The wet towel gently thudded in the hamper. She tugged open the drawer and took out the notebook. With the pages gripped in her hand, she sat on the bed beside me. The mattress dipped.

My muscles tensed in nervous, twitchy anticipation of her letting me see something no one else had.

“Try not to laugh too hard.” She shoved it in my direction without looking at me.

“Bay…” I caught her turning head with a gentle touch of the back of my hand against her cheek. Holding her gaze, I didn’t let her escape into the rabbit hole of doubt.

She stared into my eyes. Her gaze shrouded in uncertainty.

“Nothing I see in here will change what I think of you.”

A nod.

I flipped open the cover. A rainbow of scribbles filled the first page. Bay’s designated does-this-pen-fucking-work page.

She shot up, tidying the room as I turned to the next page.

Some of the pages had a title at the top and others didn’t.

Some filled only a few lines and others took up multiple pages.

Each told me a little more about her, uncovering those secrets I’d been dying to learn.

Songs filled page after page of the notebook. Older ones where the handwriting was loopier and sloppier and in bright and bold colors. That’s where I learned she loved My Little Pony and hated a boy named Anthony O’Connell in the fifth grade.

The ink had faded in some, but there were others that were newer, even recent, from the brightness of the pen strokes and the change in the emotional charge. These were no longer about recess and water balloon fights. They were about the struggles of finding herself and what her family was with her dad gone.

Grappling with finding her place in a town where no one knew her name. My heart sunk. That had been my doing. I’d made that time in her life even harder than it needed to be, and I couldn’t even remember it.

The next song was one of confusion and searching for a reason a quasi-enemy was now trying to play nice. The last page detailed the chaos in her head trying to sort through the feelings that brought up. The feelings I brought up in her. Each one painted a picture so bright and clear it was like being inside her head.

To see myself how she saw me as a one-time villain who’d transformed, although she fought it hard, fortified my resolve. I wouldn’t hurt her again. I closed the notebook and sat it on the bed beside me.

“What did you think?” She peered over at me from the basket of clothes she folded.

“You have a gift.”

A huffy laugh burst from her lips. “I’m not that on edge, you can tell me what you think.” She shook out a t-shirt five times before folding it against her chest.

“You think I’d lie?” I turned the page of lyrics primed to cut out a piece of my heart if she sang them to me.