Luminosity Read online

  When I got there, Rosalie was dominating the conversation, monologuing about how she was not happy with the photos on her current passport and driver's license and planned to major in photography in college so as to be able to get better pictures. (I assumed she left off the phrase "this time around" only because we were in a room full of humans, and relied on stereotypes of blondes to save her from someone remembering that people, even photographers, generally didn't take their own ID snapshots.)

  Emmett told her, "But it's your turn to go to medical school next, Rose."

  "I've already been," she grumbled. "Why don't you go? Or Alice? There's no reason it has to be just me and Edward taking turns. Anyway, I think Carlisle can wait a little longer."

  "Wait, what?" I put in eloquently. Rosalie rolled her eyes and looked away, somewhat vacantly, apparently not wishing to be part of any conversation in which I participated.

  Edward answered my question. I'd avoided looking directly at him since I'd sat down, unsure how or when he wanted to pick back up being "friends". But when he spoke, my head turned automatically, and he didn't appear upset, just interested in satisfying my curiosity: "Carlisle needs updates on how medicine is advancing, every now and then," Edward said. "He returns to medical school himself sometimes, but to reduce the chances he'll be recognized by a colleague, I've also been twice and Rosalie once, to update him. She graduated summa cum laude from Columbia," he added, glancing at his sister; I guessed that he had hoped to flatter her back into the conversation by mentioning this achievement. I thought I saw a flicker of a smile on her face before she resumed staring out the window.

  "Reading journals won't do?" I asked blankly. I wondered, but didn't ask, why Rosalie hadn't mentioned Jasper.

  "Carlisle has to be able to seem like he's fresh out of med school," Alice put in. "He reads journals, too, but they don't necessarily say much about what they're saying to new students straight out of pre-med."

  "Makes sense," I acknowledged. I considered offering to go next, but I wasn't even a vampire yet, let alone an acknowledged fixture of the Cullen family who could do such things as go to medical school on Carlisle's behalf. Being a doctor wasn't my life's ambition, but it sounded like something I'd like to get around to with forever to spend learning anything I liked. "How do you deal with being around blood? I assume you have to be around blood in med school."

  "I held my breath," said Edward, "and didn't go to work thirsty."

  Rosalie tossed her hair and didn't answer; I wasn't sure if that meant that Edward's reply held for her as well, or if she just didn't feel like sharing.

  "So," I asked, as the topic dwindled to a halt, "where did your last names come from?"

  "Cullen was Carlisle's last name as a human, and he kept it," Edward said. "I didn't always use it - at first, I used to pretend to be his brother-in-law, a younger brother to a fictional dead wife, and I used my original last name, "Masen". I pretended to be Esme's brother when she joined us and used her maiden name, which was "Platt", for some time. When Rosalie arrived, she preferred to keep her real last name, "Hale"; then to explain ourselves we started using the template you're familiar with, where Esme and Carlisle are adoptive parents to the rest of us, so I took the Cullen name. Emmett did the same when he arrived, and so did Alice, but Jasper took advantage of his and Rosalie's similar coloring and pretends to be a Hale."

  "I suppose it would be awkward for you four to present as unmarried couples if there weren't at least two last names between you," I mused, waving vaguely at Alice, Jasper, Emmett, and Rosalie. "Even given that you advertise you're adopted. Still, why use real names? Surely that would make it easier to follow you if anyone got suspicious? You could just make things up."

  "Rosalie is attached to her name," said Edward. "And Carlisle has used his for more than three hundred years without anyone successfully following him. Although we may need to change policies as computers start leaving more easily discoverable traces in more places."

  I nodded. "Your first names are all real?"

  There were four nods and one, "I think so," from Alice.

  "You don't remember that either?" I asked, turning to the little vampire on my right.

  "It feels like "Alice" is my name," said Alice. "And it felt like my name when I woke up. I just have no way to be sure. I don't have a guess about a last name, or a middle one."

  "I should probably learn all your full original names at some point, but if I try to do it all at once I'll never remember," I said. "How's the water working out for you all?"

  "I can't believe we never thought of it," laughed Emmett boomingly. "Makes us look that much more natural."

  "It helps. I noticed my first day here that none of you seemed to be eating anything."

  "You're unsually observant," remarked Edward. I thought for a moment that this was a compliment, and then I realized that he probably knew just how much other students did and didn't notice.

  "Well, I probably wouldn't have thought much of it, but it was really conspicuous that day I sat with Alice," I said. "I guess you don't normally pull aside random humans and sit down with them, though."

  "Not likely," hissed Rosalie under her breath; I barely caught it. Emmett nudged her with his elbow.

  The middle of the cafeteria is not the correct place to ask an impolite vampire what her problem is, I reminded myself, and Alice neatly diverted the subject to the reception of the vampire family by Forks's residents in general. Some had made an effort to be friendly - Esme had been invited to a garden party, things like that - but they had no close neighbors, did not initiate social plans of their own, and Carlisle was sure to be merely cordial to his co-workers and those he encountered as patients. Over time, as usual, people stopped going out of their way to befriend the vampires.

  "Charlie thinks the world of you all, you know," I commented. This seemed to elicit surprise - even from Edward. "You didn't notice?" I asked him, confused. "Even when you showed up at my house - he wasn't thinking anything like that? I don't think he lied..."

  Edward blinked, then gently smacked himself in the forehead just softly enough to avoid making a telltale noise audible to nearby humans. "Of course," he said. "Of course."

  "What?" I asked, quite bewildered.

  "Bella, I'm sorry to say that I always thought of your father as a man who simply didn't think very much," said Edward. "I typically don't get words from him - just some images, some feelings, all a bit vague. I couldn't tell what he thought of the family at all even when I was standing right next to him. But with your complete inaudibility - it must be genetic, that's all. I imagine he thinks as much as anyone and I simply can't make it out clearly. I wonder what your mother sounds like! What combination would have created you and your silent mind?"

  "Oh." I frowned. "You thought he was stupid?"

  "No," Edward said quickly, then he winced and amended. "Not unusually so. I didn't give it much attention," he pleaded, trying to backpedal. "I'm usually not trying to listen to anyone."

  "When would you have met him before, anyway?" I asked.

  "We actually do buy food," Alice said. "To keep up appearances. Mostly nonperishables we can save up and dump at a food drive in Seattle around the holidays. It would look odd if we just never turned up at the grocery store; someone would notice. And we're around town to buy other things, sometimes - lightbulbs, clothes, car parts, music, that sort of thing. At least one of us has probably encountered any given person who lives here, though we rarely chat."

  "Just the car parts? Is one of you a mechanic?" I asked.

  "That would be Rose," said Emmett, chucking his wife under the chin affectionately. She smirked, more than smiled, but did acknowledge the gesture and turn to face the table again.

  It was an incongruous image, the vain model elbow-deep in engine oil, but I didn't tease - I wasn't entirely sure she wouldn't eat me, for one thing, and for another, it only sounded silly for bad reasons.

  * * *

  The lunch bell rang. Ed
ward escorted me to biology, any traces of annoyance over the souls thing having evaporated, and then diverted course to sit in his own seat while I joined Angela.

  I was starting to regret having switched lab partners by the time I was a quarter of the way through the class. Angela was nice and didn't drag me down in the grades department, but she was not one for talking in class - and anyway, if I wanted her to hear me I would have to speak up enough that I'd risk being heard. And we were still covering cell anatomy. If I'd had a way to trade my mitochondria for the chance to never hear the biology teacher drone on about them ever again, I might well have done it.

  How much worse must it be for Edward? He had several times more relevant education than the man proposing to teach him about cells. He hadn't even forgotten anything since the last time he heard it; I had to admit, however grudgingly, that every seventh or eighth thing that came up in the lecture was something I might have missed if it had appeared on a pop quiz. And yet he was, apparently, in high school voluntarily. Maybe he just found it easy to think about other things.

  I wondered what he was thinking about. Coral reefs and sharks? Portuguese verb conjugations?

  Me?

  What was I going to do about the souls thing anyway? It was really a problem if Edward thought souls were important and vampires couldn't have them. For one thing, I didn't think it would be good for his self-esteem. Clearly, he could love and admire Esme and the other members of his family. But on some level, this was hypocritical. How could he care for vampires and find humans in general "boring", as Alice had put it, while simultaneously thinking us mortals to be possessed of some spectacular commodity that outweighed every vampire advantage all by itself and ought to be preserved even at the cost of life itself? It would be as though I decided that the objective content of moral worth was the color yellow, and then went on sacrificing bananas and eggs and squash so that Charlie could eat well because, even though he was not yellow, I preferred to actas though he were more important than the yellow things to which I'd assigned primacy.

  If Edward really believed as he claimed, why hadn't he executed Emmett the first time he'd eaten someone, or at least tried? If it were more valuable to live as a human than as a vampire, then any vampire who was a danger to any human ought not to exist, intent or no. Dangerous dogs were executed even though no one held them morally culpable, simply because they might hurt humans, a more valued species.

  Edward might believe in souls, might believe they were important, might believe vampires had none - but he did not act this way - except when he was trying to decide what advice to give me.

  There were several ways to explain this.

  One: Edward was not actually in love with me. He'd fooled his entire family (including Alice's visions of us being so happy), or had gotten them in on it, and was carrying on an elaborate subterfuge for unclear reasons, but didn't want to have to keep it up for all eternity, or deal with fallout after I turned and was not magnetically drawn to him. Implausible in the extreme - too complicated, and no sensible motive in sight.

  Two: Edward did not realize that he didn't act like he believed what he said about souls. This was more likely - in particular, it explained why he'd find it uncomfortable to talk about Esme as a soulless creature, because it would expose the disparity between his words and behavior. It was also not incompatible with other explanations.

  Three: Edward had difficulty balancing selfish and selfless motives. While he genuinely believed it would have been better for Esmeif she'd died at the bottom of the cliff, he thought it was better for him that she be an immortal vampire who could remain a part of his family forever - now that his own soul was unsalvageable, anyway. Thinking about how glad he was that she was alive made him feel bad about himself, but the magical vampire love thing made him more enforceably concerned with what he thought was best for me for my own sake. This seemed plausible, although it relied on an assumption I wasn't sure I could support about how vampires worked.

  Four: Edward thought I would snap and kill people if I turned, and the souls thing was a gentler way of advising me to stay human than saying "Bella, love, I think you're likely to be a murderer." But he had gone to some trouble to avoid lying to me.

  I mulled this over, writing indecipherable shorthand in my notebook as a reference ("Lying, Confused, Selfish, Snap" - I hoped Alice wouldn't be able to make sense of that if she saw it). The only way to figure out which it was would be to talk to Edward more, but I suspected some combination of two and three.

  Biology dragged on.

  * * *

  Gym was a little better than Biology. (I almost laughed out loud wondering what I'd have said if I'd been told back in December that I'd think that.) Edward was on my mind, but at least not in the room tantalizingly unadjacent.

  After I'd dragged myself through an hour of yoga poses and left the gym, Edward appeared beside me right on schedule. "Hello, Bella," he said warmly.

  Had he completely forgotten the conversation on Saturday? "Hello, Edward."

  "Would you like to visit us again today?" he invited.

  "I don't see why not," I replied. "Unless you're still upset about the souls thing and you're just a very good actor."

  "There's no reason to talk about it," Edward said.

  "There is," I said, "if you don't want me to be a vampire for reasons I don't understand. I ought to have all the information before I decide - headaches for Alice or no - right?"

  "Bella," he said pleadingly.

  "I'm sorry I brought up Esme as an example. Would it be easier if we talked about someone else? Rosalie?" I suggested.

  Edward frowned. "I don't want to argue with you."

  "It doesn't necessarily have to be a fight," I said. "But maybe - I don't know, do any of the others agree with you? I could talk it over with someone else."

  Edward was silent, looking somewhat brooding. "No," he said finally, "but Carlisle's familiar with my views on the matter."

  "Will he have a while to talk to me about it today?"

  "Most likely," grumbled Edward.

  "You don't sound happy about it," I said. "Why?"

  "I was hoping to keep you to myself all day," he said with a faint smile. "Even though I said "us"."

  "You still owe me the rest of the story about the shark, so you'll get at least some of my afternoon," I reminded him. We arrived at my truck. "Are you going to ride with me to your place?"

  "You could let me drive," he said.

  "The way you speed, you'd break the poor thing even without crashing. I like my truck."

  "I can keep it slow, for the truck's sake," Edward laughed. "I'm not sure I can promise it won't break down, though. This thing's not likely to last out the year. It might choose today to die."

  "Well, lucky me," I said, walking around the front to get to the passenger seat, "I can't be stranded with you around."

  "It is an advantage," Edward acknowledged, sliding into the driver's seat and holding out his hand for the keys. I dropped them into his palm and he started the engine.

  * * *

  After I had gotten the shark story - and three more - out of Edward, Carlisle came home. Esme flew to the door to greet him as he came in. They looked and acted more like newlyweds than a long-married couple, and it was cute to watch from my vantage point at the dining table.

  "Bella, hello," said Carlisle after Esme had flitted up the stairs to return to whatever she'd been doing. "How are you?"

  "I'm well, thanks," I replied cheerfully. "Hey, if you have a bit, I wanted to ask you something."

  "Oh? I don't have anything pressing to do," Carlisle said genially. "We can talk in my office if you like."

  I got up and followed the doctor up the stairs. I thought I might have heard Edward say something, but it was too low for me to make out; if it wasn't my imagination, he'd surely intended the utterance for Carlisle, who didn't visibly react.

  Carlisle's office was cozy, and he gave me his undivided attention once we had both
taken seats. "What did you want to ask me?" he inquired.

  "Did Edward tell you anything about the conversation we had on Saturday - about souls?" I asked.

  "No," said Carlisle, furrowing his brow. "What happened?"

  "Apparently he thinks vampires don't have any souls, and that they're important," I said. "I just don't see how that could be. All of the things humans can do that might be what souls handle, vampires can do too - you can think, you have memories better than mine, you can do moral reasoning. I said as much and Edward mentioned the idea of an afterlife. Even if I grant for the sake of argument that that's in the picture, and it's hardly a trivial assumption - why would he believe that vampires have a different afterlife situation than humans? Are there vampire ghosts floating about as cautionary tales that he didn't mention or something?

  "And," I went on, knowing Carlisle would have no difficulty keeping track of my questions, "he doesn't want to talk about it any more, even to answer those questions. I upset him on Saturday when I brought up Esme as an example. If it's really better for a person to be a human and eventually die than it is for them to live potentially forever as a vampire, it would follow - mind, I don't agree with this - that it would have been better for Esme if you'd let her die instead of turning her. But Edward doesn't seem to think so. He only doesn't want me to be a vampire. He said you wouldn't turn anybody who had a life to live, at least under normal circumstances. I don't know who Alice saw turning me back when she saw clearly; it might not have been you. But if I stay human, I will eventually die, because that is just something humans do, pretty darn reliably. And if I'm not going to stay human, there's no obvious reason to wait until I'm dying of something to turn me. Edward's basically saying that he wants me dead so I can keep my soul, and doesn't have a coherent explanation of why I should be willing to die to keep it."