Chapter Text
Being content with a small life is a fine art. Takes years of well practiced self control and a harsh suppression, to deny, at the slightest presence, any arising want for more.
That want had long left Bella. Her belief in the systemic give and take of the universe faltered at 21, irreparably shattered before she'd even finished with college.
It is a peculiarity the ways in which the world seems to work.
A teenage Isabella Swan had spent her formative years wanting nothing more than to just go. To be. To see something. Anything. Anywhere. So long as she could say she'd crossed the borders of Washington state.
The one tether to an otherwise unbearably overcast town was the one reason she'd stayed, even after. Especially after.
She couldn't bear to leave Charlie, didn't. He left her. Unwilling. Unexpected.
The art of telecommunication; How does one relay the contents of boxed grief through linear frequencies?
Isabella Swan?
Asked like an apology, the way the eroteme shaped those two words into a casket of forgive me. And she knew in the cadence of her name that life was an unforgiving teacher. So much so she became one herself.
That lasted all of two weeks before she shed her unforgiving nature like an olive jacket, impulsively bought, ill fitting from the beginning, tags cut, non returnable. Throw it out. Give away the unforgiving. Some teachers wear it so well.
Miss Hale wears it like a second skin.
Bella noted the way students would attend her class, fresh from hell in the form of linear approximation. Miss Hale taught hard. Wielded equations with a fiery passion, burned right through the sun.
Rosalie Hale, dictatorial math teacher. Entering into a regimented classroom, the war cries of lead to paper, send in the troops with each point of contact.
Tyler Crowley once had the audacity to question the necessity of retaining knowledge he deemed inapplicable in the real world. That was the last day anyone saw or heard from him.
Forks High School. Home of the Spartans.
Home to a personable teacher of prose and literature. A hardened pedagogue of the mathematical.
Where's your high school spirit?