Paper Things

by Jennifer Richard Jacobson

  “You’re kidding!” he said, like it was impossible for anyone to like paper people better than electronic ones.

  “In the Sims,” I said, trying to get my words right, “the game decides what will happen to my families. If the Sims mom accidentally leaves the stove on, the house burns up. If a toddler falls into a pool, she drowns.”

  Nate stopped clicking and looked at me.

  “I don’t want to see that Grim Reaper guy,” I added.

  “Oh.” He nodded, and I could tell he was thinking so much more than he was saying. “Good enough.” He went back to playing his game, which was loud and full of violence. The very thing I don’t like about video games is probably what makes them exciting for him.

  Ever since then, I’ve avoided playing Paper Things when Nate or Cody is around unless I’m allowed to go into Chloe’s room and close the door, which is rare. Now, though, I spread out my Paper Things on both the floor and Chloe’s bed. My house has grown over the years. There are two living rooms and a playroom on the first floor, and five bedrooms on the second floor. Four of the kids share rooms, but my teenagers have their own rooms, and so does Nicky, who is the cutest little baby boy that I found in a Target catalog a few months ago.

  When I first started playing Paper Things, Sasha raised her eyebrows at my family. My mom and Miles were white, my dad was Asian, and Natalie was African American. I’d just shrugged. “Not all families look the same,” I’d said, and that seemed to satisfy her.

  Before long, I’m lost in my world of Paper Things. My paper mom and dad are taking Miles and Natalie to the park, where they will meet up with their friends. Miles runs ahead to get a swing but trips and falls. Dad picks up Miles and carries him on his shoulders.

  There are lots of voices in the other room, and I wonder if Gage and Chloe have returned from the Wash Tub. There’s also loud music, and I pretend it’s coming from one of my teenagers’ rooms. “Turn it down, please,” my mom says. (If it were Janna, she’d threaten to take the iPod away for a week, which is what she did to Gage — Gage, who lives for his music.)

  I’m just about to start packing away my Paper Things and work on my outline when the door to Chloe’s room flies open.

  “Whoa! What’s going on here?” says a guy I’ve never seen before who’s about Gage’s age.

  “Careful! Don’t step on her stuff!” There’s a girl with him, and she wraps both arms around the guy’s waist to hold him in place.

  “Freaky,” the guy says, and he backs out of the room.

  “She’s probably working on a school project,” I hear the girl say. She closes the door behind her.

  I quickly pull my things together and put them back in their folder, my face warm with embarrassment. “Freaky,” the guy had said. I slide the folder into my backpack and pull out the library books. That’s when I hear my name called.

  Or at least I think I heard it. I open Chloe’s door to find that the living room is filled with kids who I’ve never met. Most of them are drinking beer, and they’re devouring a bag of Doritos. One of them offers me a handful, and I gladly accept.

  The guy who thought Paper Things was freaky pulls the girl back into Chloe’s room and shuts the door.

  “Hey, Ari,” says Nate. He pats the cracked couch cushion next to him, and I sit between him and a glassy-eyed girl who’s staring to the left of the TV.

  “Look what I found,” Nate says. He’s got his laptop, and he’s pulled up an online clothing catalog that has lots of pictures of kids.

  “They’re the wrong sizes,” I murmur, conscious of all the eyes on the screen.

  Nate grins. “Watch,” he says.

  Of course! Because the images are digital, he can make the people any size he wants, although at some point they become blurry.

  Nate and I are looking at the kids and guessing their personalities when Chloe and Gage return with garbage bags filled with clean clothes.

  Chloe’s face lights up. You can tell she’s happy to see so many friends in her apartment.

  “Hey, guys,” she says. “What’s the occasion?”

  Gage pulls her closer to him. She doesn’t notice, the way I do, that he’s tense. Annoyed.

  “Mason quit his internship today,” says a girl with a pink gem in her nose.

  “Finally,” says Chloe. She pulls away from Gage, grabs a beer out of the fridge, and hands it to him, but he shakes his head no.

  The door pushes open, and more kids flock through.

  I want Gage to look at me, I want to give him a smile, to show him that this is OK, but he’s looking at the crowd. “Get your stuff, Ari. We’re going.”

  “What?” asks Chloe. Now she’s paying attention to the creases on his face, trying to figure out what’s made him mad. She makes a good guess.

  “Ari’s not a little kid, Gage. She’s eleven. She’s OK.”

  I give him my please? face, but it doesn’t work. It hasn’t worked much since we moved out of Janna’s.

  “Go on,” he says to me. “Get your stuff.”

  “There’s someone in Chloe’s bedroom,” I whisper. I know better than to barge in on them.

  “Can you get her stuff?” Gage asks Chloe.

  “My backpack is near your desk,” I say.

  Chloe doesn’t move immediately. She just stands there and stares at Gage. Then she shrugs and tiptoes into her bedroom. I hope I grabbed all the clothes I need.

  Chloe comes back out and hands me my backpack.

  “You could come with us,” says Gage. “We could hang out at Briggs’s.”

  Chloe looks around the room. “Or we could stay here.”

  Gage takes the backpack from her and leans in for a kiss.

  Chloe turns her face, but he kisses her on the cheek just the same.

  I can hardly keep up as Gage hikes up the hill toward Briggs’s apartment. “Don’t go crabby on me, Ari,” he yells over his shoulder. “I wanted to stay at Chloe’s, too.”

  I’m not looking at him. I’m looking at the ground. It’s really cold now, and my toes are beginning to feel numb. It happens all the time, partly because my shoes keep getting wet (my boots were stolen at Lighthouse) and some of the stitching is coming out. Would Mama have been upset if I was at a teenage party? I wonder. I know Janna would’ve been. I feel like telling Gage that he’s just like Janna, but I don’t.

  When I don’t talk, Gage talks more. “Things would only have gone downhill,” he says. “Neither of us would have gotten any sleep there tonight. I have to work tomorrow, and you have to go to school.” He’s practically sprinting up the hill.

  You’re not my father! I feel like saying. But I don’t. Instead I stay invisible. At least, that’s what my silence feels like to me: I’m deep inside myself —with Gage, but not with Gage. I don’t know why this helps me to feel better, but it does.

  Gage stops to shout down the hill at me. “Even Chloe’s room had been taken over! You have homework to do tonight. You can’t do homework in the middle of a party.” He checks his cell phone and then quickly shoves it back into his pocket. No Chloe.

  That’s when it hits me: Chloe chose the party over being with Gage.

  I race to catch up to my brother, and he drapes his arm around me as we cross Congress Street. “Tell you what,” he says. “When we get to Briggs’s, I’ll help you with your school project.”

  “You will?” I picture Gage and me sitting at the little table in Briggs’s studio apartment, and it makes me feel better. Maybe I will actually have more than an outline to hand in tomorrow. Maybe I’ll get my paper completed by the April 19 due date! Maybe Mr. O. will have renewed faith in me, one of his supposedly gifted students.

  It’s not until we’ve actually reached Briggs’s apartment in the West End and are letting ourselves inside with Gage’s key that I remember.

  I left the library books. The books we took out tonight. The books I absolutely need for my outline. Those books are about a mile away, sitting on the desk in Chloe’s room.
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  Briggs is assistant manager at the One Stop Party Shop, and his apartment is decorated with alligator party lights, smiley-face rugs, and dinosaur piñatas. It’s a one-of-a-kind, coolio place. So staying at Briggs’s apartment isn’t that bad. That is, if you ignore the facts that it’s on the opposite side of town from Eastland Elementary, has the grimiest, hairiest bathtub on the planet, and is a studio apartment — which means everything is crammed together into one tiny room — so I have to sleep on the floor.

  Briggs has a matching love seat and chair. Both fold out into beds, which is très cool, but Briggs and Gage, who are longer than me, get them. I get the seat cushions they toss off when unfolding their beds. Here is an ode to the seat cushions that I wrote in Language Arts last week:

  ODE TO SEAT CUSHIONS

  Oh, seat cushions

  So quiet, so still, so nearly invisible.

  Mindless occupants

  Hurl themselves down on you

  Unnoticing

  The support you try to offer

  The comfort you give

  Your reliability.

  But in my hands,

  You are no longer reduced

  To ignored decor.

  You move from furniture to floor

  And aligned triplets

  Elongate

  Turning lack into luxury.

  You become my bed

  Shielding me from

  The foot-worn rug

  Encrusted with Cheerios

  Toenail clippings, and

  Unvacuumed dead skin.

  On you, I sink, I surrender, I sleep.

  I am pretty proud of my ode. I had revised it (You are no longer reduced / To ignored decor had been You are no longer a mere / Part of furniture), I used some pretty decent vocab words (aligned, elongate, encrusted), and I knew that the boys especially would love the part about the rug being so gross. But when Mr. O. asked for volunteers to share, I didn’t read mine. I thought of Gage and knew he’d feel bad if I told everyone that I had to sleep on a floor. And besides, I didn’t feel like answering questions.

  Maybe I’ll share it with Chloe, though, the next time we see her.

  I stay awake a long time worrying about Chloe. I don’t want her to hurt Gage the way Dominica did — Dominica, who said that Gage was too clingy. With all his heartbreaks (one father, one mother, and three girlfriends), it’s amazing he still tries to love.

  After a considerable amount of time worrying about Chloe, I switch to worrying about Sasha. I’d forgotten to call her when we got to Briggs’s. I knew she wouldn’t try calling me at Janna’s, ’cause she hates it when Janna answers the phone. (Sasha thinks that Janna doesn’t like her, but it isn’t Sasha that Janna doesn’t like — it’s Sasha’s mother. But I’m not as good at telling my friend the truth, so I’d never cleared this up.)

  And as if all that worrying hasn’t kept me awake long enough, I worry about my books, and even worse, my bibliography. What am I going to say to Mr. O. tomorrow? Will he give me a big fat F? How am I ever going to get into Carter with bad grades? And how can I tell Sasha, with all our big plans of going to Carter together, that I got an F? Holy moly.

  I guess I eventually worry myself to sleep ’cause an early-morning knock on the door wakes us up. It’s Chloe standing in the hall outside Briggs’s studio with my stack of library books. She’s holding them like they’re really heavy, and she brushes her red hair off her face like she’s put out by the journey, but she’s wearing mascara and lip gloss, and I can tell (and I’m pretty sure that Gage can, too) that she doesn’t want to leave things the way they were last night.

  I would gush a thousand words of appreciation, but instead I thank her once and get out of the way quick so Gage and Chloe can make up. They go into the hall — supposedly so they won’t wake Briggs, but I know it’s mostly so they can have privacy. OK by me. I help myself to Cheerios.

  “Who said you could eat those, runt?” Briggs says, crawling off his love-seat bed. I know he’s only kidding. Of all of Gage’s friends, Briggs is the nicest. Next year, when Briggs’s lease is up on the studio, we might try to find an apartment that all three of us can share. Then Briggs would get to live in a bigger place, and the rent would be cheaper for me and Gage.

  “Louisa May Alcott?” he asks, lifting one of the books Chloe brought me.

  “Yeah,” I say, glancing at the clock on his stove. It’s a relief to have the books back, but I know that if I’m going to get to school on time, I still won’t have an outline for Mr. O. And I can’t risk being late again; one more tardy and I’ll be assigned detention.

  “You could choose any famous American and you chose Alcott?”

  “She wasn’t just an author, you know,” I say. “She was an abolitionist and fought for women’s rights.”

  “I know. I was gifted, too, remember?” Briggs likes to remind me of this. According to Gage, Briggs got into a bunch of good colleges but went to a nearby business school to save money. He’s the first one in his family to go to college.

  Which reminds me to get the coins I’ve collected and drop them into the piggy bank Briggs gave me. It’s from One Stop Party Shop and is pink with daisies all over it. After I tap the coins in, I shake it like I always do. It’s getting heavy. When it fills up, Briggs and I will take it to the bank, where they have a coin machine that will count your coins and pay you back in dollar bills.

  “Hey,” he says after the shake. “I brought you something.” Gage and Chloe come back into the apartment just as Briggs reaches into his closet and pulls out a hat that’s shaped like an upside-down ice-cream cone. When you put it on, it looks like someone just turned a cone over on your head and the pink ice cream is running down your face. It’s very funny, and we all laugh when he plunks it on my head, but it takes me a minute to realize why Briggs brought this hat home for me.

  “We don’t have Crazy Hat Day anymore,” I say.

  “What?” Briggs and Gage say at the same time.

  “But it’s an April Fools’ tradition!” says Briggs. The first of April is coming right up.

  “Yeah, Brigster,” Gage says. “Remember when you wore that octopus hat and Mr. O. called you Calamari all day?”

  Briggs laughs. “That name stuck for months! And remember how in third grade you came to school with all your baseball caps piled up on your head? Every year after, some kid tried to beat the record by wearing more. Heck, they’re probably up to a hundred hats by now — that is, they would be if they could still do it.”

  “Mr. Chandler, our new principal, says that traditions like Snowflakes and Crazy Hat Day get in the way of learning,” I say.

  “Snowflakes?” asks Chloe.

  The three of us explain that Eastland used to have all these cool traditions. At the sign of the first snowfall, the whole school would stop what they were doing and make paper snowflakes to hang throughout the hallways. In November, we’d hang homemade cards for the teachers, thanking them for all they do for us. Then at lunch, we’d have a big potluck feast that the parents made. And on April Fools’ Day, kids wore crazy hats.

  But the best of all the traditions, the one that we won’t be doing for the very first time in the history of Eastland Elementary, is the fifth-grade campout in the library. Sasha and I had looked forward to this event for years. What could be cooler than sleeping over in the school with all of our friends and getting to see what the school is like at night, when it’s dark and quiet and almost no one else is around?

  But one of the first things Mr. Chandler did when taking over earlier this year was cancel all school traditions. We have to stay on task, our principal says. Which basically means if it isn’t on a test, we can’t do it any longer.

  “Well,” Briggs said, putting the hat back in the closet, “it’s a shame. This would have been one cool crazy hat.”

  It’s second period. I wrote up a rough sketch of an outline during homeroom and now I’m in computer lab, wondering if I can create my bibliography on the lapto
p in front of me without Ms. Finch noticing. Not an easy feat. Ms. Finch is the type of teacher who notices everything.

  We’re supposed to be exploring different sites that make word clouds. “Visual representations can be powerful,” Ms. Finch says. I make eye contact so she thinks I’m following along. “What words come to mind when I say community?”

  Paper Things, I think, but of course I don’t say it. Instead, I open a blank document, pull one of the library books onto my lap, and begin typing the title and author, hoping the desk is doing a good job of blocking me.

  Daniel, whom I’ve been determined to ignore since he dove onto the seat beside me — thereby forcing Sasha to sit on the other side of the lab — reaches over and grabs the book from my lap. I want to yell at him, but I can’t risk alerting Ms. Finch, so I settle for a glare. I think he’s just trying to get me to focus on my computer work, but instead he stretches over and starts typing on my laptop!

  I try to brush his hands away, but I see that he’s at the Port City library site and is searching for Louisa May Alcott. He clicks on the title of my book, copies the bibliographical information, and pastes it into my document. And just like that, I have all the information I need for my bibliography — with hardly any typing!

  “Daniel?” Ms. Finch asks. I freeze. Have we been caught?

  “Group, common, society,” Daniel says calmly.

  “Very good,” Ms. Finch says, and moves on.

  I let out a breath. Across the room, I catch Sasha’s gaze. She rolls her eyes, as though Daniel was being a show-off. I smile at her, but secretly I’m grateful to Daniel. Doing my bibliography this way will save me a ton of time — and is less likely to get me in trouble with Ms. Finch, since I don’t even have to take the rest of the books out of my bag. I know their titles and authors, and that’s all I need for looking them up on the library’s website.

  As the rest of the kids are typing in words (“How do you spell organization?” I hear Linnie ask Ms. Finch), I look up the information for the next book. I’m careful to type only when everyone else is typing.