Luminosity Read online

  And Mike... That was a stumper. There wasn't anything obviously the matter with Mike; I couldn't very well tell him "you're not my type because you're too cute and don't make me fear for my life". My reasons for preferring to dissuade him were entirely about myself. I hadn't yet begun to scratch the surface of what I wanted out of dating or romance or anything in that department. And it seemed like a uniquely hazardous thing to uninformedly test by experiment, both for myself and for anyone else involved.

  I hadn't had to address the problem of how to delay, though, because in Phoenix I hadn't had anyone like Mike being puppyish in my direction. Immediately after moving also seemed like a uniquely bad time to try to pair off, when I was still getting acquainted with everything around me and my judgment could be off. And I didn't know why Mike was interested - actually, I was only guessing that he was in the first place, although it seemed like a good guess - so I didn't have any known personality trait that I could tone down for the purpose of making him lose interest. He hadn't said anything explicitly, though, so I decided it was safe to simply wait and see if any good strategies turned up. Wait and try not to be encouraging, I wrote.

  I did homework - in other notebooks - for most of the rest of the afternoon. The disadvantage of starting at a new school in January was that I didn't get to ramp up slowly. I managed to get to bed at a reasonable hour anyway, but although it didn't rain that night, it was windy, and I tossed and turned for some time before I managed to get to sleep.

  * * *

  Chapter 2: The Cullens

  On my second day of school, I spent most of the morning dreading lunch. Mike sat with me in English and whisked me away to my second class before Eric could step in - Eric's disappointment was concerning - but to the general population I was less the center of attention. The classes were no more or less interesting than they had been the previous day, and that meant there was very little to distract me from the hamster in my head running endlessly over and over What is Edward's DEAL? At lunch, we'd be in the same room again, and he might... Okay, I felt dumb panicking that he might glare at me, when I put it in words. But he might and it was not pleasant.

  Jessica and I walked together to the cafeteria, where Mike spotted us and steered us towards his table (to Jessica's obvious delight - that was something to write down later). Jessica's other friends, including Angela, found us there and collected around us. Once I'd settled in and looked around, I found that Edward's four siblings were at their usual table. Edward was not.

  He didn't show up for the duration of the lunch period, and I practically had a spring in my step by the time Angela, Mike and I headed to Biology. I gave them my spiel about wanting a lab partner willing to help, augmented by a "and now Edward is absent! What am I supposed to do?" Mike took this opportunity to turn up the useful tidbit that Edward, as well as the other Cullens and the Hales, actually missed a fair amount of school - on nice days the family were outdoorsy enough to skip classes for hikes and camping trips. I got Angela's permission (and Mike's unspoken disappointment) to try to swap lab partners and work instead with her; she guessed that her current one wouldn't mind.

  The switch went pretty easily. I didn't even have to recite my entire speech to the biology teacher before he perfunctorily asked Angela's partner if she'd be okay to sit with Edward, got an apathetic shrug, and made the rearrangements. Sitting with Angela was pleasant. She was quiet - a bit like Charlie, speaking if there was cause but not fighting silence like a hated foe. Once, she asked me a question about how the material we were looking at compared to the similar content I'd covered in Phoenix, and we had a murmured exchange that, being topical, went unpunished by the teacher.

  I hurried to gym, ironically, and found the coach and recited a litany of excuses: I had the balance of a toddler - a drunk toddler - and the bruising potential of an overripe nectarine and I promised to practice yoga out of a book at home on a soft surface every day if I could please, please, please be excused from volleyball and nearly everything else.

  Understandably, the coach wasn't impressed by my yoga promises, but said I could take a mat and put it in the corner of the gym and do the exercises there during classes where I could be officially monitored. I would still most likely fall a lot, but onto something yielding and not into any innocent bystanders. I could live with that. I was less happy about the coach insinuating that maybe we should have official Yoga Fridays and I could lead them if I was so into the practice. I wasn't actually good at yoga. It was just not as likely to send me careening into walls as volleyball. Perhaps she would forget about it; I didn't see a way to discourage the plan at that exact moment without making my promise to pursue the exercise seem less credible.

  I had also "forgotten" my gym clothes, as emergency backup volleyball avoidance, and so I sat out for the second day in a row, but with my alternative arrangement in place I planned to be equipped the next day. It would have been embarrassing to flunk gym.

  * * *

  After school, I needed to make a grocery run: when I was at Charlie's, food was my domain, due to his lack of skill at or interest in cooking and tendency to forget that he needed to eat. On my way out of the campus lot, I noticed the two Cullens and Hale twins who'd attended school that day getting into their car: it was the shiny Volvo. Of course. It would be just silly if they had looks and not money too.

  Grocery shopping wasn't a very mentally taxing activity, and so I spent most of the trip actively trying not to dwell on Edward. There was no good reason for me to be doing so, especially not after an entire day where he had not even appeared. That meant I was dwelling on him for bad reasons, and those weren't likely to go away and quit bugging me until I ferretted out what they were. What bad reasons would be prompting these thoughts?

  Well, first, to get it out of the way, he was attractive. Very. Not in how he acted - just visually and in terms of what I'd heard of his voice. That had to be tweaking something on a subconscious level; I wouldn't necessarily have felt less threatened if an ugly boy had scowled at me the same way, but I wouldn't have been so self-conscious about it. I probably would have figured that it was his problem. Which was a hint that it was his problem, and I shouldn't consider it evidence that I'd done anything wrong. Edward was just a bizarre guy who'd taken an arbitrary dislike to me where no one else had, and he'd chosen to express it in the form of hostile staring. The fact that he was pretty made this no more or less likely.

  Second, it was unexplained. That made it nigglingly mysterious. It only helped to care about mysteries if there was a sensible route towards solving them available, though. Now that I thought about it, it might be safe to ask one of his siblings...? None of them had looked at me at all strangely. Of the four I guessed that Alice, the smaller, less runway-model-looking girl, would be most approachable. I didn't have information about any of their personalities, but appearance was to some extent a personal choice, and so in the absence of better ways to tell it wasn't worthless to guess based on how she looked. However, I decided it would be better to put that possibility off until and unless Edward pulled something worse than glaring at me.

  Third, it felt risky. I had no strong reason to believe it was actually risky. Driving my truck in the rain to and from the Thriftway for eggs and bread was probably more likely to kill me than Edward, just based on how many people died in car accidents and how many people were slain by inexplicably provoked classmates on an annual basis. But an angry face on another person was more the sort of thing I was wired to fear than a lump of metal under my direct control. The brain was evolved to work out social problems, not to worry about the relative danger of controlling vehicles on wet pavement.

  I'd run through all these thoughts by the time I wheeled my cart to the checkout. They helped. Simply observing the thought processes that led to some intrusive notion was so useful; I was confused about the fact that others never seemed to do it. Renée's ability to worry was limited only by her attention span. Charlie, if he had the tendency of dwelling to be
gin with, was subtler about it. I didn't see signs of the ability to consciously shut down pointless woolgathering in any of my peers. I supposed I should actually ask some - later, after I had closer friends in Forks who wouldn't find the one comment enough to consider me weird, instead of so early in their formations of impressions.

  I went home, made egg salad so dinner would already be done whenever Charlie got home, and replied to Renée's e-mail that had arrived while I was at school. Then I occupied myself by writing down as many of the things I'd decided to write down as I could remember. When I'd exhausted them I got started on my math homework. I heard Charlie come home some hours later, and went down the stairs so we could eat together.

  "Bella?" he called when he heard my footsteps.

  "Welcome home!" I replied, leaning into view at the bottom of the stairwell. "Egg salad's in the fridge."

  He served himself a generous helping, looking appreciative, and I scooped out a small plateful for myself. When he went back for a second portion, he asked, "So, how did you like school? Have you made any friends?"

  "Sure," I said. "I have a couple classes with a girl named Jessica, and Angela's my lab partner in biology; I sit with them and some of their friends at lunch. And I also met a boy named Eric and one named Mike - they're friendly." I didn't mention Edward. There was nothing worth involving Charlie in, and anyway, he was clearly hoping for positive news, of which there was no shortage.

  "That must be Mike Newton. Nice kid - nice family. His dad owns the sporting goods store just outside of town. He makes a good living off all the backpackers who come through here."

  I'd never asked Charlie much about the people of Forks, but now that I thought of it, I supposed he must have met many of them. It would be likely less fruitful, but also much cheaper, to ask him rather than Alice - obliquely, of course. "Do you know the Cullen family?" I inquired.

  "Dr. Cullen's family? Sure. Dr. Cullen's a great man."

  "I meant more the kids - they stick out some at school, I was curious."

  Charlie surprised me with a medium-sized speech about how the Cullen kids had surpassed all of his expectations since they'd moved into town, never gave him a speck of trouble, were unfailingly polite, and all went on regular camping trips as a healthy family bonding experience. He seemed to be reacting more to some background hum of gossip, like what I'd heard from Jessica, than to anything I'd said. Apparently he was upset that the locals felt the need to make unkind comments about the Cullens when Forks was so lucky to have such a fine doctor in residence. I nodded along as he talked; the only one of the family I'd "met" had not made such a splendid impression and I couldn't honestly chime in with verbal agreement. But if my father the police chief found the family so clean-cut and worthy of praise, that was some evidence in favor of the danger being imaginary. Most violence came with priors. I felt a bit better.

  * * *

  Edward was not in school for the rest of the week. I settled into the routine of school: English with Mike and Eric sitting on either side of me, competing for my attention during the moments before and after class. Government, Trig, Spanish, lunch, biology, and yoga in the corner of the gym. I discovered to my surprise that I liked yoga; it was easy to think during the languid motions from pose to pose. I wasn't doing anything complicated, mostly just stretches and so on - and I avoided standing postures so I would be less likely to topple over - but the teacher didn't complain, just looked my way periodically to make sure I wasn't goofing off during class. The group I sat with at lunch, led by Mike, made plans to take a trip to La Push Ocean Park in a few weeks - an unfamiliar sort of beach, but a beach, and I decided to go.

  By Friday I started to suspect that Edward had dropped out of school or something. The mystery was compounded, not relieved, by his absence, and the small town failed me with its lack of plausible gossip. This was odd, given that asking Jessica could yield information of the most personal sort about everyone else; I encountered more rumors about drinking problems and scandalous pregnancies and business trajectories than I could keep straight. Why shouldn't she be able to report on Edward?

  I really didn't think I was horrifying enough to cause anyone to drop out of school altogether. I tentatively concluded that he'd looked at me horribly simply because my timing was bad and I'd arrived the day before some unwelcome event took him away from Forks.

  The weekend was tranquil. Charlie worked most of it; he'd gotten into the habit of spending every day on the job when the alternative was puttering around an empty house, and typically took off only when there was urgent fishing to do. I went to the library, found it pitiful, and added a plaintive note about that in my new e-mail to Renée. Later I'd have to go to some larger settlement, Olympia or Seattle, and spend all day in a good bookstore, spending the money I would have blown on a car if not for Charlie's gift - on books, and on gas for the truck, because it got awful mileage and I needed to budget separately for that expense on a trip that big.

  On Monday, it was cold. People in the parking lot greeted me by name; in the cases where I knew theirs, I did the same, and otherwise I just smiled and waved and offered a more generic hello. I was comfortable. It was nice. The classes were mind-numbing, but I was pretty pleased with the student body.

  After English, it turned out to be snowing, and I stopped to marvel when I walked out of the building, staring up at the descending wisps of cottony precipitation. Mike thought this was amusing. "Haven't you ever seen snow before?"

  "On TV," I said. Mike laughed. Then a ball of slush hit him in the back of the head. I tracked its path and noticed Eric hurrying away, in the wrong direction for his next class. Mike bent down and started collecting his own snowball.

  "See you at lunch," I told him, moving away briskly. I thought snow was pretty, but I suspected my affection for it would be destroyed if I had to encounter it in the form of crossfire.

  The snow - first of its kind for the calendar year - was the talk of the school all morning, which would have made more sense if it had been snowing in Phoenix. Nevertheless, I didn't find it hard to muster enthusiasm, since it was genuinely novel to me. I managed to avoid the hurtling snow missiles between all of the buildings I was obliged to travel to; Jessica, walking with me to lunch, thought my caution was silly, but didn't attack me with a frozen projectile herself. Mike caught up with us near the cafeteria doors, laughing as melting ice destroyed the painstaking spikes in his hair. Jessica drew him into a discussion of snowball fight tactics as we headed for the food and I habitually glanced at the Cullen's table.

  There were five people there.

  I must have been distracted for longer than it seemed to me, because Jessica pulled on my arm. "Hello? Bella? What do you want?"

  For him to go be gone again, I thought. Or for an explanation at least. "Just a soda," I said aloud. "I'm not really hungry."

  "Are you okay?" Jessica asked.

  "I think so," I said. We waited in line, got our food and beverages, and headed for our table.

  Mike was very concerned about my health, and kept asking if I was sure I was all right. I considered faking an illness and skipping Biology in the nurse's office. Bad idea, I decided. I couldn't do that forever, and it wouldn't get me any closer to understanding what was going on. I would just stick close to Angela and ignore Edward as much as I could. But I couldn't resist looking over once, to make sure he wasn't glowering at me.

  Edward wasn't looking at me at all, and he was laughing - the entire family was. The boys all had snow in their hair, and Emmett was shaking his head to fling it out towards the sisters. Alice was using her lunch tray as a shield. It was picturesque, and I looked a little more intently, trying to figure out where the fury I so strongly associated with Edward had gone. Without it he didn't look half so predatory.

  "Bella, what are you staring at?" Jessica asked.

  And just then, Edward looked over and made direct eye contact with me.

  I ducked my head immediately, caught, but I was sure he hadn'
t looked as full of rage has he had before. Just curious again, as he had been the last time this had happened in the cafeteria instead of the biology room. Were his attitudes determined by the room? How bizarre would that be?

  "Edward Cullen is staring at you," Jessica giggled.

  "He is?" She probably would have mentioned it if he'd started looking murderous again.

  "Yep," she teased.

  "Please stop looking at him," I said. I turned towards Mike's conversation in progress - elaborate snow-enhanced battle plans - and kept my eyes to my own table for the rest of the lunch period.

  When Mike and Angela and I left the cafeteria together to head to Biology, the snow had turned to rain, and all of his weaponry was in the process of melting. He, and most of the other students, groaned. I was relieved not to have to fear snowballs between classes, and although I did miss the decoration, I hadn't fancied trying to drive home in my very first snowfall.

  I was glad that I had changed lab partners and that I didn't have to sit right next to Edward after his absence. Especially since he had a brief, bizarrely heated exchange with the teacher about the new seating chart before finally taking his place next to Angela's former neighbor. I couldn't hear most of it, but his tone was incredulous, and the girl he was to share his table with was closer to the front of the room and looked vaguely offended. And then Edward stared at me again. Not angrily. Just frustrated, as the first time.

  I turned my attention to the lab when the teacher finished setting up and told us to start identifying the phases of mitosis on our microscope slides. Angela and I worked well together; we alternated checking the slides first and then checked one another's work, with her making one error that I caught and, as far as we could tell, none on my part. While she copied our answers onto the sheet, I glanced around the room. One of the pairs had a book open under the table, trying to hide the forbidden reference from the teacher. Mike and his partner kept swapping between two slides, comparing them. Edward was staring at me again, and his lab partner was gazing into space; either they'd completed the assignment before anyone else, or they had both decided to ignore it completely.