Chapter Text
I stared across the lunch room, tugging my sleeves back down to my wrists. Somehow I had managed to avoid this whole mess, mostly by getting lost on school grounds, but I faced the truth this time. I had to sit somewhere, and outside was not an option.
I could, of course, sit at a table with people. I would honestly rather take the floor than sit at a table full of new people, ready to swamp me with questions about my ever-so-interesting life. But there in the corner sat a table, right next to the door that I could easily take to lead me on the long path to Biology.
Glancing once at the menu, I decided I wasn’t hungry enough to risk getting the school corndogs, and opted to take a seat at the empty table, right next to the door. It felt nice to not have to explain why I would ever choose to come to such a small town, but people were still staring at me. It felt like all conversations had stopped the moment I pulled out my chair. I felt once again like the center of attention. Did I have a piece of toilet paper stuck to my shoe? I hadn’t even dared to poke my head in to the bathrooms, so I seriously doubt it. I tried my best to carefully look down at my shoe without alerting anyone. Nope, nothing. So what was wrong with me? A bug in my hair? A massive pimple? This wasn’t the new girl experience I was having earlier, they weren’t ogling this time.
And then in walked a group of five people, laughing and smiling like the skies weren’t overcast and the air wasn’t wetter than an ocean. All of them were beautiful, especially the girls. I could imagine them spending hours fixing their hair for the effortlessly beautiful look, and they certainly nailed it. The loose curls in the blonde’s hair was attractive to me, and I felt my eyes drift down. A perfect chest, perfectly fitting clothes—probably designer, judging by how they carried themselves—and a perfect figure. She was taller than me, and her heels cemented that. She seemed powerful.
The brunette seemed to aim more for the ‘I woke up this way’, and she nailed it as well. Her hair was flipped up in many directions, but it looked intentional. She and the blonde girl seemed to be polar opposites, and this was furthered by the large height difference, but they were smiling at each other all the same.
My eyes drifted off to the other three. Not nearly as stunning as the two girls, but certainly eye catching. One of them, walking next to the blonde, had muscles bigger than anyone else I had ever seen, except for maybe on TV. There was also another boy, who looked strangely unalive. He looked just a little bit like a corpse, and his eyes looked just a little bit like they were going to pop out of his skull at any moment. I felt a shiver run down my spine, and looked away.
I landed on the last one. He was… strangely beautiful. The bed head that the brunette wore seemed more deliberate, while his seemed a little natural, and yet somehow ten times more attractive. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the blond one glance and make a remark to him, but I shook it off in favor of continuing to ogle. He was tall, of course. Most of them were. But it was something about him. Something about the way he strayed away from the group, and the way he seemed untouched by everything else.
The blonde girl stepped closer and closer, a disgusted glare on her face. She was looking at me . “I… I was just getting up,” I stammered, standing from the chair and yanking my bag from the chair, nearly pulling the chair down to the floor instead.
The boy I had seen walking with her had appeared behind her, a charming smile on his face, but the same distaste in his eyes as she did. “Rosie, c’mon, she’s new,” he said.
The other girl, thankfully, didn't have the same glare. She smiled, though she seemed to be off in her own world. If only I could be her. A world where I wasn’t being stared down by the whole cafeteria, and a world where I wasn’t being towered over by an absolutely gorgeous girl. A world where I hadn’t made the absolutely stupid decision to move to Forks . Of all places, I chose to move in to a place I had always hated, and here was just another reason to add to the list.
I shook my head, and stared down at my feet as I tried my best to force an apology out of my throat. Nothing worked. Instead I just pulled the door open and walked out. I would rather take the cold of the rain than the ice of her glare.
I walked in the opposite direction of my Biology class. Half of me wanted to fake a stomach ache out of fear of seeing one of them in class, but they looked just as sickly as I was, so my chances of seeing that dead looking one at the nurse was very high. I could always skip, but that whole ‘slip’ thing seemed pretty serious, so I ought to still attend Biology in one way or another.
I sighed to myself, sadly not taking either of the very enticing options. One slow step in front of the other, I walked to Biology. I hadn’t even heard the first bell. There was the odd student here and there, but thankfully they didn’t seem to care much for me. One step closer to blending in to the background.
The teacher’s name was Mr. Banner. The sheet told me that, and I wasn’t going to bother asking to see if it was correct. I waved to him as I peeked through the door, giving a meek smile. “Early, no? You must be Isabella,” he said, a much more confident smile on his face.
I nodded. “Yeah, I’m Bella,” I responded, half-correcting him. He stepped over to his desk and shuffled around some papers, before deciding on one. “There’s an empty seat over there by the window. Third from the back,” he said, briefly pointing to one.
I quietly walked back to it, watching my feet over the edge of my books. I had caught the edge of the sidewalk with the toe of my shoes on the way, and I wasn’t risking dropping my books a second time, even if the ground wasn’t wet in here. Setting my books on the edge of the desk, I pulled out the chair furthest from the aisle and sat down. Pulling my books to me with one swoop, I silently cringed as some of them inevitably fell from the towering pile.
Neatly stacking them back up, I placed my elbow on the black lab table and propped my hand up on my palm, staring out the window. Nothing had changed. Still blue and green and icky and rainy. Still not Phoenix. But what can ya do? In my case, nothing.
I traced the trail of raindrops with my eyes. I felt like a kid again, wondering which drop would ‘win’. There was nothing better to do anyway. Absolutely nothing.
My eyes flicked away from the glass panes at the alarming sound of the bell. This meant people would be arriving. This meant I would be the center of attention again. “Great,” I muttered under my breath. I shoved my arms through the sleeves of my jacket and pulled the hood over my head, pulling the strings tight. My wet mop of hair was pressing against my scalp, sending shivers of cold down my spine and through my body, like an involuntary convulsion. Unpleasant.
Students filed in to the room, mostly in groups of two. That boy that offered to show me around was here. “Isabella!” he said, waving to me. “Bella,” I quietly corrected. “Can’t believe we’re in the same class,” he smiled, leaning against the edge of the table. Something in me was happy that I wasn’t in the seat next to the aisle. I could tell Mike meant well, really, I could. But I just wanted to have a nice, quiet class. I just wanted to blend in. But with Mike, one of the clearly more popular kids, right next to me… Yeah, combined with my new toy status, have fun with that.
“Mike, um, I really would love to hear the rest of your story, but I think class is going to start, you should go sit down,” I said, giving a half-hearted smile. I didn’t want to snap and tell him I was tired of hearing him, because I was tired of everything and I wanted to just take a nap deep underground where I can’t hear the sound of the irritating tapping of the rain on the roof of Charlie’s home. It had kept me up practically until the crack of dawn. Misery.
I turned back to looking at the door, not even noticing the lack of a boy sitting on the edge of my desk. Some people looked a little familiar, like I had briefly talked to them in passing. And one of them looked more than a little familiar. The same boy from lunch. The same boy who I had been utterly floored by.
And yet again, he was looking at me. He was walking straight toward me. And when he walked down the aisle, he stopped at my table. I looked at him, and down at the chair. I wasn’t sure what was wrong. And then it hit me. “Oh… I’m sorry, I’m sitting in your chair… Again,” I half laughed, humiliated at the idea of doing this twice . One after another too.
His eyes were pitch black. Not the kind of eyes that seemed very friendly. “It’s… it’s fine,” he muttered, pulling out the chair I was supposed to be in.
“Bella, right?” he asked, giving me a flash of a smile. I nodded. “How’d you know? Lucky guess?” I remarked, though I was genuinely curious. “Good guesser. Edward,” he replied, referring to himself. I nodded, and looked back to the window.
We didn’t speak again. It was a lecture class, so there wasn’t much talking to be done anyway, but even though we both were bored out of our minds, neither of us spoke. He never even looked in my direction. When I tried to lean forward to see what he was doing out of the edge of my field of view, I noticed that he seemed very pained. Like that blonde boy he was walking around with at lunch.
I was about to ask, when the bell rang. In a flash, he was gone. Like a magician. Poof. It was like he was never there in the first place. Perhaps I was hallucinating. “Hey, we have gym next, let’s walk together!” Mike said, appearing next to me. I nodded, picking my books up and holding them tight against my chest. I quickly had Mr. Banner sign my slip, and then followed Mike out in to the hallway.
“Can’t believe you’re stuck with Cullen,” Mike groaned. “Cullen?” I repeated, though I felt like I should’ve referred to him as Edward, “Is that a nickname or something?” I asked, wondering what kind of person earns such a strange nickname.
“Last name,” Mike informed me. Wow, no duh, Bella. What a surprise. “Well, what’s so bad about him?” I asked, hoping maybe to get a little info on why he looked so uncomfortable around me.
Mike looked at me, then rolled his eyes. “Is it not obvious? He’s so strange. Sits with all four of his siblings at lunch, and talks to nobody outside of that, though that’s most of them. Beautiful and a bitch,” he summed. “I don’t think being antisocial-” “He rejects any girls who ask him out. That’s a feat in and of itself, since he has that creepy demeanor, but he doesn’t even give them a chance. His siblings are dating, why not him?”
I thought for a brief moment. “Then if they’re dating, they must be talking to someone, right?” I asked, hoping for some information about who they were, and if they were as terrifying to everyone else as they were to me.
“They date each other .”
“Uh… What?”
Mike sighed, pushing open the gym doors for me. “The blond ones are adopted, and they date the other ones. So I guess technically not weird, but still very weird. I guess Edward is waiting for a sister of his own,” Mike remarked. Rude, but possibly correct.
The bell rang, cutting our conversation about the very peculiar Cullen family short. One of the two gym teachers approached me, singling me out from the crowd of tired teens. “C’mon, I’ll go get you a uniform,” he said, motioning for me to follow him to the wooden double doors. I didn’t particularly want a uniform, as that meant that I wouldn’t have an excuse, but did I really have a choice?
“We’re in the middle of a tournament, so you can just sit aside and watch today,” the teacher said, tossing a uniform back at me. I fumbled to catch it, internally sighing as it became a crumpled mess instead of a neat folded pile. I smiled and nodded, glad I wouldn’t risk being bruised by the onslaught of volleyballs.
Taking a seat in the corner of the bleachers, I hoped that when the rest of the class returned from the changing rooms, they wouldn’t try to sit next to me. Pulling out a notebook, I found myself doodling in the margins, unsure of what to write. Maybe a to do list, but there wasn’t much to do in Forks. I didn’t have to go grocery shopping, or cook for the next week. The whole town had brought over some sort of welcoming dish, and our fridge was too full to handle anything else.
I looked up every so often from what I start drawing, just out of fear that a volleyball would come rocketing my way. Mike always seemed to pinpoint the exact time I would look up, and our eyes met almost every time. Awkward.
I looked back down at what I found my hand to be drawing. Eyes. Not surprising. When I would draw with my mom, we would always practice drawing the eyes, because they showed the most emotions than anything else did on a person. These eyes were cold, tired, and just a little agitated. Slightly familiar, but I hadn’t looked at anyone at Forks long enough for them to leave an impression in my mind, so perhaps it was someone back in Phoenix.
I leaned back against the wall the bleachers were pressed against, and closed my eyes. Why would I ever leave Phoenix? I shouldn’t have worried about the inevitable guilt if I moved in with one of my friends, but they had all offered so graciously.
I pulled my knees up to my chest, casting my notebook to the side to sulk instead. My eyes were tracing the support beams, finding the occasional lost ball. That was me. Lost and abandoned. I mean, yeah, I had Charlie, but the rain was really killing my mood, so I wasn’t going to be logical.
That’s how I spent my gym class. Absolutely exhausted and wishing I had the guts to cry in public. The comfort of knowing I only had to drop off my slip was enough to soothe me for a while, just long enough for me to get in my truck and lean my forehead against the wheel.
I yawned as I arrived at the door, waiting to finish before touching the cold metal bar. I peeked in through the small crack before deciding I should just face it. “I’m…” I stopped myself. That boy from Biology immediately looked back at me, a hint of fury in his eyes.
The woman behind the counter looked up from her desk. “Edward, really, I can’t do much about switching classes. It’s far too late in the year,” she explained. I could see him nod slowly. “Ah well, what can be done,” he said. “Thank you, Ms. Cope,” he finished, waving once at her before turning around to leave.
He looked at me again. I recognized where the eyes were from, and I felt my cheeks start to turn pink. How embarrassing. I couldn’t have just drawn something else, I simply had to draw a handsome boy who doesn’t care for me—or anyone else, as I’ve heard—and realize it right as he glances at me. I must look like a complete fool.
Watching the door shut, I took a breath in, and stepped up to the counter. “Here’s the slip,” I said, pulling it from my pocket. “Thank you, Ms. Swan. I’ll see you soon,” she said, flattening out the creases in the paper.
I waved like Edward did, and closed the door behind me, hoping to keep the cold air out of the office for the next kid. Looking out in to the school parking lot, I searched for my truck in the sea of pickups and sedans.
I saw it, and felt my heart lift. Even if I was hoping for something less rustic, it was warm and it would drive me home. Ol’ faithful.
There they were again. All five of them, talking and laughing. I guess if I got along with my siblings as well as they did, I wouldn’t feel the need for friends—that is, if I had siblings. They were leaning against a car, and no wonder my eyes were immediately drawn to them. It gleamed. The paint job was fresh, the car seemed to sparkle, and my first thought was that it probably had much better gas mileage than mine. And definitely a quieter motor. I was far from a car nerd, but something in my heart wanted that instead of my clunky truck.
I had to resist. Retracting my hands in to my sleeves, I pulled open the dew-covered door of my truck and started the engine, wiping my wet hoodie sleeve on my jeans. Flicking my phone open, I debated on calling my mom before I headed off. The line to leave the parking lot was already forming, and I’d just end up waiting a long time anyway.
I looked up through my windshield to see that shiny silver Volvo pass by, the Cullens all leaning out in one way or another. The way they oozed glamour made me sickeningly jealous. The girl with the brown hair seemed to look right at me and wave. She winked, before she looked back in to the car, likely to talk to one of the blond kids.
“That… was weird,” I said while nodding slowly. Starting up the car, I dialed up my mom to wait for the chance to pull through to the end of the line. I had a long, long, long way to go, and a lot to talk about.
“Bella! Finally, I thought you would never call!” my mom said, probably a wide smile on her face. “Mom, it’s only been a day!” I laughed, buckling my seat belt. “A day is 1440 minutes, and that’s a lot of minutes, so you better have a good excuse for not calling me yesterday,” she said, almost a little serious.
I pulled out in to the back of the line, and pressed the phone against my ear with my shoulder. “I was tired, and I had to unpack. That’s a perfectly good excuse,” I responded.
“No.”
“Yes.”
“Fine. Tell me what you think of Forks, sweetie,” she said, almost demanded. I wasn’t exactly sure where to start. I thought a lot of things about Forks. I thought that the weather was stupid, and I thought that this was one of the worst places for a naturally cold person. I also thought that the kids were a little irritating, though maybe that was just because I had never moved before. And I thought that the Cullens were a little strange.
“It’s okay,” I summarized. “Are you sure you don’t want to come back? You know I don’t mind staying with you,” she reminded me, but she couldn’t convince me. I wanted her to live a little.
“Really, it’s fine,” I told her, trying to sound comforting. “Well, what about romance? Any cute boys?” she asked as I pulled out of the parking lot. The first image to come to mind was Edward Cullen, and it took me too long to find someone else to list. It’s not very nice to have to compare normal kids to supermodels.
“There’s this one kid named Mike… He’s cute, I guess,” I told her.
“Oh, crud, I have to go! I’ll call you later, love you!” The car was silent again, minus the ambience of the motor and the dewdrops from the trees dripping on to the metal roof of the truck.
My mind was blank as a sheet until I pulled up to my driveway. Popping the door open, I checked the ground for any ice before stepping out. I had learned my lesson this morning the hard way.
The cruiser wasn’t in the driveway. I pulled the keys from the bottom of my bag and unlocked the door, and wasn’t greeted with what I expected. No food cooking, no TV or radio on, no heat either. This was the exact opposite of Arizona.
Cranking up the heat to 80, I sat down on my bed upstairs and pulled all my blankets around me. And to think, I was supposed to do my homework like this! It was stuff I had done before, of course, but it was impossible to concentrate on in the frigid room.
I sighed, leaned back, and closed my eyes. I didn’t mean to take a nap, but it was better this way. I would dream of summer sun, and fun beach trips, and all the things I can’t do here.