It was clear from the beginning that Anita May and I were opposites. She wore vibrant, poofy dresses decorated with lace; I wore overalls and stained t-shirts. Her parents drove a top-of-the-line Mercedes; mine drove a mid-80s station wagon with an engine problem and a top speed of 40 miles per hour. But the biggest difference between the two of us that I could see was our toys. She had enough toys to fill a toy store—dolls, games, dress-up clothes. She even had a Nintendo console, which I dreamt about for six months straight after the one time she let me play it. My toys—hand-me-down Barbies, jump ropes, puzzles with missing pieces—paled in comparison to anything Anita May had to play with.

Anita May and I were never friends. We never had sleepovers, we never shared clothes, we never sat together during lunch at school. Even at the age of eight we were aware of our living in separate worlds, the richer world and the poorer one. But there were times, when we lived next door to one another, that our parents would insist on our playing together—usually when one set of parents wanted some peace and quiet to themselves—and we would be forced to get along in a friend-like fashion for a matter of hours. Most of these times we were successful, but one occasion turned into a disaster.

We had spent the day watching Disney movies and eating fudgesicles out of bowls so we wouldn’t drip chocolate on her parents’ cushy suede sofa. When the credits for Sleeping Beauty began to roll, Anita May suggested we go upstairs and dress up like princesses. In her room, she began pulling large plastic tubs from underneath her bed—tubs filled with dresses, shoes, necklaces, and tiaras. As she began to sift through the contents of one of the tubs, she turned her head toward me where I sat on the floor.

“You know, we can do makeup too,” she said with a somewhat mischievous smile.

My face brightened at the thought; my own mother never even wore makeup, so imagining myself with rosy cheeks and bubblegum pink lips made my stomach churn with excitement. Anita May pointed to her closet door and said, “It’s in a box on the top shelf,” and while she sorted through her accessories I slid her desk chair to the closet so I could boost myself up and rummage around for the box of makeup.

On the top shelf sat four boxes. Two of the boxes were decorated with pictures displaying the contents hidden inside. One, a building block set; the other, plastic food items for a children’s play kitchen. The other two boxes were cardboard, the same size, and one of them was sure to hold the makeup of which Anita May spoke. I pushed one of the boxes to test its weight and, after establishing that it was not heavy, I slid it off the shelf and opened the cardboard flaps to peek inside.

What I found in the box was not a stash of makeup, but two sachets filled with scraps of paper. They weren’t just scraps of paper, however; the paper was thick, expensive cardstock with vibrant ink and smooth edges, and each piece was decorated with a picture. Some were beautiful women who looked like princesses themselves; some were hats, shoes, purses, articles of clothing. There were hundreds of them in each sachet.

I turned to Anita May, who was busy untangling a heap of beaded necklaces, and held up one of the sachets. “What are these?” I asked.

She eyed the sachet and responded, “Those are my paper dolls,” with a shrug like they were about as exciting as her toothbrush.

“What are paper dolls?” I inquired. Her nonchalance about them made me feel silly for asking, but I had never before seen anything like them.

“They’re like dolls, but they’re made out of paper. You can put different clothes on ‘em and stuff,” she said with another shrug. Anita May always shrugged when she didn’t care about something, like the time I asked if she wanted to look at my photo albums or when I asked her if she liked my new haircut.

I put the makeup on hold and climbed down from the chair to sift through the sachets. I counted fifteen different dolls and I could only imagine how many shirts and dresses and jackets the sachets held. I began to assemble outfits for the dolls: a green sweater with a brown plaid skirt, a crimson dress with a black feather shawl, a yellow tank top with black polka-dot capri pants. I became so engrossed in what I was doing that I didn’t notice when Anita May approached me with an armload of frilly, glittery dresses.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

She was frowning. I immediately gathered the scraps I’d assembled and shoved them back in the sachets. “Nothing,” I replied.

“Samantha, those are so boring,” she stated with a laugh. “I never play with them.”

I fiddled with the clasp on the sachet. I didn’t think there was anything boring about them; had Anita May disappeared from the room I could have created clothing ensembles all day long. Despite how I felt, the fact that Anita May so obviously disliked them made me feel foolish and I pushed the sachets aside and retrieved the box of makeup from the closet.

Playing dress-up had become exhausting. I was changing my dress for the eighth time, my shoes for the third, and I had nine plastic necklaces draped around my neck. I looked like an actress working a movie set, but I felt like an eight-year-old who badly needed a nap.

“What’s wrong?” asked Anita May. “You’re not getting bored, are you?”

She was struggling with the zipper on the back of her dress. I was slumped over the edge of her bed, praying for my parents to return from their friend’s house so I could go back home. I still yearned to play with Anita May’s paper dolls; I continuously eyed the sachets that remained resting in a box on her floor.

“Why don’t you like those paper dolls?” I asked her.

She had succeeded in zipping up her dress and was now removing the plastic rings from each of her fingers. “Because,” she stated with a whine in her voice, “they’re lame. I forgot I even had them until you found them.”

“If you don’t like them you can let me borrow ‘em,” I suggested. “I’ll take really good care of them.”

Anita May giggled as if I’d told her a joke. “Yeah right, Samantha. I know what your house is like.”

“But you don’t even like them!” I argued.

Anita May threw her arms up in frustration. I imagine she inherited the trait from her parents, just like she inherited their love for wearing dead animal furs and skins, and their ability to eat caviar without gagging. Then she said, “That doesn’t mean I’m going to let you take them to your house. You’ll ruin them!”

Annoyed, I removed my princess attire and sat in the corner of the room like a child who was being punished. I remained there for half an hour until my parents returned, and neither Anita May nor I spoke another word during the rest of my stay.

It wasn’t until later that night that I realized I was missing my Looney Tunes watch; I’d removed it when Anita May complained it was too “un-princessy,” and it was still sitting on the top of her dresser. Though it was close to my bedtime, my parents gave me permission to walk over to Anita May’s to retrieve my watch.

At her house, Anita May led me up the stairs; she was still wearing dress-up clothes. When we entered her room, it remained littered with dresses and faux jewelry, and the sachets filled with paper dolls had still not been put away. Anita May handed me my watch, but not before tinkering with a button on the side and complaining, “This is so ugly, I can’t believe you wear it.”

After enduring her insults for an entire day, my tolerance finally shattered and I stuffed the watch in my pocket rather than fastening it around my wrist. I strutted over to where the paper dolls rested on the ground and, after contemplating for a long moment, I snatched them up and ran into the hallway, down the stairs, and out the front door.

I intended to run home as quickly as possible, but I hadn’t anticipated Anita May would come sprinting after me. After all, she’d made it clear she cared very little about the paper dolls—why, then, was she chasing me as if I’d taken hostage Snow White herself?

I formulated a plan in my head to run through a series of alleyways until I circled back home, in the hopes I could lose Anita May somewhere along the way. But she stayed hot on my trail, shouting things like, “You dirty, geeky little thief!” and, “My mom will tell your mom and you’ll never be allowed in my house again!”

Watching the last hue of daylight fade from the darkening sky, I decided it was time to make a more extreme decision. I knew at that point I would not make it home with the collection of paper dolls—that much was clear to me. But when I recalled Anita May’s words from earlier that day—words about the paper dolls, about my watch, about my being dirty and geeky—I knew I wouldn’t sleep at night knowing she would make fun of them while they sat, untouched and ignored, in her closet.

My legs became rubbery as my feet began to throb, and I ran just far enough to make it to the canal running along the back of our neighborhood. I slowed my pace as I approached the small plywood bridge that crossed the canal, and just as Anita May caught up to me I raised the sachets above my head and chucked them in the murky water.

Anita May came to a halt just before the bridge as she stared blankly at the limp, brown packets bobbing along the water’s surface. One of them came open and began to leak out pieces, shoes and furs and belts and clothes floating in the water like tiny paper boats. I faced Anita May and searched for emotion in her face—after the chase she put up, I expected tears or reddened cheeks, something to hint at how upset she was. Instead, she stood still and calm like a statue, her eyes glued to the sachets and their contents gliding downstream.

I, however, began to whimper as I watched the paper dolls and paper clothes washing up on the side of the canal where they became hidden by clusters of weeds. I didn’t look at Anita May as I said, “Why did you chase after me if you didn’t even care about them?”

Anita May bent over the edge of the canal and removed one of the dolls, whose soggy body split in half as Anita May tried to shake it dry. She stared at it silently before answering, “My grandmother gave them to me. I only met her once. She died when I was four.” And, still holding the two halves of the doll she’d retrieved from the water, she turned around and began to walk home.

Sure, Anita May and I had never really gotten along, and I did think she was spoiled and selfish. But as I watched her walk away and as I recalled the sadness—an authentic, solemn emotion—in her voice, guilt infected my body and made my stomach churn, and I vomited into the dirt along the canal. I began frantically scaling the edge of the water, pulling out paper scraps as I found them and piling them as neatly as I could in my hand. I did this all the way down the edge of the canal until I caught up with the floating sachets. They weren’t quite in the middle of the canal, but they weren’t near enough the edge that I could rescue them from where I stood. I found a long twig on the ground and extended it toward one of the packets, pulling it toward me until it was close enough to reach. I did this with the other sachet, and once they were both secured I opened them to see what damage had been done.

The pieces inside the one that had come open were sopped, but what I had feared the most was that the ink would run. It had not, and I hoped that once they dried they would not be as ruined as I was imagining they would be. The contents of the other sachet, the one that had remained closed, were wet in places and dry in others, and this gave me hope that at least part of the collection surely would be salvageable.

With my arms full of wet paper dolls, I ambled away but I did not head straight home. Instead, I nervously approached the front door of Anita May’s house and, swallowing to ease the second wave of nausea that came over me, I rang the bell.

Anita May’s mother answered the door and instantly I knew Anita May had told on me (how could she not have?). It wasn’t the look on her face that gave it away—it was the sight of my parents sitting on the sofa in the living room, disappointedly frowning the same way they did when I socked Marty Jenkins in the face for calling me “Cootie-Breath” in the first grade.

Arms shaking, I handed the sachets to Anita May’s mother as my own mother appeared behind her in the doorway. “I didn’t mean to. . .I tried to gather them all. . .tell Anita May I’m sorry. . .” Though I struggled to hold it back, a torrent of tears rushed from my eyes and I bawled uncontrollably until I could no longer breathe. My mother embraced me, and my father joined her and they walked me home.

I awoke in bed the next morning; I didn’t remember falling asleep the night before. My eyes were puffy and dried snot was plastered to my cheeks. When I went downstairs, Anita May and her parents were sitting at our kitchen table with a pot of coffee and a plate of donuts. The creaking stairs summoned my parents, and there we were, two rival families in the same kitchen.

My mother spoke: “Samantha, we’re very disappointed in you. You should know better than to take what’s not rightfully yours. I’m sure you know you’ll be grounded for some time.”

I nodded, but kept my eyes on the floor. Then, Anita May’s mother’s voice: “But we also know you’re sorry for what you’ve done. I was sure of that last night, and I think the most important thing is that you learn a lesson from this.”

My parents kneeled to my level and asked why I’d stolen Anita May’s paper dolls. I did my best to explain that it was a combination of jealousy and revenge, but that I also regretted it and I knew Anita May probably hated me more than ever before.

Anita May’s father cleared his throat. “I also think we,” he said, motioning his hands toward his wife and my parents, “have not made the best effort to have a more welcoming relationship between our families. Maybe if we, I don’t know, threw barbeques together or went to the park together, you and Anita May would feel like you could actually be friends?” He was asking a question rather than making a statement, and Anita May and I both shrugged, shyly. I had never imagined a scenario—and I’m sure the same was true for Anita May—in which we were friends.

All six of us sat around the table and munched on donuts while we planned a barbeque for the following weekend. Our parents also made Anita May and I apologize to each other—me, for stealing her paper dolls, and she, for making fun of me. Then her parents dispersed back home, but Anita May lingered behind them. She turned to me and said, “The paper dolls are drying on our back porch. They’re a little wrinkled, but they’re not ruined.” And then she smiled, and I smiled back, the first genuine smiles we ever gave one another.