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BROOKE HADN'T MEANT TO READ THE DIARY, SHE REALLY HADN'T.
She had been hanging around the veranda by the art room, just minding her own business, when she caught sight of the notebook. Her first thought was to just let it sit, as she was never one to poke her nose in business that wasn't hers, but then she remembered how terrified she had been when she had misplaced one of her sketchbooks, relieved to find it turned into the office, but wishing it had just been given to her directly as some people had looked through it.
So she just wanted to check for a name, nothing more, but when she reached over to open to find the name, she found that, instead of opening to the front part, it opened to one of the pages, her eyes catching onto the last sentence on the page.
I DIDN'T MEAN TO CHEAT ON HIM
Slamming the notebook shut, she adjusted her jacket and looked around, hoping no one had seen her. After being sure that no one did, she grabbed her backpack and raced up the stairs, heart pounding and mind racing.
She wished she had seen who had written that.
º º º
She couldn't stop thinking about what she had read.
She had found it before school began, meaning she had to spend eight hours thinking about it. And when Brooke thought about something, it consumed nearly all of her life, and, as an extension, all of her sketchbook.
Now, she was never one to just throw paint on a canvas and call it art, though she had nothing against those who did—some people put paint on a canvas in a certain way, following the natural flow of her hands, the way they needed to in order to feel comfortable, and after being explained that over the summer when she was listening in on a seminar at the local college, she didn't have any qualms with what people wanted to do with their lives—but she didn't want to draw a person cheating on her boyfriend, that didn't sit right with her.
But she needed to make something.
So she drew a background.
She drew a bedroom. She used up all of her purples and reds and the entirety of one of her inking pens throughout the day as she made an elaborate backdrop of a mattress sitting pressed up slightly against the wall, by a window, clothes strewn about haphazardly, a shelf towards the background, cut off by the edge of the paper, part of a desk showing in the lower right, as if the camera were on the edge of it or right above it. There were magazines and books and trophies and feminine and masculine clothes. It looked like a regular scene until one looked towards the window and saw that the light peering through landed on only a necklace that was perched onto a button-up shirt.
