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

[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."

[neverbeatme]

"I use paper and pen to make decisions too sometimes," she says. "But with math."

[deepest_magic]

"I don't do math for mine," says Bella. "What do you do your math for?"

[neverbeatme]

"When there's something complicated where I want a lot of different things and I don't know how they all add up, I do math to figure that out."

[deepest_magic]

Bella thinks about this. "I don't think that would work for me. I might not like the answer."

[neverbeatme]

"What do you mean?"

[deepest_magic]

"If I have a lot of complicated wants, I don't know how important they are for sure until I think about getting them or not getting them in all different combinations. If I made up numbers, maybe the numbers would tell me what to do, but I'd be pretty likely to just go "no, that's not right" and have to keep thinking anyway, so it'd be an extra step that didn't do anything."

[neverbeatme]

She shrugs.

"When I do it, if the numbers come out wrong, I can usually tell why they're wrong and do it again with the right ones."

[deepest_magic]

"I still don't see what the point of the numbers part is."

[neverbeatme]

"Maybe our brains just work differently," she says. "Mine does numbers. Yours does made-up words."

[deepest_magic]

"I guess," says Bella. "What do you want to try first?"

[neverbeatme]

"Well, how do you do making decisions and stuff?"

[deepest_magic]

"First I write down everything I can think of about the decision. Sometimes in columns, one for all the obvious general things I could do, and then I look at the bad things about the one that looks maybe best and see if I can cheat and make them go away."

[neverbeatme]

"Heh," says Elizabeth.

[deepest_magic]

"Well, it's always best not to have any bad things happen," says Bella. "Sometimes I can do that. Or sometimes the bad things are things like - if it costs money but saves time to do something, I have extra time, that way, and I can mow the lawn and my dad will give me a few dollars. That's not exactly cheating but it sort of is."

[neverbeatme]

"I don't really think of things that way, but I can see how it works."

[deepest_magic]

"What do you do instead?"

[neverbeatme]

"Well - let's say my aunt Chris gets a cake and we have some and there's one piece left in the fridge. I could take it, or I could leave it for her. I know how much I want the cake, and I don't know how much she wants the cake but I can guess, and I know how much I care how much she wants the cake. So I write down all the numbers, and if how much she wants the cake times how much I care is worth more than how much I want the cake, I leave it. I took the cake," she adds. "I could've split it in half, but it was pretty small already."

[deepest_magic]

"Oh. I'm not sure numbers would help me compare those kind of things. They seem to match up pretty good in my head without involving multiplication. I'd be thinking, Will I get in trouble for taking this cake? Should I make some brownies? Are we getting more cake any time soon? Maybe there is ice cream?"

[neverbeatme]

Elizabeth giggles.

"Okay, so - what's processing?"

[deepest_magic]

"That's when something happens, something out of the ordinary or just rare and biggish - I usually do some before and after every time I come here for summers. And I figure out what happened in my head, and all the parts and how they affected each other, and whether any of them mean anything that I should worry about or account for later or if it's all temporary, and whether I need to change anything about how I think about things like the thing I'm processing. Oh, um, installing changes is a separate thing, I forgot to list that one, it's like - teaching my brain new tricks, only it's faster than when you're training a dog with treats or whatever."

[neverbeatme]

"And how does that one work?"