2 Subject Notebook Wide Ruled Novels & Stories

Designed. A hidden compartment. Small, flat, no wider than two fingers. Inside it: a wire cutter, the kind made for heavy gauge, its handles wrapped in black rubber, compact enough to fit in a closed fist. And beneath it, folded once, a piece of paper. I unfolded it with steady hands, even though my chest was doing something complicated. The note was brief. Four lines. Nikolai's handwriting — I knew it by the slant of the letters, the way he pressed hard on the pen like he was making sure the words stayed permanent.

Milo and Reggie leave the papers and photos for me to look through more carefully when I feel better. I pick up a picture of the front of a binder. There is a sticker on the front in Kas’s neat, loopy handwriting that says ‘Menae Notes’. The next few photos show snapshots of the contents. Cut outs from home decorating magazines, information about new appliances, upholstery samples, and furniture.

I guess I could get a good enough view of her there… Oh gosh, Anya, that’s so gross. I just shake off the thought and decide to unroll the bag. As I do so, I stumble upon something. I look below me and near my right knee is Sadie’s notebook, slightly ajar. I took them and lay them on the side so I could straighten the sleeping bag. After that, I went back to my place, taking the notebook with me. It is a medium-sized hardbound notebook. It is coated in black but there are a few statements written in what seems like a cut-out white paper taped on the hardbound. Some words have exclamation points, question marks, swear words written in all uppercase, and other words like Shh!, Quiet! It’s Not

The seventeenth notebook opened in January. She has been noting this in the annual reviews since the third: how many notebooks have been filled, at what pace, and what the pace says about the year. The seventeenth notebook opened in January and will close, she estimates, in February of next year — a shorter year than most, which means the writing was denser rather than less frequent. The third book required a different kind of attention than the briefs and the annual reviews; the notebook this year has more thinking and less reporting.

I could see the gray suggestion of the sky, nothing else. I placed my bag on the floor beside my chair and reached for the top binder. STYLE GUIDE. The cover was smooth and cold under my palms. Inside—tabs, grids, rules. Fonts by weight, spacing by decimals, color by code. Whole pages on the exact thickness of lines in diagrams, the angle of drop shadows, how not to imply movement unless requested. I flipped to the back. A neat red stamp marked the latest update: “Rev. 12 – Mandatory as of June 1.”

The first thing I noticed was the notebook. Soft leather. Ivory-colored. Elegant but simple. My fingers brushed across the cover, and my heart skipped when I saw the gold foil lettering pressed perfectly into the surface. A.D. My initials. How were they able to do that! I slowly opened it, running my thumb along the thick cream pages. The paper felt expensive…smooth, almost silky. The kind of notebook you wouldn’t want to ruin with messy sketches. The kind that made you want to draw something worthy of it.

Mabuti na lang at may pasok ‘yong dalawa kaya wala ngayon dito, kung hindi ay mas maingay pa! Kinuha ko ang tracing paper ko at ilang gamit tsaka pinaubaya sa kan’ya ang table dahil totoo namang mas malaki ang kanila kaysa sa amin. Mas madetalye ang plates nila kaysa sa amin. Hamak ang laki ng T-square nilang 48 inches kaysa sa aming engineering students na 32 inches lang. Pero kahit na ganoon, nakakabobo pa rin sa dami ng subject na Math! Bakit ba ito yung kinuha kong course?

The timeline was always approximate. I looked at what I had written. I added one more line: The timeline was always approximate. What matters is that the room was left. The room was correctly sized. I closed notebook thirteen. I went to the shelf. The twelve previous notebooks were stored in sequence — the dates written on the spines in my specific handwriting for spines, which was smaller than my standard handwriting to allow for readability at a distance. Notebook one through twelve, the complete record of a situation that had been running since before the lobby and had now produced: a merger, a marriage, two trees in a garden, and the confirmation of a fourth figure.