The journal was a silly looking thing. She thought it was terribly impractical with its cover decorated in sewn-on beads. You couldn’t carry a book like that around with you without leaving behind a trail of little beads. They were ugly beads anyway. “Who sews brown beads into the shape of flowers on the cover of a journal?” Jen thought. “Probably the same colorblind idiot who picks the most unimaginative muted shade of gray and brown mixed together as the color of the cover.” The paper inside was thin and dry and crinkled, and worst of all, it was lined. “Who wants lines fencing in their thoughts in a journal?” Part of her wanted to fill it up just to be done with it. Another part of her wanted to give it away to get rid of it. She wondered why she kept a thing that disgusted her so much. And she remembered the moment she got it. Her sister sitting on the far end of the couch smoking a cigarette told one of her children to “get Auntie Jen’s present.” The children didn’t like Auntie Jen very much, but then neither did her sister. The youngest one handed her a red bag with white tissue paper sticking out of the top of it. She didn’t want to open it. So she set it aside and started talking about something else, anything else. But it was only a few minutes before her sister insisted she open the bag. Jen reached in and pulled out the journal. She made no expression as she turned it in her hands. From the dull color, to the beads on the cover, to the lined crinkled paper inside, to the price tag still stuck to the back—the price tag that read ‘CLEARANCE - $1.59’ Jen knew that her sister never wanted to give her anything. Her sister resented the feeling that she had to give her a gift. Jen knew because she was ashamed of the handmade scarf she had only moments before given to her sister with the same regret.