Cracked Chapter 7: Time Is On My Side
Title: Cracked
Fandom: Twilight
Genre: Humor/Parody
Rating: T
Main Pairing: Bella and Edward
LJ Chapter 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
Also on ff.net
Summary: Welcome to an experiment in dark humor, with alternating emphasis on the "dark" and the "humor." To tell you the truth, I'm not sure where exactly this story is taking me; unlike my other stories, the whole thing isn't prewritten. Hopefully it's still fun, though. My thanks to Ms. Meyer, for creating such memorable characters and for not minding that we all play with them.
I love parentheses. (Really.)
Previously: Edward fought tooth and nail to prevent his family from murdering Bella. Then Alice predicted he was going to fall in love with Bella, and he ran away like a little boy and got all emo about it.
From Twilight Chapter 4: “Invitations”
Time Is On My Side
If there was one thing the Swans appreciated, it was fresh meat.
No, not that kind of meat. Ew.
Charlie, unaccustomed to grocery shopping, neglected to tell Bella about Don Carlos Carnicería. It was actually Angela’s mother, about a week or so after the new semester began (actually, the day after the accident with Tyler’s van), who saw Bella scowling at the Thriftway refrigerated meat section as she picked through the packages, feeling very much like a turkey buzzard sifting through carcasses. Actually, if she were a turkey buzzard, things would have been easier, as turkey buzzards are known for having digestive tracts resistant to the diseases carried by most roadkill. Yes, it was really that bad. Bella had half a mind to call the county health department.
“Are you Bella Swan?” Mrs. Weber asked. She was everything one would expect of a preacher’s wife: kind, helpful, friendly, and sexually repressed. That last bit isn’t particularly relevant, but it’s worth noting she wasn’t into anything one might classify as sexually deviant-all she wanted was a little creativity from Reverend Weber. Maybe a tryst in the choir loft. A nest of soft blankets in the back of the minivan? A cheap hotel, a bottle of wine, and a vibrator, for heaven’s sake!
“Oh, yes ma’am,” Bella answered, a little surprised. She really should have been used to being recognized by now, but every so often she met someone who seemed to know her, even though she had no recollection of them at all. “I’m sorry, have we met?”
After years and years of inviting people to church and getting uncomfortable looks in return, Mrs. Weber had learned speed was the easiest way to get her woman-of-God duty over with and get to the conversation she actually wanted to have. The woman introduced herself, shook Bella’s hand, dropped Angela’s name, asked after Charlie, expressed concern about yesterday’s car accident, and invited Bella to attend Sunday service all in the span of seven-point-two seconds. Poor Bella barely had time to blink before Mrs. Weber’s standard greeting was over, and then the middle-aged lady was gently removing the world’s ugliest ground beef from Bella’s hands and whispering about Don Carlos, lamb chops, and porterhouse steak. The word ‘succulent’ was used more than once, but that had less to do with Carlos Rodriguez’s products and more to do with something Mrs. Weber wished Rev. Weber would try, just one time, for the love of all that was holy. Okay, maybe not for all that was holy, but definitely for the love of all that was sexy.
Bella thanked the lady, silently vowing never to tell Angela how weird her mom was. As Mrs. Weber walked away, reflecting on her college days when she didn’t have to hide her atheism, Bella made her way to the register so she could hurry to Don Carlos before they closed.
“Hola, buenos tardes,” Bella greeted the proprietor. One good whiff of the inside of his shop, and Bella knew she was in the right place. “Please, please tell me you have beef skirt. I haven’t had decent fajitas since I left Arizona!”
“You and I are going to get along great,” Mr. Rodriguez said with a smile, pulling out a supply of Styrofoam cups and lids from a cabinet. He knew he should switch to the more solid, hard plastic soup containers, but those were generally clear and tended to freak out the non-blood-buying customers, so cheaper opaque Styrofoam was what he went with. “Let me put these in the back, and I’ll get you all set up.”
Bella, who had never spent much time in butcher shops back in Phoenix, had no idea what the cups were for at all. She was too busy examining the meat marked ‘elk’ to pay much attention to them. “Sure, take your time.”
That night, something about her day nagged at Bella, but she couldn’t pinpoint what it was, and as she had a dozen other things on her mind in addition to two papers due soon and make-up work from the previous day, she forgot all about it.
xXxXx
For nearly two months after the bizarre near-miss with Tyler’s van and rescue, Bella felt like Edward was punishing her for something. Ordinarily she would never think such a thing-she wasn’t that full of herself. He ignored her (or at least, he acted like it), which, fine, whatever, not everyone had to give her attention just so she’d feel validated. And it wasn’t like he had to suck up to her just because of who her father was; after publicly saving the chief’s daughter from certain death, no cop in town would ever give him a traffic ticket. After their mutual rudeness on the day of the accident, Bella hoped they’d be able to move on and be civil to one another. She even made a gesture of peace (a pez dispenser with Superman’s head on it), but it seemed Edward wasn’t interested in that level of maturity. He never spoke to Bella unless a lab assignment required him to do so, not even to say hello, and when forced to communicate he tended to use one-word sentences-not a very good quality in a lab partner, but Bella was more than capable of holding her own.
She told herself he was treating her with indifference, but that was inaccurate. Indifference was how he treated everyone else. His attitude, when he wasn’t so aloof, felt like veiled disdain; she still occasionally caught him making that face when she walked by. Bella called it Skunk Face (not out loud, or at least not when he was around). She had an urge to tell him it was bad for the skin, but his skin was always perfect, so it wouldn’t have made much of an impression.
Not that she spent much time contemplating his skin. Or the way it felt against hers.
Whatever his problem was, Bella decided that it was just that: his problem. What did Lama Gyatso always tell her? “Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned.” So what if Edward Cullen saved her life under mysterious, dramatic conditions, only to treat her like an insect afterward? Bella was not interested in letting anyone else make her feel bad about herself-it was a colossal waste of energy. She had homework to do, groceries to buy, dinners to make, required reading to get through, a detective novel to finish (The Maltese Falcon), and procedural dramas to watch (she was actually conducting an experiment, in which she made note of all the inaccuracies and gross factual misrepresentations and compared these to the wisdom gleaned from her father’s reactions and her own secondhand forensic science books). She had to make adjustments to her newly arrived computer and install protection software, and obtain and install a wireless router for the new broadband internet (Charlie totally caved when Bella introduced him to the wonders of HD sports channels). She had to contact her mother via e-mail often and with favorable reports of Forks, lest Renee start freaking out, which wouldn’t have resulted in any action-seriously, what could Renee do from Florida except make phone calls and gripe a lot?-but would definitely have made it even harder for Bella to get through the days without being able to slump onto her mother’s bed and vent about mean people who suck.
Charlie was a non-practicing Lutheran, so he preferred to work on Saturdays and fish on Sundays, though what he expected to catch in the freezing weather was anybody’s guess. Point being, that was how he found his center; Bella still needed to find her own, and apparently she was free to do so without her father’s presence, since he was almost never home. There were no nearby places to hear the calming wisdom of Buddhist monks-Bella had discovered their peace when she was fifteen and having a tough time with her mother’s “endless youth”-but she found a Reform congregation who held Shabbat service in Port Angeles once a month at a fellowship hall. They welcomed her with open arms, and there were even a few kids who went to Forks High; nice kids, but mostly they just wanted to know about her bat mitzvah. It wasn’t quite the same without Renee there to dole out hugs and flirt shamelessly with the cantor, but at least this way Bella felt like she was still grounded in her culture, still part of something greater than herself. She even went to the potluck dinner for Tu B’Shevat (best described as the beginning of the fiscal year for calculating the age of trees), and everyone complimented her special date-and-coconut cookies. She’d almost forgotten what it felt like to be nervous about how her cooking would be received; back home, everyone smiled with relief the minute they found out Bella, and not Renee, had cooked any dish at all. Kosher or not, Fritos were not an acceptable substitute for matzah balls in matzah ball soup.
There were other distractions to make the time go by. Namely, Mike Newton.
Mike meant well. Clearly he was going out of his way to make Bella feel welcome. Which was fine the first two weeks, but after a while Bella couldn’t write it off as casual interest anymore. He was always there. Walking her to most of her classes, hanging around her lab table before the bell, jostling for a seat next to her in the cafeteria (Bella had taken to timing her cafeteria entrance with Angela’s, hoping to sit between Angela and Jessica). For Valentine’s Day he sent her flowers, or at least he said he did, although why he should send a bouquet without a name on the card only to step up and unceremoniously claim the floral arrangement the next day made little sense. Bella weighed her options about Mike; she wouldn’t have been a normal girl if she didn’t at least consider it. He wasn’t a bad guy, and she might be able to grow to like him that way after a while. Her father wouldn’t give her a hard time about seeing him, which was the opposite of what most girls wanted in a boyfriend, but Bella’s teen rebellion didn’t lean in the direction of dating inappropriate boys, so the point was moot. Finally she decided that going out with Mike was not worth making an enemy of Jess. And anyway, she didn’t want to deal with a big, ridiculous break-up scene whenever it came time to go away to university.
Between all that and researching potential scholarships for college, along with occasionally having to make snacks for Charlie and his friends for NFL playoff games, life in Forks was as full as Bella could make it without sacrificing who she was.
It just wasn’t…home.
Fortunately (or extremely unfortunately, depending on how one looked at it), Fate provided Bella with little mysteries to occupy her mind.
No matter how he insisted at the time that the only thing he did to save her was pull her out of the way, Bella knew Edward did more. She saw the evidence with her own eyes-except that the car that had an impression of Edward’s shoulder didn’t seem to have it anymore, only a few paint scratches, and Tyler’s van was totaled and hauled away to the junkyard. Evidence be damned, Edward was never going admit to what really happened, and no one else would ever believe it (he was right about that, she was sure, and she really didn’t want more accusations of hallucinations). Even if anyone did believe it, Bella got the distinct impression that neither Edward nor his anti-social family would appreciate the attention. Asshole or not, Bella was grateful enough to Edward for saving her life that she kept her word, kept her silence, kept his secret.
That didn’t mean she was above trying to learn the rest of his secrets, when there was nothing better to do.
It was such a silly thing, but she found herself wondering who his girlfriend might be. Obviously he saw her every day-he always smelled of her, whoever she was. On the rare occasions when she arrived at school before the Cullens did, she noticed Edward always did the driving and led the others into the main building, but she never saw him arrive alone or sneak away to meet someone, and he always sat with his family at lunch, no one else. She could only conclude that he was a) stopping off at his girlfriend’s house very early each morning while his siblings waited in the car, which was unlikely-Rosalie didn’t look like the type to wait for anyone; b) sleeping at the lady’s house every night and picking his family up for school, which made sense until she Google-mapped his family’s address and realized they lived too far away from town and from anyone else for him to be the one doing all that driving; c) secretly making out with a teacher during or between classes (and good on him for being the only Cullen not to date his sister), or d) he just liked wearing middle-aged women’s body spray.
Wearing Bath and Body Works products was probably the most normal thing about him.
Edward’s eyes did, in fact, change color on their own-Bella learned of it in stolen glances over potato slices (the osmosis unit) and in his nervous stare whenever they used X-Acto knives to dissect animal organs. From bright gold to almost-hazel to midnight black; it was like watching the changes in henna ink on the skin over time. Bella would never admit how taken she was with the process, but it was so strange. In her habitual search for patterns, she realized the Skunk Face made more appearances when Edward’s eyes were black.
Then there was the eating thing. Bella wasn’t a big fan of the cafeteria food, but she wasn’t so spoiled that she felt the need to buy it and purposely turn up her nose at it. The Cullens did this, all of them, every day. At first it made her dislike them. Charlie was always saying how the Forks Food Bank was in sore need of more donations, especially in the winter, and here these rich jerks wasted enough food to feed five people for no apparent reason. It really was too bad Edward never caught on to the attention his eating habits were drawing from Bella-he was too busy pretending not to look at her to notice when she stopped pretending not to look at him.
After a couple of weeks, though, the food situation made Bella worry-could it be that their entire family was made up of people with eating disorders? She almost said something to Angela about the Cullen kids possibly suffering from anorexia (perhaps Emmett used to be really fat before he got all buff and steroid-y?), but then she noticed that, just occasionally, one of them would arrive in the cafeteria with a brown paper bag containing two or three tall, white Styrofoam cups. Gourmet coffee, maybe? There wasn’t a Starbucks label, or any label at all, and the cups were closer in size to truck-stop fountain drinks than grande coffee cups, but sure enough, they shared their drinks and sucked at their straws contentedly, looking downright happy. Well, they were smiling anyway, although Edward hadn’t thought of himself as ‘happy’ in well over forty years, and considered himself to be moderately sated by a quart of cow’s blood at best. Bella was sure they were indulging in adult beverages, but she never smelled alcohol on Edward’s breath. Just more whore perfume on his clothes. When she realized his eyes brightened a bit on the days when he had one of those drinks, things started to get more interesting.
Things were already well beyond interesting for Edward Cullen.
It was some weeks before he felt completely confident that Bella wasn’t going to tell anyone the truth about the van. By all appearances, it seemed she wanted to forget about it-the investigation and witness statements Edward had been fearing never happened, because Bella convinced her father that the drug test alone was enough to convict Tyler, and that it would make everyone’s lives harder, including hers, if he started hauling people in for questioning or pushing for a Reckless Endangerment charge. Certainly she discouraged questions about the accident when she went back to school. However, this had the side effect of making Edward wonder why she never said anything about him at all anymore, not to anyone. Not a ‘Yeah, Edward pulled me out of the way,’ or even a ‘He won’t let me copy his work in biology,’ and certainly never ‘God, he’s so handsome. Why doesn’t he have a girlfriend again?’
That last one was mostly wishful thinking. Nobody ever said that about him. The fear was so ingrained that even when mortals found him attractive, they didn’t question his lack of attachment (although they did make mental notes to think about him when they masturbated later…which was awkward, especially that time when the thought came from an old man). That was just normal for humans. But from Bella, the lack of curiosity somehow hurt more, even though officially it was what he wanted. The only human being not afraid to talk to him or put him in his place, and she still appeared to find him uninteresting. Occasionally he wondered: if he didn’t possess a vampire’s beauty, would anyone still find him even remotely attractive? Talk about a bruise to the self-esteem.
Of course, there were some moments when Edward desperately wished he wasn’t such a bleeding-heart vegetarian. (Metaphorically speaking, of course. His heart didn’t bleed, and he had always hated vegetables, even as a human. He really needed to find a better word for his diet.) Specifically, he cursed the ground Mike Newton walked on, and every time the boy plopped his baby-fat-laden ass in front of Bella at their biology table, he wanted Mike to die a terrible, bloody, gruesome, EVERLASTING HELL-BEAST DEATH TO END ALL OTHER DEATH!
Or something like that.
Ridiculous, that’s what it was. Here this girl should have been absolutely uninteresting to Edward precisely because she was so interesting to Mike, and everything Mike liked was lame. The kid liked basketball, for god’s sake. Didn’t Carlisle say ‘netball is for women?’ He said it ninety years ago, but still-everybody who was cool liked baseball. Then again, cool people didn’t say ‘cool’ as often as they used to, so Edward really didn’t have a very good sense of perspective. Be that as it may, Edward wanted what Mike wanted.
Wait, wait, wait-since when do I want her? That’s probably in my head because Alice put it there, but I just want her blood. Don’t I? What is there to want?
What, indeed. She was just a mortal girl, after all. Nothing special about her. Not her strange sense of humor that most of her human friends didn’t get. Not the face she made when Edward walked into the room, even though she wasn’t looking at him, like she just knew he was there. Not how fast she could decode a cryptogram in those variety puzzle magazines she always had. No, nothing set her apart, at least not in a good way. She was plain-so plain-looking, in fact, that she’d gone all the way around it and come back looking interesting. She smelled too delectable, she tripped over her own feet, and she often bit her lip in that infuriating way that she never seemed to notice. (And why should she? What kind of loser chronicles the biting of their own lip?)
In Edward’s mind, which followed Bella around constantly through the minds of others (without satisfactory cause, and to the continual bewilderment of most of his siblings, who weren’t the least bit fooled by his disinterested pretense), the human girl was a world-class klutz, managing to fall no less than seven times a day. She must have equilibrium problems, he guessed, or just truly awful balance. Every moment he spent within smelling distance of her, he was frightened that she might fall and scrape her hands or knees. Being prone to exaggeration, he translated this into a fear for her hand-eye coordination as well. Whenever the pair of them used scalpels in class, Edward felt caught between a desire to snatch the stainless steel blade from her hands and forbid her to use it, and a crippling sense of dread that warned him if he moved a single muscle while she held a knife, she would accidentally slice open her fragile skin and let loose a stream of warm, delicious, irresistible blood.
He need not have worried; Bella’s clumsiness was actually the result of one leg being an inch longer than the other. This apparent ineptitude was not nearly as terrible or frequent as anyone imagined it to be, especially Edward, and it definitely did not extend to her fingers. Not for nothing was she such an excellent biology student-it was the class she gave the most effort. If anyone had bothered to ask her, they’d have learned the colleges on her list were all schools with Criminal Justice programs, specifically those that offered Bachelor’s degrees in Forensic Science. Her particular ambition in life was to solve mysteries with the power of observation and evidence.
Too bad Edward never bothered to learn that. If he had, he might have known that the great 20th century philosopher Mick Jagger was wrong: time was most definitely not on his side.
Fandom: Twilight
Genre: Humor/Parody
Rating: T
Main Pairing: Bella and Edward
LJ Chapter 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
Also on ff.net
Summary: Welcome to an experiment in dark humor, with alternating emphasis on the "dark" and the "humor." To tell you the truth, I'm not sure where exactly this story is taking me; unlike my other stories, the whole thing isn't prewritten. Hopefully it's still fun, though. My thanks to Ms. Meyer, for creating such memorable characters and for not minding that we all play with them.
I love parentheses. (Really.)
Previously: Edward fought tooth and nail to prevent his family from murdering Bella. Then Alice predicted he was going to fall in love with Bella, and he ran away like a little boy and got all emo about it.
From Twilight Chapter 4: “Invitations”
Time Is On My Side
If there was one thing the Swans appreciated, it was fresh meat.
No, not that kind of meat. Ew.
Charlie, unaccustomed to grocery shopping, neglected to tell Bella about Don Carlos Carnicería. It was actually Angela’s mother, about a week or so after the new semester began (actually, the day after the accident with Tyler’s van), who saw Bella scowling at the Thriftway refrigerated meat section as she picked through the packages, feeling very much like a turkey buzzard sifting through carcasses. Actually, if she were a turkey buzzard, things would have been easier, as turkey buzzards are known for having digestive tracts resistant to the diseases carried by most roadkill. Yes, it was really that bad. Bella had half a mind to call the county health department.
“Are you Bella Swan?” Mrs. Weber asked. She was everything one would expect of a preacher’s wife: kind, helpful, friendly, and sexually repressed. That last bit isn’t particularly relevant, but it’s worth noting she wasn’t into anything one might classify as sexually deviant-all she wanted was a little creativity from Reverend Weber. Maybe a tryst in the choir loft. A nest of soft blankets in the back of the minivan? A cheap hotel, a bottle of wine, and a vibrator, for heaven’s sake!
“Oh, yes ma’am,” Bella answered, a little surprised. She really should have been used to being recognized by now, but every so often she met someone who seemed to know her, even though she had no recollection of them at all. “I’m sorry, have we met?”
After years and years of inviting people to church and getting uncomfortable looks in return, Mrs. Weber had learned speed was the easiest way to get her woman-of-God duty over with and get to the conversation she actually wanted to have. The woman introduced herself, shook Bella’s hand, dropped Angela’s name, asked after Charlie, expressed concern about yesterday’s car accident, and invited Bella to attend Sunday service all in the span of seven-point-two seconds. Poor Bella barely had time to blink before Mrs. Weber’s standard greeting was over, and then the middle-aged lady was gently removing the world’s ugliest ground beef from Bella’s hands and whispering about Don Carlos, lamb chops, and porterhouse steak. The word ‘succulent’ was used more than once, but that had less to do with Carlos Rodriguez’s products and more to do with something Mrs. Weber wished Rev. Weber would try, just one time, for the love of all that was holy. Okay, maybe not for all that was holy, but definitely for the love of all that was sexy.
Bella thanked the lady, silently vowing never to tell Angela how weird her mom was. As Mrs. Weber walked away, reflecting on her college days when she didn’t have to hide her atheism, Bella made her way to the register so she could hurry to Don Carlos before they closed.
“Hola, buenos tardes,” Bella greeted the proprietor. One good whiff of the inside of his shop, and Bella knew she was in the right place. “Please, please tell me you have beef skirt. I haven’t had decent fajitas since I left Arizona!”
“You and I are going to get along great,” Mr. Rodriguez said with a smile, pulling out a supply of Styrofoam cups and lids from a cabinet. He knew he should switch to the more solid, hard plastic soup containers, but those were generally clear and tended to freak out the non-blood-buying customers, so cheaper opaque Styrofoam was what he went with. “Let me put these in the back, and I’ll get you all set up.”
Bella, who had never spent much time in butcher shops back in Phoenix, had no idea what the cups were for at all. She was too busy examining the meat marked ‘elk’ to pay much attention to them. “Sure, take your time.”
That night, something about her day nagged at Bella, but she couldn’t pinpoint what it was, and as she had a dozen other things on her mind in addition to two papers due soon and make-up work from the previous day, she forgot all about it.
xXxXx
For nearly two months after the bizarre near-miss with Tyler’s van and rescue, Bella felt like Edward was punishing her for something. Ordinarily she would never think such a thing-she wasn’t that full of herself. He ignored her (or at least, he acted like it), which, fine, whatever, not everyone had to give her attention just so she’d feel validated. And it wasn’t like he had to suck up to her just because of who her father was; after publicly saving the chief’s daughter from certain death, no cop in town would ever give him a traffic ticket. After their mutual rudeness on the day of the accident, Bella hoped they’d be able to move on and be civil to one another. She even made a gesture of peace (a pez dispenser with Superman’s head on it), but it seemed Edward wasn’t interested in that level of maturity. He never spoke to Bella unless a lab assignment required him to do so, not even to say hello, and when forced to communicate he tended to use one-word sentences-not a very good quality in a lab partner, but Bella was more than capable of holding her own.
She told herself he was treating her with indifference, but that was inaccurate. Indifference was how he treated everyone else. His attitude, when he wasn’t so aloof, felt like veiled disdain; she still occasionally caught him making that face when she walked by. Bella called it Skunk Face (not out loud, or at least not when he was around). She had an urge to tell him it was bad for the skin, but his skin was always perfect, so it wouldn’t have made much of an impression.
Not that she spent much time contemplating his skin. Or the way it felt against hers.
Whatever his problem was, Bella decided that it was just that: his problem. What did Lama Gyatso always tell her? “Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned.” So what if Edward Cullen saved her life under mysterious, dramatic conditions, only to treat her like an insect afterward? Bella was not interested in letting anyone else make her feel bad about herself-it was a colossal waste of energy. She had homework to do, groceries to buy, dinners to make, required reading to get through, a detective novel to finish (The Maltese Falcon), and procedural dramas to watch (she was actually conducting an experiment, in which she made note of all the inaccuracies and gross factual misrepresentations and compared these to the wisdom gleaned from her father’s reactions and her own secondhand forensic science books). She had to make adjustments to her newly arrived computer and install protection software, and obtain and install a wireless router for the new broadband internet (Charlie totally caved when Bella introduced him to the wonders of HD sports channels). She had to contact her mother via e-mail often and with favorable reports of Forks, lest Renee start freaking out, which wouldn’t have resulted in any action-seriously, what could Renee do from Florida except make phone calls and gripe a lot?-but would definitely have made it even harder for Bella to get through the days without being able to slump onto her mother’s bed and vent about mean people who suck.
Charlie was a non-practicing Lutheran, so he preferred to work on Saturdays and fish on Sundays, though what he expected to catch in the freezing weather was anybody’s guess. Point being, that was how he found his center; Bella still needed to find her own, and apparently she was free to do so without her father’s presence, since he was almost never home. There were no nearby places to hear the calming wisdom of Buddhist monks-Bella had discovered their peace when she was fifteen and having a tough time with her mother’s “endless youth”-but she found a Reform congregation who held Shabbat service in Port Angeles once a month at a fellowship hall. They welcomed her with open arms, and there were even a few kids who went to Forks High; nice kids, but mostly they just wanted to know about her bat mitzvah. It wasn’t quite the same without Renee there to dole out hugs and flirt shamelessly with the cantor, but at least this way Bella felt like she was still grounded in her culture, still part of something greater than herself. She even went to the potluck dinner for Tu B’Shevat (best described as the beginning of the fiscal year for calculating the age of trees), and everyone complimented her special date-and-coconut cookies. She’d almost forgotten what it felt like to be nervous about how her cooking would be received; back home, everyone smiled with relief the minute they found out Bella, and not Renee, had cooked any dish at all. Kosher or not, Fritos were not an acceptable substitute for matzah balls in matzah ball soup.
There were other distractions to make the time go by. Namely, Mike Newton.
Mike meant well. Clearly he was going out of his way to make Bella feel welcome. Which was fine the first two weeks, but after a while Bella couldn’t write it off as casual interest anymore. He was always there. Walking her to most of her classes, hanging around her lab table before the bell, jostling for a seat next to her in the cafeteria (Bella had taken to timing her cafeteria entrance with Angela’s, hoping to sit between Angela and Jessica). For Valentine’s Day he sent her flowers, or at least he said he did, although why he should send a bouquet without a name on the card only to step up and unceremoniously claim the floral arrangement the next day made little sense. Bella weighed her options about Mike; she wouldn’t have been a normal girl if she didn’t at least consider it. He wasn’t a bad guy, and she might be able to grow to like him that way after a while. Her father wouldn’t give her a hard time about seeing him, which was the opposite of what most girls wanted in a boyfriend, but Bella’s teen rebellion didn’t lean in the direction of dating inappropriate boys, so the point was moot. Finally she decided that going out with Mike was not worth making an enemy of Jess. And anyway, she didn’t want to deal with a big, ridiculous break-up scene whenever it came time to go away to university.
Between all that and researching potential scholarships for college, along with occasionally having to make snacks for Charlie and his friends for NFL playoff games, life in Forks was as full as Bella could make it without sacrificing who she was.
It just wasn’t…home.
Fortunately (or extremely unfortunately, depending on how one looked at it), Fate provided Bella with little mysteries to occupy her mind.
No matter how he insisted at the time that the only thing he did to save her was pull her out of the way, Bella knew Edward did more. She saw the evidence with her own eyes-except that the car that had an impression of Edward’s shoulder didn’t seem to have it anymore, only a few paint scratches, and Tyler’s van was totaled and hauled away to the junkyard. Evidence be damned, Edward was never going admit to what really happened, and no one else would ever believe it (he was right about that, she was sure, and she really didn’t want more accusations of hallucinations). Even if anyone did believe it, Bella got the distinct impression that neither Edward nor his anti-social family would appreciate the attention. Asshole or not, Bella was grateful enough to Edward for saving her life that she kept her word, kept her silence, kept his secret.
That didn’t mean she was above trying to learn the rest of his secrets, when there was nothing better to do.
It was such a silly thing, but she found herself wondering who his girlfriend might be. Obviously he saw her every day-he always smelled of her, whoever she was. On the rare occasions when she arrived at school before the Cullens did, she noticed Edward always did the driving and led the others into the main building, but she never saw him arrive alone or sneak away to meet someone, and he always sat with his family at lunch, no one else. She could only conclude that he was a) stopping off at his girlfriend’s house very early each morning while his siblings waited in the car, which was unlikely-Rosalie didn’t look like the type to wait for anyone; b) sleeping at the lady’s house every night and picking his family up for school, which made sense until she Google-mapped his family’s address and realized they lived too far away from town and from anyone else for him to be the one doing all that driving; c) secretly making out with a teacher during or between classes (and good on him for being the only Cullen not to date his sister), or d) he just liked wearing middle-aged women’s body spray.
Wearing Bath and Body Works products was probably the most normal thing about him.
Edward’s eyes did, in fact, change color on their own-Bella learned of it in stolen glances over potato slices (the osmosis unit) and in his nervous stare whenever they used X-Acto knives to dissect animal organs. From bright gold to almost-hazel to midnight black; it was like watching the changes in henna ink on the skin over time. Bella would never admit how taken she was with the process, but it was so strange. In her habitual search for patterns, she realized the Skunk Face made more appearances when Edward’s eyes were black.
Then there was the eating thing. Bella wasn’t a big fan of the cafeteria food, but she wasn’t so spoiled that she felt the need to buy it and purposely turn up her nose at it. The Cullens did this, all of them, every day. At first it made her dislike them. Charlie was always saying how the Forks Food Bank was in sore need of more donations, especially in the winter, and here these rich jerks wasted enough food to feed five people for no apparent reason. It really was too bad Edward never caught on to the attention his eating habits were drawing from Bella-he was too busy pretending not to look at her to notice when she stopped pretending not to look at him.
After a couple of weeks, though, the food situation made Bella worry-could it be that their entire family was made up of people with eating disorders? She almost said something to Angela about the Cullen kids possibly suffering from anorexia (perhaps Emmett used to be really fat before he got all buff and steroid-y?), but then she noticed that, just occasionally, one of them would arrive in the cafeteria with a brown paper bag containing two or three tall, white Styrofoam cups. Gourmet coffee, maybe? There wasn’t a Starbucks label, or any label at all, and the cups were closer in size to truck-stop fountain drinks than grande coffee cups, but sure enough, they shared their drinks and sucked at their straws contentedly, looking downright happy. Well, they were smiling anyway, although Edward hadn’t thought of himself as ‘happy’ in well over forty years, and considered himself to be moderately sated by a quart of cow’s blood at best. Bella was sure they were indulging in adult beverages, but she never smelled alcohol on Edward’s breath. Just more whore perfume on his clothes. When she realized his eyes brightened a bit on the days when he had one of those drinks, things started to get more interesting.
Things were already well beyond interesting for Edward Cullen.
It was some weeks before he felt completely confident that Bella wasn’t going to tell anyone the truth about the van. By all appearances, it seemed she wanted to forget about it-the investigation and witness statements Edward had been fearing never happened, because Bella convinced her father that the drug test alone was enough to convict Tyler, and that it would make everyone’s lives harder, including hers, if he started hauling people in for questioning or pushing for a Reckless Endangerment charge. Certainly she discouraged questions about the accident when she went back to school. However, this had the side effect of making Edward wonder why she never said anything about him at all anymore, not to anyone. Not a ‘Yeah, Edward pulled me out of the way,’ or even a ‘He won’t let me copy his work in biology,’ and certainly never ‘God, he’s so handsome. Why doesn’t he have a girlfriend again?’
That last one was mostly wishful thinking. Nobody ever said that about him. The fear was so ingrained that even when mortals found him attractive, they didn’t question his lack of attachment (although they did make mental notes to think about him when they masturbated later…which was awkward, especially that time when the thought came from an old man). That was just normal for humans. But from Bella, the lack of curiosity somehow hurt more, even though officially it was what he wanted. The only human being not afraid to talk to him or put him in his place, and she still appeared to find him uninteresting. Occasionally he wondered: if he didn’t possess a vampire’s beauty, would anyone still find him even remotely attractive? Talk about a bruise to the self-esteem.
Of course, there were some moments when Edward desperately wished he wasn’t such a bleeding-heart vegetarian. (Metaphorically speaking, of course. His heart didn’t bleed, and he had always hated vegetables, even as a human. He really needed to find a better word for his diet.) Specifically, he cursed the ground Mike Newton walked on, and every time the boy plopped his baby-fat-laden ass in front of Bella at their biology table, he wanted Mike to die a terrible, bloody, gruesome, EVERLASTING HELL-BEAST DEATH TO END ALL OTHER DEATH!
Or something like that.
Ridiculous, that’s what it was. Here this girl should have been absolutely uninteresting to Edward precisely because she was so interesting to Mike, and everything Mike liked was lame. The kid liked basketball, for god’s sake. Didn’t Carlisle say ‘netball is for women?’ He said it ninety years ago, but still-everybody who was cool liked baseball. Then again, cool people didn’t say ‘cool’ as often as they used to, so Edward really didn’t have a very good sense of perspective. Be that as it may, Edward wanted what Mike wanted.
Wait, wait, wait-since when do I want her? That’s probably in my head because Alice put it there, but I just want her blood. Don’t I? What is there to want?
What, indeed. She was just a mortal girl, after all. Nothing special about her. Not her strange sense of humor that most of her human friends didn’t get. Not the face she made when Edward walked into the room, even though she wasn’t looking at him, like she just knew he was there. Not how fast she could decode a cryptogram in those variety puzzle magazines she always had. No, nothing set her apart, at least not in a good way. She was plain-so plain-looking, in fact, that she’d gone all the way around it and come back looking interesting. She smelled too delectable, she tripped over her own feet, and she often bit her lip in that infuriating way that she never seemed to notice. (And why should she? What kind of loser chronicles the biting of their own lip?)
In Edward’s mind, which followed Bella around constantly through the minds of others (without satisfactory cause, and to the continual bewilderment of most of his siblings, who weren’t the least bit fooled by his disinterested pretense), the human girl was a world-class klutz, managing to fall no less than seven times a day. She must have equilibrium problems, he guessed, or just truly awful balance. Every moment he spent within smelling distance of her, he was frightened that she might fall and scrape her hands or knees. Being prone to exaggeration, he translated this into a fear for her hand-eye coordination as well. Whenever the pair of them used scalpels in class, Edward felt caught between a desire to snatch the stainless steel blade from her hands and forbid her to use it, and a crippling sense of dread that warned him if he moved a single muscle while she held a knife, she would accidentally slice open her fragile skin and let loose a stream of warm, delicious, irresistible blood.
He need not have worried; Bella’s clumsiness was actually the result of one leg being an inch longer than the other. This apparent ineptitude was not nearly as terrible or frequent as anyone imagined it to be, especially Edward, and it definitely did not extend to her fingers. Not for nothing was she such an excellent biology student-it was the class she gave the most effort. If anyone had bothered to ask her, they’d have learned the colleges on her list were all schools with Criminal Justice programs, specifically those that offered Bachelor’s degrees in Forensic Science. Her particular ambition in life was to solve mysteries with the power of observation and evidence.
Too bad Edward never bothered to learn that. If he had, he might have known that the great 20th century philosopher Mick Jagger was wrong: time was most definitely not on his side.