The little boy was not the only one at his school made of paper. There was a sweet girl with lovely ringlets of alphabet streamers, and another boy whose frequent growth spurts threatened to tear his very binding. There were the twins, both so densely freckled that it was impossible to say whether their skin was blank white and splattered with ink, or construction paper black and speckled with correction fluid. But our little boy was the only child in town whose paper body was recycled.
Once, the boy’s mother and father had a different nice little paper boy. He was athletic despite his delicate composition, and preciously affectionate. He was his parents’ pride and joy—perfect and beautiful and whole. Until the rainstorm. Now, as all parents of paper children know, water damage devastates the fibrous skin of their offspring. So as soon as they can walk, paper children are taught to carry an umbrella and are stuffed into tall rubber boots on any day the sun so much as flickers. But the athletic boy grew careless one afternoon as he played tag with his flesh-and-bone friends in the neighborhood park. He did not watch the sky as it darkened and roiled, and he did not heed his friends’ warnings as the clouds piled up like scoops of peppery ice cream.
The first drops he did not notice. He was sprinting—faster, fleeter than the clumsy, meaty bodies that pursued him. As the rain grew more insistent, he began to worry. But no, he was not afraid of a little rain, was he? He was going to win, just as he always won kickball games and footraces and schoolyard fights. Before long, the droplets were bleeding through his bloodless limbs and pushing gaps through his already crumpling layers.
By the time his parents were fetched, only a sopping puddle of scraps remained. In desperation, they collected the damp pulp and vowed to heal their son. They should not have been surprised to see him go—it was why there were so few paper men and women, really. They were just too vulnerable. Their paper casings could not be knit back up like flesh, and they had no bones to brace them against the world. And yet, these parents were determined and blind. They pressed their son’s pulpy remnants onto wire screens and tenderly trimmed the dried sheets. They pressed the pieces together, bending and creasing and rolling until a full paper boy lay on the table before them. Not an exact replica, they thought, but near enough.
When he opened his eyes, the mother saw that the new boy’s pupils were muddled and scratchy, when the first boy’s had been crisp and smooth. Despite the first boy’s youth, his skin had been worn and stretched by running, and wrinkled by laughter. It was old enough to be set in its ways and did not appreciate being forced to form different parts of the body. The new boy’s skin was angry. It was confused and sad and frustrated and unsure. No other body in the world struggled like this, and nobody could even begin to imagine the anguish that slithered through his bitter skin. The recycled boy was alone.
The other paper children teased him for his rougher skin—spread by inexperienced hands—and for the way he stuttered when his tongue remembered it ought to be fingers and kneecaps. It was the reason, you see, that no other paper child had ever been recycled. It simply didn’t work. And so the recycled boy lived meekly, flinching at his own rasping voice and shuddering as he bandaged endless rips in his rebellious skin. He tried to soothe his paper surface, penciling encouragement between his knuckles and under his chin, tiny happy words that did not make up for his loneliness. His gritty eyes could not cry, and his stiff lips could barely frown, and his parents did not care. They were too disappointed by this quiet, thoughtful, sensitive boy who was not fast, not strong, not popular, not cheerful, not right.
Not the same. When they still were.
While his brother had enjoyed being team captain, the recycled boy did not enjoy sports because he did not enjoy being picked last. Instead, he found illustration the way the ringleted girl had found poetry. (She adored the lopsided columns of printed shapes filling up the page. The way her paper palm held a haiku perfectly.) It is a curious side effect of being made of paper, it seems, to become completely enveloped and absorbed by it. While some skin people become doctors, intrigued by the revolting mysteries of their own insides, many more become dancers or carpenters or professors. But all paper people seem to end up carving their livelihoods and their pastimes out of paper. So the recycled boy began to draw.
He liked to visit the art supply store. He liked the calm, smooth, linoleum tiles and the whisper of silky brushes rattling in plastic holders. The leaves that filled the stacked sketchpads did not repulse him—those bleached and slivered hides. He was jealous of their possibility and purpose and value. That paper was wanted and bought and used and kept and protected by a shell of paint and graphite and charcoal.
He had a particular interest in color—his own body cloaked in the drab, mottled gray of dishwater. He kept booklets of colors, pages upon pages of spiral-bound rainbows. The precise pink glow of being wished a happy birthday. Soft, pale yellow like sunlight filtering through creamy kitchen curtains on a mild weekend morning. Deep gray-green peace and the relief of home after a long day.
He experimented in his color diary until he found just the right shade for his own loneliness. Mixing a pure and somber blue had frustrated him for weeks, until he realized that he did not, in fact, feel blue—he only thought he did—and he had to start over. Finally he blended the most scathing orange he could muster, a new shade of the neglected hue that no one else would ever get the chance to appreciate. Satisfied, he tucked the barely dry sheet beneath his bed before rinsing his brushes and scraping his palette clean. He switched off his lamp and crept beneath baseball-patterned blankets that could not warm a body that could not generate heat. There, motionless and soundless, he slept. He dreamed of an origami maker, a gift wrapper, a caring girl who would understand paper the way he understood paint.
In the morning, our paper boy did not wake. His recycled body lay in bed until his parents decided that he was not worth recycling again. They only tucked him into the far corner of the grimy attic, where moths burrowed into his ears and no rain would ever reach him.
