Headphones on and head down, I was doodling in my notebook in the farthest back corner of the classroom when a large crumpled piece of paper landed on my desk. My eyes shot up and interlocked with a curly-haired boy seated diagonal to me. He wore a dark hoodie and looked at me with the whisper of a smirk on his mouth and a discernible twinkle in his eye. I looked at him tight-lipped and wide-eyed. It was the first week of school and I had yet to talk to him, nor anyone else for that matter.

Heart racing, I quickly paused my music and opened the wad of paper as discreetly as possible, cringing at the obvious sounds of its unkinking. It took me some time to decipher the chicken scratch, but I finally read:

You are dead. As you hover on the intermediate plane of existence between life and
death,waiting for something to happen, a loud voice echoes from above, to inform
you of your options. "You may reincarnate as: a rock, a sheet of paper, or a pair of
scissors. Choose wisely."

I could feel an unauthorized smile stretch across my face in amusement and my eye brows furrow in contemplation. I glanced up, expecting to lock eyes with him again, however his head bopped up and down from the presentation at the front of the classroom to the notebook under his nose, while he vigorously scribbled notes. Suddenly remembering my surroundings, I recovered my uniform look of general disinterest and covertly reread his note.

I quickly decided on paper, living an eternity as an inanimate object with no power or control would ultimately be an infinite prison sentence. Rock and scissors were solid, strong. Paper could simply wash away in water. It could disappear like it never existed. It was delicate like that. Fragile. And no one would miss it either. Reams of paper came packed in hundreds, and boxes filled with reams turned hundreds into thousands. Across the world were truckloads of boxes filled with reams - millions of different pieces of paper, and yet all the same. I liked that paper felt anonymous in its masses of indistinguishability; but what I found most comforting was that no one would fret over the loss of a single paper because there were so many others to replace it.

The bell jolted me out of my thoughts and I gathered my things into my backpack slowly, as always, to ensure I’d be the last out of the classroom. Through heavy eyelashes, I sheepishly glanced towards the curly-haired boy's desk, wondering if he had waited to hear my response, but he had already made his exit; and I was alone.

Downcast and silent, I walked out of the classroom and into a crowded hallway filled with so many of the same types of people, and I realized that there really was nothing stopping me from becoming a piece of paper.