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3rdPersonPOV
Alyssa Hale, Agnes Jane Jones, and Melinda Mabella were all cramped together. It was a sleepover in Melinda's backyard with a blue tarp tent casting dark shadows over their eyes and the glowing of the lamp in the middle light up their chins and tips of their cheeks. Agnes Jane was hunched over her favorite book, glasses pushed up to her eyes, the rims touching her forehead and cheeks as she read. Her face was alit with the flickering candle lamp and awe as her eyes trailed across the pages filled with black and white. She sniffled a little, using her pointer finger to push her falling glasses back up her nose. Her eyes were wide as she reread what she had already memorized.
I saw several things simultaneously. Nothing was moving in slow motion, the way it does in the movies. Instead, the adrenaline rush seemed to make my brain work much faster, and I was able to absorb in clear detail several things at once.
Edward Cullen was standing four cars down from me, staring at me in horror. His face stood out from a sea of faces, all frozen in the same mask of shock. But of more immediate importance was the dark blue van that was skidding, tires locked and squealing against the brakes, spinning wildly across the ice of the parking lot. It was going to hit the back corner of my truck, and I was standing between them. I didn't even have time to close my eyes.
Twilight, the best book in the world in Agnes Jane's opinion, was the book in her lap that she was focusing so intently on. She had lost count of how many times she read it and each time she was amazed and found a little detail that she had missed before. The sea of frozen faces, all in shock? A perfect metaphor. The compliments go on.
While Agnes Jane was reveling in her book, Melinda was flicking the tent side, watching as it rippled and fell back to place, quivering and then pausing. She flicked it again, and the process continued on.
Why did she have a sleepover again? Oh, yes, that's right. She was being punished. Some punishment, right? To Melinda it was, because on this night her mother was hanging out with her friends, who are moms, who brought their daughters over because they thought that the kids would entertain themselves and become best buddies and that is when her own mother suggested that, when the girls were already so great of friends that they should just have a sleepover, shouldn't they? It would be fun! Well, they lied. Melinda knew the girls, and was disgusted by them. Geek Girl and Emo Weirdo were ranked way under a popular like her.
Melinda rolled her eyes and tried to keep her thoughts distracted from the nerd-ness of the girl behind her with her horribly nerdy glasses and tied up hair and the emo weirdo girl with dark hair, and thought about other things. She quizzed herself. Favorite color? Pink, duh. Favorite subject? Recess, if that is a subject. All the others are boring. Very easy to fall asleep in. Favorite animal? Rabbit, preferably pink. Favorite book? Simple: Twilight. Best book ever. She was absolutely obsessed with Twilight, and of course, she had already chosen a team and has seen all the movies more than once. Melinda's thoughts spiraled down into the world of Twilight and vampires and werewolves as she absentmindedly flicked the tarp, no longer bored.
A faint scratching of pencil on paper was in the background along with the tweets of late night birds and crickets chirping beautiful and the rustling of leaves in the summer breeze. The sweet smell of grass flowed through the tent through the bottom edges where the tent wasn't in, and Alyssa took a deep breath through her nose, a small smile on her lips when the familiar scent was identified. The beauty of nature and its surroundings, and Alyssa's smile grew bigger as she ducked down to scribble that in her notepad. The scratching continued and the words piled on each other, running into sentences, running into paragraphs as Alyssa's imagination went wild, not failing for a moment.
The dust swirled around the red cheeks of a pale little girl with a wilting lily calla in her hand and leaves in her hair and dirt on her face. Her vintage pink dress was damaged with twigs and dust spots, and white flurries twinkled past the girl, falling in her hair and outlining the red in her cheeks and tip of her small nose. They fell on the long black eyelashes, and she blinked, her eyelids closing over chocolate brown eyes rapidly and she reached out to her grandmother who was walking down the rickety porch steps to the little girl.
"Grammy Marie, it's almost dead!" She cried, her fingers grabbing onto her grandmother's sleeve.
Her grandma looked over to the fading lily and her eyes softened, the wrinkles forming around her eyes as she smiled genuinely and pried the flower out of her granddaughter's small hands. "We'll save them, Bella, don't worry. Come inside; I don't you to catch a cold." She put her hand on Bella's back and led her inside, and inside they went to the kitchen where Bella scampered over to the cabinet to pull out a cup, which she filled up with cool water. Grammy Marie put the lily calla in the water after trimming the ends.
"What now?" Bella inquired as she watched the flower intently. Her chin just reached the top of the counter on her tip-toes, her hands around her chin as she gripped the smooth counter.
"Let's make a pot for the lily."
And so they did, and for the next few months with flutters of white powder snow and ice cold winter winds and coats and gloves and scarf's, they watched that little lily grow and bloom in the warmth of Grammy Marie's home from the almost dead flower to the bursting lily. Then one day, Bella asked in her sweet voice a question that had Grammy Marie stumped.
"What does a lily calla mean, Grammy Marie?"
Grammy Marie pursed her lips, and answered honestly, "I don't know, Bells. Shall we look it up?"
Bella agreed vigorously, nodding with a large smile on her face as she scampered over to the laptop, booting it up and bouncing in the large seat as her grandmother walked behind the chair, watching, amused. Bella opened up the internet browser and typed as fast as she could into the Google tab: "What do lily calla's mean?" She clicked on a page that popped up and Grammy Marie smiled widely and rubbed her hands together. There was one word under the flower name.
Beauty.
Alyssa stopped writing and examined her writing before smiling happily. She was writing about her favorite characters in an alternate universe, different from the vampire/werewolf world of Forks, Washington that teenage Bella Swan lived in with her father, the good chief of Police Charlie Swan. It was her favorite book, which was weird since Alyssa preferred to write instead of read.
Alyssa was too absorbed in her writing techniques to notice anything else, especially the Twilight book in Agnes Jane's lap and Melinda daydreaming in the corner with her I Heart Edward Cullen tee-shirt on. Then, one exclamation of surprise and awe breaks through the thick ice.
"Edward kisses her!"
The flicking of the tent stops and Melinda looks up in surprise from her concentration of Twilight, her face betraying surprise and wonder. Alyssa stops writing, the flow of the scratching stopping and all is quiet in the forest – the chirping of crickets, the singing of birds, the croaking of frogs for only a beat before starting back up, minus the pencil and paper. Alyssa looked at Agnes Jane.
Agnes Jane's cheeks reddened under the relentless stares and she pushed her glasses up, ducking her head and going back to reading Twilight, faster than she had before in her embarrassment. The words blurred and she couldn't find where the sentence began or stopped. Her cheeks burned and she was chastising herself for speaking out loud. Her inner voice that she had stupidly named Buzzle was shaking his head sadly.
A tiny little hand with painted pink nails and white dots on the rims snatched the book away from her lap, and Agnes Jane's head snapped up, reaching up with her hands to take her precious book back."Wait..." Agnes Jane trailed off as Melinda flipped violently through the pages so quickly that Agnes Jane was afraid that she would rip a page.
"Oh, shut the trap, geek girl. Lemme see the books for two seconds," Melinda snapped, jerking her head back down to Agnes Jane's book. Agnes Jane flinched, sniffled, pushed her glasses up her nose and ducked her head.
"I'm not a geek," She whispered, twining her fingers together. But Melinda didn't hear because she was concentrating on the pages as her head turned to one page to the other as she searched for the famous quote. Alyssa wasn't paying attention to Agnes Jane either; she was watching Melinda curiously, her mind spinning with possibilities of what she was looking for.
Melinda gasped, pointing a manicured nail to the line that she was looking for, holding it up to her face as she whispered the words, loud enough for Alyssa to catch.
"'And so the lion fell in love with the lamb...," he murmured. I looked away, hiding my eyes as I thrilled to the word.
"'What a stupid lamb," I sighed.
"'What a sick, masochistic lion,'" Melinda's voice faded off as she uttered the last word under her breath, Alyssa smiling at her as Melinda felt Alyssa's stare on her. She looked up, and her expression was torn, almost pained, as her eyes flickered between Twilight and Alyssa, trying to decide which to stare at and ending up staring at the faded page with bent corners to mark the pages, her eyes rereading what she already had memorized.
"I love that quote," Alyssa sighed, her voice clear and barely above a whisper. "Edward is such a hopeless romantic." Her thoughts were rolling as the subject was picked through. "Do you know what he means when he says that?"
Melinda, being the Twilight fanatic that she is, knew what Edward meant. She had Googled it and then bought the Guide to Twilight to learn every detail in the series like the other two girls had. Melinda and Alyssa chatted over the Twilight series, forgetting completely about the small girl hidden in the dark corner with her glasses pushed up her nose and her eyes rimmed with red, fingers overlapping her opposite hand as she squirmed.
Agnes Jane was used to this – the whole invisible act and being ignored, purposely and not. She trained herself to be perfectly still, not uttering a single word and being, for lack of other word, invisible.
She listened, eyes down on her lap, to the other girls chatting together with their heads close and bent over the Twilight book– her Twilight book thankyouverymuch –upset that she was excluded. It was so stupid, since her whole life was like this, to be upset but these people felt different, like there was something between them but she guessed she was wrong.
"Oh, I love this part, you know, when Edward comes into Bella's room. That's so cute, you know?" Alyssa pointed out a part in the book, talking to Melinda, who agreed.
Agnes Jane watched as the girls bonded, feeling a little left out but pushing the feeling away and turning her head away from the scene, cheeks slightly tinged red and eyes slightly blurry with wetness.
She was used to feeling invisible. She was used to feeling like an outcast. She was used to all that. She wasn't used to watching the people she so desperately wanted to be like make a friendship as she hears what they're saying to form the friendship and see them laughing and joking together. It sucked, really.
It sucked bad.
After a few minutes of trying, and failing miserably, to block out the girls chattering, Agnes Jane finally decided to sleep and rolled herself into her sleeping bag and zipped it up all the way after fluffing her pillow to perfection and spraying her bag with disinfectant to keep away the spiders and bugs and germs.
She was very frail.
She laid down, her head perfectly in the center of the pillow, her body straight with the blanket pulled up to her chin and hands by her side and glasses beside her. Agnes Jane was dying to get her Twilight book back, but she didn't want to be insulted again by Melinda, the evil fashion pixie.
It, she, was the perfect cliché. The popular, beautiful, fashionable, only child, blonde, mean, gossipy girl that was Melinda that was straight out of Mean Girls. Agnes Jane hated clichés. She hated them with passion, because there was a cliché for her. The nerdy-nerd-nerd with big ole glasses and freckles across her nose and the greasy hair in a big scrunchie resting at the back of her neck with a snotty nose and no friends, sitting by herself in the dusty corner in the lunch room. Yes, that was her, but still. It annoyed her perfectly because it described her, the lonely girl she was. Poor her.
The chatter of the girls died down softly and the scurry of the pair getting in their sleeping bags – which were conveniently by each other in the small blue tent – and Agnes Jane, who was still awake, realized that the book, her book, the beloved Twilight book, was still where Melinda left it.
She got up after a few minutes or so and crawled over to the book.
Colors were swirling around, and almost as if it was a song that she couldn't get out of her head, the words from Twilight and New Moon and Eclipse and Breaking Dawn were all spoken, some from Bella, some from Edward, some from Carlisle, some from Esme, some from Emmett, some from Rosalie, some from Alice, some from Jasper, some from Jacob, some from Renesmee, and every other character in the books, in the whole series.
The light, so bright swirling around Agnes Jane, she thought of they were just from getting up to fast – you know, those little white dots that you see in the dark when you get up too fast. Those. She blamed it on that. The words and sentences from her favorite characters from her favorite book she blamed on like having a song in her head.
And she crawled back in her sleeping bag, zipped it up all the way after fluffing her pillow to perfection and spraying her bag with disinfectant to keep away the spiders and bugs and germs since she was very frail. She laid down, her head perfectly in the center of the pillow, her body straight with the blanket pulled up to her chin and hands by her side and glasses beside her and finally with her Twilight book beside her. And she fell asleep.
A/N:Such a tiny little chapter…so cute…Anywhoo, I hope you enjoyed the chapter. Leave a review for me and flood my inbox! Thank Lissy for beta'ing this chapter and giving me an endless list of ideas and being patient with me while I was bitching and throwing away her ideas only to go to my imaginary dumpster to pull the idea out and use it.
Now…did you like it? Lissy says to R&R!