Lunacy

Chapter One

First Sight

I'll be the first to admit that school is normally a terrible, boring thing, but my first day in the Forks high school was downright strange. I kind of lived under a rock back in phoenix (or, more accurately on TV Tropes) but I was pretty sure that the massive amount of attention I was getting was odd. Sure, it was a smaller town but the reaction still seemed disproportionate. Mike was helpful, and Tyler was actually pretty funny. Jessica seemed nice, but part of the popular crowd, not something I was used to being a part of. At my old school I was pretty much a chunk of tofu, making small talk with whoever I came in contact with and being generally agreeable.

The fact that most of my friends were books didn't bother me. Anyway, I digress. I was talking about Jess (as she prefers to be called). Jess is popular and nice, but a bit… well, not ditzy. I think oblivious might be a better fit. Not that I'm one to talk. I'm pretty much late to every bandwagon there is. Angela seemed to be more of the type of person I could hang out with. She was quiet, but nice and pretty motivated. Lauren, another blonde who joined us for lunch, seemed a little catty but it didn't really bother me. If she stayed out of my hair, I'd stay out of hers.

"Oh my god here he comes," Jess gasped dreamily.

I looked up and spotted Mike walking coolly across the floor toward our table. I snorted inelegantly and tried not to laugh. This earned me a glare from Jess.

"What's so funny, Bella?"

"I just had an imagination spot of Mike making a duck face while he walked in slow motion with an inexplicable wind blowing through his hair – like… have you even seen Mean Girls?"

Angela, who had been squinting at Mike as I talked gave a deep throated laugh I wouldn't have expected of her. "Oh god, I can totally see that."

Apparently Jess got the picture in her head as well. By the time Mike sat down we were lost in helpless giggles. It wasn't even that funny – the laughter just kept feeding on itself. It was as I was about to make a (probably inappropriate) comment about zombies (don't ask) that I spotted a group of people better suited for a clothing catalogue than a high school. They didn't even look to be quite the right age to be attending.

After staring at them for several curious minutes, the smallest boy at the table suddenly turned as if his name had been called, and met my gaze. His eyes were very black, and his hair was a rather messy copper color – not quite dark enough to be red.

Gingers have no souls. I snorted again and tried to keep from laughing at the boy (man? he's rather too old to be a boy seeing as he's a junior but not old enough to be a man… food for thought)and slowly drifted off to look elsewhere in the cafeteria as I pondered where the gingers joke came from. My own hair was a weird reddish brown so I really didn't have the right to make ginger jokes.

I groaned along with Mike when the bell rang, signifying the start end of lunch. I didn't want to go to biology. My best classes were more slanted for English. Science was boring, I'd never need to use it, and, on top of that, I hated it. I entered the classroom last (somehow or another I'd read the map wrong and ended up in the wrong building – thank god for Mike) and drifted over to the only available seat – which so happened to be next to the boy from the cafeteria.

He flinched violently before I could sit down, eyes going huge before narrowing in utter hatred. I stopped dead in the middle of sitting down, legs cramping with strain (note to self: ask Charlie if he still has the exerbike). The redhead finally broke eye contact and sat as far away from me as possible. I took this as a signal to sit, and did so just as the teacher entered the class.

Note taking.

Call me lax, but I never took notes. Instead I stared out the window at the endless green, doing my best to ignore the tense shape of the boy next to me and wondering if I could get away with reading Rose Madder while the teacher directed the class. I eventually came to the conclusion that no, I could not (the book was too hard to disguise inside the text book, and my neck already hurt from hiding it under the desk in my previous class).

Time passed, I day dreamed, and about twenty minutes before the end of the class, the teacher had to leave the room to discuss grades with a student. The rest of the class began talking quietly, so I decided to try and pierce the impenetrable force field around my lab partner.

"My name's Bella Swan – of no relation to the pirate king. I don't know your name though."

I waited politely. Kill 'em with kindness, as my mother always said. I was pissed at my partner or anything – merely curious. Although I did have major passive aggressive tendencies for when I was angry.

"Edward Cullen," he breathed, as if trying to avoid taking in any air.

"Huh. Can't say I've met anyone named Edward before. Not common now a days, though it seems common with comic book characters. Done any ritual sacrifice lately?"

I laughed nervously. "Whoops. Word vomit. I need to learn to have a filter."

Edward only stared at me with a neutral expression, though his eyes still seemed oddly… bestial? I wasn't sure what, but the way he was looking at me was doing very inappropriate things.

I blame the internet for my feelings.

Anyway, the teacher came back in and dismissed us soon after. Edward was out of the room faster than a speeding bullet but I was happy to get the hell out of school.

"What, did you stab Cullen with a pencil or something?"

I frowned and pondered this. "Huh. Did seem like he was in pain…. Oh! I didn't actually, but that might've been funny."

"Sadist, are we?"

"Well, maybe a little. But have you ever seen AMV? Everyone's a little bit sadist."

Mike nodded. "You have a point."

"And you have several," I replied, meaning his hair.

I talked with mike about the school – thanked him for his help and climbed into the monstrous old Truck Charlie had given me as a present. I made it home without incident and dashed inside through a sudden cloud burst. Charlie still wasn't home (he probably had a ton of paper work to file seeing as he'd taken my day of arrival off to catch up) so I pulled some fish from the freezer and some potatoes from the cupboard along with all the little trimmings and fixings and got started on making my own rendition of fish and chips. I'd been craving it for a while, and we had a lot of fish to go through.

It's a good thing I like (and even prefer) fish.

"Hello darkness my dear friend~ something something here agaaain. Lalala something some some thiiiing," I sang (terribly) as a worked, hoping to get rid of my earworm without seeking out the song itself.

Unfortunately the song was enough of a distraction that I managed to slice open my finger while trying to peel a potato.

"Motherf- ACK! "

Something hit me hard. I landed on the linoleum floor, felt a hand roughly grip my hair – the lights winked out. A hard, heavy body dropped onto of me, and stabbed up at it with the knife I still held, only for it to bounce off something rock hard with a grating metallic sound – I ended up cutting myself again.

Flailing, I opened my mouth to scream bloody murder only to have something – cloth – shoved between my teeth. All I could do was make muffled shrieks as I felt the icy weight on top of me press closer – someone inhaled deeply and there was a swift, burning streak of pain in my neck. I gagged on the cloth in my throat and cried for my dad to rescue me as my hands were pinned and the pain started to grow – creeping through me even as my body became unresponsive and light.

I felt dizzy. Bursts of color went off in front of my eyes as I felt something pull

And then there was a crash and my attacker was no longer on top of me.

"No!"

Voices. Arguing. A name.

Pain.

Authors Note

I blame the 'If I wrote Twilight' meme on dA for this. If you folks like this, I'll probably continue. Forgive inconsistencies with character description – its been a while since I read the books. This is a twilight written if Bella had a personality. She does, and I'm going for cloudcuckoolander – that's a trope. Anyway, when/if we get there you can vote on the pairing. Please review.