A short story by Heidi Dischler

Marley Evans isn’t like other girls. Her mother treats her like a fragile, thin doll who is just waiting for the moment when she breaks, but Marley isn’t a doll—at least not in the fine china sense. She is made of paper. 

Of course, being young and naïve, it had never occurred to Marley that she was any different, and, for a while, no one treated her as if she were. Marley was completely ordinary for the time being. It wasn’t until fifth grade that she started to notice a difference. 

It was a Monday when things started falling apart—literally. An unexpected rainstorm fell upon her sleepy town. Marley’s silver-spun hair rustled around her sharp-cornered shoulders. Her face was pristine that morning, Marley having spent a good part of the early hours applying it. That’s what all of her friends were doing now: applying new faces. 

She knew as soon as she arrived at school that it was going to rain. She hadn’t realized, though, what the rain would mean for her. 

Marley was walking up the cement pathway to the doors of her school when it had started pouring. While other kids ran from the rain, Marley could not. The rain seemed to make her slower, soggy even. 

“Help!” she had cried to her friends, but none of them came to her aid. 

“Look,” they laughed, “Marley finally realizes what a freak she is.” 

Her paper-white skin and frail body had never felt so heavy. Her mother had showed up at that exact moment and saw where her daughter was crumbling. 

When her mother finally got Marley into the vehicle, Marley was falling apart. Her arm had a tear in it that she stared at until they got home. It didn’t hurt, but she thought that even if she could feel it, it wouldn’t feel as bad as what those kids, her friends, had said to her. 

When Marley was dried, her mother gingerly took tape and pieced her daughter back together. The tears were fixed, but the damage was still there, able to be seen by anyone who dared to glance at her. 

“Why am I not like the other kids?” Marley had cried that night. “Why can’t I be ordinary?”

“Ordinary is nothing to be proud of, Marley,” whispered her mother. 

It was several years later when Marley was in high school that the tears and the tape couldn’t hide how she felt.

Marley tried to ignore the comments, the whispers, the stares, and the hostility, but no matter how hard she tried, the people still got to her. It was the fact that she was different that made her a target. Her once-white paper became filled with dirty remarks, smudges from her attempts to apply her face, and the anger that others would throw at her. What was once white seemed to become shades of gray. The only thing that kept her paper from being thrown away was her uncanny ability to dance. She pirouetted, soared, and twirled across her high school’s stage. It was the only thing that brought her even a speckle of joy. It made her feel real.  

“Oh, look,” her classmates would say, “the freak wants to be a ballerina.”

Marley would wipe at the invisible tears, smudging her face even more. 

Her classmates would continue to insult and degrade her. Some would even go as far as to smear gum into her papery arms. 

“Isn’t that where gum goes? The trash?” They would bark with laughter. She would feel the prickling sensation of another rip on her skin. 

Marley began to carry tape with her at all times. It was something that was more common than not for Marley to tape a piece of herself back together. After all, her classmates’ anger and hatred only led to more tears. 

Marley’s mother could see the pain all over her daughter’s face and skin, but there wasn’t anything that she could do to fix it. She couldn’t protect Marley from the inevitable evil that lurks within the world. 

Senior year of high school came with even more changes to Marley’s life. She became something of a sight. A reporter had found Marley in the school auditorium, dancing during her lunch period. A few days later, an article appeared in the paper and on the internet. “Paper Doll Dances in Local High School,” it read. At first, Marley was terrified. Journalists from all over the world heard about her and didn’t think twice before visiting her small and sleepy town. They all wanted to see her dance, but she couldn’t perform in front of all of these people. 

So, she hid and danced more than she had ever danced before, trying to outrun the world and their disapproving stares. There, hiding from the reporters, is where she met a man who appeared to be everything that he was not. He charmed Marley, made her swoon with his fake repertoire of smiles, kindness, and charisma. He made Marley believe that the world would not judge her, that the world would accept her for who she is. Whether or not they would have, Marley would never know because this man full of cruel tricks made her a spectacle. He made her an exhibition that when people paid to see her, they didn’t want to see how talented of a dancer she was, they didn’t want to see her glide gracefully across a stage. They wanted to stare. They wanted to look and whisper and marvel over how odd she was, how different she was. 

Once Marley had left her mother, once she had dropped everything and followed this stranger of a man, she had nowhere else to go. She was forced to be what she had never wanted. She was forced to be a freak. 

Her paper-white skin was now dull, gray, and stained. Marley had blackened mounds of gum stuck to her skin. Her silver-spun hair was bristly and knotted. 

The man who had taken her in would paint her white, cover her tape and tears, apply her face expertly, but it did nothing to stop Marley from looking at herself when all of it wore off at night. She was a dancer. She had danced in front of hundreds, maybe even thousands, of people. Hadn’t this been what she wanted? Wasn’t this her dream? 

Marley Evans isn’t like other girls. Her mother used to treat her like a fragile, thin doll and even if that wasn’t true in the beginning, that is what she had become. 

On a particularly gray, overcast day, Marley felt as if she couldn’t go on. She laced her ballet shoes after making sure that she was painted white and walked onto the stage. Marley looked at the faces of the crowd, all expectant, all wanting to see the paper doll. So, she danced. She danced until the white paint and the tape couldn’t hold her together any longer. Marley’s leg ripped, and it was a tear that was worse than any she had ever had. The crowd booed and yelled at her to continue, but couldn’t they see that she was hurt? Couldn’t they see that she could not go on? 

In the crowd, Marley could see the faces of her classmates. She could see them whispering to her, telling her that she is a freak. But, of course, it wasn’t them. She had left them behind long ago. Instead, it was the faces of random people: People she had never met, people who didn’t know her, people who she had done nothing to. It made it that much worse that they hated her. They continued to boo and began throwing things at her on the stage, but she was unable to move. As if it would be a fun joke, a boy in the first row opened his lighter and wanted to test if this girl was really made of paper. 

Once the flames had lit her skin, no amount of tape or paint could make her look the way she did as a child. Marley screamed out in agony and it was then, and only then, that the crowd stopped and fell completely silent. It was then that they realized what they had done to a girl who felt, who loved, and who was alive, but happened to be different from everyone else. It was then that Marley Evans turned to ash. 

It was silent on that overcast day as the crowd slowly filed out of the theatre. A few people shed tears for the shame that they felt in their hearts. 

A few days later, an article was released about Marley Evans. It was titled, “Marley: A Paper Girl.” Written in this article was a poem: