E-reader Note Taking Novels & Stories

Catherine had been keeping an archive of her own thinking in the margins of the things she was thinking about. He understood this practice intimately. He had been doing a version of it for two years, in the notes application on his phone, in the design notes he sent to himself, in the things he wrote down before they were lost: the bare trees in November show the branch structure. The intention is on the ground. A private record of the thinking-in-progress. The working, not the answer. He put the book back on the shelf and thought about the year.

“Hailey.” “...yes?” “Why is your bag so light? Is it empty?” “Of course not! It has my lunch and my tablet in there. And before you go and narrow your eyes at me, let me just remind you that digital note taking is a thing now. I keep my notes in my tablet.” “Pictures or handwritten notes?” “What’s the difference? A note is a note!” I snatched my bag away from him. “Sure, I failed about... four quizzes, but these notes are enough to let me pass the semester!”

Hailey “How do you even read this?” I asked as I tried to look through Tyler’s notebook. There were no dates. All of his notes for his different classes were in the same notebook, and his handwriting was chickenscratch. “I don’t,” he said. “I just take notes so that I look busy in class. They call on me less that way.” I shook my head as I turned page after page. Half of them weren’t even notes. There were stick figure drawings of people shooting at each other and…were those supposed to be wolves fighting each other?

Casually skimming through one, it took him a few hours to get to its last. Looking at the other two, he took a quick break by noting down some terms in his electric notepad. After a quick summary, he then read the second book, reading to its half, he left it there.

The lycan alpha and his beta would not see it as a coincidence. I hopped off the bed and sat behind the table with a quill ready in my hand. It was only then that I noticed that the candles that had gone off when the creatures came had lit up again. I made my observation known to Sara as I wrote. When I was done, I sealed both letters in an envelope and handed it to Sara, who tucked it away inside her shirt. "Aaron and Nolan should figure this out," I said, crossing my leg. "Who would want to do this?"

He looked at her for a moment. The desk was hers in the specific way that tools became theirs to the people who used them correctly—the specific angle she held the notebook when she was thinking, the two pencils always parallel at the top right, and the way she read research papers by printing them rather than reading on screen and annotating in the margins in a handwriting he had never been able to fully decipher.

Inside was almost nothing. A phone, powered off, that Marcus immediately bagged for his tech team. A half-empty water bottle. And a small spiral notebook, worn soft at the corners, the kind of thing someone carries for years without meaning to. I flipped through it carefully. Most of the pages were mundane—grocery lists, gas mileage, nothing that told us anything. But near the back, tucked between two blank pages like it had been added separately from the rest of the notebook, was a single line in different handwriting than the rest of the notebook.

Funny how I had researched on this topic but didn't understand it as much as I did now. My eyes shifted to the boy sitting beside me. He had an elbow propped on the desk to support his head as he occasionally twirled the pen in his hands or tapped it against his notebook. His brows would furrow every now and then, and he'd write something constructive on his notebook. I saw his hands move coordinatedly against the book and I immediately got curious. He pouted his lips, carrying half his attention on what he was writing and what the professor was saying. Stealing a closer look, my mouth dropped at what he was doing. His notes were divided into doodles with emojis carved next to them, actual n

“No, I need a break, and you need a break. Leave your books, and let’s get some rest.” “Fine.” She sighs, and closes the book. “I just quickly want to write down the names of the books--” “Leave it.” “You know someone will come by later and put them away.” I open the little desk drawer, take out a pad of paper and pencil, and quickly write a note on her behalf: *Don’t touch. Alpha Edric.* “There. Can we go?”

It was a picture of a notebook page covered in my handwriting. Not just any notes—these were the margins notes I made while reading books I checked out of the library. Not to mention the little observations and questions I'd scribble down when something struck me as interesting or important. I clicked to the next image. Another page of notes, this one from a different book. And another, then another, then another. "Allison, you snake."