"Well, I don't think you should do this to anyone I like. I'm not particularly suggesting it at all. I'm just wondering why you don't do it. 'Without screwing up anyone else's life' wasn't a qualifier on your three wishes. Your first idea for how to go to jail was to kill somebody."

"Well, one, getting this mythical chick pregnant wouldn't help anything," he says. "Except the odds that she'll marry me, I guess, but that kinda depends on her. Two, I know I'm kind of a slut, but the people I want to fuck and the people I want to fuck over are not the same people, y'know?"

Bella shrugs. "Fair enough."

"But if you find anybody who might wanna have a big fake relationship to go fishing in my dad's wallet, hook me up," he adds.

"I'll let you know," Bella laughs.

"No guarantees he'll bite, but it's worth a shot."

Bella decides to write this down. (She does it in a way that would not be obvious to a typical snooper; the note reads Pinball wizard may benefit financially/residentially from romantic subterfuge.)

"So what's up with the notebooks?" he asks idly. "Is it a Harriet the Spy kind of deal?"

"No." Pause. "Well, not really. In brief, they're a memory aid. Humans have pretty bad memories."

"Yeah, I'll give you that," he says.

"So I write down things, more than most people do, but a lot of them are things ordinary people would write down if they got in the habit. Grocery lists and appointments and notes-to-self. But I also write down things I think. Because we can misremember our own thoughts, too, and then we don't know who we are. Brains are self-serving critters. Mine tries to tell me that I'm nicer and smarter than I really am. My notebooks tell me otherwise."

"My brain's never bothered trying to tell me I'm nice," Alice reports sunnily.

"Well," says Bella. "Would you like it if you were nice?"

"I'd like to be nice. But I care about other things more, so I don't go very far out of my way to get that particular wish. But then, my brain tries to tell me that whatever I did instead of being nice was really nice after all - I had better motives than I did, whatever mean thing I said was an accident and I meant to say something else, it wouldn't really have been nicer to do the 'nice' thing for some reason even if I couldn't have known that ahead of time. And that's bullshit, and I do not wish to be full of bullshit - and that is something I care about more than most other things."

"Oh," he says. "Huh. Yeah, I get it."

Bella smiles. "So that's why the notebooks. But I've been doing this for a while, and my brain mostly gets the picture that I'm not going to let it pull anything like that, so I don't need them that much recently. Except for more ordinary notetaking."

"I compile them into searchable typed-up files, periodically," she continues. "This one's almost full and ready to be converted."

"What?" Bella asks, tilting her head.

"I was gonna say, can I read some, but I'm pretty sure the answer's no."

"I don't put anything sensitive in the ones I bring to school. They've been swiped before," Bella says, handing over her current notebook. "Plenty of it's written in a weak makeshift code of sorts anyway. You can ask if you don't understand something that sounds interesting - in general it's not specifically aimed to keep you out."

"Okay," he says, grinning, and starts flipping through this one from the most recent page backward. "So I'm a pinball wizard now, huh? Awesome."

"It amuses me, and thus it is so," Bella says placidly. "Makes a decent code too, although frankly so would 'Alice'."