the summer i was ten

[deepest_magic]

Bella is ten. School has let out; she spends one week at the beach with Renée, celebrating, and then from there Renée drives her up to Forks, and drops her off, with many hugs. Charlie picks her up, with some hugs, although not as many; it's not his way. Bella settles in for the summer. It is, if nothing else, cooler up here.

Comments

[deepest_magic]

"How do you do it? That sounds useful."

[neverbeatme]

"Well, I'm not sure. It's just obvious to me, but if it was obvious to everybody then people would be a lot better at each other."

[deepest_magic]

"How do you mean, better at each other?"

[neverbeatme]

"I mean everybody would understand each other more easily and not have such a hard time figuring each other out."

[deepest_magic]

"I think people are pretty bad at themselves," says Bella after a moment. "If the thing I do was easy for everybody they wouldn't be."

[neverbeatme]

She laughs.

"Well, how do you do your thing?"

[deepest_magic]

"I write," Bella says. "Whatever I'm thinking, and why, and then I figure out if those whys make sense or not, and what I want, and how I could get it with what I have."

[neverbeatme]

"...See," says Elizabeth, "that's the kind of thing that's obvious to you but not to other people."

[deepest_magic]

"I wonder why."

[neverbeatme]

"Well, you've been doing it for a while, right?"

[deepest_magic]

"Since I was six."

[neverbeatme]

"And you don't talk about it with other people much, right?"

[deepest_magic]

"Not the specific things. I'll tell them approximately, but people don't ask usually."

[neverbeatme]

"Yeah. So the person you usually talk to about it is yourself. Right? And when you talk to yourself - I mean general 'you' - you can leave a lot of things out because you know what you meant to say, and it'll still make sense. To you. But then if you try to talk to other people the same way, they get lost because they don't already know what you're talking about. See what I mean?"

[deepest_magic]

"Ye-e-es. That makes sense," agrees Bella. "I take lots of shortcuts writing it down because I'm the only person who'll read it."

[neverbeatme]

Elizabeth nods.

"That's one of the kinds of things I'm good at figuring out."

[deepest_magic]

"That I take shortcuts writing things?"

[neverbeatme]

"No - that lots of people do stuff like that sometimes, and that that's probably the reason why the stuff you said about what you do makes more sense to you than it does to me."

[deepest_magic]

"Okay. I wonder if I could teach somebody to do it if I really wanted? I figured out how all by myself."

[neverbeatme]

"You could try it and see!" says Elizabeth.

[deepest_magic]

"Do you want to learn it?"

[neverbeatme]

"Sure."

[deepest_magic]

Bella pulls out a notebook, flips through the first few pages, then says, "Just a second," and goes inside and comes out again with a fresh one, which she presents to Elizabeth, along with a pencil.

[neverbeatme]

"Okay," she says. "Now what?"

[deepest_magic]

"Well, it depends on what you want to do, I guess," says Bella. "Some pages in my notebooks are just like diaries basically, with more made-up words because English isn't very good at some things. Some of them are for processing and some of them are for decision-making and some of them are for figuring out what I want."