Luminosity Read online

  Edward winced terribly, and Emmett chuckled. Jasper cracked a smile but didn't make a sound. Rosalie looked bored and Alice conflicted.

  "Speaking of magical powers, Jasper, I never want to be on the receiving end of yours except in the unlikely event that I explicitly, verbally request help. Alice didn't make it sound involuntary - right?" I said, turning to the blond boy.

  "It's voluntary," he confirmed, looking wary. "But I'm not sure I can promise that."

  "If you can't promise that, then I need to find some other way to protect myself," I said firmly. "It is possible, but unlikely, that you will prefer whatever I come up with."

  "Some emotional states aren't safe," Jasper said. "If you're flailing around hysterically near something sharp and also near Edward..." He trailed off as Edward made a small growling noise.

  "Then..." I considered, wondering what he thought the obvious consequence of this situation might be. "Then I'll start bleeding and smell even more delicious and I'm a snack?"

  "Right," said Jasper. "You'd want me to calm you down then."

  "I'd want to be calm then," I said. "But not to be made calm. The reason I'm asking you to leave my emotions alone, instead of telling you to stay away from my friends and whatnot, is that I can deal with my own and most people can't. If I start flailing hysterically near something sharp and also near Edward, you can warn me that hysteria is dangerous to me at that time. You know, using words. I do have a self-preservation instinct; I would not choose to be hysterical if it would likely get me killed. Although," I said, turning back to Edward, "it may be that you should avoid simultaneously being around me and sharp objects."

  "Edward is a sharp object," rumbled Emmett. He looked a lot more lighthearted than the other vampires.

  "Point," I acknowledged. "Uh, no pun intended. But anyway, Alice, you see me being a vampire, definitely, not a corpse?"

  "Yes," she said, "but even a very solid vision can change, if someone makes an unlikely decision."

  "So it is something to be sure I'm sane about, but not something to rearrange my life over," I decided. "I wear a seatbelt; but I don't walk to school."

  The vampires actually looked confused by my analogy. "Car accidents are a fairly common cause of death among us fragile folk," I reminded them, and comprehension dawned. Of course. If a vampire got in a car accident the worst case scenario - the only scenario worth worrying about - would be catching fire, and comparatively few accidents had that feature, in spite of cinematic embellishment making it look like cars were just begging to burst into flames on impact.

  "Anyway," I said. "I find myself pretty much taking what Alice said at face value, given the available snippets of evidence. However, as she predicted, I would like a little more proof. I've got a list. Two tests require somebody other than Edward or Alice to be valid tests of the things I'm looking for, and one is specifically of Edward. Can't compel participation, but I would appreciate it."

  "What've you got?" asked Emmett. I took out my notebook, tore out the page, and handed it to the large vampire. Edward leaned slightly to look at it.

  "We're all going to do them except Rosalie," reported Alice. Rosalie sniffed.

  "Aw, Rose," said Emmett. "Don't want to pick up a tree?"

  "Or even let Bella admire you in the sun?" asked Edward in a low voice.

  "No," said Rosalie, "I don't. You don't need me anyway; the four of you can satisfy her curiosity doing whatever tricks she likes if that's how you want to spend your afternoon."

  "And Carlisle and Esme," added Alice. "They'll be there. But not this afternoon. We're doing it Thursday. There'll be a little sun around four p.m."

  Rosalie snorted and Emmett rolled his eyes. I had a moment of unkind speculation about the depth of that relationship. But for all I knew they'd been together for seven hundred years and there were vast reams of subtext I couldn't detect; at any rate, I had no reason to act on information about their love lives, so it didn't bear investigation. "Tomorrow?" I said. "I guess that works; I need to study for trig with Jessica this afternoon."

  Alice nodded. With the important orders of business out of the way I took a bite of my macaroni and cheese, then started peeling my orange. The macaroni had flecks of bacon in it. I wondered if vampire taste sensations were anything like human ones - I'd have to ask a non-Alice vampire about that. It would be sad to give up normal food.

  * * *

  Lunch ended, and I - flanked by Edward - caught up with Angela and Mike. Mike gave Edward an annoyed look, which Edward responded to with a tight-lipped smile and narrowed eyes. None of us talked on the way, but I suspected we all had different reasons: Angela didn't mind silence, Mike didn't want to talk to Edward, Edward didn't want to talk to humans who weren't me, and I knew all of that and didn't want to oblige anyone to talk. We arrived at Biology and went to our respective seats.

  The class was, as usual, something I'd done before - the syllabus indicated we'd get to some fresh material in the next unit, which I hoped would be interesting, because Biology was increasingly tiresome as we went over more and more that I already knew. It occurred to me to wonder why the vampires were in high school. They moved a lot - did they have to repeat high school over and over again? Or did they just do this occasionally, and at other times spend their days pretending to "homeschool" and secretly pursuing whatever interested them?

  The latter would make more sense. I could see attending high school anew once every thirty years or so to get an update on the state of education - they would always need to be able to pull off having attended high school recently - but even if that was the goal, it would make more sense to go to college repeatedly and at least choose a different major each time. There was no reason the vampires couldn't pass as youthful college students, especially at a large, prestigious school that would tend to attract prodigies. Maybe they liked continuity more than I would have guessed, and preferred to segue into college with genuine secondary school histories. (Living as they did there had to be a source of forged records, of course, but they might not use them for absolutely everything.)

  While the teacher talked about ribosomes I started speculating pointlessly on what sort of knowledge they must have acquired over their lives. Alice had hinted at knowing Korean. I couldn't think of any other clues, so I made things up to entertain myself, fabricating long lists of languages they'd speak and cities they'd explored and skills they had mastered and books they'd read and performances they'd attended - there was so much to do with life as soon as you took a few of the bars off the cage.

  The thought of how much time would be freed up by the mere lack of a need for sleep was staggering. Not only the time spent sleeping, but also the time preparing for sleep, waking up from sleep, ensuring the comfort of the place in which one might sleep, managing threats to the peaceful environment such that one might sleep, and dealing with the interruption to any long-term pursuits due to sleep. That, and there was little to no risk attached to anything they could do that didn't call for sunbathing. No reason not to skydive.

  I was warming up considerably to the idea of joining their ranks. Three days of "not fun", a loss of my love of bacon, and the introduction of a temptation to slurp up the fluids of those around me notwithstanding, I wanted immortality and real twenty-four-hour days.

  * * *

  Chapter 4: Matchmaking

  Edward gave me a vaguely meaningful look, catching my eye as I left the biology room to go to gym. I wasn't sure what the meaning was supposed to be - perhaps if it was important he'd find me after school. As Mike and I walked towards our final class, it looked like his brain was chewing on itself - I didn't envy him a bit - but he still didn't say anything. I decided that it was a priority to politely deflect him. I wasn't actually sure how reliable the vampires were about not eating people, especially since Alice had been worried, and goodness only knew how Edward would react to whatever he caught of ongoing teenage boy thoughts from Mike about a mutual crush.

  Maybe I could set Mike u
p with someone else. If he liked me, that was some clue about his type - slender but without any visible athleticism, brown-haired, brown-eyed, symmetrical-ish but not particularly striking, that was me. I thought about the girls who sat with the group at lunch. Jessica seemed plausible; she was dark like me, little and cute and fairly popular. I didn't see them settling down and having five kids, but it wasn't hard to picture them going to watch a movie. I'd try to suggest him to her discreetly while we studied trig.

  Eric was less obvious. While I started my yoga, I paired him in my head with others. There was Angela, but she'd made vague murmurs about liking some unidentified boy, and I didn't think from how she described him that it was anyone I'd met (even after I corrected for the fact that he was being described by a girl who liked him). I supposed Lauren might work, although I wasn't sure Eric deserved her - he was fairly nice, and Lauren was the least pleasant individual I'd yet encountered in Forks unless I made very broad inferences from what I'd seen of Rosalie. But she was pretty - had a sort of haughty class to her bearing and well-proportioned features. Her coloring wasn't like mine, at the moment, but she dyed her hair different colors from time to time and with any luck I could time my attempt for a week when she went dark. I wasn't sure if she'd have him, but she complained enough about being single.

  I felt a little guilty about planning all this matchmaking more for my covenience than for the happiness of its objects. Upon noticing this guilt, I also noted that my brain was trying to rearrange its estimations of the couple quality to justify it: Jessica and Mike would be cute together, said my brain, it's not like they couldn't work out, they're already friends, aren't they? Jessica didn't mention him in her list of top ten boys she wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole... And maybe Lauren is only girl-mean, and would be nice to a boy like Eric...

  I entered my next pose too fast, yanked something in my leg that wasn't meant to be yanked, and promptly moved to a more comfortable sitting posture to massage the discomfort away. Mike jogged over after perfunctorily soliciting teacher permission. "Are you okay, Bella?" he asked.

  "Yeah," I said. "Nothing broken, nothing dislocated, just an unhappy leg."

  "You're sure? Do you want me to help you to the nurse?"

  "If you could tell the teacher I'm going to just sit for the rest of class, that would be great," I told him, "but I don't think I need medical help - it'll be okay by the bell."

  Mike nodded obediently and trotted off. He reminded me a little of a golden retriever.

  He'll only be less happy if you let him simmer in his crush like this, said my brain. It's in his own best interest for you to send him away, and as long as he hasn't said anything yet, it would only be needlessly hurtful to address it directly. Set him up with Jessica for his own good.

  I shook my head to myself, just a little, to put my next thought out into the world where it couldn't reshape itself like fog. (Taking out a notebook during gym might have made the teacher suspicious about my leg.) That wasn't why I wanted to put Jessica and Mike together. Even if it was true, it wasn't why I wanted to do it. Even if it contributed, and made me want to do it more than I would have, it wasn't necessary or sufficient. I had no doubt that if I'd wanted Mike for myself, I'd never have dreamed about sending Jessica after him because they'd be cute. I was sure that if Mike hadn't liked me, but had instead been pining after someone else implausible like Rosalie, I wouldn't have bothered with juggling his love life to make sure he wasn't marinating in unrequited attraction. I just didn't want his attention, and so I was trying to send it somewhere else. I refused to lie to myself about the nobility of the decision, even as it firmed up on my list of plans.

  What sort of person am I? It didn't matter if I could make up flattering reasons for my choices. They had to be the actual reasons I made those choices, or they simply didn't answer that question. If I'd let myself believe the pretty justifications for it all, went along with the self-aggrandizing delusion, I'd be mistaken about the one topic I most adamantly refused to be mistaken about:

  Inside Bella Swan's skull, who's driving this thing?

  * * *

  Edward caught up with me on my way to my truck. I limped only a little, and he didn't comment on it - I speculated that he'd seen the event through Mike's eyes and didn't want to let any evidence of that slip. "Jessica's forgotten that she's supposed to call you," he told me. That put a ding in my speculation. Maybe he'd seen the event and noticed that I didn't want help.

  "I guess I'd better call her, then," I said. "Trig is so important for later life."

  Edward chuckled, then grew more serious. "Why did you switch lab partners?" he asked softly.

  "Because the one I was assigned looked at me like I'd recently killed his puppy, and then wasn't even in school the next day while I was still getting used to things, and Angela and her previous lab partner didn't mind the switch," I replied.

  "I'm very sorry I looked at you that way," he said sincerely.

  "I don't understand why your wanting to have me for dessert would make you look angry," I said. "Help me figure that one out?"

  He grimaced - he seemed to do that a lot, and it didn't do much to help his attractiveness, not that he needed help there. "I was angry that you were... straining my control. That you were making me less the person I try to be."

  "The kind of person who doesn't poke straws into people during school."

  "Right. No straws." He laughed ruefully. "It didn't make any sense to blame you. You didn't do anything. But it felt like you did."

  I nodded. "That explains the anger. But before that you were looking at me weirdly too - like I was confusing. What was up with that?"

  We'd reached my car by this point, and Edward looked pleased - maybe that I'd asked another question instead of hopping right in and rumbling away? "The fact that I can't read your mind," he said. "It's never happened before - that I noticed. It actually did take me a while to pick up on it with you, simply because I wasn't trying until I noticed that everyone in school was thinking about you. I wanted to know what all the fuss was about, and... couldn't tell."

  I wasn't sure if Alice had told Edward - or thought near Edward - that she'd told me that he liked me. I elected not to bring it up on this occasion. "I guess mindreading is something you get used to after a while?"

  "I couldn't do it, before," he said. "Carlisle realized what was going on before I did; I kept replying to his thoughts as though he'd spoken them aloud."

  "Why do some of you have extra powers and some not?" I asked.

  "We aren't entirely sure. In my case and Jasper's, at least - we can only guess about Alice - it's similar to strengths we had as humans. I was very good at reading people. Ironically, now that I have my abilities to rely on, I think I've deteriorated at reading faces," he said wryly. "Jasper was a leader, very charismatic - he could calm a crowd or rile them up even before he turned."

  I nodded. "I'm having a little trouble guessing what would produce Alice's ability, if your trend isn't just a coincidence. Good pattern recognition? Extensive physics knowledge?"

  Edward shrugged. "I don't know. At any rate, just because Jasper and Alice and I are the flashiest talents doesn't mean the others don't have unique abilities. Rosalie kept her beauty. Emmett's the strongest. Carlisle has an amazing ability to resist blood - he can practice as a physician without a trace of discomfort. Esme brought with her the ability to love passionately."

  "When I'm a vampire, will I be able to turn invisible?" I suggested. "Since I'm mentally invisible now?"

  Edward growled a little in the back of his throat. "You don't have to be a vampire," he said. "Alice's visions are never certain. There has to be a way for you to stay human."

  "Two things," I said. "First, there doesn't have to be such a way. The universe is allowed to be the way it is, even if the way it is, is a way that winds up with me being a vampire. Second, I kind of like the idea. I'm not sure when a good time will be, but it sure sounds like it comes with a lot of perks."
r />   "No," said Edward. "Bella, any of us would rather be human -"

  I started at him incredulously, and he cut off midsentence. "What? Okay, Alice said that the three day initiation process or whatever it is is "not fun". I could buy that it is sufficiently not fun that you wish it hadn't happened to you, don't think it was worth it. It'd be a little hard to believe, but not impossible. But why in the world would you want to go back once you've already been through that part? I don't know how old the rest of you are, but you realize Alice would be dead by now, right? Humans generally don't live to be a hundred years old. Whatever it is she misses about being human, she wouldn't have it anymore anyway. And there's nothing to love about being dead."

  "Ask Rosalie what she misses," said Edward darkly.

  "What will she tell me?" I asked.

  "Her answer," he muttered.

  I opened my truck door.

  "Bella," said Edward coaxingly. I supposed he wanted me to stay.

  "Nope," I said. "I don't want to have cryptic conversations. If that's the only kind you can have right now, I'm going to go home and call Jessica. See you tomorrow!" I said. I hoped I'd managed to inject enough cheer into my voice that I didn't sound vengeful. That wasn't the point; I didn't want to get back at Edward for being mysterious, I just didn't want to put up with the mystery because it was unpleasant. It would be nice if eventually he decided to stop being vague and unhelpful around me, but even if he didn't, I would still get more of what I wanted by leaving when his remarks took a turn for the uninformative.

  * * *

  Edward didn't try to follow my truck. I parked in the driveway, let myself into the house, and phoned Jessica. She admitted that the plans had completely slipped her mind, but agreed that I should come over after dinner to study. I whipped up a sauce and started marinating the night's salmon in it. Fish cooked fast enough that it made more sense to start it after Charlie got home. I set a timer to remind myself to preheat the oven sufficiently far in advance, then did my homework for the day.