When Alyssa's cousin Emma gives her a glittery notebook with her name on it for her birthday, Alyssa thanks her warmly and gives her a hug, because that's what polite young ladies who are friends with their cousins do.

Good enough friends, even, that Emma could hardly fail to have noticed that Alyssa doesn't use side-spiral notebooks.  They make it annoying-to-impossible for her to produce handwriting up to her standard and she always buys top-bound ones even though they're a dozen times more expensive and almost never decorative.  (Or she buys looseleaf.)  But this one has her name on it, and isn't it pretty, Aly?  And you wear these colors a lot!  So of course she says she loves it.

She doesn't resent Emma for this at all.  Alyssa isn't annoyed about having to lie to her, or disappointed in the gift.  When she wants things she gets them for herself, and maybe sometime Emma will notice that Alyssa never uses it, and that Emma uses the sports bag Alyssa got her for her birthday almost every day, and then Alyssa will be winning.  (Well, more than she already is.)

But she can use it for handwriting practice, even if not for handwriting practice that anyone else can see, so a few weeks after her birthday she flips to the end - minus a handful of pages for later numbering, if she feels like it - and marks her spot with a treble-clef-shaped paperclip, and Googles a new pangram.

And starts writing on the back of a page:

My girl wove six dozen plaid jackets before she quit.