Paper Things (4 page)

I remember the first time I played Paper Things at Chloe’s place. I thought I was hidden in my little spot behind the couch, but Nate must have seen what I was up to, because he said, “You know, Ari, there’s a dollhouse video game you could play.”

“The Sims?” I asked. Janna wouldn’t let us have video games, but I’d played the Sims at Linnie’s house back when she was still my friend as well as Sasha’s.

“Yeah, look,” he’d said, pulling up a demo. Nate was so excited about showing me the game that for a moment I thought I should pretend that I’d never seen it before. But then I decided he would be just as happy to go back to his own game, so I said, “I don’t like the Sims as much as my own Paper Things,” which is true.

“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.

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:

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.