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  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Legal Page

  Book Description

  Dedication

  Trademark Acknowledgements

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Epilogue

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  About the Author

  MADE OF FOLDED PAPER

  KAI WOLDEN

  Made of Folded Paper

  ISBN # 978-1-83943-194-4

  ©Copyright Kai Wolden 2022

  Cover Art by Kelly Martin ©Copyright May 2022

  Interior text design by Claire Siemaszkiewicz

  Pride Publishing

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, places and events are from the author’s imagination and should not be confused with fact. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, events or places is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any material form, whether by printing, photocopying, scanning or otherwise without the written permission of the publisher, Pride Publishing.

  Applications should be addressed in the first instance, in writing, to Pride Publishing. Unauthorised or restricted acts in relation to this publication may result in civil proceedings and/or criminal prosecution.

  The author and illustrator have asserted their respective rights under the Copyright Designs and Patents Acts 1988 (as amended) to be identified as the author of this book and illustrator of the artwork.

  Published in 2022 by Pride Publishing, United Kingdom.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the authors’ rights. Purchase only authorised copies.

  Pride Publishing is an imprint of Totally Entwined Group Limited.

  If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book”.

  College friendships are supposed to last a lifetime… But this is a little more complicated…

  Will, a daydreamer and romantic from small-town Iowa, starts his first year at Weston Academy of the Arts, where his peers nickname him “Iowa.” Iowa becomes acquainted with a charismatic thespian named LA, who introduces him to his two best friends—Cynic, a suave and sardonic musician, and Charlie, a reserved and enigmatic writer.

  Over time, Iowa becomes increasingly fascinated with his three new friends in different ways, forming a brotherly bond with LA and a more complex connection with Cynic. Only Charlie remains distant, capturing Iowa’s intrigue most of all.

  When Iowa catches a glimpse of an alarming scar on Charlie’s chest, he becomes obsessively concerned about him. He begins to view Charlie as a fragile, tragic figure—but when he finally breaks through Charlie’s barriers, he discovers that this couldn’t be further from the truth.

  As Iowa is overcome by intensifying feelings for Charlie, the group dynamic grows tense. It turns out Charlie and Cynic have a history, and seeing Charlie and Iowa together just might be enough to drive Cynic off the rails…

  As graduation approaches, the four friends’ relationships are tested by jealousy, heartbreak and tragedy. Will love be enough to hold them together in the end?

  Dedication

  This book is for trans people, all of whom deserve to be loved.

  Trademark Acknowledgements

  The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of the following wordmarks mentioned in this work of fiction:

  Uber: Uber Technologies Inc.

  Toyota: Toyota Group

  Holden Caulfield: J. D. Salinger

  Set Fire to the Rain: Adele Adkins and Fraser T. Smith

  Mad World: Roland Orzabal

  Clamato: Keurig Dr Pepper Inc.

  Hamilton: Lin-Manuel Miranda

  BMW: Bayerische Motoren Werke AG

  Stepford: Ira Levin

  Bruce Wayne: DC Comics

  Disney World: The Walt Disney Company

  Corvette: General Motors

  Google Translate: Google LLC

  Newsies: Alan Menken, Jack Feldman and Harvey Fierstein

  A Bridge Between Us: Julie Shigekuni

  YouTube: Google LLC

  King of New York: Alan Menken and Jack Feldman

  Boys Don’t Cry: Hart-Sharp Entertainment, IFC Films, Killer Films

  Piano Man: Billy Joel

  Styrofoam: The Dow Chemical Company

  GQ: Condé Nast, Inc

  Boston Park Plaza: Sunstone Hotel Investors

  Into the Woods: Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine

  Cats: Andrew Lloyd Webber, T. S Eliot, Trevor Nunn, Richard Stilgoe

  Chapter One

  I’m not sure when I first started fictionalizing my life, casting everyone around me in glamorous roles, romanticizing their flaws and my own. Maybe it was in middle school, when life was hell and it made things so much easier to imagine that the mean kids had secret, tortured home lives—neglectful parents, dead siblings, empty cupboards, holes in the roof that let in the rain. Maybe it was in high school, when I skipped class and hid in the back of the library with a stack of books, listening to the other truants who slipped between the shelves for more sensational reasons, contriving storylines for their hurried love affairs, illicit exchanges and muffled heartbroken sobs. Maybe it was after high school, those nights working at the general store, where drunks shuffled in to buy cigarettes and pornography, where my boss told me not to accept checks from Black people, where one year off to save money for college turned into another and another while at home my father slowly died from lung cancer. Regardless, at some point along the way, I developed a fascination that bordered on fetishism for tragedy.

  I had always planned to go to college. There was never a time in those five years that I resigned myself, even for a moment, to a lifetime of working at the general store or the mill where my father had grudgingly labored for most of his life. I made excuses for putting it off year after year—money, my father’s health, my mother’s well-being after he died. She didn’t need me, but I pretended she did, pretended she needed someone to clean the leaves out of the gutters and fix the leaky pipes at the very least. I put into that drafty old clapboard house all the love I was never able to give to my father and all the love I wished I could give to my mother that she wouldn’t accept. When she told me she was selling the house and buying a condo in Des Moines, it was like she was telling me she was giving me up for adoption. I was twenty-three, but I curled up in the corner of my closet and cried like I was six. Then I crawled out, grabbed the laptop that I’d scrimped and saved for and lay on the threadbare carpet all night, researching colleges.

  I made the economical choice—I would take general classes at a community college, a respected one as far as community colleges went, that was only an hour’s drive from Des Moines. I still wasn’t ready to completely sever those arterial ties with my mother that she’d clipped as easily as an umbilical cord. After two years, I would transfer to a four-year university to complete my bachelor’s degree, though I wasn’t sure yet where I would go or what I would study. I’d only ever loved one thing—books—but there was no money in an English degree
, and I needed to make money if I ever wanted to escape Iowa for good. For those two years, in which I worked odd jobs and rented an elderly couple’s basement for almost nothing, provided I helped out around the house, I tried to muster an interest in something else—accounting, real estate, law, anything lucrative and sensible.

  But in the end, when I confessed to my guidance counselor that I’d failed, she said impatiently, “Hey, at least you love something. You know how many people live their whole lives and never find anything they love? Do what you love.” So I started applying to English programs.

  I had it in mind that I wanted to go to the East Coast—Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire or New York. I wanted to get out of the Midwest anyway, and there was something so gloomy and romantic about the East Coast in my mind (I’d never actually been there). But when I added up tuition and living expenses, I just couldn’t make it work, no matter how many financial aid packets and possible scholarships I factored in. I wasn’t a particularly impressive student on paper, though I had done well on my ACTs and written a masterful personal statement on the topic of my father’s agonizing demise. I ended up applying to eight universities across the United States, chosen for the prestige of their English programs, affordability and admittedly the aesthetic of their websites. I got three letters of acceptance, and when I laid them out on the flimsy card table in my rented basement room, it was the one with the thickest paper, the blackest ink and the most elegant sigil at the top—which contained an open book, a pen, a paintbrush and a violin—that drew my eye because I’d never seen anything so beautiful with my name on it. That was how I ended up in Michigan.

  I was a bit embarrassed to be starting college at twenty-five—and I did think of it as starting because, compared to Weston Academy of the Arts, my quaint little community college was less than nothing. During the long drive east, then north in my beat-up Toyota with everything I owned rattling around the back seat, I did something I hadn’t done in a while—made up a backstory for myself. My father’s death I would keep, but it would be a boating accident rather than cancer—much more dramatic and devastating. My mother’s estrangement I would also keep, but I would lose her to grief and a pill addiction instead of apathy and a condo in Des Moines. Iowa I would abandon entirely in favor of something a bit superior—Minnesota or Illinois, perhaps—nowhere that would require an accent or change to my mannerisms. I wouldn’t lie about my age, but I would explain it away—a gap year that got out of hand, a spree of reckless behavior after my father’s death, a soul-searching quest across South America, a whirlwind affair with a Columbian woman (I’d taken Spanish in community college). By the time I arrived, I knew my story so well it was almost as if I’d actually lived it. But I never told it to anyone.

  It turned out I’d misjudged the student population of Weston. I’d thought they would be wistful romantics like me, and they were. But the people who attended Weston were people who could have gone anywhere, but chose to slum it in Michigan because they romanticized the Midwest, small-town America and working-class, salt-of-the-earth folk like me. There was no better role I could have played than William Paine from Iowa. People called me “Iowa,” and soon enough, I dropped my name and embraced the character. I began to exaggerate certain parts of myself, the parts I could tell my peers most appreciated—my ignorance and inexperience (I didn’t know what Uber was, I’d never tried sushi, I’d never been to Europe), my wealth of practical knowledge (how to change a tire, how to sew on a button, how to fix a wobbly table), my poverty (my old flannel shirts and scuffed work boots, my battered Toyota with its cracked windshield, my job at the campus bookstore where I hauled boxes of textbooks and mopped muddy footprints from the floor).

  I played the boy next door, blond and broad-shouldered, wholesome and hard-working, bursting with Midwestern hospitality. I exuded images of green and gold cornfields, boundless blue skies, blood-red sunsets, black storm clouds and ruinous tornados. I manifested the American Gothic—William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Sherwood Anderson, Stephen Crane. I became a warped and grotesque caricature of myself, composed entirely of the qualities I had been most ashamed of and most wanted to leave behind when I started my new life. But my peers reveled in it, and I enjoyed the unfamiliar novelty of being popular, even if it was for all the wrong reasons.

  Chapter Two

  Since I had already earned my general credits, I was free of the freshmen and sophomores, who made me feel terribly old. Most of my classes were held in Swan Hall, a glassy modern structure that housed the English, Writing and Language departments. However, one of my courses, Introduction to Shakespeare, was held across campus in the grand, ancient performing arts building. I spent so much of my time surrounded by other insecure, pedantic English majors, it was intriguing to get a glimpse into the lives of the swaggering, ostentatious performing arts students. One of them, a gregarious thespian known as “LA,” took a liking to me because we had both been nicknamed after our places of origin. He always saved me a seat beside him in the front row of class, which I wouldn’t have minded except that he constantly volunteered us both to read aloud. My clumsy oration compared to his energetic, flawless delivery was humiliating. I didn’t have the heart to tell him this, though. LA was sunshine in human form.

  It was because of LA that I started spending time in the performing arts building even when I wasn’t in class. He was always inviting me to watch his rehearsals—not just me, but everyone, including the professor. I agreed out of politeness the first time, but then I kept coming back because it really was fun. He was playing Mercutio in an upcoming production of Romeo and Juliet, and his lengthy, melodramatic death was undoubtedly the highlight of the show. I liked melting into the plush chairs of the cavernous auditorium and giving up my role as “Iowa” for a while to become a spectator to people whose lives seemed so much larger than my own. LA had a lot of friends from different disciplines who dropped in to see his performances, and I became acquainted with them over time. Of these, there were only two constants, who I came to understand were LA’s best friends.

  Cynic, whose real name was Cedric, but who earned his appellation with his prickly demeanor and acerbic wit, was LA’s opposite in every way and was, I thought, the very embodiment of everything I’d glamorized about the East Coast—money, cashmere, cigarettes, ennui, a sharp Bostonian accent. Charlie, the only one of us who didn’t have a quirky nickname, but who Cynic sometimes called by his last name, “St. James,” had a habit of fading into the background beside his friends’ blazing personas, which made him difficult to cast in my mind. Cynic was cordial to me in his wry way, but not friendly, and Charlie never bothered to acknowledge me at all—he hid behind his curls and gold-rimmed glasses and only ever looked up from the sheaves of paper in his lap to watch LA’s performance onstage.

  On opening night, LA got me a free ticket and I ended up sitting in the nosebleed seats next to Cynic. He smelled strongly of cigarette smoke and some ironic cologne, and at intermission he and Charlie disappeared and came back reeking of marijuana. I was surprised to learn that Charlie indulged in such behavior… He seemed so ascetic and bookish. I exchanged only a few polite words with Cynic, but he and Charlie murmured to each other between scenes so softly I couldn’t catch a word. At one point, we both tried to use the same armrest and our arms collided in the dark, and a shock went through me as though I’d bumped into Holden Caulfield on the street because, up until that point, Cynic hadn’t been any more real to me. LA died beautifully and stole the show, earning much admiration from the audience, and I found myself feeling oddly proud, for I’d begun to think of him as my friend.

  After Romeo and Juliet, LA started working on his own project, a one-man show about his grandfather’s experience in a Japanese internment camp in San Francisco during World War II. He rehearsed this on a smaller stage and invited a select few people to watch—I was honored to be one of them. It wasn’t completely a one-man show. During the song and dance numbers, Cynic joined him onstage a
nd played the piano. It was a stirring performance, I had to admit, even when LA stumbled or forgot his lines, which Charlie read to him patiently from the front row. At the end of each run, Charlie clambered onstage to join the other two, and the three of them conferred around the grand piano, sometimes running through songs again, which was how I discovered that Charlie could sing even better than LA.

  Once, they conversed for so long the audience emptied and I decided I wouldn’t get a chance to offer LA my praise today, so I gathered up my things and made to leave. But before I could reach the door, LA called after me, “Hey, Iowa, get up here! Settle an argument, will you?”

  I complied hesitantly. I’d never been on the stage, or any stage for that matter. It seemed somehow profane for me, the watcher, to invade the sacred space reserved for the performers I watched. I climbed the steps, reeling a bit as I glanced out at the empty seats and imagined them filled with faceless strangers. LA was sitting cross-legged on the piano, barefoot, in the black tank top and leggings he usually wore for rehearsals. Cynic was lounging on the piano bench, smoking—no one was supposed to smoke in the building, but Cynic didn’t seem to think earthly rules applied to him, and perhaps they didn’t. Charlie, leaning on the piano, was muttering to the other two, gesturing with the papers in his hand for emphasis. As I approached, I caught the distinct words, “I just don’t see why we need the white guy’s perspective.”

  “We’re in Michigan, St. James,” Cynic reminded him. “Of course we need the white guy’s perspective.”

  “Iowa,” LA interrupted them, “what do you think? Would it be problematic if I did a Japanese accent for the show? I’m really good at it. I was practically raised by my grandparents.”