California was a magical place. I never expected to live anywhere else. I was born there and would surely die there, and I had absolutely no problems with this fate.

However, sometimes fate has different plans, and totally fucks you over.

After fourteen years of living in the beautiful city of Malibu with my parents and four older siblings, I decided that I was now an adult, and thus ran away with my twenty two year old boyfriend, Michael Stevenson.

A lot of people did not approve of this pairing, understandably. He was eight years older than me, but I thought I was in love. Not the Disney version of love, where a man rescues some damsel in distress and takes care of her and they live happily ever after. No, we were in the kind of love two broken people shared. No one could understand why we were in love. He was a pessimist and came from a broken family that barely scraped by on government money, while I was the daughter of a wealthy businessman who constantly tried to find a bright side. There was never a time when Michael bought me dinner or surprised me with flowers, like I'd seen my father do for my mother. Instead, we shared each other's company with stolen sandwiches and cans of 99-cent tea.

An entire relationship was based solely on being broken, and being able to relate to that feeling. When we started to fall apart too much, we simply glued each other back together and held the pieces in place until it dried. The biggest flaw with this plan being that sometimes we broke at the same time, so we'd sit and try to figure out which piece belonged to whom. Sometimes a piece of my mind would end up in his and a piece of his heart would end up in mine.

To everyone else he was a screw-up. He didn't care enough about his education and too much about silly things like adventure and playing the guitar, but I understood him. I knew he was intelligent, but not willing to let that define him. We shared a secret hatred for conformity and thrived off of trying to be different in our respective ways.

Then the day came when he broke and wouldn't let me fix him, no matter how much I tried.

And when I pushed him too hard, he pushed back by giving me a black eye. I didn't tell anyone because I understood. He was dealing with PTSD and trying to get his life together. Trying to keep a job. I knew it was a lot of pressure, but the longer I waited for him to get better, the worse the abuse got.

He fortunately didn't hit me very often, but got mad at me for eating "his" food and drinking "his" beer, even though my trust fund was paying for our lives at that point.

After nineteen long months of this happening, I knew the relationship was not going to get better and it had to end. Even with this knowledge though, I didn't know where to go, I was almost seventeen and didn't think my family would necessarily accept me back into their lives with open arms. Thankfully, before I simply ran away to live on the streets, I met Charlie.

I had been sitting in a coffee shop writing when he noticed the bruises on the back of my neck. I had tried to cover them, but I later learned he was trained to notice those kinds of signs. There was no denying they were the shape of someone's hand, and before I could really understand why, I told him everything.

He begged me to go back home to my family, but after hours of trying to explain, he offered a compromise.

I contacted my parents then. I told them that I was leaving Michael, but not ready to come home yet. I was going up to Washington to live on my own for a while, to recover. They were surprisingly understanding.

I packed a bag of my things and left with Charlie while Michael was at work, and the lie was born.

I would pretend to be Charlie and his ex-wife's daughter. We didn't look very related, but not too obnoxiously different either. We both had brown eyes and brown hair, though mine was slightly darker, with more red in it, and despite my current residence, my skin looked like it had never seen the sun.

California was a magical place. But sometimes fate has different plans. Apparently, fate thought I belonged in Forks.

This was just a random idea I had…I mostly just thought Bella's backstory/entire personality could be a little more interesting/less flat. {Don't kill me Bella-lovers} I don't know if I stick with it but tell me if anyone would be interested whatsoever!