Chapter Text
Bella and I talked for a while longer, but once I finished eating she made herself scarce. Presumably to get something to eat for herself, unless she photosynthesized like Jessica. I made my way over to the human table cautiously.
"Hey, so, uh, how about the rest of that tour?" I tried.
"Are you kidding?" demanded Jessica. "You talk for twenty minutes with Bella 'what in the everloving fuck' Cullen, and then expect to get away without telling me every word she said?"
"What's so special about her? She pretty much just showed up, told me she knew my mom, called me 'Ned', and said I was pretty. And then we... talked about... band stuff?"
Our resident busybody wasn't the only one making faces anymore. Apparently, this was some high-caliber gossip. Jessica and Ben looked shocked, while Mike and Lauren looked murderous. (I noted privately that Angela got going while the going was good. Clever girl.) "Seriously, what's going on?"
Jessica entered her Exposition Machine mode in record time. "Bella Cullen is the Marie Celeste of Forks' gossip mill. In freshman year, she moved here from 'somewhere in Europe' – her words, mind you. She speaks about once a week, as far as anyone can tell. Her grades are literally flawless in every class but English and Art, the teachers of which hate her from the bottom of their shriveled little hearts. She's apparently, given the evidence, straight or at least bi, but until now she hadn't expressed the slightest interest in anyone in her whole time here. As Mike can attest." Mike scowled down at his sandwich.
"And she's a vampire," muttered Tyler.
Jessica rolled her eyes. "And Tyler thinks he saw a picture of someone who looks like her working in a munitions factory in 1938, and that plus the fact that she has some freaky colored contacts is enough evidence to declare her Lestat, yes. Do not get him started, please."
Tyler joined Mike in the scowling corner. I reminded myself not to friend him on Facebook. (I had enough of the vampire conspiracy theorists back in Phoenix.)
Lauren decided that her two cents were needed, for whatever reason. "And she's a total bitch."
Ben snorted. "Just because she's hotter than you and the C page of Riley's yearbook was always sticky-"
"So," I interrupted before things got ugly, "she's weird and mysterious. And she called me pretty, and that's one or more signs of the Apocalypse. What does that mean?"
"You're the Chosen One?" Mike grunted.
"She vants to sahk your blahd?" offered Tyler.
"You are going to become her very best friend and get us all of the choice gossip humanly possible?" hinted Jessica.
"I'm not going to be your insider, Jessica. For one thing, if she doesn't talk to anybody else, she'd figure out I was telling you instantly. Plus that's a shitty thing to do to someone, but we've got priorities here."
"After all I've done for you," she gasped, "all that I've sacrificed, you turn on me now? I made you!"
"We've known each other for five hours. Anyway, I will tell you stuff about her. Just nothing that could be called 'choice gossip'. Because that'd be shitty."
She huffed. "Fine. But you're gonna field my questions, okay? Because I've always really wanted to know her favorite color, but she'd never give me a straight answer."
"I'll try."
As a cloud of teenagers filtered out of the lunchroom, I thought about the enigmatic Bella Cullen. As I sat through my next class, I thought further on the enigmas of Bella Cullen. In fact, I thought about her enigmas for the rest of the day, with an intermezzo in the men's room during Algebra to think about her, ahem, enigmas. Because, let's face it, that girl was hot as hell.
But mysterious.
But hot as hell.
Really, that was basically the summary of my thoughts about Bella for the next few hours. I pondered the fact that she knew Mom – well enough that she knew Dad's name – even though Mom had never been a woman to make friends with her neighbors just because they were nearby. (That was kind of why she lived in the forest.) I considered the fact that she'd seemed to just spontaneously appear at my table, and I hadn't felt it; my weirdo psychic knack wasn't very consistent, but the sense-of-being-watched had never failed me before. Jessica had assured me that she'd walked up like a relatively normal human, and teleportation wasn't involved, which just confused things further. My situational awareness wasn't great, but you'd think I'd have heard something. I wondered who the hell called people "Ned" anymore. Maybe she was a big Pushing Daisies fan, or something?
And of course, she was fun and interesting and I felt like I could talk to her forever. And again, super hot. But she was so weird.
A mystery wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a pair of freaky colored contacts, that Bella Cullen.
At 2:45, I was soaring down the road in my preposterously shiny new Volvo. (A car had struck my mom as a good "sorry for abandoning you for ten years" present; the car had become very slightly my girlfriend.) Jessica blessedly had a dentist's appointment she hadn't been able to get her mom to reschedule for new-kid hassling time, and though Mike had offered to host me at his place for video games and illicit beer, he was easier to brush off than his girl. I'd told him Mom wanted me back early my first day, and he'd apologized and slunk off like a kicked puppy.
I'd have to figure out what to do about that whole mess eventually. For that matter, I'd have to figure out what to do about this entire bizarre harem anime situation that seemed to have coalesced around me. It seemed like it was easier to list the girls at this school who didn't want to get in my pants. No, it was easier. Angela. The list was Angela. Out of every female I'd personally met today, she alone had decided that Edward Cullen was not her flavor of the week. Maybe she was gay?
I realized, to my horror, that I was actually assuming a girl was a lesbian because she didn't want my dick. This goddamned town was warping my brain.
As I swung into Mom's driveway, I resolved to turn the gaydar on Angela tomorrow, just to check.
Five minutes later, I found myself sat down in the dining room holding a fresh-baked sugar cookie, not entirely sure what happened. "Spill," Mom instructed.
"Spill what?"
She rolled her eyes. "Edward. You've just had your first day of school. I want all the gossip and small-town politics you laid your grubby little eyes on. Do not deprive an old woman her stories."
"My eyes aren't grubby, and you aren't old," I objected.
"Spill."
Grinning, I recounted Jessica's counsel. Mom listened with the gleeful fascination of a mom receiving a new shipment of vicarious teenagerhood, her eyes sparkling.
Her eyes. Which were a bit distracting, because while I didn't quite remember their color from my elementary school memories, I kind of doubted they were blood-red. It wasn't the only change I'd half-noticed since her recovery from her ten-year battle against Polidori's Etiolation, but it was sure the most obvious. (Her lighter skin, the crystalline undertone to her voice, the personally uncomfortable improvements to her figure... the list went on.) I'd asked her about them, but she'd told me they were all side effects of the disease.
Personally, I had trouble believing it. I'd never heard of P. E., this one-in-a-million congenital blood disorder that could strike at any stage of life, that left you in unthinkable agony for years, that left you looking like a dracula for the rest of your very brief life if you survived. It was in all the medical books under "hell if we know", it had an anemic and poorly sourced article on Wikipedia, and that was pretty much it bar the inevitable vampire conspiracy theory sites.
It was shady as hell. But the only other explanation was the vampires, and that was on the rung between lizardmen and water fluoridation on the conspiracy theory ladder; I wasn't going to turn into one of those nuts on Facebook ranting about Pharrell Williams' graduation photos. So I was forced to accept the stated explanation.
I continued, "Jessica herself likes Mike, but she's got half an eye on Riley, Lauren, and of course, myself. Mike, on the other hand, likes Jessica, Lauren, Angela, and... myself."
Mom cackled. "That's my boy. Growing up into some kind of heartbreaker."
"I'm not breaking any hearts, Mom. I'm not getting involved in Jessica and Mike and, uh, possibly Lauren's, whole thing. That's a recipe for sixth grade all over again."
"I maintain that boy was better off with the number of teeth you left him with," Mom said firmly.
"He couldn't talk around the denture properly until grade 8."
"And he couldn't talk shit about your boyfriend either, which meant you didn't have to take out any more of his teeth for him."
I shook my head. "Anyway, I lost the thread. Oh, yeah, so, apparently everyone except Angela's infatuated with me. The only one who I'm actually interested in is Bella Cullen, though. Who you apparently know?"
"Yeah. Sweet girl. We met through the Polidori support group; she'd gone through the worst of her blanching when I showed up, and she helped me through mine. Nice as anything."
Well, that made sense. I'd thought she was just some kind of goth, but if she had the same obscure and nonsensical disease as Mom, there was at least... some amount of connection there. They could dracula together. "She's really nice, yeah. We hung out at lunch. And apparently we have Bio together, but she wasn't there today.
Mom grinned. "She skips class a lot, yeah. She's not in love with you, I'm guessing."
"Well, uh, maybe?" I looked down at my cookie. "She said I was pretty. And that she wanted to stare at me forever. It was kinda cute."
Silence. I looked up. Mom wasn't grinning anymore. "What?" I asked. "It was. She's cool, she plays the clarinet and stuff."
"I'll bet she plays the fucking clarinet," she muttered. "Listen, Edward, that girl is dangerous."
"Because she plays the clarinet?"
She made a frustrated noise. "I'm sure you're right, you'll get along great, like I said, she's a great kid and all. But if she ever makes you uncomfortable – if you ever feel threatened in the slightest by her or her family – you come straight to me. And I get you out of the country."
What the fuck?
"What?" I asked aloud. "She's a teenage girl, not John McClane."
"She's very nonthreatening, yes. Just keep it in mind, that's all I'm asking. You have the option."
I nodded slowly. "Alright. But I'm still confused. Sure, Bella's kind of weird, but not like... scary weird. She doesn't seem like she'd track me down and firebomb my car, or whatever."
Mom gave me a Look. "Of course not. You'd know, after all; you had all of lunch with the girl. Maybe I'm just a poor little middle-aged mom who's anxious about her little boy being courted by all the girls at his school now that he's all grown up, just ignore me. Bella's great. Very stable."
Just as I opened my mouth for a return volley, the doorbell rang. She froze where she sat.
The doorbell rang again, and I went to get it. Bella stood outside, wearing motorcycle leathers and a "who, me?" grin.
"Hi, Lizzie! Can Edward come out to play?"