I don't own any part of Twilight; though I wish I did.

Chapter 1: Nerd Alert

Forks was dreary, rainy, green, and for all intents and purposes my definition of perfection. I had moved from West Michigan a year ago; a place I greatly hated. I could handle general religious fervor. I thought religion and morals were overall beneficial to society. What really pissed me off about West Michigan was not the intensity of the practitioners, but the way it seemed like everyone I talked to about religion tried to force their beliefs down my throat and called me a heathen.

There was very little of that in Forks. Granted Forks was as spiritual place as any but things were different, more peaceful and accepting.

I looked at the clock trying to will the long hand to sweep around the face. I had given up long ago trying to force the smaller stick to bend to my power; now it only mocked me. I still had hope for the big hand. It was larger and hopefully more responsive to my albeit ineffective telekinesis.

I often mused that the more one looked at the clock the slower time moved. Simply for something to do as the teacher droned on about Shakespeare's fantastical romances and tragedies I pretended that I could only move in slow motion like the clock. I will be the first to say I'm a nerd; but when there's nothing else to do I have to keep my mind occupied in some way.

As much as I was enthralled by the dragging class period, I was infinitely glad when the bell rang dismissing us for lunch. After I acquired the miniscule salad and carton of milk for lunch I took my usual place at my lonely table in a corner of the cafeteria. At first I was sad that like my last school I was a bit of a social outcast, exiled from the student body, but soon I got use to it. This sort of exile was better; they left me alone and I left them alone. This was not to say that I was completely shunned. I had a good relationship with a vast majority of students, often being consulted and consulting others on various assignments. But in general I just never fit into the social scene so they left me alone. Blissful peace.

Since, like usual, I was alone at the table I decided to take my normal course of action once I finished eating and wrote. Sometimes I wrote stories, sometimes poetry, although I will admit that nothing I penned was of any literary value. I only did it to keep myself busy.

I was working on the rhyme scheme for a poem that for the past day had been eluding completion. We were working on Shakespeare in English and I felt it would be both prudent and enjoyable to mix my passion for writing with the insight to complete an assignment that wasn't due for a few days. Traditionally I would consider myself a procrastinator, but things meshed for me this time and I went to work trying to find a twist and last six heroic couplets for my Shakespearian Sonnet.

I was engrossed by complicated rhyme schemes that I could not make relevant to the subject when I heard a dull buzzing in the background. Looking up I saw that the lunchroom was starting to clear out, meaning that the buzzing I heard was the bell signaling lunch was over and the next period would soon start.

Chemistry was fun and one of my favorite subjects, but that was only when we were going over theories. Today was math-orientated trying to determine the molar mass of various salts. The work wasn't particularly hard, but it was distracting to instantly think of the small mostly blind mammal that burrows in the ground ever time the teacher mentioned the world 'mole'.

After enduring a chemistry class full of puns that only got worse as the hour went on I buzzed through biology. This class was more interesting than any of those I had had throughout the day. We were in the lab which made the class fly by. I wasn't necessarily excited to see the end of the day, but I must admit that I was ready to go home.

I trudged up to my room on the second story of the quaint house my mother and I shared; my father having died in a car accident when I was very little and I hardly knew the man. I slung my backpack down on my desk and pulled out the annoyingly thick packet of green paper that was the guidelines for our senior biology project. We were supposed to research a species and compare chromosomal counts on the members of a specific genus and then describe how the different species in the genus are related to each other. I cited a combination of my good grades, a feigned an interest in the local flora, and the option of "and other possibilities" in my persuasion to have the teacher allow me to instead write a rather lengthy paper about the types of trees found in forks and biological reasons why the are found here. It was an easy enough task, all I had to do was spend a little bit of time online and then actually get down to writing.

With this excuse in mind I emptied out my backpack of the textbooks I never read and other various folders and notebooks that instead of being filled with lecture notes were instead a categorical account of my writings by genre and repacked it with the little bit of relevant biology handouts I had, a digital camera, sketchbook and pencils, and then after a brief trip to the kitchen added a few snacks and a water bottle.

In constant Forks fashion, a thick cover of clouds blotched out any hopes of sun. I knew it wasn't supposed to rain but there was always condensation of some sort in the forests around Forks and in a prudent afterthought snagged my raincoat incase something crazy happened.

I made my way in my white Oldsmobile honorably nicknamed the 'White Weasel' out of town to some of the more pristine forests. I generally liked hiking through the woods around Forks. It was a pleasant way to spend some time, a decent workout, and very very relaxing.

The trails I chose for this hike were a set generally unused by the public. The entrance just off the side of the road was overgrown with a mixture of weeds and thorns and after gingerly snaking through the thistles that were the gates to the paradise of the imagination I was free. A sly smile crossed my face as I looked with satisfaction at my hands. I had successfully kept my face clear of the sharp spikes and made it through with only a few red beaded lines on the back of my hands, a general success.

It was late spring signaling to myself that despite it being already four o'clock I still had a good three hours of daylight before the sun started setting and at the very least I had another hour after that before I officially had to turn back or fear being lost in the woods overnight. It was not something I generally feared; I could take care of myself with little difficulty but since it was a Wednesday and I had school the next day as well as a parent who would start to worry if I was not back by dark I would have to save the survival escapades for another time.

I hiked for an hour into the depths of the woods. Once I broke through the barrier of weeds on the side of the road and was able to see the moss covered trunks of trees I was no longer able to see the sky. Dark green canopies of beech and maple with the occasional birch scattered in the fray darkened the sky making the atmosphere around me into a perpetual twilight consistently on the verge of dusk no matter what time the clock displayed.

Once I felt I was deep enough into the old growth I set up camp. Because of the bit of research I did before trying to persuade the teacher as to my version of the assignment I knew a bit of what to look for right off the bat. I made detailed notes as to the moisture content, the color, and other factors regarding the soil making sure to take many pictures. Once I finished analyzing the soil I turned my attention to the types of trees. I could easily pinpoint a maple tree, mostly because I knew what the Canadian flag looked like, and generally left these alone. It was the presumably beech trees that I was interest in. I assumed they were beech after stumbling on the term "beech-maple forests" in my research. So I took many pictures of the trees from all different angles, collected samples from the lowest level of the trees I could reach before climbing up as far as I could to pluck a few leaves from upper layer of the trees.

It was collecting leaves from the upper layer of a particularly wet and slippery tree that I finally realized that I was particularly high in the air. After collecting my bounty I slowly and carefully made my way down from upper limbs. As I neared the bottom of the tree I started to get careless, slipping a little bit on the thick wet branches. When I was only a mere ten feet from the ground I became just plain stupid, allowing my wannabe acrobatic self show off. I slid from one branch and reached out to grab another before landing gracefully on me feet. Unfortunately I didn't get that far. The branch I tried to grab on to was thicker than I expected and my hands did not fully encompass the limb. I tried to compensate by flailing my body to slow myself down but that turned out to be another mistake. Instead of slowing myself down my momentum shifted to my feet and I swung faster and out of control.

I was parallel with the ground ten feet below me when I felt my hands slip off the wet beech branch. I freefell all the way to the ground and landed with a dull thud on the moist earth below me. I hardly felt the throbbing pain that radiated from the back to the front of my body, instead trying to still the canopy that was spinning around me. I could feel my eyelids start to slide down my eyes as everything overcame my senses and I fell unconscious.

The sky was pitch black when I woke up. I checked my cell phone to see what time it was before I even got up. My mom had called me at the 9:30 mark and I knew she would call again before 10 rolled around. Without even getting up I gave my mom a quick call and told her that I had fallen asleep in the woods and just woke up; technically I wasn't lying and it was something that would not necessarily be foreign to me. My mom was worried but I told her that I was fine and on my way back.

I hung up the phone and sat up, instantly regretting my snap decision. The world began to spin and swirl before me. After waiting for the world to hold still I was able to rise to my feet. There was just enough light in the woods to allow me to navigate between the trees. I had a general feeling as to which direction I needed to head, knowing that if I was wrong I would run into the Snikkasee River if I walked too far to the north or east and highway 110 if I went too far south. So instead I went east.

An hour slipped by before I realized that I went in the wrong direction. The Snikkasee River was illuminated by silver moonlight shining through a gap in the clouds. The scene was beautiful. Ghastly white rays shimmered off of the gentle waves. The sight was really special, both because the clouds hardly ever let up over the Olympic peninsula and also because I was never out when it was this dark, especially while standing on the banks of a river surrounded by nothing but wilderness for miles.

But as beautiful as things were I had to get back to civilization. I took a quick peek at the position of the moon and related it to the river. I had walked east and now had to slog two hours in the opposite direction all while entertaining a fairly massive headache. My mom was going to be pissed at me but it would blow over. She was never really one to hold a firm stance; she was too caring and loving for any sort of sustained hostilities. I was more upset that my absence was worrying her when I was perfectly fine.

Or so I thought.

I had successfully completed a mere quarter of the doubled distance I had to trek. My knees and ankles had joined my head in a protest for an immediate halt in all conscious activities making me view the hour and a half I still had left to walk in the near total darkness an undesirable necessity. But how else was I supposed to get back?

I was debating which mythical means of transportation I would most want at the moment to get me home safely and opted to bypass the obvious choice of teleportation for Jean Gray's mutant power of telepathy; that way I could not only levitate myself home but I could also finally make the clock move just a little bit faster. I was so engrossed with these thoughts that I didn't hear curiously quickly approaching disaster.

It wasn't until it was practically next to me that I finally understood what the growling really was real and not a figment of my imagination. Some unknown mass collided with me sending me soaring into the massive trunk of a majestically large red maple tree. I don't mean soaring as in just skidding a few short feet into the tree, I mean I was knocked into the air high enough for me to clear the dead log that was to my right and into a tree some fifteen feet away.

I was instantly aware of a trio of rasping growls resonating from three different sources; one quickly moving from way off in the distance, a wolf-like half growl half howl from further back in the woods near the river, and finally the one that was most threatening. Pinning me to the trunk of a tree was a man whose features I could hardly distinguish in the darkness. I could make out two things from this man. The first was that he was beautiful and the second was that his face was mere inches away form mine, snarling and growling and frankly poised and ready to kill.

I had just enough time to register the fact that he was for all intents and purposes ready to tear me to shreds when a blur followed by a stream of growls came in and collided with the form pinning me to the tree, taking out a few young trees several feet away from me; disappearing from sight but keeping up a constant shouting match done completely in growls and snarls.

I took in all of the events with relative ease. I knew this was real because I could feel the intense pain of large cut on the back of my head that allowed a small trickle of blood to drip down my neck and back. This sticky viscous liquid was a reminder to me that no, everything I was seeing was real and that I had just stumbled upon something pretty spectacular.

This last resounding thought was highlighted to the extreme by the appearance of a massive form with shaggy fur. If my judgment was even in the right cardinal direction then this form resembled that of a wolf, albeit what had to be the size of the common horse.

"Seth! Go human and get her out of here. Jasper can't hold back!"

To me this seemed like a very foreign thing. I continued my policy of intake-first-think-later and watched as the massive wolf started to shake violently before transforming into the shape of a man. He gingerly picked me up in his arms making sure to be extra careful, or so it thought. I felt two things as this man scooped me up into his arms: he was very strong and very hot. I could not tell if the latter was a physical attraction but his skin felt like he was having a fever.

Then I felt the wind on my face. We were moving faster than I had before this very strange night ever imagined possible. He had me clutched close to his bare chest bridal style, backpack and all, and quickly darting between the trees. The massive form continued running without making a sound. Since my eyes saw nothing but black and gray due to the landscape around me being draped in night I decided to close them, feeling relieved when the pain in my head ebbed considerably. My ears were soon filled with complete silence broken only by my ragged breathing and my ride's steady almost relaxed breaths. I tried to match the pace of my lungs to his but soon found myself slipping onto the realm of dreams.

a/n: West Michigan isn't all like that; it's really a good place to live. I just wanted to throw that in because there are a few people like that. And yes, I do live in West Michigan.