Stephenie Meyer owns it all.
I never gave much thought to how this would all turn out.
She and I became friends the summer after fifth grade when she moved to my neighborhood. She had cute hair, cool clothes, and was an only child just like me. Most importantly, though, we were the same age. I had never had a friend, who was a girl, who was the same age as I.
That summer we were inseparable: the proverbial two peas in a pod, spending every hot, hazy waking minute together. We rode our Huffys, hers pink, mine blue, the whole hilly mile to the public pool. We sat on the swings at the park on the corner of my street after dinner until the street lights came on. We had PG movie night sleepovers and ate microwave popcorn with Skittles mixed into the bag so they got soft and melted rainbow sticky sweetness all over the white popped kernels. We giggled for hours on those long humid nights, long after her mom switched off her ballet slippers lamp, about cute lifeguards, and what middle school would be like. We'd be the prettiest, most popular girls and have eighth grade boyfriends. Our distant futures played bright and bold on the screens of our innocent minds; high school sweet hearts, frilly prom dresses, attending the same college, marrying men who were also best friends, and living in houses next door to each other.
I never gave much thought to Edward Cullen either. His family had always lived across the street. My dad was friends with his parents. He was Rose's little brother, (which actually made he and I the same age). He was part of the neighborhood crew of boys. When we were seven, he caught a frog and dared me to kiss it. I did.
It took them three years, a month before we started our freshman year, to get together. She was busy being popular and pretty, with her yellow polo shirts and flare jeans and her Sun-in highlighted Jennifer Aniston shag. I honestly don't even think she knew who he was until she saw him on stage, the quintessential punk band bassist, in all his pouty lipped, brooding anarchy, sweaty Sid Vicious glory.
That may have been it. The exact minute she laid eyes on him and, in her words, fell "in instant, and irrevocablelove" that put in motion the events that would play out over the next few years and utterly, fundamentally alter our lives.
It may have been what happened next, or what happened after that.
There is the highly likely possibility, in that existential scheme of life sort of way, that most of it was never really that serious. I've had reason enough to think about it all in the last few months, and maybe it's more like all those clichés about being young and life feeling so intense or not seeming to have consequences but at the same time feeling so final and concrete; some "hindsight is…" nonsense like that.
Back then, no one was worried about the two, twelve, or twenty years-from-now tomorrow and how any of us would eventually end up. Our world was fast and hard and deep and dark and loud and thick and bright nonstop never ending more MORE MORE!
Maybe that was the real problem. The true culminating catalyst.
Maybe I should have paid a little more attention to the red and white box in the corner marked "break glass, pull handle". Or someone should have. As it was, there were only three things that absolutely, positively mattered to most anyone who was anyone in our little too cool to care teenage, trend squad . There was Alice or there was Edward. There was AliceandEdward. And then there was everyone else.