Page 49 of When I Picture You

Lola burst into giggles. “You should see your face.”

“I don’t need to, because I know it looks entirely professional.”

“I’ll go again.” Lola straightened up, but to Renee’s relief she didn’t bring out that high-gloss sheen. “This is my home studio, where I write most of my songs.”

Lola gave a tour. As she did, she sounded—normal. Like she was talking to Renee, not a reporter or her management. She explained that the awards displayed in here were only the ones she’d won for songwriting, with the one exception of the prize she’d taken at the Fellows High School talent show their freshman year. After the pageants her mom had put her in, it felt like the first thing she’d won for herself. She showed off a letter she’d received from Elton John after her second album, dried roses preserved from a bouquet from Stevie Nicks.

Lola stopped at a glass-fronted cabinet full of notebooks. She had one hand clasped behind her neck, the other hidden in the sleeve of her sweater. “These are my journals.”

“Like where you do the actual writing?”

Lola grinned. “Yes, the actual writing. I use the notes app on my phone too, but there’s nothing like working the song out on paper.”

“There must be a hundred notebooks in there,” Renee said, staring at the cabinet.

“I haven’t counted, but they go back beforeSeventeen Candles.”

“You always had a journal with you back then.”

Lola’s dark eyes darted to Renee. “I got made fun of enough for it.”

Renee shifted uncomfortably. She hadn’t made fun of Lola herself—at least not to Lola’s face—but she’d never stopped anyone else from doing it either. “I’m sorry. I kind of hoped you’d forgotten about that.”

Lola’s hand slipped from her neck and she looked directly into thecamera. “It might shock you, dear viewer, but I was not terribly cool in high school. Right, Renee?”

“I wouldn’t sayterriblycool,” Renee said carefully. “You had other priorities.”

“Come on, you can admit it. I was different. Even you didn’t like me in high school.”

Renee flushed. “You probably don’t remember, but back then I didn’t likeanyone.”

“I remember,” Lola said quietly.

Renee wished she wasn’t holding the camera. “I really am sorry. If I’d known better, we could have been real friends. I was too busy being an idiot.”

“It’s fine. I was halfway out of Fellows anyway, and you had a lot going on.”

“So did you. That’s not an excuse.” Renee’s ribs were suddenly too tight. “Anyway, I like you now, enough to make up for it.”

Lola was looking at her with her lips parted, her eyes round. Renee hastily angled the camera at the journals. “Can we look at them?”

“At my journals?”

“No, no—I mean, let’s film you looking at them.”

“They’re sort of private.” Lola hesitated, her fingertips light on the latch of the cabinet door. “But … all right. Why not?”

HALF AN HOURlater, Lola sat on the floor, her old journals fanned around her.

Renee couldn’t believe Lola had allowed her this. She understood exactly how personal an artist’s notebooks were, that they carried the unrefined contents of your heart and mind. The other artists Renee knew were devoted to a singular style of notebook, imported from places like Japan or Germany, and could not create without them.Renee herself preferred a specific Finnish brand with dotted pages that she imagined would fit in at a film archive.

But Lola, whose notebooks probablywouldend up in an archive, had begun writing songs before she knew how artists were supposed to behave. Her notebooks were in all shapes, colors, and sizes: floppy college-ruled things with stickers on the cover, fancy leather-bound sketchbooks, staticky black-and-white composition books, girlish diaries with tiny locks. The spines were cracked and bindings bent, corners battered and covers peeling. Renee thought of her own notebooks, stored under her bed in Fellows; even the used ones looked nearly as pristine as the day she’d unwrapped them.

Lola got to her knees and pulled out a thick accordion file folder. “This is where I keep most of the scraps.”

“The scraps?”

Lola fluttered her hand as if everyone knew this term. “When you have an idea, so you just grab an old envelope or whatever? It’s excessive, but I like to save everything I can.”