Strips of Paper
by Jordan Eizenga
The teacher came to school with a box. We wanted to know what was in it, but she held it at her shoulder so we couldn’t reach it. It turned out to be little strips of paper. They were thin and long and lots of different colors. No one really cared until Marcus took a few and stapled them into a loop with a "feather" like a little inchworm and made his own headdress.
"Hey, look! I’m an Indian!" he said. Everybody wanted to be an Indian now.
At recess there would be a huge line for the stapler with all the boys in it, and when we all had our headdresses we would run around shooting fake bows and arrows and making Indian sounds. Everyone knew what Indians sounded like.
I made a headdress once with three feathers in it and Marcus said, "Hey, Indians have to do somethin’ brave to get extra feathers!" I talked to Adam the bully and put three more feathers on my headdress.
The headdresses were nice, but if you looked out at recess, every one of them would be exactly alike. None special. So I spend almost a whole recess cutting little triangle slits out of one of the strips and making a perfect feather. My headdress was the best one.
My new feathers were like candy. Everyone wanted one. People kept asking me to make one for them, so I did. I used to do a lot of favors. I made feather after feather for weeks.
Then, I realized that the headdresses weren’t that cool. They didn’t even look like headdresses. They just looked like strips of paper stapled together. I stopped making feathers.