Wind strips her face, snatching and flinging her hair, setting it dancing around her ears. Highway snakes out lithely in front of her car bonnet. Her shades slip slowly and inevitably back on her head, increasing pressure on the bones behind her ears, and lend a curious sense of gathering, of fruition, of anticipation to the gusting of hair and rush of car. She snatches the shades off, chucking them on the empty seat to her right, keeping her eyes dead ahead. She barely hears the clatter as they fall between the seat and the door over the sound of the radio humming in and out of static. Dashed road markings flicker past in a sepia-tinged morse code. The horizontal light necessitates a perpetual squint against the glory of onrushing twilight. The air has the cool edge that anticipates the vast grandeur of night. Rolled down windows give no protection against time and the elements, and the thought makes her shiver. Rolled down windows, and the road rolling under her. The car is a still point in a turning universe, and her lips quirk up, smirking at such egocentric insolence. The exit nears, and she brakes tentatively. The weight of the fine evening is fading, air clammy, but it deserves her momentary reverence as a meteorological rarity, she thinks, in this fine town of Forks. Bella turns off the highway, slowing now, and rolls up her windows. Wouldn't do to be caught speeding, not when your dad's the local cop.
After the monotony of concentration, pulling into home's driveway jerks her mind into the present, away from dusty postcard sunsets and bald spinning tires, grease and engines. Inside, she boils the kettle. Waiting for the keen and whistle, she rummages in the inside pocket of Charlie's nasty fishing coat, emerging triumphant with a packet of cigarettes. She knicks a few and carefully replaces the pack, repositioning the coat into casual nonchalance. The kettle screams, demanding attention, and she gathers cup, teabag, milk one handed, closing cupboards and fridge with her elbows. The wet heat of the steam laps her hand as she pours out the boiling water, and waits patiently for the black to seep out of the teabag, leaching into the transparency. Her eyes glaze slightly as she waits, and the world pauses. She pours in the milk, slowly, slowly, once the tea is as black as sin, and watches the vortices of white force the black to brown. She fishes out the teabag with her fingers, hissing between her teeth at the burn, and chucks it in the bin she levers open with her foot and knee. Cradling cup, with cigarettes twined in her fingers, she slouches upstairs to curl at her window. Cigarettes scatter around her feet, and she sips and stares at nothing.
Her eyes betray nothing, eyelids flickering imperceptibly only when she raises the cup to her lips. But her mind moves through eddies unknown, sinuously synthesising that which her gaze seems to brush over carelessly. She sips on deep structure and forgotten syntax, ignoring the twinge of burning heat at the back of her mouth. Once the tea is gone, she pats around her ankles without looking down, locating a cigarette with wandering fingers. Other hand seeks the lighter pushed out of sight behind a book, and she brings them together in exquisite matrimony. The delicate whisper and hush of first burn holds the moment still, and her first drag is a sigh. She drops her hands and inhales-exhales through the cigarette, breathing nothing but smoke and ash until her eyes water. Cigarette snatched away, and she pants deep sucks of air for a moment, mind swirling around optative moods. Then automatic rise and fall of occasional drag joins her respiration. The first cig disappears quickly, and the next is lit, rises and falls, shortens in relentless creep, and is naught but ashy butt soon after. Out the window, she unsees the sharp treeline in the dusk, silhouetted by washed-out blue that intensifies bit by bit into hard, dark indigo. She smokes until the clouds gather, covering the first scattering of pinpoint stars, and the heavy rain drops fall, splashing like hot blood down her window. When the third cigarette burns out to sweet scar of smouldered filter, she gathers momentum, all of a sudden, unlatches the window and throws the butts she'd gathered in her lap outside. They arch through the air to land somewhere, abandoned in the wet grass. Admiring the scatter of drops on her hand, she extends a leg out the window, some childish glee in the simple sensation of rain, black in the night, splattering onto her shins. Finally closing the window out of concern for the cushions in the rain, once the haze of smoke had dissipated into the drip and wash of the outside world, she sprays an old perfume around her room, hiss-hissing esterified scent over the dirty smoke smell. She wrinkles her nose, and vacates, looping the empty tea cup in her fingers. Tripping light down the stairs, she deposits the mug in the sink and snags an apple from the fruit bowl. She leans back on the counter to crunch through it, quickly entranced again by the downpour visible also through the downstairs window. The rain falls in parallel streaks above the kitchen table, in cinematic frame. Her fingers smell like smoke when she raises the apple to her lips.
She needs to sleep, she thinks. The ache in her bones skitters restlessly. The time was too flat, stretching out around her, hard to pick apart. Maladroit, a shiver of anxiety plucking at her chest, she wonders if she is confusing ennui with exhaustion. Charlie's cruiser finally pulls up, a little past midnight, as she toys with the browning apple core and licks, cat-like, at her vile fingers, and she recognises the plain pause in his eyes and his implausible smile as he walks in the door. The rain had sunk into his soul too. She wishes him goodnight, kissing him on scruffy cheek, and treads upstairs to finally sink into the bed in her awful smelling room. Her dreams are all flat greys, punctuated by brief glimpses of sunrises.
She slips into the next morning's shower as the morning strokes the treeline out her window, spreading bright orange-russets into the saturated landscape. The hot water and soap feel like baptism. She leaves her window open to air out her room and Charlie in the kitchen with a coffee and a promise to pick up some more milk as she drives off to school. The corridors and halls feel like a daze. She twirls her pencil in her hand, and ignore the static of classes. Her page consists of lists – countries and continents (Pangaea, Yugoslavia), words (alderbest, myrmecophile, philoprogenitive, abomasum), biological jargon (meiosis, adanine), Jewish physicists (Feynman, Oppenheimer, Bohm, Einstein, Witten, Zweig), songs (Ramble On, Misty Mountain Hop, She Said She Said), homework assignments (essay, sheet, chapter) – and her mind consists of concentric circles. She talks and smiles on social cues, but the cycle of her blood, oxygenated and gradually deoxygenated, gushing round and around, beats so much stronger and insistently in her mind. Nothing is concrete other than the slip and swill of her body. The thought of the cafeteria is impossible, and she treads out, shrugging into her truck, and drives away.