Paper Things (2 page)

I force myself to pay attention — to listen to Mr. O. talking about the poor imaginary bookseller who has bought a ton of books, but now nobody wants them.

I wish I hadn’t laughed in Mr. O.’s class, I wish I hadn’t been caught by Mr. Chandler, I wish I could be seen as shiny once again.

Sasha is waiting for me on the corner of Walnut and Washington, still wearing her patrol leader vest over her red puffy coat. Today, her so-blond-it’s-nearly-white hair is pulled back in a bun, like she has a ballet recital or something. All day, girls have been saying, “I like your hair, Sasha.” No one has complimented me on my hair in weeks. Janna was the one who could do the French braids and cool updos, not me. And definitely not Gage.

“Patrolling is so much fun, Ari!” She’s bouncing up and down like Leroy, the little terrier we had when Mama was still alive — four years ago now. I can remember Leroy’s funny little face more than I can Mama’s, which makes me feel terrible. Gage says that I shouldn’t feel bad, that memories are strange that way . . . and besides, most people remember from pictures. We don’t have many.

“Were you on walker patrol or bus stop?” I ask Sasha.

“Walker!”

“Wow! Really?” I was expecting Sasha to say bus stop. On bus stop patrol, you tell each line when it can board and help the little ones climb the steps. But on walker patrol, you have to gauge traffic and direct kids to cross at the precise moment.

“Did you have to determine the safe gap?” I ask. The safe gap is the time it takes for a car to get from the intersection to the crosswalk.

“Yup. But there are lots of other responsibilities, too,” she says. “Like reminding bike riders to walk their bikes across the street.”

I nod, but I also keep my eyes peeled to the sidewalk for pennies. People don’t bother to stoop down and pick up the pennies they drop. You’d be surprised how a few pennies can start to add up.

We’re on our way to Head Start, where I help out after school. West told me about the job; he knew I was looking for leadership roles and said the teachers at Head Start could really use my help. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that the only leadership roles Carter was interested in were the ones our teachers assigned us. Besides, the job sounded interesting — and it gave me access to lots of free catalogs!

“Wait till you see the kinders,” Sasha says. “They are so sweet!”

I’ve never heard her call kindergarteners that before. Maybe that’s patrol leader talk. To tell you the truth, I never thought Sasha would be patrol leader before me. For the millionth time, I wonder if things would have been different if I’d stayed with Janna.

I nod. “Like the Starters,” I say, trying out this new lingo. “They’re cute.”

“Sasha Skinny!” we hear Linnie yelling as she races down the hill toward us. She lives right here on Boyd Street. She stops fast, like she’s on the basketball court and just caught a pass.

“Sasha Skinny!” Linnie says again. “I
cannot
believe you are safety patrol leader!”

Leave it to Linnie to insult Sasha while pretending to compliment her. Who better than Sasha to be patrol leader? (Never mind that just moments ago I was thinking how surprised I was that Sasha was chosen before me.)

Sasha pulls the vest off as if she were caught at the end of a first day of school still wearing a name tag with the Eastland Tigers on it.

“Ari should have been patrol leader,” says Sasha quietly. “I’m sure she’ll be next.”

“Ari?” says Linnie, looking at me for the first time since she caught up with us. She singsongs, “I don’t think so,” then laughs.

“What’s so funny?” I say. I know that Linnie isn’t laughing because she’s jealous; she doesn’t want to be patrol leader. She didn’t even bother to sign the interest form, since she already knows that she’s going to Saint Anthony’s next year. “I’ll be patrol leader next. You’ll see!” I look to Sasha to defend me.

“She will,” Sasha murmurs. But instead of staring Linnie down, Sasha’s looking at the ground.

That’s when I realize that Sasha’s just being nice. She’s no longer sure I’ll be chosen. Or maybe she’s no longer sure I
should
be chosen.

“I’ll call you tonight,” I say, and walk away.

As soon as I go through the door of Head Start, Omar looks up. He leaves his spot at the water table and barrels into me the way little kids do, wrapping his arms around my legs, the water from his hands seeping into the back of my pants. The happy sound he makes is a cross between a fire truck siren and a guinea pig squeal. Other kids leave the centers where they’ve been playing and come trap me in a kid cocoon. None of them worships me quite as much as Omar does, but they all love to greet me in the same way.

Carol is on the other side of the room, pouring milk into little metal pitchers for snack time. “So glad you’re here!” she calls, like she always does. I look around the room for Fran, but I don’t see her.

Omar, who misses nothing, points to the drama center, the area underneath the loft. Today it’s been set up to look like a grocery store. There are shelves with empty food boxes, a bin with plastic vegetables, and a toy cash register. Fran, who is so small she sometimes looks like she’s one of the helpers, has a basket on her arm and is pretending to buy groceries. She says the word
potato
over and over: “Look, here is a potato! I like potatoes. I can’t wait to get home and cook this potato. You can make French fries with potatoes.” A lot of the kids in this class don’t speak English, and that’s Fran’s way of helping them learn new words. All the teachers are big on repetition.

“Buy the po-po-tato!” says Marissa as she stands in front of the cash register, making it ring.

“Ari,” says Juju, a serious three-year-old who always wears party dresses and talks in whispers, “go look in your cubby.” Some of the kids return to what they were doing, but a small group pull on my fingers, leading me to my cubby, a painted wooden cube just like theirs. I know what I’ll find, but I’m as excited as they are.

A small pile of catalogs greets me. “Count them!” the kids shout. They count to four with me, and then, for fun, we count them all over again.

Four catalogs! Two of them are for women’s clothing, but there is the newest Pottery Barn, which will have pictures of furniture, and best of all, a Mini Boden catalog. In Mini Boden, all of the models are kids. I smile a thank-you at Carol.

“Is there a dog?” asks Omar, who, unlike the rest of the preschoolers, hasn’t run over to get his carrots and graham crackers. We take a quick peek inside one of the catalogs, and sure enough, there is a dog. I think it might be a beagle. “Six dogs!” he shouts.

I place the catalogs on the cutting table and sit with the kids at Omar’s table to have my snack. Carol has slipped me a hummus cracker sandwich. (The little kids don’t seem to notice that my snack is different. Or if they do, they don’t seem to mind.) As I take a carrot from the plate in the center of the table, I wonder if it’s time to add a new paper family to the one I’ve already cut out.

I started my first paper family when Mama got sick. She spent a lot of time in bed, with books, magazines, and catalogs lying all around her. Sometimes she’d read to me, but when she got tired, she’d close her eyes and I’d look at the catalogs. At first I was just looking at the clothing, thinking,
Wow, wish I could buy striped puddle boots or a princess dress.
But eventually I realized that the clothes were laid out like paper doll clothes. That’s how Sasha and I got the idea of cutting the people out and making paper families. (Back then, Sasha had been my downstairs neighbor, and we spent a lot of time at each other’s apartment.)

In the beginning, there were just three people in my paper family — just like in my real family: Mama, Gage, and me. I started with the kids. You would think that finding pictures of kids to cut out would be easy, that I’d have a gazillion choices, but it’s not true. Catalogs usually show only part of the model; most of the time their arms or legs have been cut off in the layout. In the first catalog I checked, which was an L.L. Bean kids’ catalog, I could find only one decent picture of a boy. He looked like he was around seven, and he was crouched, playing with a lawn sprinkler. But he would do. I cut him out and named him Miles. In that same catalog was a toddler girl with dark hair and warm brown skin. She had on a yellow dress with leggings and was cupping a toad in her hands. Best of all, she was smaller than Miles — which was good, since I wanted her to be the younger sister. I cut her out and named her Natalie. Finding their mom was much easier. Most of Mama’s catalogs were filled with women. I just had to find a mom that was about the right size: one who didn’t fill up a catalog page and wasn’t tucked in a tiny box in the corner, one who was the right proportion for my family. Luckily I found one who looked as fun-loving as my mom — before she got sick, of course.

While Sasha was choosing the people for her paper family, I decided to cut out furniture for mine. First I cut out a bed that was shaped like a boxy car for Miles. Then I found a white-lace canopy bed for Natalie. Later that day, Sasha went home and cut out furniture from her mom’s catalogs. Before you knew it, we were creating whole rooms and outdoor patios and even parks with swings and slides and monkey bars. (The Home Depot advertisements that come in the mail have the greatest play gyms.)

My apartment was best for playing Paper Things. Since Mama spent so much time in bed, we would spread our paper worlds out across the floor of the living room. I showed Sasha that if you set up near a couch or chair, you could create an upstairs in your home. Sometimes Gage would complain that he was tired of stepping around scraps of paper everywhere, but mostly he just let us be. He was fourteen and we were seven, so he was probably glad we weren’t bugging him.

I shake my head and focus on the four catalogs in front of me now. I tear out the pages that I don’t want and set them aside for the kids to cut up. After snack is skills time at Head Start, and one of the skills the older kids learn is cutting with scissors. When I told Carol about Paper Things, she asked if I would be the helper at the cutting station. At first I thought I could teach the kids to make their own paper families, but it didn’t take me long to realize that the best most of them can do is make scraps. However a few of them, like Juju, do an all right job cutting out shapes. Carol says I’m a good role model for them.

“Are you ready?” Juju asks. Omar might love me best, but Juju loves Paper Things as much as I do. She helps me throw away my napkin and paper cup and then walks me from the snack table over to the cutting station.

Omar comes, too, and reminds me to cut out the beagle for my family. My paper family has grown. Now there’s a dad (one that looks so kind and strong — one that matches my image of my own dad, who was a war hero, but who died before I was born), four more kids, and five dogs. Six with the beagle. I’ve thought of starting new families instead of continually adding on to the one I have, but part of me wishes I belonged to a big family. With a big family you’re likely to have someone watching out for you always.

“What should we call this dog?” I ask Omar.

He stops his own cutting (ripping is more like it) and looks thoughtful. “Let’s call him—”

Claire sneezes.

“Gesundheit,”
says Fran.

Omar’s eyes light up. “Let’s call him Sneeze.”