It was there, sitting in the lunchroom, trying to make conversation with seven curious strangers, that I first saw them.
Out of the corner of my eye they looked like any other ordinary group of teenagers. There were five - two boys and three girls. Boys and girls? No, that didn't seem to fit.
Now that I was looking closer, the childlike terms "boy" and "girl" absolutely did not fit the alien beings sitting across the room. One was wide in the shoulders and had hair like an oil slick. His arms stretched the material of his blue tee shirt, and he had one draped across the shoulders of the lanky male beside him. This boy, for lack of a better word, sported glowingly gold hair that touched his shoulders and was much smaller than the one touching him. His hair looked dry and crisp, like straw.
The women... now, that really did seem to fit. Of the three of them, none looked alike. The most beautiful of all of them looked like a volleyball player - long in the leg, with wavy gold hair almost identical to the lanky boy's. It too, while gorgeously colored, looked like it might break if touched.
While I stared, the golden girl draped one long, shapely leg over the lap of the tiny girl beside her in a motion that jerked more than flowed. This one looked like a ballerina - small-featured, delicate, almost impish. She smiled broadly at the leg in her lap, then began stroking it with one hand. She reached up with the other to carefully pat her black, spiky pixie-cut.
The last woman had her back to me. Brassy, wild curls flowed down her back to nearly touch the seat she was sitting on, and I could see that she was picking apart a sandwich with spidery, glass-like fingers. Her waist was hidden by her hair, but her hips swelled out into a pear shape. Her legs were neatly crossed at the ankles and tucked beneath her chair, and as I gaped at her she snapped her head, too quickly, to the side. More hair swung over her shoulder onto her back, and in that moment I caught a glimpse of a round, freckled cheek.
But their too-perfect features, their alien, jerking movements, weren't why I couldn't look away. They all looked how I felt on the inside - tired, grey, too pale, and starving. Absolutely starving.
Their eyes were like bruises in their faces, black and grey as if they each had been socked in the nose. Their skin clung to their muscles and bones like paper-mâché, like all the moisture had been sucked from their bodies. Cavities and lines seemed exaggerated on their faces, their necks, even on the bulky one. Their sunken cheeks and prominent collar bones reminded me of National Geographic depictions of Ethiopian children, not Sports Illustrated models. I felt an inexplicable urge to take each of them home and make them lasagna, if I hadn't been so afraid - afraid? why would I be afraid? - of them turning out to be sharks in meat suits.
"Who are they?" I asked the girl from my Spanish class, whose name I'd forgotten.
As she looked up to see who I meant, the brassy-haired one, the shapely one, snapped her head over her shoulder to look at us. She looked disinterestedly at my table-mate for a fraction of a second, then flicked her black eyes to meet my brown ones.
She looked away quickly, more quickly than I could, though in a flush of embarrassment I dropped my eyes at once. In that brief flash of a glance, her face held nothing of interest - it was as if my table-mate had called her name and she'd looked up in involuntary response, already having decided not to answer.
My neighbor giggled in embarrassment, looking at the table like I did.
"That's Edythe and Emmett Cullen, and Rosalie and Jasper Hale. The tiny one is Alice Cullen; they all live together with Dr. Cullen and her wife." She said all this under her breath.
I glanced sideways at the beautiful girl, who'd turned her back on us again. Her fingers picked at her food with nervous tension - too quickly, too precisely. The others had turned towards her, appearing to be listening. A pit dropped in my stomach.
Strange, unpopular names, I thought. The kinds of names grandparents had. But maybe that was in vogue here - small town names? I finally remembered that my neighbor was called Jessica, a perfectly common name. There were two girls named Jessica in my History class back home.
"They are... very nice looking?" I struggled with the statement, trying not to be rude.
"I mean, maybe," Jessica said, glancing over with an appraising eye and a conceding nod. "They're all together though - Jasper and Emmett, Alice and Rosalie, I mean. You know, in a gay way. Plus they live together."
I raised my eyebrows at the statement, as well as the judgement in her voice. I had to admit, though, even in Phoenix such an arrangement would cause gossip. "Which ones are the Cullens? They don't look related..."
Jessica gasped, then giggled again. "Oh! Oh no, they're not. Dr. Cullen is really young, in her twenties or early thirties. They're all adopted. The Hales are brother and sister though, twins - the blondes - and they're foster children."
"They look a little old for foster children."
"They are now; Jasper and Rosalie are both eighteen, but they've been with Mrs. Cullen since they were eight. She's their aunt or something like that."
"That's really kind of nice - for them to take care of all those kids like that, when they're so young and everything."
"I guess so," Jessica admitted reluctantly, and I got the impression that she didn't like the doctor and her wife for some reason. Probably just small town homophobia.
As I pondered, Jessica nonchalantly took a bite of her pizza. "I think they just did it to have kids of their own. You know, them being lesbians and everything."
Whomp. There it was.
I frowned at her, but she didn't notice - she was cramming fries into a paper cup of ketchup. I considered turning to talk to the boy on my other side - Nick, was it? No, Mike - but thought better of it. Jessica seemed a better source of information. Plus, I wasn't quite ready to out myself here, and especially not to Jessica, considering her unforgiving assessment of the "Gay Way" Cullen family.
My eyes flickered again towards their table. They held unnaturally still, each couple turning to look towards the other. Their lips moved quickly, as if they were muttering sweet nothings to each other. The redhead continued to pick at her food, her head turned down to the table. Even among her family she looked alone.
I took a shuddering breath. "Have they always lived in Forks?"
"No," she said, in a tone that suggested that the fact should be obvious, even to a newbie like me. "They moved down from Alaska two years ago."
I felt a surge of pity, and relief. Pity because, despite their perfectly symmetrical faces and well-shaped bodies, they were outsiders, obviously not accepted. Their unsettling appearances may contribute to their alienation from the rest of the school... and, I begrudgingly admitted, the fact that they were gay adoptees probably didn't help either. I felt relief that I wasn't the only newcomer here, and that maybe - just maybe - I had more in common with them than met the eye.
As I examined them, the youngest, one of the Cullens, looked over her shoulder to meet my eye again, this time with evident curiosity in her expression. As I looked swiftly away, it seemed to me that her glance held some sort of unmet expectation.
"Which one is the girl with the reddish-brown hair?" I asked. I peeked at her out of the corner of my eye, and she was still staring at me, but not gawking as I did at her family earlier. She had a slightly frustrated expression. I looked down again.
"That's Edythe. She looks interesting, of course, but don't waste your time. She doesn't like to hang out with anyone but her family." She sniffed, a clear case of the sour grapes. I wondered when she'd turned Jessica down for a shopping trip.
I bit my lip to hide my smile, and something skipped in the space between my stomach and lungs. I glanced at her again. Her face was turned away, but her hair was tucked behind her ear and I could spy a lifted, freckled cheek, as if she were smiling too.
After a few more minutes, the five of them left the table together - the thin blond boy with an arm around the burly one's waist, the pixie-like girl almost skipping to keep up with Volleyball Captain's long strides, the lonely redhead taking up the rear with her skirt moving lazily about her legs. They were all jerkily graceful - each foot landing precisely, each knee snapping into place, every glance stopping a few times before meeting its mark - and it was disturbing to watch. As if mannequins had been given life.
The one named Edythe didn't look at me again.