It’s the quiet ones you have to watch.  Angelo is a perfect example of this.  The kid barely says a word, and yet he’s done more damage to the Centre in the past month than I could hope to accomplish in a year.  That time when all the pens went missing from every office on the sublevel?  Yeah, that was him.  I’m still not sure why he needed all of them, but some very strange graffiti started cropping up in the air vents and on the undersides of furniture.  And that time when the elevators mysteriously stopped working and I couldn’t get to the lab for a week?  I found some of the wiring wrapped around his wrists like bracelets.

And yet, the Centre never suspects him.  I get hauled in for questioning, but whenever someone suggests Angelo as a suspect, he just looks up at them with those big vacant eyes.  Then, whoever suggested him is laughed out of the room.  I don’t know how he does it, but I tip my hat to him.  Or, I would if I had a hat.  Maybe Angelo can get me a hat?  There seems to be no place in the Centre he can’t get to.  He brings me stuff sometimes—souvenirs from his travels.  In a pillowcase under my mattress I have a packet of ketchup from the mess, a disposable diaper from the neonatal unit, and an expensive-looking paperweight that could only have come from someone’s private office.

Angelo can get away with it because he’s so quiet and placid-looking.  Whenever I get into trouble, I tend to broadcast it.  Like a couple weeks ago when I rerouted the security system; I could have gotten away with that, but no I had to act like an idiot, laughing and spinning in my chair.  Of course Sydney caught me.  He didn’t even have to look back through the security footage; he took one look at my face and knew I was guilty.  I need to get better at controlling myself.

The best criminals are the ones who don’t realize they’re doing anything wrong.  Maybe that’s why Angelo can be so calm in the face of very annoyed sweepers.  I remember a time when I was about six—back when I still got breaks during the day.  Sydney had some paperwork to catch up on, so he took me into his office with him (where I’m sitting now, actually) and gave me an Erector set to play with.  Well, it didn’t take long for me to get bored with the Erector set and start looking for entertainment.  

Sydney had foolishly left some of his most recent paperwork piled in a cardboard box on the floor.  I found the pages and decided they would make great material for my origami.  So, for two hours Sydney sat at his desk doing paperwork, and for two hours I sat at his feet turning said paperwork into little paper birds.  He never glanced down, not even when I took the paper that he’d just finished working on from his hand and started folding it.  At the end of the day, I had “improved” about thirty pages of what turned out to be my own file!  I just think it’s a pity that after all that, Sydney went back and unfolded all the birds.  All my hard work went right down the toilet!  So now, quite a few of my old progress reports are held together with scotch tape and adorned with suspicious looking creases.  When he finally wised up, Sydney wasn’t too happy, but what could he do?  I didn’t realize I was doing anything wrong.  Yes, I was good at innocent looks back then.  It’s a skill I need to reclaim. 

Come to think of it, there’s a bird very much like the ones I used to make still in this office with me.  It’s on the top of Sydney’s bookshelf, which must be why I’ve never noticed it before.  Sydney probably bought it in a store or made it himself out of real origami paper.  Still, the more I look at it, the more it looks familiar.  Yes, there are letters and numbers on the wings in Sydney’s handwriting.  Almost as if the paper began its life as one of my old progress reports.