommates. It's obviously someone in the U.K.--someone who's not familiar with calling the States, since they wrote the international calling code wrong ("01 (0)" instead of "001"). Could it be an English hosteller I befriended in June? He'd promised to send a housewarming present. No, I decide; he didn't know me well enough to have written that particular job description--and besides, he's been in India for a month. How about another hosteller I met in July? Nah, he's been travelling around the U.S. since then, and again, wouldn't have known that I'm an "international scholar and social coordinator."

It has to be someone who knows me well. Of course! It must be my best friend in England, my former flatmate Lucy. It's just the kind of thing she would do, and as she doesn't call me more than once a year, she could've easily not known the proper country code offhand. I fire off an email and leave a voicemail, but it's radio silence for a few weeks. Then last week comes a long letter from her, with the postcript:

"What business cards? I don't have any idea what you're talking about."

...
...
...

What. the. hell.

Goosebumps, people, goosebumps.