Sweetie Belle was bubbling with excitement as she rushed upstairs to her bedroom. She barely greeted her parents as she made haste to ink the memories of her sleepover in her diary while they were still fresh, even if she almost broke her neck tripping up the stairs!
"Where's the fire?" Her father called up the stairs behind her. "You alright?"
"Yeah, I'm fine!" Sweetie replied as she entered the room. "Better than fine," she mumbled under her breath with a grin.
She set her saddlebag with her sleepover things on her bed, and retrieved her diary from underneath her pillow. A few weeks ago, she had accidentally forgot to conceal it and left it on the desk for all the world to see — just before a sleepover no less! Luckily for her, she stowed it before anypony had seen it.
Her quill was shaking in her teeth, and the entry was going to be a tricky one to decipher later, but Sweetie Belle didn't care. The emotion would come across plain as day!
Dear diary,
I finally did it. I told Scootaloo how I felt, and guess what? SHE LIKES ME BACK!!!! Apple Bloom invited us over, and we played truth or dare, and we kissed, and it was bad but not really, but then we were going to sleep, and then then we started talking and then me and Scootaloo kissed and it was so AWESOME!!!!
Sweetie Belle spat the quill out, frowning at the spray of words she had just written down, hardly legible, and hardly sensible. Sweetie Belle took a deep breath, and decided to think before just pouring her next series of racing thoughts onto the page. There was just so much to cover!
She and Scootaloo woke up, snuggling quite close despite their agreement not to. Apple Bloom had asked what exactly was going on, and with about as much preparation as Sweetie Belle had with her latest diary entry, she and Scootaloo told Apple Bloom about what had happened the night before.
Apple Bloom looked shocked at first, then amused. "I'm happy for y'all," she had said, "but keep your kissing practice to yourselves around me, okay?" Sweetie Belle and Scootaloo were both very disappointed by this request given the prowess they thought they had made.
And what prowess I made... Sweetie Belle thought, as she flipped quickly through her diary pages. All of the pages filled with her hopes and longing. And then last night, with all of the circumstances just coming together in a perfect storm of—
Sweetie Belle froze. As the pages fanned out from her perusal, she saw something flitting out from between the sheets, barely visible in the orange glow coming from her open window. This object floated for a bit before landing on the floor to the right of her desk, and without the tinting from the sunset obscuring it, Sweetie Belle very easily identified it.
It was a hair. A hair with the exact same shade of red as one that rested underneath the pink bow of one of her best friends.
Sweetie Belle paused for a moment, her mind a whirlwind. And then, she smiled.