A/N: Please note that this is my very first time writing any real story (meaning one that was actually put onto paper...uh, in this case computer monitor) other than a few chapters of a very embarrassing and unrealistic story in which a family lived in a garden behind an occupied house for eight years and no one noticed. I was in the third grade. Constructive criticism is appreciated (I need to learn to take it better) but please don't be harsh without some real reason.

Basically it's a version of the Twilight series where Bella never moved back to Forks, and she is "replaced" with a girl named Meryl, who meets a certain werewolf. Not going to give away too many details. This is just an intro—it WILL get better.

Disclaimer: I don't own Twilight or the character of Meryl Stepp (she's the brainchild of the incredibly awesome girl who has dealt with me and my weirdness for the two and a half years and counting during which the roleplay off which this is based has been going on. I love her very much and that could be weird considering I've never actually met her, but the hell with it), as I'm not Stephanie Meyer or said awesome girl. Unfortunately, I don't own the Pack either. If I did, they'd have their own series because they're just that awesome, and I say that only partially because they're shirtless a lot of the time. I own all the edits (which for this chapter at least were pretty big) to the original roleplay and about half the plot and that's all.

Sunspot- a cooler darker spot appearing periodically on the sun's photosphere; associated with a strong magnetic field

Wide Open Spaces-Dixie Chicks

Better Days-Goo Goo Dolls

I'm Moving On-Rascal Flatts

(This is not a song fic but I just found these songs and they happen to work VERY well with this chapter, and I probably will be doing this for every chapter following because I think it enhances it a bit. Listen to them!)

Fate had screwed up big time in the "first" story. They were disappointed, to say the least, with what had happened when a mere mortal had been allowed to take the wheel. They had chosen poorly to let her have control. This time, they wouldn't allow what was always meant to be slip through the cracks. Their version-the true version-would do much more good, with little permanent harm done.

This would be doing two young people a favor. One had suffered enough in her seventeen years, and the other wouldn't miss what pain he would now never have. The girl named Bella Swan, the one in that woman's books, loved Phoenix and happened to get along perfectly with her step-father, even sharing his intense love for baseball-although she was known to often miss the ball completely and somehow could never make it off the field without getting injured-so she never saw any need to move back to Forks, Washington. She would live a content, average life, marry an imperfectly normal human man, and live in a nice house in a nice town with two children and a golden retriever.

A girl named Meryl Stepp from Dalton, Georgia was always meant to take her place.

Meryl sighed as she finished pushing her couch up against the wall. She smiled, sitting down on the couch and looking around. From this point in the living room she could see all the way down the hallway past the kitchen and bathroom to her bedroom door; the house was that small. It was perfect for her—a freshly emancipated seventeen year old girl who didn't have a lot of money and didn't like big fancy houses anyway.

The next morning, she was to start her senior year at the high school on the Quileute reservation in La Push. She lived close enough to the border of the rez to have the option to go there instead of the high school in Forks, like some of the teenagers who lived farther out from town did. The council elders had only decided to do this recently, because they knew that as time passed less and less of the children who were raised here would want to stay and they would have to get used to the fact that they were considered a minority in the outside world.

Her parents had been abusive and when she saw a chance to petition the court to become emancipated and leave home, she did. It had taken most of the money she had saved up just to get here and to rent the house along with buying her beat-up Jeep, but she was here and away from them and that was all that mattered. She was free and could build herself a new life here. Little did she know that things would never be the same.

Three loud beeps from her alarm clock woke Meryl at 7:05 on the dot the next morning. She sat up, pushing the blankets down as she stretched and looked over at her open window. Standing up and dragging her feet across the carpeted floor, she peered outside, looking up at the murky sky and sighing as she saw that it was raining. The last thing she wanted to do was go out there.

Had she closed her window the night before? She couldn't remember, she had been exhausted from the day of moving in and she had almost fallen asleep when she was still in her clothes. She had known it would be cloudy and wet a lot here, especially now that it was the beginning of September and starting to get cooler, so she was sure she wouldn't have left it open on purpose but she had been tired and probably hadn't been thinking straight.

She jumped in the shower, letting out a deep breath when the warm water hit her back and standing there for a few moments before starting to wash herself, relaxing and letting the steam collect around her.

Pulling her wet dark brown hair (dyed-her natural color was blonde, but she liked this for a change) into a ponytail, she grabbed her bag and an apple to eat in the car.

Meryl pulled up to the high school a few minutes later, noting that there weren't really any actual parking spaces and the "parking lot" was just a long rectangle of packed sandy dirt a few yards behind the school. She parked the Jeep, hearing a group of boys a few cars down laughing and making a lot of noise.

She walked past them on her way into the school, noticing out of the corner of her eye that the tallest boy was staring at her. When she turned halfway toward him to toss the apple core into a trash can, she smiled and gave him a half-wave. Honestly the staring was a little creepy, but she was new and she wasn't sure how many other white students there were here. She would never make any friends if she kept to herself, though the look he was giving her made her want to do just that. Her eyes suddenly locked on his and she turned away to quickly go inside, turning red and barely catching herself from tripping and landing flat on her face.

I'm excited for this. It took forever even though it's just over two pages on MS Word, but anyway…What'd you think? I don't expect any reviews since this is just getting started, but I'd love love love to check on this later and see that someone did write something, even if it's just a few words. Please?

Wolfy boy in the next chapter, though I'm sure you've guessed which one he is already. He is listed as Character A, after all. :P