American schools were similar and different to British schools, all at once. For example: they had the same awful cat poster tacked to the wall of the counsellor's office (whoever created that monstrosity needed to be punched), there was a familiar shade of mould on the ceiling, she'd definitely seen that brand of radiator before because it was the one that blasted heat twenty four-seven rather than just occasionally in winter, and above her were the same sputtering fluorescent lights that used to make her paranoid about becoming epileptic back in Britain. All of those things, flaws though they were, felt familiar. Nora could be attending any school in the world with those details.

On the flip side, Forks High School was also completely new and different and alien. For one, the small town wasn't quite up to date with modern technology yet and suffered through unbearably slow cube-shaped computers that probably belonged in museums. Like the one the counsellor was tapping away at right now. The tapping was so bloody irritating. If there was one thing Nora would miss Littleton's Comprehensive School for, it would be the power of Google and all its wonder.

But Nora wasn't going back there ever again so the sentiment was pointless. Though, she should clarify: it wasn't one of those "problem child" situations where an angsty kid gets booted off to a new high school with the hope that they'll change. After all, she hadn't killed anyone or knocked out any Mean Girls' wannabes with one of the frying pans from Cookery class.

What actually happened was worse. Her worst nightmare, in fact.

Her father died. He had a heart attack, plain and simple. (Except it wasn't, not at all, because she couldn't seem to navigate her life without him in it.)

But she didn't like to focus no that fact. Because thinking about her father made something ache in her chest, sharp and unrelenting. People weren't lying when they said that you always remembered the little things. To Nora, her father was now a multitude of little things: bright orange hair identical to her own, an awful singing voice that wailed to Led Zeppelin or The Moody Blues, brilliant omelettes on Sunday mornings, awful tea which was always too milky, and that sense of self-confidence that always surrounded him. He was what she'd taken for granted up. Right up until he was ripped away from her. Now, all those little things hurt.

So, she stamped down on them. She'd cried at the funeral, bawled into her brother's shoulder like a newborn baby, and then she and Jon had just continued living. She'd shoved all of it down deep inside and ignored it. They both knew their father would've wanted them to move on so they just... did.

And now here she was: in pain but trying very hard to ignore it.

Huh, she thought wryly, maybe she was the angsty kid forced to change schools. She deeefinitely had enough angst.

"How're you feeling today?" said Mr Davies, the school counsellor. He hadn't looked at her since she'd sat down. He was focused on typing her responses into a computer.

Oh, you're grieving? Click, clack, click, clack, click, clack.

How was she feeling today? She was feeling pretty damn bad. For the millionth time, she wished she had an addiction so that she could obsess over something else other than the thoughts crawling around in her head. Literally anything would do if it managed to take her focus away from herself for a minute. Cigarettes or cocaine or Gossip Girl.

"Miss Brennan? I asked you a question. Are you ashamed to tell me about your feelings?"

Nora clenched her jaw. Fuck you, she thought, you uppity little shit. Usually, she was a big supporter of mental health but she'd found that after spending hour after bloody hour with a man who seemed to be Freud and Jerry Springer's love child, she really couldn't stick counselling anymore.

She didn't want to talk to anyone about her father. She got it, she did. It was important. Mental health was very important. But the guidance counsellor opposite her was a portly, balding man who, during their first "session", had looked at her indifferently for all of ten seconds and then just read aloud from a checklist that lay on his desk. He wasn't in any way the inspirational, motivational, aspirational (anything, really, with 'ational' attached) person he thought he was.

Nora wasn't going to spill her heart out to the guy. She couldn't even spill her heart out to her God damn brother, so she wasn't going to start with some random teacher reading off a checklist. Guidance counselling wasn't her thing. And if Jon didn't have to go to counselling then Nora didn't think she should be confined to the nine circles of Hell either.

Of course, Jon was too old to be in high school so the bastard got away with it while she was forced to deflect her arse off until Mr Davies freed her from her misery.

"I'm going to take your silence as an answer, you realise," he said after a solid minute of silence.

Screw it.

"I'm feeling like chips," said Nora. "I was told that you guys call them fries here, right? Well, I'm feeling like fries then. Though, I've got to be honest with you: your version of fries aren't as good as the chips back home. I really miss chips. A lot."

"Miss Brennan."

"Yes? Mr...?" A quick glance at his desk revealed a name holder. "Huh, no kidding," said Nora mildly. "You're first name's R. So, R. Davies? Does the R stand for Roger by any chance? I'm a huge fan of JK Rowling."

Mr Davies' eyes made it clear that he was restraining himself from just telling her to leave. If the vein pulsing on his forehead was any suggestion, that restraint was probably going to lead to a brain aneurysm if he tried to restrain himself for much longer.

Nora wasn't actively trying to give her counsellor an aneurysm, obviously. She just reallyreallyreally didn't want to do this.

"Miss Brennan, you have attended two of these sessions so far with very little success," said Mr Davies. His lips were pursed and he was squinting at her as if she were an irritating bug. Which, right back at you, Roger. "I realise that moving to a new school and a new country is stressful especially given your situation but you need to take this seriously." He raised both eyebrows. "Do you think you can do that for me?"

"No." She'd thought about it. She really, really had."It's not you, it's me. I'm just not that into you. Picture every cliched breakup movie speech and apply it to you and me and our unfortunate situation." She leaned forward in her seat and sighed. "I know I need to go through the stages of grief or stare moodily at a lake or whatever but honestly? For now, I just want to try and figure out American schools. It's my first day. Last week, I didn't say anything because I hadn't officially begun but can I please be excused before I'm late for my first lesson?"

Across from her, he sighed, rubbing his eyes. "You can leave, Miss Brennan."

"Thank you."

With an utterly empty smile, Nora quickly hopped out of her seat, grabbed her satchel from the floor and headed out of the classroom. She breathed in a big gulp of fresh… hallway air. She wanted to go home already. But she couldn't go home until the gruelling day of torture in the form of high school education had ended. Joy.

She glanced down at her handy dandy school map and attempted to guide herself, a la Columbus, to her English class. Luckily, after a quick handing over of the sacred-new-girl-in-school-note to the teacher, she wasn't forced to introduce herself. She snagged the available seat near the back, beside a boy with hair that couldn't seem to decide on whether it was brown or red or both, and practically sunk down into her chair in an effort to escape the curious glances boring unrelentingly into her face. Nora had almost forgotten the fact that being a new student meant something to the rest of the student population.

The stares didn't last once the teacher left them to do their own thing. Instead, because the lesson was just individual study, the kids all buckled down to start analysing random chapters of their books together. Nora was so fucking grateful for laidback, hands-off teachers. She could start reading and highlighting like a maniac, and forget all about the horrific counselling session and the memories she had forcibly tucked away. She'd think about that later, in private.

For now, she would continue trudging through the day, pretending her life was an extended episode of Glee and that she'd unfortunately lost the remote. And man were these people chipper enough to get away with that comparison. She'd already been startled into silence that morning by some blonde kid named Mike who reminded her of a golden retriever on ecstasy. He'd appeared in front of her out of freaking nowhere and attempted to suavely guide her to the counsellor's office until her deadpan stare made him back the hell off. For a moment, she'd reconsidered her plan to puppy-dog-eye Jon into swindling her away into the forests to become feral children. The forest was plentiful; they might not find her.

But, no. She couldn't do that. Feral children couldn't watch Netflix.

Instead, she should probably make an effort to socialise normally at some point today. She offered her desk partner a smile. Or at least she hoped it was a smile. It was probably more of a grimace. The boy with the ambiguous hair colour (she was going to tentatively label it copper) offered a polite if a bit distant smile in response. Alright-y then. The thing is, Nora would usually be entirely on board with polite distance. But she'd just escaped the Counselling Session from Hell and anything that could stop her dwelling on her thoughts was a big hell yes in her book. Plus, Jon would want her to actually make an effort.

So, she did the unthinkable: voluntarily started a conversation.

"I'm Nora." She offered an awkward wave and nearly knocked his book off the table. "Shit. Sorry."

She figured it was a mix of first day in a new school and Jesus-Christ-I'm-living-in-a-new-country nerves.

"It's quite alright," said the boy. He did the polite smile thing again. "My name is Edward Cullen."

"Cool. Never met an Edward before. It's a pretty old school name, isn't it? But hey, at least people will always remember it, even if you're boring." Was that rude? She laughed weakly. "Sorry. My thoughts are kind of jumbled."

"I noticed," said Edward. She snuck a glance in his direction. Judging by his raised eyebrows, the laughter hadn't made her seem like any less of an idiot. Though, now that she'd looked at him properly, she realised that he was... absurdly flawless. Like, creepily so. She wondered how much time it took him to perfect his hair in the morning. It sort of looked like he was from one of those Ken doll-inspired boy bands that were becoming increasingly popular these days. She supposed he did look handsome, but in an irritating kind of way. He was all pale skin and sharp cheekbones, and part of her wanted to punch him just so his nose would resemble a human being's rather than an extra from 90210.

Though the longing to punch him was probably because his current expression made her feel like one of those seals clapping for an audience. Like she was amusing but also incapable of anything other than clapping at him.

Nora was not a seal.

She decided to ignore him. She'd done the introductory bit and was no longer stuck in a post-counselling haze, so mission accomplished and time to move on.

The class was reading Cormac McCarthy's The Road. The book in her hand was on loan from the school library and automatically fell open onto one of the most-analysed sections:

"Then he just knelt in the ashes. He raised his face to the paling day. Are you there? he whispered. Will I see you at the last? Have you a neck by which to throttle you? Have you a heart? Damn you eternally have you a soul? Oh God, he whispered, Oh God."

Here's the thing: her father had loved The Road. He'd made sure she'd read it too so he could talk to her about it. She remembered reading it outside in the summer. She'd been curled up under a blanket on the beach. Her house, her old house that is, was tucked between the dunes. Her father had brought her an orange juice.

She wanted all of that back: waves crashing, gulls crying, the strong scent of sea salt assaulting her nose. She wanted her father. But he was gone.

Nora stared at the words for a very long time, reading them over and over again. She wasn't religious. She never had been. Yet she couldn't stop herself -

Is he right? Are you there? she thought. And then, worse still: If you are, why did you do this to me? Why did you let him die?

"This book is so interesting, don't you think?" said her partner suddenly. He was reading over his notes, apparently unaware of the existential crisis he'd interrupted.

Nora swallowed tightly and discreetly wiped her eyes, hoping he didn't see. Don't cry. Your partner's talking to you so be a normal person and respond, Brennan. Come on.

She turned to face Edward. He had golden eyes, she noticed. Part of her blanched automatically. Were golden eyes a thing? Odd. She was staring at him for too long again, she knew, and should probably have felt bad about being so rude, but she was tired, and dazed, and The Road hurt to read and brought up buried questions, so she'd prefer to think about the fact that there wasn't a single blemish, scar or stray hair on Edward's face than the fact that she'd just tried to mentally yell at a God she didn't believe in.

Ignore it.

She kept staring because staring was so much easier. And really, the more she stared, the more Edward resembled a porcelain doll rather than a human being. Unnatural, her mind offered and the word fit.

"Do you think the man relies on God as the sole reason to continue?" said Edward, interrupting her thoughts yet again. "I mean, he exists to continue a biblical mission, guiding his son, so I suppose that would be the most sensible analysis, wouldn't it?"

She didn't say anything. Honestly, her head was still too far away for analysis. She really couldn't care less. And she really wouldn't blame him if he decided to spread rumours about her after this. Honestly, one attempt at a conversation and she'd already acted like a complete moron.

But Edward merely narrowed his eyes at her silence.

"I think," he told her as if she'd asked him for his opinion, "that the man realised that he's there to fulfil the role that God's given him. He thinks that the child is 'the word of God', right? Therefore, following the child is following God, Himself."

No, thought Nora. You're wrong.

"I'm going to assume you think I'm right," he continued, "and that the man's faith in God's will is what lets him keep his morality."

It was that conclusion that jolted her back into reality for a minute.

"I don't think that's what sustains him," she told him. It came out much quieter, and far less indignant, than she'd intended.

Okay, not fully jolted back to life then. She could feel the words on the page staring at her still.

"What do you think?" said Edward quietly.

"I think his love for his son sustains him," she said. The words continued to stare at her but she focused on Edward's question instead. "God may be present but He's indifferent to their suffering. The man's faith in the world and in God and in goodness is completely destroyed. But love is more powerful than faith. Look at the way the book talks about morality, for example. It's morality founded in love, not religion. The man teaches himself how to be one of the 'good guys', but he's not doing that because of God's will. He's doing it because every time he does do something bad, his son is upset. He loves his son and doesn't want his son to be upset so he chooses to act morally. It's his love for the boy that's the moral compass here, not God. I mean look at this," she added, flicking through to another page she could remember her Dad reading to her. "'If he is not the word of God God never spoke'," she read. "McCarthy's not making him God. He's just making the boy step into a position God should fulfil but fails to."

"Are you an atheist?"

She looked up at his question and her mind flitted back to earlier. "Does it matter either way?" she said, uncomfortable with the question. Am I? Or did I just want to blame someone?

"It matters," said Edward. He looked so sure of himself, too. "A religious person might not wish to imply that the world is godless, after all."

"I'm not saying that. I'm just saying that love is a stronger force than faith."

He tilted his head. "Do you really think that?"

Nora huffed, threading her fingers together and turning to face him properly. "Yes. The man is good because he loves his son. He's not being good for God. God's gone. He has to have faith in something stronger than his faith in God because God betrayed him and left him to his misery and that's not something he can ever forgive. You can't return to faith after something like that. But you can return to love. Because the man knows that loving his son won't lead to betrayal at all. Love's just love. And what's stronger than the love between a parent and child anyway? Pretty much nothing. So, love guides the man to be moral despite the fact that being moral has no purpose. They won't win if they're moral, and they won't be saved if they're moral, yet there they are," she gestured to the book, "striving to be the 'good guys' because they love one another, and love is strong enough that you can have complete faith in it, even in a world where faith has been destroyed."

She paused and felt her stomach drop once her words caught up with her. That... well. Her rant was a little too on the nose for her liking. She'd gotten too into it.

"Sorry," she said, embarrassed. She hadn't planned to reveal all that. She felt scraped raw.

"Don't be," said Edward. "You have a unique perspective."

His voice was different now. Not as smooth to listen to. She looked up. He was observing her in return, expression unreadable. Again, it felt like their conversation had another layer beneath the surface. And she knew it was there, knew something had passed between them, but she couldn't quite figure out what that something was. She considered asking but she had an inkling that if she did, he would lie.

Suddenly the school bell released a loud ring. Chairs scraped back and the sound of chattering erupted. The suddenness of sound made her realise how quiet the entire lesson had been as if everyone around them had been muted.

Nora pushed her thoughts aside for later dissection. For now, she'd accept the enigma sat beside her. She had enough in her head to deal with without forcing herself into someone else's. Besides, Edward had actually helped a lot over the past hour, even if he was unaware of it. Talking about God and love and father's... it had soothed something in her mind that had been fragile and ready to break.

"That was good," she said to him, feeling incredibly awkward. "The debate, I mean. Thanks. And, uh, it was nice to meet you."

"You too, Nora," said Edward. He was still looking at her curiously but the intensity had faded. He seemed to mean it. Even if he made her wary, she still felt that he was being sincere.

But Nora had had enough sincerity for now. Their conversation had refreshed her and, with that, came her usual deflection tendencies. "If you'll excuse me, I'm going to go brood my way through the rest of the day. See you next time, Edward."

At the door, Nora turned back to smile at him. It was a quick, blink and you'll miss it smile. It was far more real than any of her expressions had been.

He smiled back. His was more real too.