Bella

Nothing knew how to soothe my soul quite like Thom Yorke. There was something in his music, in the way the melancholy notes and his lazy falsetto combined, that exuded a wave of calm tinged by a pang that I could feel in my stomach. Every so often there would be a particularly mournful note, and the pang would travel on pins and needles up my spine, to rest at the back of my neck. It was the kind of music that I wished I had the ability to write – unfortunately, I had trouble expressing myself in any way but through listening to other people explain it to me through the chords that had come out of their own minds.

When the chorus hit, my eyes closed and my head titled forward and to the left. I leaned with it, then back to the right, swaying not with the beat but with the music. A girl spoke up out of the silence of the car I was in.

"Do you mind if we sit here? There isn't enough room to sit us all together anywhere else."

Of course I nodded and slid over to give them room to sit. There were three of them, and one of the boys sat next to me while the other boy and the girl sat across from us. When she laid herself down on the seat with her head in his lap, I decided that they were a couple.

The boy had situated himself so that he was awkwardly close to me – or maybe he hadn't had enough room. Either way, I moved closer to the window and began typing at my laptop again. It was an e-mail to my mother, that she had requested in order to assure her that I hadn't died on the way there, but I couldn't send it yet due to the lack of internet connection. I saved the document, and moved to shut my laptop, but I didn't. I felt the sudden urge to just write things down, things about what I was thinking and what I was feeling and what I was doing, but that was a diary and I knew diaries were pointless. I decided that I was going to do it anyways, but in such a way that even if the boy next to me could see my laptop screen, he wouldn't know what I was doing, and to save myself the shame of knowing that it was, in fact, still a diary entry, I turned my music up louder.

My eyes closed, and my brain struggled to organize my thoughts, not in such a way as to think of what to say, but in such a way as to get rid of as many of them as I could, so that what I wrote would be real and raw. Three songs later, I remembered what I had been preparing to do and set about it with the hopes of busying myself for the rest of the train ride.

Edward

She wasn't pretty, the girl I was sitting next to. The front of her face was nice enough, but in profile, it was really flat. She was wearing what appeared to be a short dress with a pair of jeans, which was odd, and her hair was in a ponytail, but it was so short that only the back half could reach the band holding it up. The rest was held up with what appeared to be ten thousand pins. If I had to choose a word to describe her, I didn't know what I would pick. Odd had too much of a negative connotation, and spunky implied a certain zest that she didn't seem to have.

She seemed nice enough, though, because she didn't even hesitate in allowing us entry and moving over to give me room to sit. And now, Alice was giving me long, meaningful glances that I had no clue how to decipher. I shrugged at her, and she glared at me, and I felt the girl move over even more so that our thighs were no longer touching, even though I hadn't even noticed that I'd sat much too close. I smiled apologetically in her direction, but she was typing away and didn't notice.

Alice sighed happily as Jasper ran a hand through her hair in such a way as to not disturb the way it was lying or make it fall onto her face. He asked me a couple of questions, like 'do you have the passports and shit' and 'how long will it be until we switch trains, so that I can set my watch a little bit early in case we doze off,' and random stuff like that. It occurred to me that Jasper would be a good father someday, and I secretly hoped that it would be with Alice, because we had become as close as two siblings over the past couple of years, and if they broke it off it would be too awkward to talk to her, and I'd miss that.

The three of us had fallen into an animated conversation about hotel rooms and whether or not they were allowed to have sex in the hotel rooms at strange hours of the morning (because there might be two beds but I was only going to be sleeping like five feet away, and I did not want to wake up to that shit). We must have been talking too loudly, because the girl had stopped typing and was halfway through closing her laptop before she changed her mind and pushed it back open. Alice whined about being tired and Jasper told her to just go to sleep, because we had time and it wasn't like she needed to be awake for a train ride. A few moments later, I could very faintly hear a high melody, and it occurred to me that the girl had turned up the volume to tune us out. I felt a little guilty.

Something about the tune she was listening to, though, was familiar. Soon I figured it out – the song was by a band that I loved. It was only a bit disappointing that the song had made its way to the radio stations some time after I'd started enjoying it, which meant that I couldn't decide if I had one-sidedly bonded with her until I could recognize something else, either from my own music library or the radio.

But Jasper had started humming a different tune to Alice, as she was nearly asleep already. She sighed and snuggled closer to him, but opened her bleary eyes at me to give me one more of her incomprehensible looks before allowing herself to drift off. Jasper gave me a lazy smile, and rested his own head on the window, and closed his eyes with his hand resting on Alice's cheek.

I registered that I was jealous of Jasper, not of having Alice, but for having someone to be his Alice when I didn't have one for myself. Instead of watching them, I looked out the window.

The landscape slid by, but it felt strange to watch it, so instead I focused on the girl I was seated next to. She had completely zoned out of the room, and was typing as if she was trying to poke holes in her computer. She typed only with the first three fingers of her left hand and the first two of her right, using her left thumb to work the space bar. It was odd and spunky in the same way as her physical appearance, and it brought an amused smile to my face. I could hear the music playing on her iPod now almost as clear as day. It was some sort of an instrumental piece, but definitely not a classical one, and as I tried to decipher its melody from such a distance, I realized that she was moving with the beat, her hands typing and pausing at intervals that, from what I could hear, matched up with the speed of the music.

Her hand moved back to push her hair away from her face, only there was no hair there to push. She must have chopped her hair of recently, or surely the habit would have been broken before now. When her hand fell short, she started, and looked up. My instinct was to look away from her before she saw me, but I knew that I had been caught.

Her song changed to a haunting melody that I knew well. Once she had started attacking her keyboard again, I chanced another look at her. This time, she was biting her lip, probably from embarrassment as her cheeks were stained red. It was cute, and I decided that she might well be pretty after all.

I continued to sneak glances at her until she closed her computer and put it away.

"I'm sorry," she said, "But I feel like you're reading over my shoulder."

"What, are you Canadian?" I asked as a joke, but she just stared blankly at me, and I felt awkward as hell. "I mean, I'm the one who should be sorry. I wasn't reading whatever it was you were doing, though."

She nodded, but it was more like ducking her head than a real nod of agreement. I noticed that all of her movements were quick, angular and awkward. It was very endearing. She blinked a lot, too, if I tried to look her in the eye, or broke eye contact quickly. I tried to make conversation that she would reciprocate.

"What are you listening to?"

"Oh," she said with a blush, and looked down towards her iPod. "Um, it's Radiohead. I know it's weird, but-"

"It's not," I reassured her. "Radiohead is great."

She nodded, but didn't try to continue the conversation. I felt like screaming in frustration. I wanted to know this girl, the girl who listened to good music and was awkward but still had spunk, and her evasion of any sort of conversation whatsoever was only making it worse.

She was starting to look uncomfortable, though, so I told her I was going to go get a drink, and left the compartment to wander around the train for a few minutes. I ended up deciding to go get a drink after all, and once I made it through the surprisingly long line to buy an astonishingly expensive drink, I made my way back to my car, to find the girl gone.

Alice was sitting up, her hand on Jasper's leg. He was still sound asleep. Her lips were pursed, and she looked disappointed in me. As though I wasn't a thousand times more disappointed, of my own accord.

"You scared her off," she accused me. I would have told her that what she said was a lie, except I was beginning to believe that I had done just that.

"It's a shame," she continued, "Because she was really attracted to you. You weren't looking, but her eyes lingered on you forever when we came in here."

"What?" I asked.

She looked ten times as disappointed as she had when I walked in. "You mean you didn't even get the message? I was sending off telepathic messages like you would not believe, because I know that you never notice these things. You idiot."

"I can't read minds, Alice," I said.

"I know," she said. "It's just, she's exactly your type. I could tell. I only put us in this car because I could hear her singing from three cars back – it was that stupid Killers song you like so much, the piano one that you play at Jasper's all the time."

"Enterlude." It seemed appropriate, for a girl that I'd barely spoken to, that I hadn't known existed more than an hour before.

"Anyways, there's something there. Well, it's a note, but I didn't read it. I figured it was for you anyways."

I picked up the sheet of paper. On it was written only two words.

Sorry.

Bella

It was concise and precise, two attributes that I decided matched the girl and her dress and the way she moved her elbows perfectly. But there was no way to contact her – no phone number, no address, not even a last name that I could use to find her on Facebook.

Still, I smiled. I would remember this afternoon for as long as I lived, and if I ever saw the girl Bella again, I would know that it was fate. If I ever saw the girl Bella again, I wouldn't rest until I had persuaded her to be mine.

I handed the slip of paper to Alice, and she frowned at me.

"Is this good?"

I shook my head. "No," I said, "It's perfect."