Part One:
They used the same paper in birth, death, and marriage records. The same method of branding the ink to the fiber, the same stamps that insure that the records are authentic. At the end of the day, some of the most important legal documents that compose a life are made from pulpwood logs and just as easily destroyed as the people whose names are on them.
He'd never given much thought to paper. The world was increasingly becoming paperless; everything could be written, sent, and read off of a screen. He did all of his charting on a tablet that was used at the clinic he worked for, he hadn't gotten an actual printed receipt in years, all his bills were online and his payments direct deposit.
But, as mighty as technology had become, the proof that paper was still alive (If only hanging on by the tips of its fingernails) was in the pile of papers sitting in the center of his kitchen table.
All the important things still came in print.
His diplomas were paper: parchment, with foil embossed stamping. His mother had sent out a Christmas card every year that was printed on high gloss and signed from the family, in her carefully composed cursive. His marriage license was paper; only given the title of paper stock because the security features included in the paper were top secret.
And, yet, none of it had meant what it should have to him. They were tangible reminders, tangible things that you could hold onto and touch and smell. But, the Christmas letters had ended up tucked into drawers and, eventually, thrown away. His diplomas had been framed and were now coated in dust above his desk. And, his marriage license had been placed in a fireproof safe, where it was expected to withstand anything that could lead to its destruction.
And, now, the dissolution of his marriage was carefully laid out in legal-size, plain, white paper. Each of the spots he was expected to sign or assets he might like to negotiate were marked with yellow stickers.
He'd read somewhere that the firm she'd gone with to draft the papers had transferred over to using recycled paper. And, he can't help thinking that it would be fitting to have his divorce papers made out of the recycled remains of marriage licenses; the recycled hopes and dreams and love.
He'd never thought much about paper, but, now, it's all he thinks about.
The night he'd asked her to marry him, he'd spent the entire day on a plane.
His family had moved back to Texas his junior year of high school to help out his grandfather on the ranch (It had been in their family for four generations and it seemed wrong to let all that hard work fall apart). But, he'd left his heart in New York and missed her every day since then.
They'd never officially broken up, but their relationship had swerved between late night phone calls that stretched deep into the early morning hours, to weeks of radio silence.
He'd see pictures of her hanging out with their friends or with a boy he didn't know and he'd get a familiar clench in his gut that came from realizing that they weren't as close as they'd once been. That he'd stopped belonging somewhere between the 1,744 miles that stretched between them.
Or she'd see a picture of him at a party with his old friends; a girl pressed to one side in the photo, despite the fact that he'd been avoiding the girl all night. And, he'd hear her jealousy and insecurities in her voice as she'd speak to him in stilted, uncomfortable conversation the next day. Nothing he said ever managed to assure her that he was coming back.
He'd spent all of the money he'd collected from his family as a gift for his graduation on a plane ticket to New York. Not sure what he was actually doing, until he'd shoved his clothes into a duffel bag and found his grandmother's ring sitting in a velvet box in his sock drawer.
He'd climbed her fire escape in the dead of night, knocked on her window, and felt all those miles be crushed into nothing the minute that their eyes had met.
She'd packed her own bag and slipped out the window; clutching his hand through the entire descent. They'd sat up all night planning the future on the courthouse steps in whispered voices; his thumb rubbing circles into her palm and their lips close enough that they could feel each other's breaths on their faces.
He'd half expected her to change her mind by morning. To come to her senses and realize all the reasons why they should wait, but she never had an ounce of uncertainty appear in her eyes.
They'd been first in line as soon as it opened; the sun barely rising in the sky. And, they'd been legally bound to one another for the rest of their lives before anyone even realized they were gone.
Their families had been furious and there'd been plenty of yelling and hurt feelings, but he couldn't bring himself to regret it even, now. Because for a moment they'd belonged to only each other and their future had been as bright as the rising sun.
The silent standoff lasts for three weeks before a car pulls up to the house and a blonde gets out. The blonde's shoulders are squared and she moves with purpose, as she crosses the lawn that's in desperate need of trimming and pounds on his front door with her fist.
He doesn't make any effort to move from the window that he's spent most of the last three weeks sitting in. He can see most of the neighborhood from the bench he'd carefully sanded and upholstered shortly after they'd purchased the fixer-upper.
His neighbor across the street and one house over is working in their flower beds and the one directly across the street has been working under the hood of their car all morning. Everyone else's lives are going on, while his stands deadly still.
"Lucas!" her voice echoes through the street, as she retreats back into his field of vision on the front lawn. He must be in real trouble if she's decided to start using his name, "I didn't fly fifteen-hundred miles to stand on your grass making a scene. Get down here and sign the stupid divorce papers, so I can take Riley home."
He closes the blinds and her language rapidly deteriorates.
They moved into a one-bedroom apartment above a bookstore. They have to turn sideways to slide along the wall to their bed and they blow a fuse whenever they use the microwave, but they're blissfully happy.
They lay twined together; as they study textbooks and notes from their classes. They're always touching, always reaching out to each other, whenever they're in close proximity. The world outside of their little home feels like a dream and he lives for the moment when he slips his key into the door and walks inside.
She's usually spread out across the hardwood floors (they're still saving up for a couch); her back propped against the wall and her laptop spread across her legs. She'll turn and look at him; her eyes dancing with love and his heart will feel full enough to burst.
He's not sure how Zay got leave from the Navy, but he's the next one to show up; wearing low-slung jeans and a dark green, long-sleeve shirt. But, he still has a soft spot for Maya, after all these years, so it really shouldn't surprise Lucas all that much.
He uses Riley's key to get in through the front door and Lucas hears the sound of his feet falling heavily on the stairs, before he's pulling open the door to the spare bedroom and flipping on the lights.
It's the first bit of hope that he's been given that there's still a part of her that cares, if she'd been willing to give her key to the house to Zay, but not to Maya.
"She still snaps and you still come running?" Lucas offered, his head rested against the blinds and his feet spread out across the window seat.
"It's Maya," Zay offers, quietly, sitting down on the edge of the bed.
Zay had enlisted directly out of high school, several months after Maya had shredded his heart and had been running ever since. Lucas got a steady stream of emails and the occasional bit of news from Zay's mother, but he could count the number of times he'd seen his best friend since high school on one-hand.
He'd never made any secret of his resentment towards Maya over the entire matter, but Maya had resented Lucas long before that for the monopoly he'd had on her best friend. They hadn't waged open war, until he'd married Riley and, then, it had become open season on Lucas Friar.
"You think I should sign them?" Lucas questioned, opening his eyes just enough that he could read the expressions on Zay's face.
"I think if your marriage was really over, she'd come down here and ask you to sign those papers herself," Zay returned, kicking off his shoes before settling back on his bed.
They make it through school living paycheck to paycheck and eating food almost exclusively out of cans. He knows that Riley is a somewhat capable cook and learning to grill is a Friar rite of passage, but they're both caught up in classwork and part-time jobs.
They get so sick of it that Riley bans canned food from their home; the minute she gets hired on at the library. They're still conservative with their spending, since Lucas is working his way through a doctorate degree, but Riley cooks her way through recipe after recipe and their house always smells like slowly simmering roast or homemade spaghetti sauce.
The kitchen is littered with cookbooks that have Riley's notes in the margins. They end up splattered in food and crinkled with water stains, but Riley had packed up her Kindle and gone back to paper after one of her teachers had taught her to love the essence of a corporeal, bound, book.
Lucas doesn't entirely understand it, but she's enjoys it and there's always a plate of food left in the rarely used microwave when he gets home from his late-night studying sessions.
He eats in the dim lighting of the kitchen, occasionally flipping through the cookbooks and running his hands over her familiar writing. Before, climbing into bed next to her and pulling her into his arms. She's usually gone before he gets up the next morning and they're lucky if they can snag an hour together during their coinciding lunch breaks.
But, he thinks they're still happy.
She never tells him otherwise.
By the time that four weeks rolls around he comes to the conclusion that she's not coming back. She'd taken all of the books from the bookshelf in their bedroom and a good number of her clothes are missing from the closet. Each of her missing belongings leaves the house feeling less like the home they'd worked so hard to build.
He wanders from room to room trying to find something familiar; something that would tether him, but without her there's really nothing left.
When Maya shows up for her standing appointment to demand he signs the papers; his neighbors are already gathering on their lawns, ready to watch the show. But, the papers are taped to the door, Lucas's signature scrawled in each of the appropriate places.
She takes them and leaves; he goes out and jabs a, "For Sale," sign into the front lawn.
Part Two:
The beginning of the end starts with a pregnancy test. They aren't trying, but her period is a week late and she stops by the drug store on her way home. There's an entire row of brightly colored boxes that promise accuracy and surety and she snags three of them before heading to the checkout.
The woman at the register smiles at her, offers her words of encouragement and Riley realizes that she should be excited about this. Lucas had been hinting for a while that he was ready to start a family, as soon as she was, but every time she'd start to feel ready, something in their life would get complicated.
They'd considered it when she'd gotten her first job at the public library in New York. It was the same one that had planted the start of their romance and it had all felt like destiny coming together. She'd tended the books with love and walked between the shelves with fond memories.
Then, Lucas had gotten busy with school and she'd started seeing less and less of him. All their moments were stolen and she suddenly found herself trying to find things that could fill the loneliness inside of her. She'd cooked, until she could mince and whisk and poach with the best of them and surrounded herself with the books that felt like old friends.
And, she'd considered having a baby, so she wouldn't have to come home to an empty house. But that reasoning felt wrong and they didn't have room for another human being in their tiny apartment, anyway.
They'd moved to Texas after he graduated; Lucas wanted land and skies that weren't obscured with city lights and Riley had never lived outside of the city and was ready for a new adventure. They'd talked of their children, as they'd toured through home after home and finally seen a future among a foreclosure that was missing all of its doorknobs and light fixtures.
She'd mostly fallen in love with the window upstairs that gave a perfect view of the neighborhood and had the perfect seat for reading. It would need to be sanded down and upholstered, but it was enough like her Bay Window, to feel like a little piece of home. And the neighbors all waved as they drove down the street and the front porch was perfect for sitting and rocking and listening to the crickets chirping in the night.
A construction project was no place for a baby and they'd tabled the decision until they had a chance to settle in.
And, now, she was a week late and they hadn't even been trying.
Maya had been trying for over two years.
She sits listening to the quiet ticking of the clock on the wall opposite her, as she waits for the timer on her phone to go off. Three pregnancy tests sit lined up on the counter beside her and she forces herself to stare intently at her knees that are visible around the full skirt of her dress.
She thinks of a baby with Lucas's sandy hair and her brown eyes, or one with her dark hair and his green eyes. She tries to picture herself with a baby in her arms or settled on her hip. She tries to imagine Lucas throwing a football as a carbon copy of him reaches out to catch it.
They're dreams she's thought of a million times, but they all feel a little hazy around the edges, now that she's faced with reality.
The timer goes off and every test is negative. She throws them away in the neighbor's trash and realizes on the way back that she isn't feeling disappointment, but relief.
Her period comes the next day on her lunch break and she cries in a bathroom stall; overwhelmed with guilt.
Maya and Riley were always supposed to have children together; children that would be best friends and play together and maybe marry each other, someday. They'd whispered about their plans in hushed voices, when they were supposed to be sleeping.
Riley had told Maya her dreams of white weddings and long aisles and Maya had promised to drag Riley along when she decided to elope in the dead of night.
They'd never dreamed that it would be Maya to walk down a church aisle and Riley to run away the night of her graduation to marry the boy that had stolen her heart and broken it in equal measure.
Maya had never forgiven her.
Though, whether it was for stealing her dream or not taking Maya with her was never entirely clear.
Lucas works long hours. He's at the bottom of the food chain and still trying to learn how to put everything he'd learned in school into practice.
She misses him. She misses Maya. She misses home.
She's not sure he's noticed.
It's a rainstorm that persuades her to leave.
It starts late the previous night, long before Lucas comes stumbling in exhausted and collapses in the bed next to her. She stares at the ceiling, listening to the sound of rain hitting their roof and knowing that she should get up and place a pan under the leak in the neighboring room, but unable to bring herself to do so.
She's still awake when Lucas slips out of bed the next morning and starts getting ready for work. She was supposed to be leaving for her own job at that exact moment, but she can't find the energy or desire to get out of bed.
He doesn't notice. Doesn't try to wake her.
She hears the sound of the front door slam and his car pull out of the driveway and she wonders if he would notice if she was dead.
"You were so young when you got married," Maya reminds her later, after she's called in sick and curled up in her window seat, "And Lucas had been gone for so long; it must have been easy to get caught up in the excitement of having him come all that way and tell you that he was still in love with you. He didn't give you any time to process your decision and it was so unlike you to give up everything and run away with him."
It was unlike her and it had been fast. She's known what she'd wanted and decided that nothing else mattered in her pursuit of it; not Maya's feelings or her parent's opinions.
And it was hard to remember why she'd done it, when she's sitting in her window seat alone; when she can't remember the last real conversation that they had.
"You think I should leave him?" Riley questioned; letting her head fall against the cool glass of the window. The raindrops distort everything that she can see and she closes her eyes.
"I think you deserve to be happy. And he hasn't made you really happy in a long time."
He signs the papers and she's not sure how they came to be here.
She has a vague recollection of going to the firm that her mother had recommended; being swept away by a lawyer that had known her mother in law school and hadn't ever questioned what Riley wanted. She'd already had the papers drawn up and she'd returned to her hotel room and sat on the edge of the bed; clutching them in her hand and feeling sick to her stomach.
Maya flies out a day later. She helps Riley pack up her belongings and hold the papers to the fridge with the same magnet that had held up Lucas's mother's Christmas card the year before.
The card that she'd carelessly thrown away a month before his mother had been killed in a car accident. Before, Lucas had started working so hard at the clinic. Before, he'd closed himself off from her.
She throws up on the front grass, while Maya loads her bags into the back of the car.
It takes him four weeks to the sign the papers.
It takes her six months to realize that he's not coming after her.
All Riley thinks about is paper.
She's spent her career in rooms full of sheets of paper bound into books. They carry life and love and tragedy and death, but, most of all, they carry hope. Because, even though, the world's turned their back on the printed word; somehow, it's still alive. And, as long as she's breathing; she'll continue to make sure that it matters to everyone that walks through her library doors.
She ends up at her old middle school and offers life advice in the books that she hands out to troubled students.
She can't think of a single one to help her situation, when Lucas Friar walks through her doors.
"You didn't file our divorce papers," he started; the expression on his face clearly showing that this wasn't how he'd meant to start out.
"I didn't sign them," she admitted; her eyes focusing on a crack in the counter in front of her. His presence fills the entire room and her heart feels like it might just beat out of her chest.
"Why not?"
"I guess, I just wasn't ready, yet. And I figured that if you could take four weeks to sign them," she trailed off, when she realized how little of an argument she really had.
"You could take a year to file them?" he suggested.
She can't come up with a response, any more then she can meet his gaze.
"It really made a mess of filing my taxes," he, finally, continued.
"I'm sorry."
"I'm not," he admitted and she finally met his gaze, "I don't know where we went wrong, or how we went wrong, but I'd like a chance to figure it out. I miss you, Riles."
"We were so young when we got married," she reminded him, "We didn't know anything about life or being adults or being married. And we didn't care that our families thought we were too young, or that we were doing it without our best friends in the entire world there to witness it. Don't you ever feel like we messed everything up?"
"No," he denied, "Sometimes. Do you?"
"No. Sometimes," she repeated.
"All I wanted was you and I don't regret the time we've had together. Maybe, we didn't have any idea what we were getting ourselves into or what we were doing; but does anyone, really? I jumped on a plane the minute I found out we weren't legally divorced; your rings are still hanging around your neck. Can you honestly tell me you wouldn't make the same decision we made then, right now?"
He flies across the country with only a duffel bag. She leaves the library with only her purse.
It's the middle of the day and what they're doing isn't practical and it certainly doesn't make sense. But, she grips his hand tightly in hers and follows him through the hallways and out the doors.
They don't have a destination, but, maybe, they don't really need one.
They talk about their future on the front steps of the middle school in quiet whispers and, then, they live it.
Epilogue:
He'd given a lot of thought to paper over the last two years.
The world was increasingly becoming paperless; everything could be written, sent, and read off of a screen. He did all of his charting on a tablet that was used at the clinic he worked for, he hadn't gotten an actual printed receipt in years, all his bills were online and his payments direct deposit.
His wife had a different view, but they'd worked through their differences a long time ago.
As mighty as technology had become, the proof that paper was still alive (If only hanging on through Riley's sheer willpower) was in the pile of papers sitting in the center of his kitchen table.
All the important things still came in print.
Riley's cookbooks, which were still scattered around their kitchen and printed in high-gloss. The letters he'd started writing to her on parchment paper (Placed under her pillow for the nights that he worked late). Their marriage license; printed on paper stock and still securely protected in a fireproof safe.
And, now, the pictures of their daughter; printed on ultrasound paper and each of her body parts labeled in fine print.
This started out as a chapter of Infamy; it did not stay that way.
Someday, I'd like to go further in depth with this story and flesh out some of the ideas that I brought up, but I think I've got quite enough on my plate at the moment. I apologize for the weird formatting. I considered breaking this up into different chapters, but, then, thought it would look a little weird in BTR and, then, considered making it it's own three-shot story, but the different word counts for chapters was making me crazy and I wasn't sure how that would work if I decide to expand on it. I, also, took a different stylistic approach on this and tried to really make an impact in as few words as possible. No idea if I succeeded.
Once again, thanks to everyone that's read my work and I would really love it if you left me a review and let me know what you think!