The Cootie Catcher Knew Who You'd Marry

Someone in your class had one. Folded out of a sheet of notebook paper, maybe torn out clean if you were lucky, with the little spiral holes still hanging off the side if you weren't. It was about the size of a small bird. It opened and closed when she put her fingers in the four pockets underneath, and the outside was covered in the words RED and BLUE and GREEN and YELLOW, often written in the same blue ballpoint pen, because the kid who made it didn't actually own colored pens, she just wrote the word.

It was a fortune teller. It was a cootie catcher. It was a paper machine that knew things about your life.

You held out your hand. You said do me. She opened the cootie catcher and waited.

The Fold

Nobody knew how to fold the cootie catcher. Specifically: you didn't. I didn't. The folding was done by one person in the room, a girl, almost always, named something like Brittany or Megan or Kayla, who had learned it from a babysitter or an older sister and now possessed a skill the rest of us could observe but not reproduce.

The fold was eight steps. You started with a square. You creased the diagonals. You folded each corner to the center. You flipped it over. You folded each corner to the center again. You creased the resulting square in half one way and in half the other to loosen the paper. You slipped your thumbs and forefingers into the four pockets on the bottom. You squeezed. The thing popped up into a four-flapped beak.

I have just typed this out from memory and I am almost certainly wrong about at least two of those steps. That was the whole problem. Nobody could reproduce it. Brittany could reproduce it. Brittany made all the cootie catchers. There was a small economy of cootie catchers in the third grade and Brittany was the entire supply side.

The cootie catcher was a four-step state machine made of notebook paper and operated by a girl named Brittany.

The Outside

The outside got four colors. RED. BLUE. GREEN. YELLOW. Sometimes PURPLE and ORANGE, if Brittany was feeling expansive that day. Sometimes BLACK, which was nobody's color, which nobody ever picked.

The colors were written in colored gel pen if it was a fancy operation. They were written in regular ballpoint with the word "RED" if it wasn't. Either way the function was the same. You looked at the four flaps and you said one of them out loud.

"Blue."

Brittany would then move the cootie catcher in and out. Open. Close. Open. Close. B - L - U - E. Four letters, four motions. The motion alternated direction. First the cootie catcher opened up-and-down, then left-and-right, then up-and-down again. This was important. This was the engine of the entire ritual. Without the alternation it was just a paper that made a noise.

When she finished spelling BLUE, the cootie catcher came to rest open on one of its two axes, revealing four of the eight numbers inside.

The Numbers

Inside were the numbers 1 through 8, written one to a triangle, in whatever pen had been available when the cootie catcher was manufactured. You looked at the four numbers facing you. You picked one.

"Three."

She opened and closed three times. Open close open close open close. When she stopped, you saw four numbers again. They might be the same four you saw before. They might be a different four. You did not look closely. You picked one again.

"Seven."

This time she did not open and close. She turned the cootie catcher slightly so you could see the number, and she peeled back the flap underneath. On the underside of that flap, in the same blue ballpoint, written in her particular tight cursive, was your fortune.

What Was Inside

The fortunes were a lot. They were a mix of things she'd written that morning at recess and themes she returned to, jokes she'd refined over multiple iterations of cootie catcher. The fortunes were her work. The fortunes were what you were really asking for.

A standard assortment might include:

Brian was in the class. There was always a Brian. The eighth one was rotational. Sometimes it was you will die alone. Sometimes it was you smell, with a little drawing of a stink line. Sometimes it was Tyler likes you, which was the most powerful of the eight, because Tyler was sitting four desks away and could potentially be told what the cootie catcher had said.

You did not know which fortune was where. You picked a color. You picked a number. You picked another number. You got what you got.

The Power

This is the part that takes a minute to notice. The cootie catcher was a fixed object. The eight fortunes were written down. They did not change between picks. Brittany was not improvising. The system was sealed.

But Brittany knew where every fortune was.

She had written them. She had folded them in. She knew that BLUE - 3 - 7 was you will marry Brian, and BLUE - 3 - 2 was you smell, and she knew, when you said blue three seven, whether to peel back the flap straight or to rotate the cootie catcher and pretend to peel back a different flap entirely.

You did not catch her doing this. You had no way to catch her doing this. The cootie catcher was, in the end, less a fortune teller and more a thin paper interface for Brittany's opinion of you on a given Tuesday.

The cootie catcher was a fortune teller in the same way that a fortune cookie is one. Someone wrote the fortune. The randomness was decorative.

If she liked you, you married Brian and lived in a mansion. If she did not, you died alone with eight kids and you smelled. The cootie catcher was technology built specifically to let a ten-year-old launder her social judgments through a piece of paper.

The Boys

The boys did not have cootie catchers. The boys had paper footballs.

Paper footballs were a similar economy. One or two kids in the class knew how to fold them, an endless demand for the product, the same fundamental mystery about where the supply came from. But they were used for a completely different ritual. You flicked the football across the lunch table at someone else's makeshift goalposts. There was no fortune involved. The football did not know things about your life.

I think about this sometimes. The girls had a paper artifact that predicted your future and assigned you a husband. The boys had a paper artifact that you flicked. The cootie catcher had information. The football had physics. Both were folded from notebook paper. Only one of them was about you.

The boys got their fortunes told too, eventually. They got told who they would marry. They got told they smelled. The cootie catcher did not discriminate by gender. It would predict your husband whether you wanted a husband predicted or not. A boy would say do me and Brittany would say fine and the boy would learn he was marrying Brian also, because BLUE - 3 - 7 said what it said.

The Re-Do

You could ask for a re-do.

You could ask for a re-do if your fortune was bad. You could ask for a re-do if your fortune was confusing. You could ask for a re-do if you just wanted to watch the cootie catcher open and close one more time, which was, honestly, the part of the ritual most people actually enjoyed. The fortune you'd forget by lunch. The opening and closing you carried.

Brittany did not always grant the re-do. Brittany had a line behind you. Brittany would say one more in a tone that suggested one more is one more for everybody, and you should be grateful. You would say a different color, a different number, a different number, and the cootie catcher would inform you that this time you smelled. It was a one-way street with bad fortunes. The re-do never got you Brian.

The Wear

A cootie catcher had a lifespan of about three days.

By day two, the creases were soft. The colors on the outside were starting to smear from finger oil. The fortunes underneath the flaps were beginning to show through the paper, slightly, in mirror image, which let the careful observer guess what their fortune was going to be before Brittany finished the count. By day three, the cootie catcher was floppy. The pinch wasn't holding. You'd say blue and the thing would open into a sad limp paper flower and Brittany would say it's broken, I'll make a new one.

The new one would have entirely different fortunes. None of the previous fortunes carried over. The first cootie catcher's promise that you'd marry Brian was non-binding once the cootie catcher was retired. The new one might say you were going to marry Justin, who was a worse choice, and you would have to come to terms with that.

There was no continuity in this universe. Each cootie catcher was its own canon.

What It Was, Really

The cootie catcher persists in my memory not as a fortune teller but as a ritual object. Four colors. Two numbers. A flap. A sentence in someone else's handwriting that you took seriously for fifteen seconds and then forgot.

The exact fortunes are gone now. Brian's last name is gone. Brittany's last name is gone too, probably. She is on Facebook somewhere being a real estate agent or a nurse, and she does not remember the cootie catcher, and if you reminded her she would say oh my god, I forgot about those. The piece of paper she folded and unfolded fifty times a week in third grade is the most vivid object I can recall from that classroom, and she does not know that.

A few years ago I tried to fold one. I sat at the kitchen table with a square of printer paper and I tried to remember the eight steps. I got six of them. I got six of them and then I got stuck and the paper looked wrong and I unfolded it and tried again and it still looked wrong and I gave up.

I had to look it up. I had to look up how to fold a cootie catcher, on the internet, on a phone, in the year 2024. The instructions were the first result. There was a video. I followed the video. The cootie catcher came out fine. It opened and closed on both axes. I wrote BLUE on one flap in a Sharpie I found in a drawer.

It was the saddest thing I have made in a long time. The cootie catcher I made was structurally identical to the cootie catchers Brittany made in 1993, but it was not a cootie catcher. It was a folded paper. The cootie catcher needed someone else to make it. The cootie catcher needed eight fortunes you couldn't have written for yourself. The cootie catcher needed a line behind you and a name on the first flap that you couldn't predict and a girl in the third grade who had absolutely no business knowing what would happen to you and who would tell you anyway.

I threw mine away. I didn't even open it.