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We walked into Rachel’s room, which was where I first learned what a chaotic mess was. The room wasn’t small, but it felt small and it looked small. This was largely due to the presence of brightly colored clean and dirty clothing that was strewn over every visible surface — the floor, the lone desk chair, the unmade bed, the top of the dresser. Between the articles of clothing were the other elements that made up the life of a twelve-year-old girl, such as magazines, schoolbooks, intricately folded notes to and from friends, and shoes. But what really dwarfed my older cousin Rachel’s room was the pile of brown, stale-smelling cardboard boxes stacked in the far left corner. The pile was like a pyramid — a mountain! — and it claimed a fourth of the floor space and touched the ceiling.

Most of the boxes were closed, and I could only make vague guesses as to their mysterious contents.

My eyes followed the pile of boxes up to the ceiling, a part of the room that I knew how to react to even less than the far left corner, because — the ceiling wasn’t visible at all. Then again, I noticed, neither were the walls. The entire room, practically ever square inch, was covered with scraps of paper and pictures, and other unexpected objects.

“Rachel, this is so cool!” my cousin Sarah exclaimed from my right as she looked around.

“Yeah, Mom and Dad wouldn’t let me paint the walls. So I just covered it up with all of this stuff. Like this is a picture my friend drew for me during class (she pointed to the closest piece of paper, picturing a colorfully scribbled animal). And this (she pointed underneath of it) is a receipt from a pair of jeans I bought a while ago.” Then she pointed to the thin piece of paper beside the light switch. “And here is one from another pair of jeans, I don’t remember which ones. But the receipt is from K-Mart, so I guess that’s where I got them. Oh, and here are the other tags underneath of it.”

I looked closely at the jeans receipts and advertisements and other various tags and saw shades of hideous bright pink between and under them. No wonder she wanted to cover the walls and the ceiling up. It was like walking into creative chaos, I decided. But it was very cool.

“What’s this?” I asked, pointing to a small stick hanging by a string on the wall above her mattress..

“Oh, that was from a corn dog from the fair a few years ago,” Rachel said.

“What’s the string from?”

“I don’t know,” she shrugged.

I gave a small, uneasy laugh. What was she thinking, putting all of these things on her walls? Pieces of paper were clustered all over, side by side, their corners curling up from having been taped there for so long. There was hardly any ceiling or wall showing at all, I noticed. There were small spaces where a bit of bright, bubblegum pink would shine through, but for the most part everything was completely covered. Did she take this seriously? I didn’t want to laugh at her if she did, but it was one of the most amusing and random things I had ever seen.

As the youngest of the three of us in the room, I was deeply impressed. My bedroom had none of this character, none of this flair. The wallpaper border of pleasant, neutral green and purple brushstrokes in my bedroom paled in decorative comparison to this amazing bedroom. Would my parents even let me hang a corn dog stick from the wall? I doubted it as I imagined myself asking Dad if he could please put a nail, here, on the wall. He’d ask what for, what picture am I hanging? Was it a new unicorn or horse picture I had added to my collection? And I’d say, “No Dad, see, it’s for this corn dog stick on a piece of miscellaneous string.”

No way. How did Rachel get away with such creativity? Her parents had to have been as strict as mine. I needed to know. But before I could ask, Sarah spoke up.

“What’s with the boxes?” she asked, motioning towards the massive pile of rotting and moldy cardboard boxes. They emitted a strange and unpleasant odor, like the smell I associated with my grandparents’ attic, only more concentrated from being trapped in a small space. Sarah looked tiny standing beside such a large brown mass. I think she realized it, too, because she stepped away once she looked up at it.

“My dad collects things to sell at flea markets for after he retires. He brings new stuff home almost every day and finally he and Mom ran out of room in the basement. Ooo, check this out,” Rachel said as she grabbed a small box off of the side of the mountain. She ripped the cardboard top open easily as Sarah and I stood a safer distance away. Small filaments detached themselves from the box and floated into the air. Rachel didn’t seem to notice. Sarah and I watched as she reached into the box and pulled out something I had never seen before — something of such extraordinary design that I could never have thought up on my own: an old coke bottle with a rubber chicken head attached to the top. It appeared as though the chicken’s neck had been severed from the rest of its body at one time — for what demented reason, I could not fathom. Apparently someone thought that an old green tinted coke bottle was a sufficient replacement. The chicken’s head bobbed up and down, its characterless black eyes wide, as Rachel held it out to us to see.

“I don’t know what Dad was thinking when he found this thing. Mom about killed him when he brought it home.”

I tried to look at Sarah and see what her reaction was; she looked more confused than troubled. There was an uneasy silence between the three of us as we gazed at the chicken, its head bobbing up and down, up and down, as if what was left of it was autistic or crazy or possessed.

Illustration by Lacey Anderson.

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