Luminosity Read online

  It was not impossible that the Hales' parents had left the Cullens some money in their wills. Or that when the Cullen children were adopted, they came with monetary bonuses to help with their care (and I didn't know how long those three had been in the family, except that it was longer than two years). Or that they were wealthy independent of the doctor's income for some other reason. But that, too, seemed like something I'd have heard a rumor about. There was little to no way that a resident of Forks was a lottery winner or the heir to a diamond cartel or a trust fund baby or something similarly dramatic and pecuniary without it being branded on their forehead forever by public chat. Jessica had proven able to divulge astonishingly personal things.

  They all bore weird visual similarities. The pale skin, the incredible beauty. But they were not, supposedly, genetically related, except Jasper and Rosalie, who had only hair color in common (none of them looked like family - they looked like they took the same dance classes and wore the same full-coverage white makeup and had been handpicked from the same modeling agency). I knew it was hard to adopt children - if the Hales were Mrs. Cullen's niece and nephew, that did some explanatory work, but Edward, Emmett, and Alice were from some other source. Didn't it take years of paperwork and waiting to get a child? I supposed it was faster if one was willing to take an older adoptee - but then, it was slower if you wanted a white kid, one without developmental problems. (This was evidence in favor of the hypothesis that Alice, and possibly Edward, were insane, which would have made them easier to adopt. I didn't know about Emmett. But they all did well in school and largely kept to themselves and Charlie thought they were model citizens...)

  And it was known that Mrs. Cullen couldn't have children of her own. Since her husband was a doctor, that might have turned up earlier than it would in most couples, but my impression was that fertility testing didn't customarily enter a conception attempt until considerable trial and failure.

  The timeline just didn't shake out naturally. I was placing a lot of faith in Forks's rumor mill, but it was a very good one. I guessed that Dr. Cullen was thirty-five at the very oldest. He was supposed to look a decade younger than that. If he'd finshed high school when he was sixteen, say - he probably could have skipped a grade or two back in elementary school without that making its way to my ears - and gotten through med school in an accelerated seven-year program so he had his doctorate at age 23, and raced through whatever licensing hoops were in his way at age 24, and was such a miraculous boon to medicine that he'd immediately gotten his super high paying job in Alaska -

  And by then the Hales would have been living with Mrs. Cullen. I didn't know when Dr. and Mrs Cullen had gotten married, so they might not have been living out of the doctor's pocketbook until later. (But what was Mrs. Cullen doing before they married? If she had job skills, they'd never made it into the town consciousness.) But that left Dr. Cullen eight years racking up the big bucks. Not enough time for really high-yield investments to pay out. Was he living like a graduate student that entire time, surviving on ramen and store samples, only to start living like a king a little later on when he'd have to mostly eat savings to do it? When did the other three kids come in? If he'd been saving like a Scrooge during this period, why did they act so used to their nice things? Alice's story about her boots hadn't held any of the earmarks of being a gleeful once-a-year splurge, and I was sure they'd cost at least two hundred dollars, though she hadn't named a figure.

  What about school loans? I guessed if I was factoring into the story that he was a brilliant doctor commanding an immense salary, he could also have been a brilliant student commanding a full-ride scholarship...

  The bell rang.

  * * *

  Edward seemed to be following me to Biology. This was a slightly silly impression to have even given everything that had happened: we were both starting from the cafeteria, and were both headed for the same classroom. But he was walking right behind me, and seemed to be matching pace awfully precisely with me, Angela, and Mike. I couldn't speed up with all the ice on the paths - so I slowed down, claiming to my friends that I felt liable to fall. This was entirely credible, as I did fall down a lot even on surfaces not encrusted with slippery substances. They slowed down with me.

  Instead of going around, Edward slowed down too. It did not seem likely that this was a coincidence or that he felt a deep and abiding need to keep off the grass.

  What had Alice said to him, anyway?

  We arrived at Biology after what seemed like a very long trip to have squeezed into only three minutes. Angela and I sat at our table, Mike slid in beside his partner, and Edward walked through the door a half a step behind us. He hesitated, like he wanted to go on following us - me - but instead plopped into his chair. He held himself very stiffly but didn't turn around to look at me.

  Biology progressed in perfect ordinariness. Mike and I walked to gym, which ensued with no unusual happenings. It wasn't until I walked out of the gym building that Edward Cullen appeared at my side and said, "Hello, Bella."

  I jumped, startled. My feet came down on the ice and immediately sheered off in opposite directions. I went down, scrunching my eyes closed and emitting a squeak. But where I expected my head to crack on the ice, there was silence. I opened one eye.

  Edward had caught me neatly, and it must have looked to bystanders like we were in the middle of a very oddly timed ballroom dance. "Are you all right?" he asked.

  "Yes," I said. "Please let go of me."

  Edward stood me back up. He didn't seem to have any trouble with moving me around any which way he pleased, nor with avoiding balance challenges himself. "Thank you," I said, but I narrowed my eyes a little bit. I waited for him to talk next. He was the one who had greeted me; presumably he had a reason. I started counting to five in my head; if he hadn't gotten my attention by the time I reached it, I was going to continue towards my car.

  "Alice told me you were upset by my... staring... earlier," he said in that smooth voice (if they made voices out of caramel, this would be one of them), looking into my eyes steadily. His were still gold. "I wanted to apologize."

  "Oh," I said. It wasn't very helpful of me, but I didn't feel charitable; I wanted to see what he'd say without prompting.

  "I'm sorry," he said, after an awkward pause, apparently having realized that saying he wanted to apologize wasn't quite actually apologizing.

  "I accept your apology," I said. I'd gotten into the habit of saying that instead of "it's okay" when I was fourteen, having noticed that I often wanted to accept apologies for things that were not really okay.

  "Thank you," said Edward.

  "You're welcome," I replied.

  There was another pause. I began counting to five again.

  "Would you like me to walk you to your car?" he offered when I'd reached three. "I noticed you seem to have some trouble with the ice."

  "No, thank you," I said.

  This seemed to surprise him. "May I ask why?" he inquired after a moment.

  I considered the pros and cons of various answers. Eventually I hedged my bets: "Are you sure you want to know?"

  "Yes," he said immediately.

  "Because I'm liable to ask very intrusive personal questions of you if I spend time with you socially, and I prefer to avoid situations in which I'm especially likely to be rude." And then, because it would have put the lie to my statement if I'd done otherwise, I turned and picked my way across the ice towards the parking lot.

  Of course Edward couldn't let me walk away; he loped beside me, one long easy step to six of my careful ones. "Why would you ask intrusive personal questions?" he asked lightly.

  "Because there are a number of things about you - your family in general, actually - that don't add up," I said, deciding that if he kept following me after what I'd told him, he wasn't entitled to special rudeness-avoiding care. "You are distractingly mysterious."

  "You like solving mysteries?"

  "I like the nonexistence of mysteries. Mysteries
mean I've missed something," I said shortly.

  "Interesting," Edward murmured softly. "What's missing about me?"

  He seemed to want to keep me talking. That was potentially useful. I stopped - carefully, on a salted patch of sidewalk - and turned to face him. "If I tell you what's missing, will you fill in the gaps?"

  "Probably not," he said, smiling in a manner that he probably thought was roguish.

  "Then I have no incentive to answer your question," I said, and I continued to walk to my car.

  Edward's face fell, and he kept following me. "What?"

  "The only reason I'd mention to you what's confusing about you would be if I thought you'd demystify things for me," I said briskly. "I don't enjoy having my curiosity abused to no end. If I thought it was fun to muse aloud about things that confuse me, I could talk to one of my friends or parents instead. In the reasonably likely event that you're hiding something on purpose, then telling you what's off about you will only help you cover things up better - and I've got no motive to help cover up a secret I'm not in on, since I don't know if there are adequate reasons for it or not."

  He kept following me until I got to my truck, although he didn't come up with anything else to say during the brief journey. "I suppose I'll see you tomorrow," I said as I pulled open my cab door.

  "Of course," he said. "Tomorrow."

  I hopped into the driver's seat and went home.

  * * *

  I pulled into the driveway, let myself in, and started a pot of lentils boiling, because they were impossible to overcook as long as I added water periodically, and so would be hot and ready to eat whenever Charlie got home.

  I pulled out my notebook and wrote for a solid forty-five minutes. My hand was cramping up by the time I was done. All the confusing tidbits, all the erratic pieces of behavior, everything I'd heard from Jessica and other sources. I tapped the eraser end of my pencil several times around the bit where I'd written about Alice's lunch behavior. Her timing was strange. She'd interrupted me just before I'd asked any awkward questions, and I was sure I hadn't looked like I was going to say anything. I'd recorded video of myself thinking and writing before, just for kicks - my emotions were readable, but if I closed my eyes and skipped to a random point in the video before re-opening them, I couldn't tell whether I was about to write something or not until my arm actually moved. And I'd been the one in the video.

  And then there was the bit with the van, in the morning...

  I thought of a crazy idea.

  I thought of a very cheap test.

  That was the only kind of test worth doing on a crazy idea. If one was wise, one didn't bet one's life savings and firstborn child on something this silly. But it would cost me less to perform this test than it would cost to expend the willpower on avoiding it, now that I'd thought it up.

  I shut my notebook. I shut my eyes.

  I made up my mind that, when Charlie got home, I was going to tell him all about my suspicions of the Cullens.

  Fifteen minutes later, the doorbell rang.

  * * *

  Chapter 3: The Reveal

  When the bell rang, I was at the stove, giving the lentils a stir and pouring in a little more water. I left the spoon in the pot and went to answer the door. It was Alice.

  "Hello, Bella," she said.

  "Hello, Alice," I replied. "Can I help you?"

  "May I come in, please?" Alice asked.

  I thought about this. Charlie wouldn't likely object to my having her over; although I didn't have any classes with Alice, she was a peer in some sense, and he swore up and down that she and her family were the ideal sort of people. Besides, if I was ever going to figure out the answers to my questions, it would probably involve talking to some Cullens at some time. I stood aside and waved Alice into the house; she pranced inside.

  "Want some lentils?" I asked idly, gesturing at the pot on the stove. "They're sort of related to chickpeas, I think."

  "I already ate," said Alice. "Thank you very much anyway."

  I nodded and sat down at the kitchen table; Alice did the same. "So," I said. "What's up?"

  "Be patient with me, please," Alice said, looking pained. "I have a lot to tell you and I've never had to explain it before and it's really complicated and my family is going to be angry at me, but there's no other way, I looked, there's really not. You've got to know, and sooner's safer than later."

  "I, um, register a general approval of knowing things rather than not, and of safety," I said. "Do you think you're going to be able to explain what you want to explain before Charlie - I mean, my dad - gets home?"

  "Yes," said Alice confidently. "He won't get back until after eight. The basics won't take longer than that. You're going to want extra proof, but we can meet some other day and take care of it. So, uh, first - I can predict the future."

  I nodded slowly, inviting her to go on. My crazy idea was looking less crazy. If Alice believed of herself that she could predict the future, and I'd independently thought of it - it was still wildly unlikely, but she was willing to let me test it, apparently, and that sure was something.

  "Here," she said, passing me a folded sheet of paper. "It's the weather for the next week. I know that weather reports are sometimes right and that Forks is easier to guess than anywhere else, but weather's easy for me, and I put everything down to the minute. I can do physical events like that with no trouble. I can tell what people are going to do if they've made their decisions - if they might do any of several things I get less clear images, but not nothing - but minds can always change. So weather's one of the best tests."

  I unfolded the sheet of paper. It specfied heavy rain until 11:09 that evening, after which brief sleeting was called for, and then a subdued drizzle would dominate the night. She'd thrown in a rainbow for Thursday morning. I folded the paper back up. "Dice?" I proposed.

  "Cards would be better. How you shake the dice matters, but once you shuffle cards they stay put," Alice said. "I can do better than chance with dice if you prefer them, though. Oh, but you have a dice cup. I can do perfectly with dice too that way."

  I got some of both from the cabinet under the stairs and offered Alice a sheet of paper. I shuffled the deck several times and she filled her page with predictions, writing rapidly and with perfect penmanship. Then I took the paper and flipped through each card in succession.

  * * *

  She got them all right. I didn't bother repeating the cards right away; time was limited and I already had more information than I could readily explain. Charlie indeed owned a dice cup, which Alice said would let her get all of the dice perfect as long as I hid the cubes under it for a moment after shaking them. She was right sixteen times in a row, at which point I swept the dice out of the way and planted my elbows on the table.

  "How do you do it?" I asked.

  "I honestly don't know," said Alice. "I've been able to as long as I could remember. I focus on people, or things, and the possibilities show themselves in visions. No audio, but I'm okay at lipreading; they're not always very clear, and it gives me headaches to focus on really indecisive people."

  "As long as you can remember is - how long?" I asked. "You're, what, my age? A year older?"

  "I'm at least a hundred years old," said Alice evenly, maintaining steady eye contact.

  "What? Wait - at least?"

  "I woke up in 1920 with no memories and looked about as old as I do now. I think I'm physically nineteen, but if I look old for my age - I mean, the age I was when it happened - then I could have been born as late as 1905 or so," she said.

  "And when you woke up you could see the future," I said. I wasn't sure if I was playing along or if I really bought the rest of the story along with her casino-busting tricks, but even if she were playing with me, outright lies were a change of pace from cryptic eccentricity.

  "Yes," she said. "I'm not - none of my family is - human. But I'm the only one who can't remember being one. We're not sure what happened to me; I can't see t
he past the same way I can see the future. The rest of them know more about where they came from."

  "And so you are a...?"

  "Vampire," said Alice, wincing a little. "Please don't freak out."

  "I... really don't think I want you to prove that to me," I began carefully.

  "No, nonononono," said Alice, her eyes flying open very wide, "we don't drink human blood. Not my family. Animals only. Although it wouldn't be smart for you to watch us eating them, either."

  "Okay... That's why you guys never eat anything at school?"

  Alice winced. "I know it's kind of conspicuous. It's not physically impossible for us to swallow normal food, but it's really, really unpleasant. And we can't digest it, so it just all comes back up later."

  "Charming mental image," I remarked. "Is that why you all look like you're made of chalk, too?" Alice nodded. I asked, "Did you ever consider wearing makeup?"

  "They don't make the stuff to stay on our skin," she said, holding out an arm. "Go ahead," she added.

  I laid my palm on the back of her hand. She felt like a piece of rock. Cold, smooth, unyielding rock. I nodded.

  "It'd all rub off as soon as we touched anything," she said, putting her arm back down. "So before you ask, most of the myths are false. We do drink blood, but have no unusual relationship with bats, no aversion to garlic in particular over anything else you might eat, don't sleep in coffins - or at all, actually - can't turn into smoke, and aren't harmed by sunlight. Although sunlight does make us kind of conspicuous, so we avoid going out in it in public. That's why we pick places like this to live - cloud cover. A stake through the heart would be impossible - there's no way you could drive a piece of wood through my eye, let alone my ribcage - and decapitation's only an issue if we don't get everything reattached in a hurry. We can catch fire, though, so please don't try that one. We are very fast, agile, and strong, and have very acute senses."