Jealousy, jealousy, jealousyIt's such an evil thing to watch someone have
-Paris Hilton "Jealousy"
Chapter 1: It's never too late to send out all the invitations to the last night of your life
It all started when Phil killed my mom. If it hadn't been for that event, I wouldn't have ever tried to escape to Washington. I would have never been depressed and miserable, avoiding every single normal person and I wouldn't have gravitated to the Cullens. I wouldn't have met Edward, and lost all sense of myself. I wouldn't be tied up to this chair, staring at the evil she-beast across the room who was planning my death. I wouldn't be praying for salvation.
But I was never good at staying out of trouble.
I'm getting ahead of myself. My name is Isabella Swan, or Bella for short. I am 19 years old. I've spent the last three years living with my mother and my step dad Phil. Phil is a nice guy. Even after everything that happened, I can't hate him. Even if he did end my mother's life. Phil plays minor league baseball, or at least, he did. So when they got married, they wanted to ship me off to live with my real father so I could have some stability. Instead, I dropped out of school and got my GED.
If only I had known I would end up in Forks either way. Maybe it was fate.
In every way, I am painfully average. White female, six inches over five feet tall. My hair is a chestnut brown color, and my eyes are a completely typical shade of hazel. I'm neither breathtakingly beautiful or ugly. Just average. It's no wonder my love life has been pretty much empty. Between traveling and not sticking out, nothing ever really happened.
So I made my way to Forks, Washington, where my father was the well-respected Charlie Swan- Chief of Police. A sleepy, quiet town that had little to offer me besides a quiet escape… Or so I thought. Charlie helped me get a job as a switchboard operator at the police station during the day, and at night I enrolled in a cosmetology school.
I was walking home from class one night when a series of events, which I can only label as unfortunate now, occurred to change the course of my life. What was left of it, anyway.
"Hey, wait up!" Yelled a shrill voice from behind me. I paused and looked back to see a small girl running towards me. She was bundled up in several layers of clothes, which only served to make her seem even tinier then she was. She was extremely pale, with dark brown hair that looked black in the light of the few streetlamps in downtown Forks. I stopped walking and let her catch up to me. She was delicate, probably only about five feet tall and very slim. She was like a little pixie or some kind of creature that lived in the trunks of trees and baked you cookies.
"Did I drop something?" I asked. She chimed a musical laugh, her dark eyes glittering.
"No, I just thought maybe you'd want to walk home together. It can be dangerous out here." She replied as she linked her arm in mine and started walking the way I'd been heading. For as small as she was, her arm felt surprisingly strong.
"Dangerous? In Forks?" I rolled my eyes. "I doubt it. Besides, everyone knows who my dad is."
"Who's your dad?" She asked. She looked so serious with her eyebrows knit together as she bit down on her bottom lip.
"Chief Swan? I'm Bella Swan. Don't tell me you're the one person in Forks who doesn't sit around and gossip."
"Oh.. You're the chief of police's daughter?" She asked as some of the enthusiasm left her voice.
"Why do you sound so bummed out at that?" I asked after nodding. She seemed caught off guard by my question.
"I just thought you'd be fun to hang out with, but the chief's daughter probably likes to stay out of trouble." She said with a wink.
"I can still have fun." I protested. "I don't live with him or anything. What kind of fun did you have in mind?"
"I can't tell you." She sang in a teasing tone. She stopped abruptly. "But, prove you can keep up with us."
"What do you mean?"
"We're meeting tonight out in the woods. It's a full moon you know. If you can find the clearing, you're in."
"Um. Okay." I sounded unsure, which I was. What was I getting into?
"Just follow me." The girl said. She leaned in close and kissed the tip of my nose before letting go of my arm and running into the woods at an unbelievable speed. I stared at her in disbelief. Did she really expect me to run through the woods in the middle of the night? I could barely see into the woods, it was so dark. I saw a bright figure far ahead, and the unmistakable flutter of her white scarf. I took a deep breath, and started walking into the woods.
"You're going to have to move faster then that!" she yelled from ahead of me. This was insane. There was no path, just trees everywhere. I looked up and the sky was clear. It was a crisp night, and the man in the moon was staring down at me with a grin. This was insane.
But I stepped forward. I started moving quickly through the woods. Or at least, as quickly as I could stumble. I don't know what compelled me to move forward. Fate? Insanity? Perhaps I just didn't even care if I got lost in the woods and died. I felt hopeless, and the thought that I could always turn around and go back to my boring one bedroom apartment didn't do anything but spur me forward.
"Where are you?" I yelled. I heard giggling. To my left? I couldn't see ahead of me. The moon illuminated just enough to cast strange shadows on everything. I tumbled ahead blindly. A flash of white to my right, and I followed it. More giggling, this time behind me. I stopped and turned around but saw nothing. I continued forward. To the left, I saw an orange glow from behind some trees. A fire? I started to make my way toward it. I could see dark figures dancing around the flames, and as I got closer I could hear music. I saw the little pixie girl dancing with a tall girl. A tall guy stood near them laughing. I was almost to the clearing. I could see another boy sitting sullenly on a scraggly folding lawn chair by the fire.
"Finally!" I exclaimed as I was starting to step out of the tree line and into the clearing. My ankle caught on a tree root, and I saw everyone turn just as I did a faceplant into a tree before falling to the ground. Nice.
"Bella? Are you okay?" The pixie girl asked in between bursts of laughter. The tall girl- a leggy blonde I recognized from the cosmetology class- and the tall guy didn't try to hide their laughter. The boy who had been sitting in the chair stood up with his thick eyebrows stuck in a painful expression.
"I'm fine." I groaned as they helped me to sit down on one of the lawn chairs by the fire. My head was splitting.
"Well, she knows how to make an entrance." The tall guy said. He was easily over six feet. He had dimples and a boyish charm to his face. Dark, short curls danced around the tops of his ears.
"Here, this will help. Open your mouth." the pixie girl said to me. I obeyed, and she stuck a pill on my tongue before handing me a cold beer to wash it down with.
"Alice, you're being rude. Don't you think she deserves introductions?" The tall guy asked again.
"Why? She won't remember them once that pill hits." the tall blonde girl said with a catty laugh.
"Oh! Of course. I'm Alice, and this beautiful girl is my best friend Rosalie." The pixie girl said as she twined an arm around the tall girl's impossibly thin waist. She was easily two or three inches taller then me with an adorable heart shape faced and a perfect hourglass figure. What did she give me? Too late for that, I guess. I tried to push the worry from my mind.
"I'm Emmett." He held out his hand and I saw double. He laughed and I could feel it rumbling in my chest. Was I laughing too?
"What about you?" I asked the quiet boy with the intimidating eyebrows. He was standing off to the side, his hands shoved down deep in his pockets.
"I'm Edward." He said. His face in that moment will always be burned in my mind. He looked in pain, torn over something. His hair was chestnut, only unlike mine had rich overtones of red. He had pale skin, high cheekbones, and a strong jaw line. "I just met them tonight." He added as an afterthought.
"At least I'm not the only new kid here." I said. My voice sounded strange and foreign to me. Edward sat in the other lawn chair and pulled it closer to me.
"I'd ask you to dance, but after that scene I'm going to guess…" He trailed off.
"Not a good idea." I said as I paused to take a gulp of my beer. The heat from the fire was sweltering, even on this chilly night. "Even on a good night it'd be a bad idea."
Edward looked down at his hands and chuckled. He had long fingers and a thin frame. He was about as tall as Rosalie, so about average for a man. He had a cleft in his chin and a sorrow in his green eyes. I saw his pulse pounding in the hollow at the bottom of his neck, and I felt like pressing my lips to it just to see if I could count his heartbeats. My head was starting to swim.
"Alice?" I asked in the direction of the pixie-girl. She nodded, seemingly delighted that I had remembered her name. "What did you give me?"
She laughed and shook her head as she slowly walked towards me. The shadows the flames threw made her face look scary. It almost looked like her teeth were growing sharp, like fangs. I looked at Rosalie and Emmett. Their faces looked the same. Edward was turned away from me.
"Hey, Bella?" Alice whispered in my ear. I startled. I hadn't realized she'd gotten so close to me.
"Yes, Alice?" I asked nervously.
"Run."
My blood froze. My heart stopped. Insert any cliché for fear that you can think of, because I felt it. I stood quickly and tried turning, but my feet had that prickly half-asleep feeling to them. I tripped over the chair and fell. The trio was laughing again. I tried running, but my legs wouldn't cooperate and I fell again. I started moving as fast as I could on all fours.
"Alice, why are you doing this?" Edward asked. He sounded sad. I turned to plead with him for help. Nothing was making sense to my drugged mind. "I believe you, just let her go."
But my arm twisted, and I fell before I could finish turning. My head hit something hard, and everything got fuzzy as it slowly turned black.
Lordy, Lordy, Lordy!I can't help it i like to party, it's genetic!It's electrifying, wind me up and watch me goWhere she stops, nobody knowsA good excuse to be a bad influence on you
- Pink "Bad Influence"