Paper Things

by Jennifer Richard Jacobson

  “I will if I have to,” Reggie says. “I can’t very well abandon this old girl,” he says, reaching down to scratch Amelia behind the ears. “But I had been looking forward to that shower and to seeing some of my buddies at the shelter.”

  The wind picks up speed, and the sleet hits my face like a million tiny pinpricks. Finally I can’t take it any longer. “Please say yes!” I shout, tugging on Gage’s arm. “Please?”

  Gage looks down at me, shrugs, and mutters, “OK, then. Thanks.”

  We follow Reggie across town to the storage units. First Reggie has to tap a code on a keypad clipped to a tall metal fence. After we go through the gate in the fence, he has to type the code into a box outside the door of a très big brick building, which looks kind of like a garage. Once we’re inside, he leads us down a brightly lit hall of shed doors until we arrive at number 26. Then he taps in another code, and the door opens to reveal . . . boxes. All I can see is a wall of boxes. Boxes that seem to go all the way up to the tall ceiling.

  I try to hide my disappointment, because I don’t want to seem ungrateful, but I think Reggie was stretching the truth quite a bit to describe this place as apartment-like. To me it just looks like a storage shed. A very crowded storage shed.

  But then Amelia leads us on a small path through the boxes — a path I hadn’t even seen. Reggie motions for us to follow her, and so we do, and lo and behold, we come out into a long, skinny room set up just like an apartment!

  Along the wall to the left is a camp cot. Next to the cot is a nightstand with a big flashlight on it, and beside that, a camouflage-print dog bed. Along the wall to the right is a long, narrow table. On the table is a plastic jug of water, a small coffeemaker, a cooking burner, and a toaster oven. Next to the table is a little refrigerator, the kind you see in back-to-school flyers advertising stuff for dorm rooms. On top of the refrigerator is a cooking pot, a cup and plate, and a pitcher full of cooking utensils. In the middle of the room sits a handsome coffee table. Right now, there’s a model airplane being built on the coffee table — a plastic one, not a paper one. Reggie sure has a thing for planes.

  A camping porta potty sits in the corner at the foot of the bed. “Like I said, it’s pretty modest.” Reggie sounds almost embarrassed.

  “It’s wonderful!” I say. Amelia wags her tail in agreement.

  Reggie blushes and takes a mattress pad from a box and places it on the floor. He also retrieves a rolled-up sleeping bag and a few quilts, which he tosses onto the cot. “You guys hungry? I’ve got corned-beef hash or tuna noodles.”

  I nod, eager to see Reggie prepare a meal in this secret house. But Gage bristles.

  “Hey, man,” Gage says. “You don’t have to feed us, too.”

  “It’s my pleasure,” says Reggie. “I’d rather eat with the two of you than some of the slobs at the shelter.” He winks at me, and I smile in return.

  While Reggie mixes up the Tuna Helper, he tells me where to dig for more dishes and cups. Mixed in among the boxes are a bicycle tire and pump, a pair of ski boots, and a plastic sled. The boxes themselves are filled with tools, pictures in frames, and candles. The candles make me think of electricity, and when I ask about it, Gage points out the outlet on the overhead light that powers this room.

  “This place is great!” I say. “How much does it cost a month?”

  “Ari,” Gage snaps.

  But Reggie doesn’t seem to mind the question. “It’s cheaper than renting an apartment,” he says, “even Section Eight. But I don’t recommend living in a storage unit if you can help it. It’s hard to live without plumbing. Besides, it’s technically against the law for me to sleep here. But it’s against the law for me to sleep in the park or at the bus station, too, so what’re you gonna do when the shelters are full?” he asks with a shrug.

  “What’s Section Eight?” I ask.

  Gage speaks up. “It’s like that apartment we saw tonight — units that are set aside for people who income-qualify.”

  I want to ask Reggie why he isn’t living in the house where all this furniture came from, but I’m worried the question is too rude, and I don’t want him to change his mind about letting us stay here.

  Instead, I polish off my Tuna Helper and pull Fran’s bicycle ad out of my backpack — along with her three dollars — and ask Reggie if he would make her an airplane, too. I tell him again about the wish I made on my plane and how it came true.

  “She’s paying me to make her a paper airplane?”

  “Yup,” I say. “But if you don’t want to —”

  “Oh, I don’t mind doing it, and the money will come in handy for dog food.” He hands me back a dollar. “This one’s for you, though,” he says. “For being my business partner.”

  I shake my head. “Oh, no. She wanted you to have it.”

  “But I wouldn’t have this job if not for you. You were the one who told your friend about the plane I gave you, and you were the one who came up with the idea of making a wishing plane.”

  I look at Gage, who nods that it’s OK. “Thanks,” I say, reluctantly taking the dollar. I can’t help remembering that Reggie needed money for Amelia and wonder how he bought the tuna and how he pays the rent for his storage unit.

  “Disability check,” says Reggie, as if he’s reading my mind. He begins to fold Fran’s plane. “I get a check each month, but it’s not enough to make it through thirty days.”

  “Were you in the service?” Gage asks.

  Reggie nods. “Air force. A pilot.”

  “Our dad was in the army,” Gage says.

  “He was killed in Afghanistan,” I say.

  Reggie nods. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “Did you lose your house because of your disability?” Gage asks.

  Now it’s my turn to shoot him a look for being too nosy.

  But again Reggie doesn’t seem to mind the question. He hands me Fran’s plane and says, “Yeah. You might say my disability led to the loss of a lot of things.” Reggie is quiet, but then he looks up and smiles. “But I’m luckier than a lot of folks, and you can be sure I’m grateful for all that I’ve got — like new friends.” He raises his cup of water to us.

  “To new friends,” Gage and I say together.

  After dinner, Reggie takes Amelia for a short walk and then says he’ll be leaving for the shelter now but that he’ll be back in the morning to pick up his girl.

  He shows us how to keep the door locked from the inside, and then gives Gage the security codes to put in his phone, cautioning us not to leave without them.

  After Reggie leaves, I call dibs on the mattress pad so I can cuddle with Amelia all night. There’s no better feeling than looking into a dog’s eyes. It’s like they fetch all the love you can possibly throw out and then they give it back to you. That, and they seem to know all your secrets.

  “Can we get a dog?” I ask. “When we get an apartment? It doesn’t have to be a big dog like Amelia; it can be small like Leroy.”

  “No way,” says Gage. “You heard Reggie. Dog food is expensive . . . and dogs need licenses and shots and a bunch of other stuff, too.”

  “But I’m collecting change —”

  “Do you have homework tonight?” Gage interrupts. I can tell that he’s tired and not in any mood to argue.

  I do, but I lie. I’m tired, too. Too tired to work on my report, too tired to do my math, too tired even to play Paper Things. Besides, I’ve started rubbing Amelia’s belly, and now she won’t let me stop.

  Gage turns out the light, and as I lie back on the mattress pad, I remember that I don’t have a clean shirt in my backpack. My already-dirty shirt probably smells even worse after all the running around we did today. I guess that’s another downside of living in a storage unit — no washing machine.

  “No clean shirt tomorrow,” I whisper to Amelia in the dark. It’s just one more secret to her.

  “You can wear the white one Briggs loaned me,” Gage says, apparently still awake. “The one I
wore to my interview.”

  “It’ll be huge!” I say.

  “It won’t be that big. Wear it under your Tigers vest. It will look cute,” he says. “I promise.”

  What choice do I really have? I can’t very well wear a smelly shirt to school again, not after all the nasty comments Sasha and Linnie made last time. Though I’m sure I’ll get an earful about how silly I look wearing a man’s shirt.

  Sometimes there’s just no winning, I think at Amelia, rubbing her belly till my eyes drift shut.

  Gage’s new phone rings at some ridiculously early hour — or at least I think it’s a ridiculously early hour; who can tell when you’re sleeping in a box without windows?

  “Who?” growls Gage into the phone.

  I think it’s a wrong number, but then he hands the phone to me.

  “Hello?”

  It’s Daniel. “Have you looked outside?”

  “No, I —”

  “It’s snowing!”

  In Maine, snow in April, especially at the beginning of the month, is no big deal. I remember one time we got snow in June. So it takes me a moment or two to realize what he’s suggesting.

  “Will we be ready?” I ask. “I made some snowflakes yesterday at Head Start, but probably only fifty or so.”

  “That’s perfect! I made a bunch last night, too. I think we must have known snow was coming!”

  “Yeah, I guess so,” I say, though really, I was just happy to have a new activity to share with the Starters.

  “Can you meet me at the school in half an hour?” Daniel says. “That should give us plenty of time to set things up.”

  “What time is it, anyway?” I ask, glancing at Gage, who is moaning under his pillow.

  “Six. Let’s hope the building opens this early, or we’re sunk.”

  Gage isn’t too keen on letting me leave the warehouse without him — though it’s far too early for him to show up at work. He offers to walk me to the bus stop, but I remind him that we can’t leave Amelia alone in the storage unit (if she barked or howled, she’d be discovered and taken away from Reggie — and he’d probably lose the storage unit, too), and Reggie might be really upset if he got back and not only were we gone but so was his dog. “Besides,” I add, “I’m eleven. That’s old enough to walk to the bus stop by myself.”

  I can tell that Gage wants to argue some more, but eventually he gives me Briggs’s big white shirt to wear and lets me go.

  Daniel is standing outside Eastland when I arrive. My feet are soaked, but I’m too nervous to mind. “Did you bring tape?” I ask him.

  “Of course,” he says. Thankfully, he doesn’t ask me why I didn’t bring any.

  Daniel strides up to the front door and gives it a confident tug. But nothing happens. He frowns and tries again.

  “Locked!” he says, like he can’t believe the door wouldn’t be open at six thirty in the morning.

  “What now?” I ask, stamping my feet to try to warm them.

  Daniel looks around and then smiles. “Tracks!” he says, pointing to large footprints in the snow — footprints that definitely don’t belong to either of us. We follow them with our eyes from the front door back up the walkway and to the parking lot, where the janitor’s car is parked. A thin layer of snow dusts the windshield, though the hood is clear — probably because it’s still warm.

  “Come on,” Daniel says, walking around the building. “She’s gotta be in here somewhere!”

  Sure enough, we see someone vacuuming in one of the third-grade rooms. We rap on the window and the vacuuming stops.

  As the figure approaches, I see that it’s not Mrs. Hurley, the janitor, but Yan, her helper. I wonder if he walked to the school or if he and Mrs. Hurley carpooled. Anyway, he frowns when he sees us and motions for us to go back around the corner to the nearest door.

  He opens the door just a crack, his frown deepening. It’s clear that he doesn’t really want to let us in. My stomach ties a knot or two.

  “Eastland tradition,” says Daniel, as if he’s twenty and not eleven. “We’ve got to hang up snowflakes today.”

  Yan has only worked for Mrs. Hurley for a few months, so I’m not sure what he makes of this talk of tradition and snowflakes, but he slowly steps aside to let us pass.

  “Be good!” he calls as we tear down the hall toward the front office.

  Being in the school when no one else is here is both really cool and very eerie. Now more than ever I feel like a ghost — though a ghost with a friend this time. I think of the things we could get away with right now: sneaking into the teachers’ lounge, rearranging desks in classrooms, hanging safety posters upside down. If I wasn’t trying so hard to get into Carter, I might suggest some of these things to Daniel.

  I wonder if this is what it’s like for kids like Linnie, who don’t have to worry about being good all the time, because they don’t care about getting into Carter. Is life a lot more relaxing and fun when you don’t have to try so hard?

  Daniel quickly surveys the window outside the front office. “Help me pull this bench over and we can begin up high.”

  Before you know it, the front hall of our school has been blitzed with snowflakes. Just like old times, snowflakes appear to float from the ceiling to the floor in the main hall. It looks amazing, and I can’t wait for everyone to see it, especially Sasha.

  “We’ve still got an hour before school starts,” Daniel says. “Want to make more?”

  “Snowflakes?” I ask stupidly. “Where would we put them?” The walls and windows of the main hall are practically filled with flakes already.

  “Anywhere!” Daniel says.

  His enthusiasm is catching. “We could put some in Mr. O.’s room,” I suggest. “He always liked the snowflake tradition. And maybe in the cafeteria, too.”

  We head down to the art room for scissors and raid the recycling bins for paper. “Don’t be too particular about these,” Daniel says as we start folding and cutting at the large art room table. “It’s the overall effect we want.” So we mass-produce the easiest snowflakes we can. They’re not very fancy, but we’ve learned to cut more than one at a time, and soon they’re piling up.

  We finish decorating Mr. O.’s room in record time and move on to the cafeteria. We can hear movement now in the hallways — teachers and students arriving — and we start taping even faster than before. At one point we’re almost caught, when Ms. Finch walks by the doors, but we duck behind the tables and she doesn’t see us.

  Ten minutes before the bell is supposed to ring, we head to the hall where our lockers are located, acting like we’ve just arrived. But my stomach is jumping like it’s Christmas morning.

  The school looks amazing. I can’t believe that we were able to hang so many dazzling snowflakes, that in less than two hours we created this wintry magic. Sasha approaches me with Keisha at her side. I wonder where Linnie is. Has Sasha ditched her, too, and moved on to Keisha?

  I hold my breath, waiting to hear what Sasha has to say. Will she know that the snowflakes were my doing? It’s weird to keep such a big secret from my best friend — or maybe my former best friend.

  To my surprise, Keisha grabs my arm. “Hey, Ari,” she says. “That shirt looks really cool. Doesn’t it, Sasha? Where’d you get it?”

  At first I worry that she’s making fun of me. Briggs’s shirt was just as big as I’d feared it would be, though I’d worn it under my vest as Gage had suggested and rolled up the sleeves. Maybe the look was pretty cool. “I borrowed it from a friend,” I say mysteriously.

  “Cool,” Keisha says again. Sasha just gives me a wide-eyed look.

  I smile and turn to head into math. I decide to keep my secrets just a little bit longer.

  I’m in my seat, trying madly to complete last night’s math homework before the bell rings, while still listening to the reactions to the snowflakes. I can’t help it.

  Most of the kids are guessing that adults did it — either the PTO or the basketball boosters or something.r />
  Some kids are a little grouchy about it. “It was fun when we got to do the snowflakes,” they complain.

  Their reactions make me realize that we probably should have involved more kids from the beginning.

  Class is just about to begin when Mr. Chandler’s voice comes over the loudspeaker. “Would the young man and the young lady who decided to enter the school unlawfully this morning and, further, deface school property come to the office immediately.”

  Unlawfully? Deface?

  I glance at Daniel. Neither of us moves.

  A few minutes later, Mr. Chandler’s voice comes over the loudspeaker again. “Would Daniel Huber and Arianna Hazard please come to the office?”

  My wobbly knees are not to be trusted, but I stand up. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Daniel doing the same. The kids around us are shocked. “Ari?” I hear Sasha gasp, and I don’t dare look at her. Daniel and I grab our backpacks and head for the door.

  “How does he know it’s us?” I ask as soon as we’re in the hall. “I didn’t think Yan even knew who we were.”

  “There’s probably a security camera,” says Daniel. “I can’t believe I didn’t think of it.”

  “What do you think is going to happen?” My stomach is back to doing flip-flops, and that’s when I remember that I didn’t have any breakfast this morning. I didn’t pack a lunch, either. Not that I can imagine eating a thing.

  “I don’t know,” says Daniel. “But think about what you’re going to say to Mr. Chandler. Why are Eastland traditions important?”

  I try to think of this like an essay for Carter. If I had to explain why I wanted to reinstate the traditions at Eastland Elementary, what would I say? Maybe something about how traditions give us a sense of belonging, that doing the same activities each year, the very same activities that our older siblings or even our parents did, makes us feel like we’re all one big family. And events like the fifth-grade campout give us something to look forward to as we grow older.