The Paper Girl

The Paper Girl 

She always went to the library. And when she did, which was basically every day, she sat in her isolated little corner, right next to the window that looked out into the street. The sunlight would cast golden shimmers all along the outline of her hair, and it would make her dark eyes suddenly become warm and speckled with lighter colors of brown inside of her very iris. She would always have a book with her, and usually, she would finish it by the next day. And it would be on to the next book. She was a serial reader. She read everything, from classics, to modern books, to collections of essays.

She wasn’t pretty. She was more than that. Her beauty went past her physical appearance, it was one of subtlety, the kind you overlooked simply because she was hiding. She wasn’t noticeable, but when she would put that book down, you could see everything she had to offer. Her intelligence, her ability to string together her thoughts and come up with such an insightful conversation that it would probably stagger you that someone so quiet could be so intellectual.

A loud mind, yet quiet lips.

You didn’t have to worry about wondering if whether or not she was smarter than you, because you just knew that she was.

And God, the way she read her books. Sometimes she would sit quietly in her chair, and her eyes would speedily read over the words on the page. She would be done with it within five seconds. But sometimes, her reading pace was a lazy drawl, and she would be sitting on the table on days like that; her legs swinging above the carpeted, dusty floor of the library. On languid, heated days like that, a lot of the time she would leave the book open on her lap and gaze out the window that she always sat next to. Her cheeks would become flushed with her thoughts, and then she would pull herself out of her reverie with a confused glance around the room, as if she had forgotten where she was in her daydreaming.

It was summer day exactly like that when I first noticed her.

***

“Dude, you haven’t gotten any service hours?” Michael stared at me with a mixture of shock and pity. He was my best friend, I’d known him since the second grade when he commended the potency of my burp, and then proceeded to challenge me with a competition. We had been closer than close ever since. I liked him enough most of the time, but right now he was just getting on my nerves.

“For the millionth time,” I sighed, sending him a murderous glare, “no. Not a one. I’ve been kind of busy.” I opened the double doors of the library, the cool air washing over the both of us and vanquishing the killer Texan early summer heat, even if only for a moment.

“Doing what?”

“You know,” I said after walking into the library. “Stuff.”

Michael rolled his eyes, clearly having lost any form of empathy for me. “Does ‘stuff’ mean partying your entire freshmen, sophomore, and junior year?” He dramatically placed air quotes around the word ‘stuff’, and then crossed his arms; his pierced eyebrow raised at me.

I shrugged my shoulders with an uncaring smile and rocked myself back on my heels, my two hands stuffed into my front pockets. “You’re just jealous.”

“Oh, is that so?” he sarcastically replied.

“Yes.” I gave him a playful punch on the shoulder, and his only response to that was a scowl.

“So you’re just gonna volunteer here, with no pay?” Michael asked after doing a 360 of the place, overlooking the building. As far as volunteering for places could go, the library wasn’t too bad, especially this one. The outer part of the building was a faded white that had the words “Western Lake Library” in big letters on the board that had the schedule for it. It was a three story rectangular building that had clean windows, and a lake was situated right next to it. Hence the name “Western Lake”. Inside, it had a dome-shaped skylight at the center that illuminated the entire place. All it required was an upward tilt of your head to see the dark brown and wooden spiral staircases that led to the other floors of the library.