The Genealogy projects we were doing in AP American History had to be one of the most boring projects in the history of the world.
May, senior year at another high school. The humans were off the wall with excitement at the coming summer. According to the gossip dripping from everyone's mind, only "total losers" would be staying in town this summer. A large clique of preppy girls were planning a trip to Cancun. The star quarterback of the school was spending the summer in Italy - he had been the butt of many jokes among Jasper and Emmett, all of which involved a tragic and unexplained disappearance while touring the city of Volterra.
The town was not quite as ideal as Forks had been - Wilsonville, Oregon had a population of 13,000 and the sunny days came much closer together than they had in Forks, but there were only so many towns where overcast days were the norm.
That atmosphere in AP AH was slightly more serious than the other students, but mostly they were at least as rowdy as everyone else, if not more so. The majority of the class were seniors counting the days until they were free from school forever, or at least until college started in the fall.
And according to them, the only thing standing between them and a glorious summer was this final project.
The genealogy unit in the class was huge - spanning from April to the end of the school - the idea was that our ancestors had created the history that we were studying, and by delving into our pasts we would uncover a greater understanding and reverence for the history that had shaped our very lives. Or at least, that was what the teacher had sworn in the mind-numbingly dull class period where he explained the unit.
The end of the year project, which would count for thirty percent of our second semester grade and would take the place of a final, was to construct a family tree spanning back at least a hundred and fifty years. If we were unable to go back that far, there were alternate assignments available, but to keep lazy students from simply choosing not to do the project, they were long and dull and tedious. Consequently, most of the students just chose to make things up. Teenagers were getting worse, I could swear it.
Bella and I both had American History for fifth period; everyone else had been a year ahead of us and graduated last year. Emmett and Rosalie had both taken the class last year - Emmett had had great fun making up two hundred years of his history, earning a hundred and twenty percent and an Absolutely fantastic! from the teacher. In its final draft, his ancestors had been poor sheep farmers in Iceland, until his great-however-many grandfather was a major leader in one of Iceland's attempts to gain independence from Denmark. His family immigrated to the US in the late 1920s, just in time for the stock market to crash. In despair, his great-grandmother had fallen to prostitution, giving birth to his grandfather. It was an overdramatic, ridiculous story, but the teacher had eaten it up. Emmett gloated and gloated and had gone on about how there was no way either Bella or I could possibly beat him.
Which of course meant we both had to try.
It was a little bit suspicious, that four adopted kids could trace their history back that far. Although all six of ours had been supposed open adoptions, it was still suspicious. Rosalie had volunteered to be unable to find anything on her birth family, and she had done the alternate assignments. I monitored the teacher's mind for any signs of suspicion this year, but there weren't any.
Bella actually had a fairly good chance of beating Emmett, I thought - the young male teacher was just out of school - this was his first year teaching - and had been in love with her from the beginning of the year, and his obsession wasn't hampered by her perfect grades or soft-spoken politeness. He tolerated me, but he was as jealous as any of the boys in Forks, so I was nearly positive I wouldn't be getting any hundred and twenties, even if I traced my roots back to George Washington or William Shakespeare.
***
The last two weeks of class were dedicated to presentations - the most insufferably boring two weeks of a class I could think of. Bella and I childishly passed notes to each other the majority of the time - sweet, disgustingly romantic notes that would probably make Emmett gag if he didn't write the same kind to Rosalie when he was bored.
So far, we'd averaged only three kids' presentations a day, and, of the fifteen kids that had gone so far, only two had actually done all the work. It was amusing, really. One girl had "found" that she'd been related to Marilyn Monroe, and another claimed his great-times-six grandfather had been Benedict Arnold. The teacher seemed completely unaware that most of them had spent an hour one night on and called it good.
It was Monday. Half the humans in the class looked half-asleep; I expected drool to slip out of their mouths any minute.
"Bella, you're up," the teacher intoned, nearly as bored as everyone else in the class.
Bella gave him a nervous smile and squeezed my hand under the table before letting it go.
She picked up the large posterboard sitting beside her and taped it to the whiteboard.
"My history," she began.
She had debated whether or not to actually find her history, but decided not to after realizing that, on the off chance the teacher decided to check her work, the dates would be about seven years off but the names would be right, and she would be left with a lot of explaining to do and a failing grade. If he simply checked and found all the wrong names and all the wrong dates, she could simply confess she had made it all up.
I didn't listen to her report. It wasn't nearly as elaborate as Emmett's had been, as she was going for the points in simplicity, hoping to impress the teacher with her honesty than elaborate lies, even if he believed them.
Her family had been one of the first to come from England, on a ship just after the Mayflower. From there, they just existed, passing down the family name Smith until it was lost because of no male heir in the 1860s, staying out of trouble during all the wars.
The teacher nearly fell asleep, but he gave her a 'Very good, Bella' and flashed her an infatuated smile when she was finished. At least a hundred percent, he was thinking. She traced her roots back almost four hundred years! That's more than twice the requirement…but two hundred percent would seem a bit excessive…but then again, she's so meek and pretty, no one would blame me…
Bella slipped back into her seat, grabbed my hand under the table again, smiled at me, and, the moment the teacher called another name, picked up her pencil and wrote So? Is Emmett going down?
Oh yeah, I wrote back. He's thinking about giving you two hundred percent.
She opened her mind to me for just a split second, simultaneously blocking everyone else's thoughts from me so I would be forced to hear nothing but her. Not that I was complaining, not that I didn't love every minute she did that.
She was elated, was what she was showing me. She was exulting in her triumph. It was adorable and hilarious that she, usually so impassive and noncompetitive over everything else, would be this desperate to beat Emmett in a simple high school project.
I almost laughed. I so loved seeing her happy.
"Okay, Marianne - when you're ready," the teacher said, and the tall, slim girl at the front of the room began talking.
I hope he believes me, she thought. No one else in the class actually did it, but he believed them. Mine is so boring he might think there's no way it's really true, but it is…
The first few days of class, back in September, I had thought that Marianne was exactly like Angela - though her artfully ripped designer jeans seemed to go against Angela's plain-yet-fashionable clothes, the tenor of their thoughts had seemed to be similar.
That was at the beginning of the year.
Over the course of the year, I had come to realize that she was nothing like Angela; instead, she was a preppy, snotty girl who was so convinced of her own gorgeousness that she went through several boyfriends a month and couldn't believe that there was any boy in the school not infatuated with her.
"My mother was the daughter of Linda and Robert Lour," she began, and I could see the teacher's eyelids begin to droop again. I grabbed the paper from under Bella's hand and wrote, Let's go off-campus for lunch today.
Tsk, tsk, she wrote back. You know that's not allowed.
So? It's not like anyone will miss us. It was true. Having none of the rest of the family already graduated was both a curse and a blessing. On the one hand, it was alone time with Bella, though how alone could we be among the seven hundred other students at the school? But on the other, there was strength in numbers - I could feel the glares, more numerous than last year, penetrating into my back during lunch and in class, and the increased snide comments inside people's heads were hard to ignore. Luckily, they were all scared of me, and rarely did they even speak to us, let alone tease, although in December one cocky senior boy had asked Bella to the Christmas dance with me standing right next to her. He was laughing so hard he could barely choke out the words. I had longed to rip his head off right there in the hallway, but Bella's firm hand in mine and the glare she was giving me the entire time was enough to stop me, and all the worm got off with was a very graphic threat.
Okay, fine, Bella wrote. But where will we go?
McDonalds, I wrote decisively. Their blood-flavored shakes are only ninety-nine cents right now.
She bit back a snort, though my joke wasn't very funny.
Marianne looked up and sent an icy glare our way. Bella sobered immediately, giving the girl a calming, apologetic smile.
"Anyway, um, so my great-great grandfather's name was Anthony Masen and he had two brothers, Edward and John," she said. "John lived to become a millionaire and left almost all of his assets to Anthony's family, though Anthony was already dead, when John died of heart problems in 1956. Edward wasn't so lucky. When the Spanish influenza swept through Chicago in 1918, it killed him, his wife, and their teenage son. It's suspected that that was what caused Anthony's suicide, when my great grand-father was just eight.
"My grandfather fought in the Korean War and was severely injured. He came back to his waiting fiancee - my grandmother, Marianne, for who I'm named. They had no son, so the name Masen died out…"
I was completely stunned. Bella nudged me, and I turned to look at her. Her eyes were wide, her lips forming a subtle o.
She grabbed the paper and scribbled a note.
She's your great -grandniece?
I read the paper with shock-filled eyes, and then glanced up again at the soft-spoken girl still talking. It couldn't be…
I guess so, I wrote to Bella. She extended her shield again, blocking everyone else's thoughts, probably thinking I'd like to be alone in my head for a few minutes while I took in this startling news. She was right.
How could this be? And, a better question, why had I never investigated the possibility of living relatives before? Alice had. She had even spoken with her grand-niece, searching for answers to her past.
Rosalie had loved her little brothers, but the thought of being reminded of their humanity in the form of their children would have been too much for her to bear. Emmett had never searched for family, either, though his would probably be the easiest to find, what with his eight brothers and sisters. It was probably because of Rosalie that he had not sought his family out.
And Esme had no family she cared to remember - her mother who had forced her into her horrific marriage, and her father who had refused to accept her dream of moving West.
Jasper…I didn't know Jasper's motives. Maybe, like me, he hadn't given it much thought, or he had just decided to let what would come, come. If he stumbled across his past, so be it, but he wasn't going to go searching them out.
I didn't know what to do with my findings. I didn't know whether I was happy or not. Shock seemed to be the most dominant emotion, but there was a sad, melancholic feeling deep in my stomach.
Should I approach Marianne? What would I say? What could I say?
Luckily, there were only fifteen minutes left of class, and we were free to go to lunch.
We didn't go off-campus, though I hadn't been joking when I suggested to Bella that we leave. Instead, we found an empty table in the farthest corner of the lunchroom. Unfortuantely, the school was overcrowded, so the tables in every direction were full to bursting, their bags and voices spilling over toward us. Of course no one approached us.
"Edward!" Bella said, her eyes bright and her voice low once we were settled. Neither of us had bothered to buy food today.
I waited for more, but there was nothing.
"I just…I just can't believe it," I said shakily. "The odds…the chances…it just seems like it's too good to be true, though I'm not sure good is exactly the right word for it…"
"What is that supposed to mean?" she asked sharply. "What about this isn't good?"
"Well, what am I supposed to do now?" I asked, suddenly frustrated. "Am I supposed to go up to her and say, Marianne, guess what, I'm your great-great-uncle who's the same age as you are!
"But I can't just ignore her…"
Bella's eyes widened. It was evident that she hadn't thought of my predicament in this way before.
"So what do we do?" she whispered.
"I don't…I don't…know," I said finally. "I guess that we should speak to Carlisle before we do anything."
She nodded in agreement - in her young eyes, Carlisle would always know what to do. But truthfully, I did not see how Carlisle would find any answer I had not yet considered. But perhaps he would offer some new insight into an option I had already ruled out.
The rest of the day passed in a haze. The shock of seeing a relative was still so fresh in my mind. I would be writing perfect notes for AP Statistics when I would remember in absolute clarity Marianne when she said, When the Spanish Influenza swept through Chicago in 1918, it killed him, his wife, and their teenage son, and the overwhelming emotions would sweep through me again.
Bella was perfect, as usual. She didn't try and speak to me about it again. Instead, she just put her hand in mind and refused to let it go, even when we were in class and it forced her to write with her left hand. It was the one thing that kept me connected to the earth during the endless, nightmarish afternoon, the firm pressure of her hand in mine.
***
Of course, even when we got home from school, we still had to wait for Carlisle to come home from his work. Bella was all for going to meet him in his office, but I refused. It wasn't something we could talk about in a tiny office with nosy interns and impatient nurses bustling through every few minutes. We needed privacy.
Bella drove home, something that in itself showed how preoccupied I was. I probably would have crashed the car into a telephone pole.
I was strangely reminded of that odd time when Bella had just informed me that she was pregnant, and then asked Carlisle if vampires could go into shock. I felt the same disconnected feeling from my body, the same cloudy haze threatened to take over my vision, and always the scene replaying itself in my mind…their teenage son…my great-great-grandfather's name was Anthony Masen…No, Edward. I'm trying to tell you that my period is five days late…
She stopped the car and got out of it, skidding around the front and helping me out, when it should have been the other way around. We walked through the door of the house, hand in hand. "It's okay, Edward," she murmured to me as she took my arm and pulled me from the seat, "Come on, let's just get to our room."
Nessie and Jacob were off on their honeymoon - though they'd been gone nearly the whole school year, so it didn't really count as their honeymoon, anymore - and Alice and Jasper were off at Columbia University. Only Emmett and Rosalie were here, "attending" the community college.
"Hey, Edward!" Emmett shouted from the living room, the second we walked through the door. "I got the new Wii game! It rocks, but Rose is pretty tired of playing it! Come here so I can kick your butt!"
I didn't answer, of course. Bella stiffened by my side, and I could practically hear her mentally berating herself for not realizing she'd have to cross through the living room to get to the stairs.
She clutched my hand tighter and walked into the doorway.
"Finally!" Emmett said, pausing the game. "Took you long eno-" He broke off, then said in an entirely new voice, "What's wrong? What happened?"
Bella shook her head at him, glaring. Esme appeared in the doorway.
"Edward?"
And Bella…she just ignored them all. She didn't say a word, just led me through to the stairs, up to our room, and sat me on the bed.
She kissed my forehead. "Now. I'm going to go tell them what happened, and then I'll be right back, okay? Or would you rather be alone?"
How could she think I would want to be without her in a time like this. "Come back, please," I whispered.
"Okay," she said cheerily. She kissed my forehead once more, squeezed my hand, and disappeared.
I could hear her quietly explaining to the others what had happened downstairs, but my mind was reeling once again…
My great-great-grandfather was Anthony Masen…my great-great-grandfather was Anthony Masen…killed him, his wife, and their teenage son…
And that was the way I stayed until Carlisle came home.
***
The conversation was very brief.
He agreed with me. I obviously couldn't tell her who I really was, but he said he understood that I couldn't just leave her alone without knowing more.
"Get to know her," he had suggested. "There's just a few weeks more until the end of school. You won't see her again after graduation day. Learn everything you can about her, just become friends. And then we'll leave, content that you've done everything you can to get to know her."
It was all I could do, it wouldn't be easy. She was snobbish, mean, backstabbing, uninterested in anything besides her friends and her clothes…and totally unwilling to make friends with a "loser" like me. It was apparent that, after our first conversation where the vast majority of the time she was thinking, Urgh…why is this loser hitting on me? Doesn't he, like, already have a freaky girlfriend?
It was amusing, how differently we were viewed here than we were at most of the other schools we had been too. Outsiders, yes. Excluded, yes. Thought of as eccentric and odd, yes. But not losers. Any girl at Forks High would have died if I had spoken to them. But here, we were looked down on as losers, geeks, nerds who got straight As. I had yet to decide whether it was the place or the time, and I was praying it was the former. Teenagers surely couldn't degenerate much further.
"Marianne," I had said, sitting down beside her at lunch on Tuesday. "May I sit here?"
"Um…Where's your girlfriend?"
"She's getting lunch."
"Is she going to sit here too?"
"If you're okay with it."
"Um…sure, Edward. Yeah, I guess you can sit here…" What do you want, loser? her mind shouted at me.
"So…your genealogy project yesterday was exceptional," I complimented her. "It's so sad about your great-great-grandfather's brother, though."
She looked at me suspiciously. "How do you remember that?"
"As I said, it was exceptional. And I have a good memory for things like that."
Just at that moment, Bella sat down beside me. "Hi, Edward. Hello, Marianne."
Look at her eyes! Has she never heard of cover-up? Marianne thought bitterly. She looks like a raccoon! Or maybe she's just crap at putting on eyeliner.
My hands clenched underneath the table.
"I was just telling Marianne how I thought the part about her great-great-grandfather Anthony in her genealogy project was especially sad."
"Oh, I know! I was nearly crying."
Even becoming a vampire hadn't improved her acting skills. Marianne thought she was being sarcastic.
"Oh, like yours was so much better," she snapped.
Bella raised her eyebrows languidly. "I wasn't being sarcastic," she said slowly.
"Sure."
Bella rolled her eyes but stayed silent. Her voice suddenly came, unbidden, into my mind. What a brat, she thought.
I glared at her.
"So…do you know the name of their teenage son?" I asked politely.
"Um…yeah, I think it was like Edward or something," she said flippantly. "Hey, wait a second…"
Is that his creepy version of a pickup line? she thought. With his girlfriend sitting right there? Yup, because I'm totally gonna want to go out with my great-great-granduncle, or whatever he's getting at…
It was all about hooking up with her. It was unfathomable that a boy would want to talk with her without some ulterior motive.
"I think that's so sad," Bella said quietly. "He was only seven- a teenager. He had his whole life ahead of him."
"Yes, but what if wherever he went, he's happier? What if he had no chance of being happy in that life because what he was looking for wasn't born yet?" I asked seriously, looking at her.
Bella smiled at me, her eyes melting, locked in mine…I might have given her a chaste peck on the lips, or maybe dragged her some place where it wouldn't have to be quite so chaste, but Marianne interrupted us rudely.
"What is that supposed to mean?" she asked. He is so weird.
And at that moment I realized that whatever else Marianne could or couldn't ell me no longer mattered. My past was history - but my future was right in front of me.
Happy one-year anniversary to me! Please review.