Chloe pulled the drawer out from under her bed. She had more notebooks than she could count and she needed to get them organized a little bit. She was starting college soon and Chloe’s mother wanted her to go through all the school supplies she already had before they went shopping.
Chloe was a notebook junkie, as her mother put it. They both knew Chloe didn’t need to buy any new notebooks for college even though Chloe wanted some fresh ones. Why would anyone not want to buy new notebooks? She knew her mother was right, though. She didn’t believe in having too many notebooks, but college tuition and the textbooks were expensive. If she could save a bit of money on the school supplies – even if it was just a couple of bucks – that would be great.
So, she opened the drawer under her bed. It was a tough one to jimmy open on account of it being so stuffed, but she managed.
Chloe wasn’t sure what kind of notebooks she would need for college. Her teachers in high school were so picky. Some wanted a one-subject notebook while others wanted a five-subject notebook. None of the teachers wanted their students to share the same notebook with a different class. Why? Chloe had no idea. She assumed it was because the teachers thought they’d take a lot of notes, but that wasn’t the case at all. At least, it wasn’t for her. She shared notebooks with classes anyway to fill them up. Her teachers never read her notebooks so they never knew.
Still, there were some notebooks that were halfway filled or three-quarters filled with school notes and doodles. Chloe put those ones to the side. She didn’t want to bring those ones to college, even if the notes inside might end up being useful. No, she’d use the extra paper from those notebooks for more doodles, scrap paper, or making lists. She wanted fresh notebooks for her college classes.
The next few notebooks Chloe skimmed through were the same. Some were almost filled up, others halfway, and some just the first few papers were used. She got stuck looking through these ones as they held old stories and poems. She liked to write every now and then, though she wasn’t serious about it. She liked to keep her written work though, even though it was taking space up in an otherwise brand new notebook.
Chloe knew most of those stories she could rip out of their notebooks and stick in a folder somewhere for safe keeping. However, she didn’t want to disturb the pages. There was one notebook that had a single Haiku in it and that was it. Chloe read it to herself and made a face. She didn’t know what she was thinking when she wrote that.
Now that Chloe was looking at all this, she realized she never wrote the date on anything. She wished she wrote the date on her stories so she knew how old they were. It was obvious her writing had improved from one notebook to the next and it was certainly interesting to check out her own writing again. A lot of these stories she had completely forgotten about. She briefly wondered if she could get back into some of them. Maybe she’d bring a couple to college with her in case she had any free time in her dorm.
She set aside those notebooks and realized there were two more small bins under her bed. Both of those held notebooks, but they were smaller. Some were notepads but most of them were journal-like notebooks. Chloe wasn’t going to bring any of those to school for note-taking.
She also knew, in the other room, she had a filing cabinet where she kept even more notebooks. Did she feel like going through those as well?
Chloe knew most of those notebooks were filled with started and half-written stories and poems as well. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to go through all of those and set the stories aside. The notebooks were the stories’ home, she didn’t want to rip them out and put them away in a folder. She had a feeling she’d never get back to the stories otherwise.
Chloe picked up the few notebooks she had and put them into her suitcase. She could use those to finish her stories and poems in her free time during college. If she was running low on paper for class for any reason, she could take a piece or two from the back. However, it seemed as though she was going to have to go to the store and buy some new notebooks for her classes.
Now all she needed to do was go back downstairs and tell her mother.
Words: 799
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