Disclaimer: Stephenie Meyer owns "Twilight" and its characters. This story is just for fun; no profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended.

Chapter One

"Isn't this exciting, honey?" said Mother as we boarded the plane. She touched my shoulder lightly to urge me forward, past the smiling stewardess and down the narrow airplane aisle, as if I weren't eighteen years old and perfectly capable of finding my way to my seat without her guidance.

"Yes, Mother," I said.

And it was exciting, in a way, but mostly it just seemed strange. It was the first time I had been on a plane since I was twelve years old and my aunt took me down to Florida to visit my grandparents. The flight to Florida, as I remembered it, was so different from this one: that plane had been smaller, its insides more yellowed, and my seat had been in the very back row of coach, nestled snugly between a pair of screaming babies and the bathroom, with the engines roaring away in my ear the whole time.

This time, the plane was wider and more spacious, empty save for a few stern-looking businessmen in suits and totally silent except for the little electronic ping! of a Blackberry alerting its owner of a new email. The whole experience felt new and strange to me.

"It's so quiet," I said, mostly to myself.

"That's just because no one else has boarded yet," said Father. "First class boards first."

"Oh. Right."

Our seats were A4, B4, and C4, and I reached them first. I slid my only carry-on item - my laptop case, with a small personal hygiene bag stowed away in one of the inside pockets - under the window seat and started to shuffle my way over to seat A4.

Just as I was sitting down, Mother said sweetly, "Oh, Edward, honey, let me have the window seat, will you? I like to be able to see out. Otherwise I'll be nauseous. And your father will need the aisle seat, so he can stretch out his leg if his knee starts to hurt."

And so it looked as if I would be planted firmly between Mother and Father, in blasted B4, for all eight hours of the flight from New York City to Barcelona, Spain. Fun times were sure to ensue.

As the plane sped down the runway for take-off, Father gripped the arms of his seat and pretended not to be scared on one side, while Mother closed her eyes and whispered prayers under her breath on the other. But I watched eagerly out the window as we flew up into the clouds, leaving the city far behind; I wasn't afraid. In fact, take-off was my favorite part.

"Oh, don't be absurd, Edward," said Father. "Take-off is the most dangerous part of flying, apart from landing. Almost all plane crashes occur during take-off or landing."

"Oh. Right," I said.

I didn't know how to explain that I just liked the feeling of power it gave me, the sense of moving with impossible speed, and then the miracle of flight as the plane was lifted in the air and the ground fell away below...

Don't be absurd, Edward, I reminded myself, my father's disdain ringing in my ears. Only little kids stare out the window like that while the plane takes off. Grow up.

The flight was impossibly long. We changed timezones overnight. The flight attendents turned off all the lights and passed out pillows and blankets at ten o'clock at night our time to help us adjust to the timezone in Barcelona, where it was currently four in the morning. The seats in first class were much more spacious than those in coach, and my seat reclined fully; I was remarkably comfortable, considering that I was on an airplane and wedged between my parents, no less, but I couldn't sleep. I closed my eyes and thought about the weeks ahead.

Europe. Would it be all I had dreamed of? I had never been out of the country before, but over the past few years, I had become obsessed with the idea of expatriotism - moving away to Europe and never coming back. It seemed like the answer to all my problems.

Back home in New York, I had always felt a little out of touch, out of step with the world around me. I had been bullied and picked on since kindergarten, when Billy Craborchard made fun of me for wearing "church shoes" to school. Father always told me to "stand up like a man" to the bullies, but I never had the guts; Mother tried to solve my problems by plucking me out of school after school each time I had problems with the other kids. I had attended seven different private schools in fourteen years, each more private and exclusive than the last.

"This one will be better, sweetie," Mother would assure me every time I switched schools. "The people here are smart like you - they'll respect you for your brains and your talents. You won't be in with the riff-raff anymore."

She was right, in a way: there certainly was no "riff-raff" in the ultra-private schools she picked out for me, but these new, snotty kids didn't accept me any more than the public school kids had long ago. Each new batch of classmates found a whole new batch of reasons to hate me. In junior high, all the kids I went to school with were rich, but not quite as rich as my family, and they hated me for it. Freshmen year, I was an outcast because I wasn't rich enough. Sophomore and junior year were miserable because I didn't know anything about luxury cars or expensive liquor or how to talk to girls. Senior year, everyone else in my class spent their weekends going on coke binges and wrecking their fathers' Mercedes-Benzes while I was at home practicing piano.

In Europe, things would be different. I could play piano and wear nice clothes and drive a hybrid car without being called a "fag" or a "loser." European girls liked guys like me - sensitive, lonely, intellectual. And the girls would be smarter too, tall and skinny and pale, lithe in their fashionable clothes, with intelligent political opinions and at least a basic knowledge of art and music and literature. European girls would be cultured and sophisticated, not bleached-blonde and fake-tanned and dressed in hideous neon clothes that doubled as walking billboards for cheap brands like American Eagle, Hollister, and Aeropostle.

American Eagle, indeed. I would certainly be glad to be rid of America's overzealous patriotic spirit, too. The tacky eagle symbol, red-white-and-blue everything - Americans just had no taste. They couldn't recognize real style if it smacked them right between their beady little eyes.

No, Europe was where I really belonged. Europeans had brains, beauty, talent, and class. They would understand me.

So the previous fall, I had applied to all the usual: Duke, Harvard, Yale, Princetown, and Brown. Then, after devoting hours and hours to research, much of it in languages I wasn't quite fluent in, to choosing the best European college, I applied to the University of Paris in secret. When I was accepted, I broached the topic of going to school abroad with my parents.

They seemed to agree that I could use a change of scenery. Though they never said so aloud, I suspected that they both clung to the same hopes I did: that I could start over abroad, in a new country where no one knew my past or spoke my language. By the time I had formally accepted Paris's offer of admission, Mother was already making plans.

She booked a European cruise for the three of us in the second week of June. The cruise would be five days long, departing from Barcelona and making stops in Cannes, France, and Florence and Rome, Italy. Once we were back in Barcelona, we would take a plane to London and spend ten days there. Then we would all go to Paris, where my parents would spend another week seeing the sights with me.

Then Mother and Father would fly back home and in the remaining weeks before school started, I would be free to roam Paris on my own. A year or two earlier, the idea of being alone in a foreign country would have terrified me, but I was ready for it now. I had spent eighteen years of my life in New York with people who spoke the same language and lived in the same city and shared the same culture, and I hated it. I was ready for a change.

And my parents did nothing but encourage me, which gave me the strength to take the plunge. My father was my biggest critic and my mother was always trying to protect me, so I knew if they thought I could make it in Paris, I could. In fact, they weren't just allowing me to go to Paris - they wanted me to go.

"Oh, you'll just love Paris, honey," Mother would say over and over again. "It's so beautiful and the people there are just - well, they're not like us. Europeans are different from Americans. They're more like you and me." And then she would smile fondly at me, touching the side of my face in her motherly way.

Then one day when I was downstairs in the study when my parents thought I was upstairs in my room, I heard Mother and Father talking about me in the next room.

"Well, there's only a few more weeks in the school year, Carlisle," Mother was saying. "If he can just make it to Paris, he'll be fine."

"Yes," said Father, his voice soft and forgiving. "Paris is exactly what he needs. Every young man should travel abroad. Right now, he's lost and...confused - I can tell - but Europe will open his eyes. He'll figure everything out, find a nice European girl and settle down, and he'll be just fine."

Ever since then, I hadn't been able to get those words out of my head. At night, when I closed my eyes and waited for sleep, visions of the future flitted through my mind against the backdrop of my father's smooth, melodic voice: "Paris is exactly what he needs... Europe will open his eyes... Find a nice European girl and settle down..."

Now, trying to sleep on the flight to Barcelona, I closed my eyes and pictured myself fifteen years from now: confident and refined, in a suit with a cigar in hand; my tall, blonde, blue-eyed wife, smiling faintly with angular features and a model's build, wearing some expensive dress and heels. Maybe we would have a child...or two...or three... Or maybe not yet. Maybe I would wait until later to have kids. Maybe I would spend all of my twenties lounging around my bachelor's pad in Paris, traveling from city to city and country to country in the summers, meeting new beautiful women of all different nationalities...

For the next couple of hours, I dozed intermittently, waking whenever we hit a particularly bad patch of turbulence. I had just fallen into a deep enough sleep to dream when the flight attendents began walking up and down the aisles, taking away pillows and blankets and turning on all the lights. To my left, Mother was suddenly wide awake; she sat straight up in her seat and opened the window shade, and I winced in the sudden brightness, longing for the darkness and my dreams of European girls.

"Look, Edward," said Mother, nudging me in the shoulder. "You can see the ocean. Look how blue it is!"

"We must be getting closer," said Father.

A stewardess was pushing a little stainless steel cart down the aisle, pouring coffee and handing out little pastries and plates of scrambled eggs and bacon. I sat up and rubbed my eyes. "What time is it?"

"It's one in the morning in New York," said Father. "Seven o'clock Barcelona time."

Jesus. No wonder my head hurt.

Breakfast helped revive me a little. I couldn't stomach the bacon and eggs, but I had a strawberry pastry and got some coffee in my system, and then I began to feel human again. Once the flight attendents had cleared all the empty plates and cups from breakfast, they handed out very official-looking slips of paper.

"What's this?"

"Oh, that's just for customs, dear," said Mother. "Just do this top part here - we don't need to declare anything yet."

I filled out the sheet as best I could, printing my name, birthdate, nationality, and so on in capital letters. Mother dug around in her bag for the cruise papers, and we listed the cruise ship as our "local address."

"Now, remember, Edward," said Mother as the plane began its descent. Outside, through the little plastic airplane windows, I could see craggy brown mountains, buildings crowded close together in a barren valley - we were flying over Spain now. "You're going to have to use your Spanish when we go through customs. Your father and I don't speak any."

"Neither do I, Mother," I reminded her.

"But you took Spanish I and II in high school."

"Yeah, freshman year. I don't remember much."

Actually, I remembered quite a bit, considering it had been three years since I had taken the class, and I had been studying my old Spanish textbooks to help refresh my memory, too. I still wasn't anywhere near conversational level, but I knew enough to get by. Still, I figured it was better to claim to know less of the language than I actually did, so that if I struggled with the language more than I was expecting to, at least my parents wouldn't be disappointed in me.

"Well," said Mother, patting my leg, "I'm sure it will all come back to you once you hear other people speaking it."

As we neared the airport, the pilot came over the intercom. "Ladies and gentlemen, this is your pilot speaking. We are expected to arrive in Barcelona at 8:12 A.M. It is seventy-eight degrees fahrenheit, twenty-six degrees celsius in Barcelona, partly cloudy with a chance of rain."

Then a flight attendent came over the intercom, repeating what the pilot had just said in rapid Spanish.

The pilot and the flight attendent continued to talk this way, trading off between English and Spanish, until we were ready to land. The flight attendent hurried through a list of connecting flights in Spanish, and then a stewardess took over, going through the usual safety spiel in both languages. At my side, Mother gave a little shriek as the wheels emerged from the plane with a loud bang. As the plane touched down, she and Father were both gripping the armrests of their seats so tightly that their knuckles turned white.

My heart thudded in my chest, not with fear, but with excitement, hope. The plane sped down the runway, slowly skidding to a stop, and I couldn't tear my eyes away from the view out of the window - the strange shape of the jagged Barcelona landscape, so different from the New York City skyline. A new land.

I did it, I thought to myself as Mother and Father and I walked through the Barcelona airport, past huge windows looking out over the city. I escaped.

Customs wasn't so bad. A woman at a desk asked us, in English, about our business in Barcelona. We told he we were going on a cruise, she nodded mutely, and stamped our passports. On the way to baggage claim, I opened my passport and looked inside, flipping past the page with my hideous photograph (I hadn't slept much the night before, and the sallow light in the photo combined with the dark circles under my eyes made me look like some kind of jaundiced serial killer) to the page she had stamped. I touched the stamp reverently: it was my first. I had finally made it out of the country.

After retrieving our bags, we took a cab to our hotel. I guess the cab driver could tell that we didn't really speak Spanish as soon as he saw us, because he didn't try to speak to us - he just began loading our bags into the trunk of the cab in silence. Mother and I got in the backseat and Father sat up front.

The cab driver got into the car and glanced around at us expectantly.

Mother nudged me in the arm. "Tell him where we're going, dear," she whispered.

"Hotel Nouvel?" I said uncertainly.

"Ah, si," said the cab driver, and then we were off.

He didn't say another word to us as we sped along the highway, past big concrete apartment buildings with clothes hanging in all the windows, smaller houses and buildings that lay squat along the ground, and billboards that looked exactly like the ones back home, except they were in Spanish. The radio was on and some kind of filthy rap song was playing; then a sickly-sweet song by an American pop star came on. It was all in English. I wondered if the driver understood what they were saying.

He didn't break his silence until we slowed down suddenly. A wreck was up ahead, with what looked like police officers in bright neon vests questioning a scruffy man standing up against the guardrail. The cab driver glanced around at us and narrowed his eyes at Mother.

"Cinturon," he said. He tugged at his seatbelt and then pointed to Mother. "Cinturon."

"Wha - ?"

"He wants you to put your seatbelt on," I said.

"Oh." She flushed pink and did as she was told, flashing the driver an apologetic smile. "Sorry," she said.

"Lo siento," I translated.

He shrugged and suddenly launched into a long explanation in Spanish. Like everyone else in Barcelona, he spoke Catalan (a local dialect that's sort of a blend of French and Spanish), which I didn't really understand, but I caught enough of what he said to put the pieces together. If the police saw that Mother wasn't wearing a seatbelt, they would fine the cab driver a hundred and fifty Euros, he said.

"Si, si," I said, just to show that I understood. Sort of.

A few minutes later we were driving through the heart of Barcelona, past rows and rows of tall buildings that reminded me of some of the older parts of New York. The driver parked on the curb next to a plaza, where at least twenty other cabs were parked in rows, just waiting for patrons. He unloaded our bags for us and then we paid him with some of the Euros we had gotten from the bank back in New York.

I looked around; none of the buildings nearby seemed to be any sort of hotel. Just behind us, a little street ran down between the buildings. There were big concrete blocks placed along the street's opening, to stop cars from coming through.

The driver pointed to the street, babbling in Catalan. I didn't catch a word of it, but I thought I knew what he meant.

"I think our hotel is down this way," I said. "He had to drop us off here because cars can't use this street."

Mother and Father nodded and, with worried looks on their faces, grabbed their bags and followed me down the street.

The street was very old and sort of cobbled, and my wheeled suitcase banged along behind me as I dragged it across the little worn-down stones. It was very early, and the whole city had a sort of misty gray early morning look about it. We were the only ones on the street.

There were little stores all up and down the street, but none of them were Hotel Nouvel.

"I don't see it," said Mother.

"Maybe you'd better ask somebody, son," said Father.

"I don't see anyone to ask."

"There's a man down there," said Mother, pointing to the end of the street, where an old, decrepit man was setting up some kind of souvenir stand.

"Alright," I sighed. "I'll be right back."

I left my bags with Mother and Father and walked down to the old man, rehearsing my lines in my head. As I approached, he looked up at me, fixing me with a pair of cloudy blue eyes. I cleared my throat and adjusted my glasses, hoping that I looked like a well-traveled, sophisticated young man, and not a stupid American tourist.

"Perdon," I said loudly, in case he was hard of hearing. "Donde esta..." Wait - was it el or la? Oh, screw it. "...Hotel Nouvel?"

Apparently I didn't say it loud enough though (or my Spanish was even worse than I had feared), because the old man cupped one hand around his ear and leaned closer.

"Donde esta Hotel Nouvel?" I repeated, half-yelling now and feeling incredibly moronic.

"Ah," he said. He pointed one crooked finger back towards where my parents stood waiting. "La calle alli, a la izquierda."

"Oh. Muchas gracias," I said, and scurried away.

I knew izquierda meant left, but the rest was a mystery to me. As I walked back towards my parents, I pulled out my iPhone and went to the translator app. According to the iPhone, the man had said, "The street there, to the left."

I looked up in the direction he had pointed. Sure enough, just to the left of my parents was a narrow alleyway. Maybe it led to the hotel?

"He said it was down this alleyway," I reported back to my parents. They looked over at the alley with raised eyebrows.

"What kind of hotel did you book for us, Esme?" Father laughed.

"Oh, I'm sure it will be fine," said Mother. But she glanced around uneasily as she picked up her bags and led the way down the dark alley.

The alley was not a cobbled road like the street it connected to; the street, or ground, or whatever it was we walked on, was not like any kind of pavement I had ever encountered before. It was hard like stone, but covered in a thin layer of sand and dirt, and it was uneven, with huge dips and mounds here and there. Occasionally there would be a baseball-sized hole in the ground through which you could see endless black depths leading into God knows what. Something smelled bad, like rotting food and a sewer combined.

More stores lined this little alleyway, but most of them were deserted and locked up at this hour. We reached the end of the alley and emerged onto another much bigger street called La Rambla, where crowds of people walked up and down past endless booths offering jewelry, scarves, magazines, souvenirs... But still no sign of Hotel Nouvel. The three of us stood staring around at all the old buildings and restaurants as Barcelona natives pushed past us and cab drivers parked up and down the street eyed us hungrily.

"Didn't you get some kind of directions to this place?" said Father crossly. He was staring to get irritated.

"Well, yes, but..." Mother slid her backpack off of one shoulder and started rifling through some of the loose papers stuffed inside. "Edward, dear, help me look through these papers - I know there's a map in here somewhere..."

She handed me a wad of papers and, with a groan, I started flipping through them. It was pointless. I was almost positive that there was no map in here, and all of this was just for the sake of appearances, so that Father wouldn't think she was an idiot for not bringing a map to a foreign country.

Bored and annoyed, I happened to look up just as one of the thousands of black-and-yellow cabs pulled up onto the curb just five or six feet away from me and came to a stop. All the doors opened at once and a cab driver got out and opened the trunk. A short, middle-aged man in shorts and a T-shirt and a baseball cap got out of the front seat, grinning stupidly. A tall, thin, middle-aged woman in mom shorts and a pink shirt climbed out of the backseat, and then a girl got out behind her.

The girl looked to be about my age; she must've been the man and woman's daughter. She was small and thin, pale with brown hair that swung about her face in a wild, unruly mass. Dark circles clung beneath her brown eyes, and her clothes looked wrinkled and mussed, as if she had slept in them.

Speaking of her clothes - they were hideous. She was wearing a neon tie-dyed Fudruckers T-shirt, pale blue nylon shorts, and bright pink tennis shoes. She pushed a lock of her dark hair behind one ear, revealing absurd ladybug earrings she must have received as a birthday present in the second grade.

As she got out of the car, she looked right up into my face, and our eyes locked for a moment; then she looked away, hurrying over to where her parents were unloading their luggage from the trunk of the cab. When she turned, I saw that her shorts read "Myrtle Beach, SC" across the ass.

They put their bags on the sidewalk in front of us in a neat row, and then the mother dug a map out of her purse and she and the girl disappeared behind it. They talked in low voices as the man stood on the sidewalk and checked his phone absently. He was the only person in sight with a cell phone out.

I realized I was staring and looked around at Mother and Father to see if I had been caught. I was stunned to find that both of them were watching the other family of three as well.

"We're in La Rambla right now," the girl was saying, her little voice ringing with authority, "so it must be right there, up that little alleyway, on the right."

"Yeah..." said the mother uncertainly. "I guess you're right... Everything looks so much smaller than I expected - "

"Yep. Not like the open range in Texas, huh?" said the man, laughing goofily as he looked up from his cell phone.

And, sneaking glances at Mother and Father out of the corner of my eye, I knew the three of us were all thinking the exact same thing: Americans.

"Um, excuse me," said Mother daintily. The three other Americans looked up as she pushed past me and moved closer to them. "We seem to have lost our map, and we can't find our hotel - could we look at yours just for a second?"

"Oh, sure," said the mother. She tore the map out of her daughter's hands and handed it to Mother. "Go right on ahead."

"Thank you so much." Mother took the map from them delicately and opened it up. She glanced over at me. "Edward, come look at this for a second, will you, dear?"

I came to stand behind Mother, studying the map over her shoulder. I found La Rambla and the plaza the cab driver had parked next to and used that to find our current location. (La Rambla was a wide strip of booths and street performers, with two narrow streets running along either side of it; we were currently standing on the sidewalk beside one of these two streets.) According to the map, Hotel Nouvel was...well, right in the alley we had just come from.

"Oh, how silly," said Mother. "We must have just overlooked it. Thank you so much," she said, handing the map back to the American mother.

"No problem," said the woman. "Where are you all staying again?"

"Hotel Nouvel."

"No way!" the woman burst out obnoxiously. "That's where we're staying!"

"Oh. Well..." Mother glanced around at the three of them - the woman, all smiles in her suburban mom get-up; the man, smirking under his baseball cap and chomping on a piece of gum; the young girl, in her neon T-shirt, her full lips shiny with sparkly pink lip gloss - and visibly swallowed her distaste. "How nice," she managed finally.

"I'm Renee Dwyer," said the woman, grabbing Mother's hand and shaking it. "And this is my husband, Phil, and my daughter, Bella."

"Nice to meetcha," said Phil heartily. He shook Father's hand vigorously, then patted Mother on the back in a thoroughly masculine gesture; she flinched.

"Hi," said Bella. She smiled at all three of us, her gaze lingering on me.

Oh God. She would probably try to make friends with me, since we were the only two kids here. Oh God, no, please. I looked away.

"Oh, my. What a lovely family," said Mother with a slightly hysterical smile. "Well, uh... My name is Esme Cullen and this is my husband, Carlisle, and my son, Edward."

I stood up straighter and adjusted my glasses in what I hoped was a sophisticated manner as I was introduced. But what did it matter, really? Why should I care what these annoying American tourists thought of me?

"So where you folks from?" asked the Phil guy as we headed off down the alleyway again, dragging our suitcases across the uneven ground behind us.

"New York," said Father.

The Bella girl's eyes lit up. "New York? That's so cool! I love New York!"

"You've been there?" asked Mother, only slightly disparagingly.

"Just once," said Bella. "But I love it. I'm going to school there in the fall."

"Oh, really?"

"Yeah. NYU class of twenty-fourteen! Woot!" she said, with a little fist pump of excitement.

Jesus. As if there weren't already enough obnoxious college kids in New York. Thank God I was never going back.

"We're from Kentucky," said the woman, Renee. "Well - Bella and I are, at least. Phil's from Texas. Actually, we're moving to Florida once we get back home."

Oh God. The only people who could possibly be more obnoxious than Kentuckians, Texans, or Floridians would have to be a combination of all three. Of course they would be the only other English speakers in the whole damn city.

Father seemed to be thinking the same thing. "So you guys are real globe-trotters, huh?" he said sardonically.

Renee missed the sarcasm. "Oh, yeah," she laughed. "My first husband is from Washington - the state, not the capital - so Bella and I lived there for a while. Then after my divorce, we lived in Arizona for a couple of years. Then I met Phil and we all moved back to Kentucky. I've got people there, ya know."

"Fascinating," said Mother.

It was only then that Renee seemed to pick up on our disdain. She stopped walking and her smile faded as she peered at Mother with a sort of perplexed sadness. Her eyes crinkled around the edges as she frowned.

Bella and Phil stopped, too. I figured they were offended, but I didn't care. Good riddance, I thought. I kept on walking, keeping in step with Father, with Mother trailing behind us.

We had gone about ten feet when we heard Phil call out behind us, "Hey! Where you folks going? The hotel's right here!"

Mother, Father, and I all turned around in perfect synchronization to see Phil, Renee, and Bella crowded around a big wooden door. Above the door in gold letters were the words, "Hotel Nouvel."

"Oh, how silly!" said Mother, forcing a smile. "We must have just overlooked it."

We followed the Dwyers (a hideous name for hideous people) into the lobby of the hotel, which was very small and compact, but beautiful inside. The sitting area next to the lobby was furnished with lots of antique-looking furniture and huge expansive paintings of the city. A big wooden staircase wound its way around the corner of the lobby, next to the front desk, and an old-fashioned elevator with glass doors stood across from it.

A bald man and a dark, hispanic-looking woman were working the front desk, and they visibly sized us all up as we walked it, most likely trying to decide what language to speak to us. I remembered Father saying something on the way over here about how everyone who works in hotels in cities like this has to speak multiple languages fluently, because so many different people from different countries travel here.

But then Renee yelled, "Hi!" and gave a little wave - effectively ending the question of nationality.

Mother sighed. "Americans," she muttered under her breath, so quietly that only Father and I heard.

"Hello," said the woman at the front desk as we approached. "Are all of you together?"

"Oh, no, no," said Mother quickly. "We're a separate family."

"Oh, okay. Bob will speak with you."

So Bob, the bald man, whose accent was thicker than the woman's, checked us in while the woman waited on the Dwyers. As the man gave Mother directions to our room on the second floor, my gaze wandered around the room. There was a mirror on the opposite wall, next to the elevator, and I was startled at the sight of my reflection: my nice khaki slacks and my favorite pink button-up shirt were all wrinkled (I had been wearing them since we had left New York yesterday afternoon, after all) and my Sperries were all dirty from walking through all that sandy crap out in the alleyway. My hair was rumpled and sticking up in a few places, and my eyes looked bleary and bloodshot behind my glasses. I looked horrible.

I was staring at my reflection in the mirror across the room, attempting to smooth down my hair and brush the wrinkles out of my shirt, when I happened to notice Bella watching me. She blushed and looked away, embarrassed because I caught her looking; I blushed and looked away, embarrassed because she caught me in a moment of vanity. The whole thing was just very embarrassing all around.

To spare myself as much humiliation as possible, I turned away from Bella, focusing on my own family instead. "Could you put our bags somewhere safe for the time being?" Mother was saying to Bob. "We're not really ready to go to our rooms just yet - we kind of wanted to go get some lunch somewhere and maybe walk around the city a bit - "

"Oh, that's a great idea!" said Renee. She looked absolutely delighted, as if we had invited them along. "Isn't that a great idea, Phil?"

Phil looked up from his phone. "Huh?"

"But we don't want to take our bags with us," Mother went on, talking over the Dwyers. "So..."

"Oh, yes, yes, of course," said Bob. "We have a special room for bags. Come."

He fished a key out from under the desk and then walked out of the lobby through a back door. We all followed him through another smaller lobby-type room with a single vending machine and water fountain to another small hallway. On one side of the hallway was an open door leading into a bathroom; on the other side was a bigger, heavier door that Bob unlocked with the key.

Bob opened the door and stepped into the tiny room. On one end of the room was a heat pump, which made the whole area stiflingly hot; on the other end was a cart piled high with suitcases. He took our bags one by one and piled them neatly along one wall. "When you need these bags," he said, "come to me. I will get them for you."

"Honey," said Father. "Where's your backpack?"

"Oh, I left it out in the lobby," said Mother with a wave of her hand. "My hands were full so I decided to just come back for it. I'll go get it."

She scurried away just as Bob stepped out of the room and started to close the door. "Hey, wait," I said. "My mother has one more bag. She'll be right back."

Bob nodded curtly and leaned against the wall to wait, keeping the door propped open with his foot.

An awkward silence descended as the six of us waited for Mother to return. Father and I didn't talk much even to each other - at home, we mostly relied on Mother to keep conversation going - and the Dwyers were apparently uncomfortable in our presence.

"So Edward," said Phil finally, "you play ball?"

I started to ask what kind of "ball" he meant, but realized that it didn't matter, as I didn't play any sports. "Uh...no," I said awkwardly.

"You run track?"

"No."

"Swimming?"

"No, not really."

"Tennis? Badminton? Croquet?"

Renee smacked Phil in the arm, flashing him a warning glare. "What?" he mouthed, throwing up his hands in exasperation.

For some reason, my eyes sought out Bella automatically; she was standing in the open doorway of the bathroom, staring fixedly at the ground and gnawing on her lower lip. She didn't seem to be aware of our exchange.

I turned to Phil. "No, I don't really do sports," I said.

"Oh. Well, what do you do, then?"

He didn't say it nastily, but the question was sort of nasty in itself. On its most basic level, it implied that there was nothing worthwhile for a man to do in life other than play sports, which was exactly the mindset I hated most about guys back home - about American society. This man, this short, stout, Phil Dwyer from Texas, was the physical embodiement of everything I had been trying to escape.

In Europe, guys did more than just play sports, and if they didn't happen to play sports, they weren't looked down on for it. Hell, football didn't even exist here; there was no such thing as March Madness. And we weren't in America anymore, damn it - this wasn't Kentucky, or Texas, or Florida. This was Europe, and things were different here.

Here, Phil Dwyer would not get the best of me. I was not athletic, but I was well-dressed and well-read and fluent in French, and here, I had the upper hand.

"I play piano," I said. "And I speak French. And, uh...I read a lot."

For a moment, the look on Phil's face was totally blank. Then he looked like he was going to laugh. Renee punched him in the arm again, as a precautionary measure.

I looked over at Bella again, and this time she was looking at me, smiling a little in this indecipherable way. I couldn't tell if it was a smile of derision or of fondness.

Just as I had decided she was mocking me, Mother reappeared. She was wringing her hands out, her eyes darting back and forth in a nervous frenzy.

"Carlisle, are you sure you didn't grab my backpack?" she said.

"Yes, I'm sure. I had my backpack and my suitcase, and that's all."

"Edward, dear, did you - "

"No, Mom. I thought you said you left your backpack in the lobby?"

"Well..." She pushed her way past us to open the door to the little room and peer inside. "I thought I did, but it's not out there now."

"Oh, no!" said Renee. "Someone must have taken it."

"But I left it in the lobby! Surely no one would..."

"You can see clear through those front doors, with the windows in 'em," said Phil, shaking his head. "Somebody musta seen you leave it there. They musta come into the lobby while we were all in here."

Mother shot a pleading glance in Bob's direction.

Bob shrugged helplessly. "It is possible," he said. "There is much crime here in the city, I am afraid. There are people always waiting to steal from tourists. You should be more careful."

Mother was so indignant that I half expected her to stomp her foot and throw a tantrum, toddler-style. "But this is a nice hotel!" she shrieked tearfully - the very picture of a snobbish woman from a wealthy family, furious because her money couldn't save her this time. "Surely nothing could... No one would..."

Bob was nonplussed. "Miss, I am sorry, but - "

"But all my things were in there!"

"Bella, where are you going?"

We all followed Renee's gaze to see Bella hurrying down the hallway. "I'm gonna go look outside," she said. "Maybe whoever took it is still out there."

"Bella, sweetheart, be careful - "

But she was gone before anyone could talk her out of it.

"Edward, go with her," said Mother. Tears were welling up in her eyes as she shoved me in Bella's direction. "She shouldn't be alone out there."

Oh God.

"But - why - I mean..." I couldn't figure out how to say what I meant ("Why do I have to do it?") without offending Renee and Phil, who were standing right in front of me. "Shouldn't someone else - "

"I need to stay here and make some phone calls. I had credit card numbers in there. You go. Hurry, catch her!"

And so it began.

"Jesus Christ," I said to myself, and ran after Bella.

Footnotes:

1. La Rambla: a street in central Barcelona, popular with both tourists and locals alike. A 1.2 kilometer-long tree-lined pedestrian mall between Barri Gòtic and El Raval, it connects Plaça Catalunya in the center with the Christopher Columbus monument at Port Vell.

(Definitions from good ol' Wikipedia.)