It Was Her Obsession - Darcy Vebber

A Moleskine, the small black classic one, eventually took the place of the bigger, spiral bound sketch book Lisa carried everywhere with her in high school. The sketch books, really there was a series of sketchbooks, were green or brown, with sailing ships printed on the cover. She covered each heavy, rough textured page with drawings and quotes and collaged scraps of paper. When she came to the end, she started another right away. They were lined up on a shelf in the bedroom she shared with her sister Katy, each thick, important bundle of paper dated. Whenever she had nothing else to do, she took them down to examine.

The rule was that each page had to be covered. She kept a tin box of markers and colored pencils in her bag, too. At rehearsals, when she was waiting backstage for a light cue or to change the set, she would color, furiously, with the side of one of the pencils, shading light to dark or making circles like boulders piled one on top of the other. Around and under and between the colors and the glued in souvenirs, she wrote down the things people around her said. People liked to look through them to see themselves quoted, their bits of dialog captured.

Senior year, a girl who was going out with Sam, a girl who was in fact older than Lisa but not as much older as she acted, told her the notebooks were a way of hiding from the world. The girl wore red lipstick and had wide brown eyes ringed in black.

"This is art," Lisa insisted. She knew the girl was uneasy about Lisa and Sam, about their friendship. The books were full of him, sketches, quotes, song lyrics that he loved. In an early one, there was even the wrapper of a candy bar he had thrown away but no one knew that. It just looked like something she admired, the letters or the picture of chocolate melting into a pool. She wanted the pages to be art, to be animated and beautiful. She wanted the notebooks to be admired by strangers.

The girl stood with her hands on her hips, looking down on Lisa who was sitting in a folding chair with one of the notebooks open in her lap. "It's like you're taking notes on life," the girl said. "It's not the same as being alive."