Bella likes shopping for school supplies. Renée drops her off at a Staples and just kind of leaves her there for an hour, going to get a manicure or something in the meanwhile. (Renée needs school supplies too, but she makes a separate trip with the other teachers so there's no admixture of teacher discounts and budget allowances with Bella's personal swag; it's usually a pack of four or five of them, working out how many pairs of scissors they need between them and splitting giant boxes of pens and sometimes hitting five stores to get a good deal on construction paper and nametags.)

Bella has put into her cart glossy new folders and a twelve pack of mechanical pencils and a compass-and-straightedge set and the art supplies she doesn't need to get from a dedicated art supply store. She has a big three ring binder and a couple of those stretchy textbook covers. She has graph paper and a highlighter and a set of ballpoint pens half blue and half black. She has saved the best for last. Notebooks time.

She gets mostly the cheap kind, assorted colors of basic notebooks she can fill with math problems or history timelines without feeling like it's kind of a waste, but she gets some nicer ones from time to time, for compiling important stuff accumulated on other media and writing her mental processes out. There's a sale bin. She rummages, taking her time, no sign of Renée coming back to grab her yet. Some of them are just the same kind she normally gets with bent corners or squashed wire, but - ooh, that one's nice, the purple with the iridescent shimmer to it, she likes that one. Into the cart with it.

She doesn't finish her previous compilation notebook till a few days later and then, after dinner that evening, she inaugurates the new one. August 18 2002 she writes inside the front cover.