Prologue
"Hello?"
Alice raises her eyebrow at the way that Bella immediately picks up her phone from where it was cradled in her hands. She's been doing that a lot lately, and Alice has taken to start counting up to how many times a day she did that. Five tonight. Each time, there was no answer, followed by a hang-up.
"Hello?" Bella tries again. "Hello…" she trails off.
Jasper often tells Alice she shouldn't focus so much on Bella. She supposes she shouldn't, because it was a new development; however, she herself is taken aback on how she can notice such little details, when the music with its heavy beats were making her heart thump along with it, when the air was heavy with cigarette smoke, when she noticed that Jasper was taking his seventh shot… and how cute he looked with a lemon wedge stuck between his lips, salt smudged on his left cheek, his face screwed up like a little pug puppy.
"You've been getting a lot of those lately," Alice chooses to comment, her hand perched on her waist, her eyebrow mirroring the quirk of her hip. Girls are giggling and whooping and gyrating a few centimetres away, and Alice didn't even have the patience to give them a haughty look, or count how many paces away they were from Jasper.
"Yeah," Bella says, smiling sheepishly. Her thin legs were turned towards each other at the knee, which is what she did when she was nervous, and her hands were switching her cell phone one ear to the other, left to right, while the other hand was tucking in her shoulder length brown hair behind her lobe.
"A lot," she repeats, nodding. The line disconnects, and she half-heartedly brings the phone back to her hands.
For the first time since Bella had moved to Forks seven months ago, Bella and Alice both looked at each other's feet, in silence. An incomprehensible silence wedged between them both, and Alice pretended not to notice Bella take a surreptitious glance back up. An awkward, thick, bubble enclosed them together, away from the party, where not even the music could reach them. Alice didn't, couldn't look at Bella, because she knew her eyes would unfairly tell Bella all; everything was fine before you got here.
Her phone rings again, and Alice then does look at Bella, her eyes fired up and furious and scary and Bella gasps, not at her look, but out of surprise. "Hello?!" she asks breathlessly. "Please. Come on. Hello?!"
Bella turns on her heel, and escapes the living room of the party, darting up the staircase where the banister was taped over with newspaper, where assorted couples were making out steps, and plastic cups were balanced precariously. Pretending not to notice Alice yell up the staircase "It's not him, you know!" Bella uses surprising balance and finesse darting through this obstacle course, her heart syncopating with the bass. Darting into a random door of the dimly lit hallway, she flicks on the lights to come into Jessica's light lilac bedroom.
She took a deep breath.
Reigned in courage from Alice's absence.
And then she begin.
"Edward."
Silence. But, the line was still connected.
"Edward, I know it's you."
She thought heard an intake of breath, but she could have just imagined it.
"I would never say this to your face, you know. But I miss you so much."
Bella paused here, to let this sink in. Her hands were shaking. Her throat was catching. The adrenaline was rushing.
"I fucking hate it here. I fucking hate it here so fucking much. And that was even when you weren't here; imagine what it is like now. I drive my car, and all of your CDs are gone. No one here can handle my truck, and now I can't use the indicator while the heater is on. Fucking weird, eh? Either I get a ticket and piss off a hell lot of people by changing lanes and turning randomly, or I'm freezing to death." She is rambling, but there is so much she wants to tell him.
"My locker is empty without you avalanche of shit pouring out of it. I'm passing Biology now, but I don't think it's worth it, and I wish I could go back to failing, and have my Bio binder filled with your notes instead of the notes I actually take. Cause now there's nothing else to do in there. I can't even listen to music anymore. Smashing Pumpkins? The Vaselines? Nirvana? David Bowie? Velvet Underground? Had to delete all of that from my ipod. Even more. All gone. I actually physically cannot take it. I can't. I just start crying. And I can't cry, because everyone knows why, and you know what I can't stand even more than you not being here?"
She pauses to switch her phone to the other ear,
"Fucking pity. I cannot stand the fucking pity."
"But you know who I pity? You. I lo-" Stop, Bella. "I could have loved you. I could have loved you so much. But you know what? I'm moving on. You could have told me you weren't graduating, that you and Carlisle fought, that you didn't want me to hang out with Jake anymore, that you were drunk that horrible night, and that you didn't mean to do what you did; what you said. But you didn't. You didn't do any of that. You know I finished a painting? For the first time ever, I finished a whole painting. I could be going to RISD in the fall. I have a future. I could go to university. I could get a job. I could get out of fucking Forks, the biggest shit hole I have ever lived in, made even shittier by the boy who I lo-loved and who I thought loved me back."
There was a beep on her phone, and Bella glanced at the screen, to see Alice, on call waiting.
"I have to go. So. Goodbye. I know that sounds like a really stupid word right now, but you know, it really is Goodbye."
And Bella hung up first this time.
Somewhere in New York, Edward Cullen took the pay phone away from his ear, and pressed it into his heart, eyes closed.