I don't own Twilight and I'm so poor I'm practically homeless. No copyright infringement intended, yadda yadda yadda.
We found out on the baseball diamond.
"Carlisle, No," Alice whined mid-pitch, dropping her pointed toe back to the mound and letting the ball roll out of her fingers, that familiar blank look in her ochre eyes.
Behind her, in the outfield, Carlisle sighed and his shoulders dropped. He cast his gaze downward as she whipped around to face him.
"Why?" Alice implored.
I straightened out of my catcher's stance and raised an eyebrow at them. Emmett stepped out of the batter's box and tapped his foot impatiently while Esme rose from the makeshift dugout and took a step forward. Rosalie harrumphed from left field and Jasper delicately kicked the bag at first base. We did the only thing we could do… wait to find out what Alice had seen Carlisle decide.
"It's for the best, Alice," my father said softly. Funny how quickly "my father" had gone from meaning Charlie to Carlisle.
The field was silent for several minutes as Alice digested Carlisle's brain and the rest of us held our figurative breaths to find out what gives. We had done this dance so many times before, it was tired. Alice always knew first, and she was incapable of keeping her mouth shut so she'd blow up the decision-maker's spot. Then we'd have to wait for the hands that changed our futures (usually Carlisle's) to find the words to express the choice to us. There was no point in trying to force it; he would have to tell us now, so we played the waiting game.
"We're going to move," Carlisle finally said.
Groans from the peanut gallery.
"I know you're all upset, but like I said, it's for the best. We need a real fresh start. It was foolish to think that a few miles would be enough for a substantial new beginning for any of us. We need a complete change of pace, a real commencement as a united family." He stressed the word any, so I knew he meant me.
"This is my fault, isn't it." It wasn't a question.
"Bella! No! Of course not." Carlisle answered emphatically.
"Oh come on, Carlisle. Yes, Bella, it is. We just got here, we're leaving already? I'm not going. This is ridiculous." Rosalie stomped her foot into the soft grass.
"I won't force you to, Rosalie, but we'll miss you dearly," Carlisle said quietly.
Rosalie scoffed loudly, arms crossed, and turned her back on him like she was a toddler.
"I'm sorry," I whispered. I knew they heard me. It was quiet for a pregnant pause.
"Come off it, Rosalie," Jasper spoke firmly. I was nearly shocked. I rarely heard him speak and I'd certainly counted him as my least likely defender. "We'd do it for you – shit, girl – we've done it for you, so don't act like you're so much better than her, like you're above doing a favor for your family. You know you're just gonna wind up back with us anyway so cut the crap and be supportive for once in your long-ass life," he drawled. A good Confederate upbringing made Jasper quite the southerner when he was chastising someone's behavior, it seems. It made me think about the values his mama must have instilled deep in him during his human childhood, so deep they resurfaced nearly two centuries later.
I gazed at him gratefully while simultaneously waiting for Rosalie's backlash. She smiled wickedly at him. "Anything to make sure you're not the weakest link again, eh Jasper? The chink in the armor of the Cullen family crest?" Rosalie wanted to fight. Come to think of it, Rosalie pretty much always wanted to fight, and she we good at it. But Jasper was a gentleman, through and through, and refused to spar with her.
"Yes, ma'am," he said, winking at her.
Her fists clenched up at her sides and she seethed silently, but it seemed that she was done for the day. "Where?" she bit out succinctly at Carlisle.
"Chicago," Carlisle said.
"Ugh, why?"
I knew she meant why, location wise, like "why Chicago." Little why. Big why had already been established. This was all my fault.
The short version of the story starts in the winter of 2005. My mom had recently remarried and was traveling the country with her new minor leaguer husband. The irony of my newfound skill playing baseball was not lost on me. I moved from Phoenix to Forks, Washington, to live with my dad so my mother didn't have to worry about leaving me home alone or missing Phil. Typical.
On a shopping trip to nearby Port Angeles with some newly acquired girlfriends, I wandered off on my own looking for a bookstore. Being the living catastrophe that I am, I got lost just as it was getting dark and wound up in a back alley with a drunken, would-be rapist and his loser friends. When he put his hands on my belt buckle, I uppercut him with all the strength in my body, which is not much, but I had happened to be wearing a diesel costume ring that sliced through the underside of his chin and he starting bleeding. A lot. He threw me to the street, cursing and gushing blood down the front of his dingy white t shirt. This did not sit well with his dickless lemmings, who, in their inebriated stupor saw my 5'4" 110-pound form as a threat. If it hadn't been three decades too late, I would have sworn they were on PCP. One of them, a short, greasy looking turd with beady eyes panicked, rushed forward and stabbed me, fucking stabbed me, right below my heart. It then became evident that you can't just stab a bitch and continue your sexual violation of her. They must have realized that there was a whole lot of not ok going on in the moment because they split real quick after Degenerate #2 went all West Side Story on me, and I was left in dark to die alone. Atypical.
I lay there in that dirty alley, sputtering up blood from my punctured lung, and waited. It was oddly peaceful, knowing I was about to die. I closed my eyes against the pain and waited for the reaper, who, thanks to Blue Oyster Cult, I didn't fear.
When I heard her voice like wind chimes cutting through the quiet of my eminent doom, I thought it was over. The sound was high and musical, otherworldly. The reaper sent an angel for me. She was whispering fiercely to someone whose reply I could not hear.
"I smelled the blood when I stepped out of the department store, I can't believe what's been done to her. You need to get here right now, Carlisle, she doesn't have long… Minutes, if that… Well where are you… When will you be here?... That's unacceptable, she's not going to last that long, you have to come do this! I've seen it Carlisle, she's ours!" I was a little pissed off. I wished my angel would have said something that I at least understood, tried to console me, or even just shut her beautiful mouth and carted me off to heaven. It was just my luck to get the crappiest angel of death ever.
"I can't… No, I can't…" she trailed off softly, sounding scared. I think I stopped listening then. This was the end, I could feel my heartbeats getting weaker and more infrequent. With my very last reserves of life, I opened my eyes to look at my angel.
Alice, from biology?
Oh that fucking figures. Send a high schooler to do an angel's job. Good one, God. Maybe I was actually going to hell and this was Satan's idea of a practical joke on the new guy.
Alice brought her face close to mine, distress in her deep golden eyes. "I'm sorry, Bella." She laid a soft kiss on my cheek, and then slid her brilliant, razor sharp teeth into my throat and across my carotid artery.
She might as well have doused me in kerosene and lit me on fire.
She repeated the action, sinking her mouth into my body, at my wrists, ankles, biceps and inner thighs.
That was about the time I figured out that something wicked this way comes. Angels don't bite.
When she drew her lips away from femoral artery, she looked up at me, pain contorting her perfect face. Listen bitch, I thought angrily, you bit me, don't act like this somehow hurts you more.
I now knew the truth, though, how hard it must have been for her to stop herself. I certainly couldn't.
I have very few memories of how the following three days progressed, but from what I can gather it went something like this:
Alice lifted my broken body into her arms, and preemptively clamped her hand around my mouth so that seconds later, when I started shrieking in the unadulterated torture that was ripped through my veins, it would be muffled and draw less attention. She raced through the backstreets of Port Angeles and loaded my crippled form into her yellow Porsche before nearly breaking the sound barrier speeding me home. "Home" was her house just outside of Forks where she and her family lived.
When we got there, Carlisle was waiting outside. He wrenched open my door and pulled me into his embrace to bring me into the house. Alice hadn't breathed since she spoke her final words to my human self.
They waited, my family, over my screaming, writhing body for nearly 72 hours without moving. I guess it really doesn't matter what species one is of, everybody is always obsessed with newborns.
At the tail end of my miserable suffering, when the scorching acid in me was slowly replaced with feeling in my fingers and toes, I was able to hear them speak.
"It should be any minute now," Carlisle anticipated.
"Can't wait," Rosalie shot sarcastically. "Explain this to me again?"
"I don't get the why, only the is," Alice intoned cryptically. "She's family. I saw it in a vision the minute I smelled her blood on the pavement."
"I'm very proud of you Alice, you've done a wonderful job." Carlisle said.
"The chief of police's daughter? That doesn't sound wonderful. We'll never be safe, Carlisle, ever," whined Rosalie.
"I've taken care of it," Jasper said. Jasper was the most strategic person in existence, I would later learn, and they trusted his judgment. I'm not certain on what exactly it was that he did; I never asked and I never wanted to. All I knew was that there had been a burial in a tiny cemetery in town and Charlie was torn apart.
When I woke up, I was a vampire.
That was nearly four years ago.
We moved about a week after my transformation, to Aberdeen, another small town about two hours drive from Forks. Carlisle's reasoning was that it would be less traumatic for me to be in a similar climate and atmosphere, keeping me far enough away to not kill my friends and family but close enough that I could still maintain a sense of familiarity in my difficult newborn years.
Since then, I've assimilated perfectly with my new family. When I was able to accept that it was vampirism or death, this was the clear choice. I understood that there were sacrifices (I'd never see my human family again, I'd never get to blame my bad decisions on alcohol, etc.) but in a careful cost/benefit analysis, I'd realized that this was the right thing. I'd rather be a version of me in a family that I love than, you know, dirt napping in Forks for getting sassy with a molester.
Not to say that it hadn't been hard. Being a Cullen was about family, respect and value… not the all consuming bloodlust that dominated every conscious thought. Those first few months especially, woo boy. I wanted to do well, really. But the raspy burning in my throat wasn't quenched by whitetail deer and the occasional unlucky mountain lion. It felt like a punishment I didn't deserve. I did battle with my self control HOURLY aaaand I might have slipped a few times. Emmett finds this hilarious, while I, years out of my change, am a bit ashamed.
Now I had it under my thumb. Or I did, until yesterday afternoon.
The first year, we went super incognito. Mainstreaming was too dangerous, and I needed constant supervision so I didn't maim three towns a day. The entire family stayed under the radar, taking turns teaching me important lessons in leeching.
In the following two years, I stayed at home practicing my control while the other "kids" started high school. Again. As it turns out, we matriculate a lot. I felt sort of like Sloth in The Goonies, the dangerous monster chained in the basement, my family's dirty little secret. But this year, it was going to be different. Carlisle and Esme had publically "adopted" me over the summer, and I'd started school as a freshman to Alice and Jasper's junior and Rosalie and Emmett's senior.
School was going so well. I had actually really missed it and was glad to be back, and I was proud of how easily I resisted snapping the necks of my classmates and drinking their blood in a murderous frenzy. Too proud, maybe, or cocky was the word. On an unceremonious day in April, I threw it all away.
It had been nearly two weeks since we'd hunted, but I wasn't going to be the one to bring it up. If my siblings could take it, so could I. I was hurting though. Each pulsing heartbeat in the cafeteria was torture, the throbbing resonated through me and made venom pool in my mouth.
Jasper kicked me under that table. "Stop," he said quietly. Poor empath, he felt my pain on top of his own.
"Sorry," I whispered meekly.
"I knew we should have hunted last night," Rosalie said, too quick for human ears. "Bella can't do it, we shouldn't try to force her."
"I can so! I just… I'm learning."
"Learning faster than you, Rosalie. How long was it before you were able to go back to school?" Alice asked. Rosalie scowled at her.
I looked gratefully at Alice, the girl who saved me in every way a person can be saved. She was my greatest ally and fiercest protector, my sister from the moment her teeth crossed my neck.
Rosalie was a little different. I loved her, truly, and somewhere deep inside her she loved me too. But nothing is ever gained from Rosalie without a hard fought battle. She was ferocious and loyal and I had to prove I was a Cullen before I could really be her family.
Now I was starting the process all over again.
That awful day, shifting in my chair at the horrific discomfort my thirst provided, I watched my human classmates eat their lunch. I looked intently at a blue-eyed blonde boy who's name I never cared to learn as he struggled to cut through his tough cafeteria bagel with a plastic knife.
I lunged forward when the efforts of his sawing forced the teeth of the knife into his soft palm and several little beads of blood spotted his hand.
"Bella, no!" Alice shouted, seeing the vision mere fractions of a second before I leapt at him.
She caught my ankle and slammed me into the tile floor, which cracked on impact. Jasper pinned my shoulders to the ground as I snarled with thirst and need. I let them hold me there, because I didn't want to be a killer. Again.
A teacher rushed over to offer help and Rosalie intercepted her. "She's epileptic. Please go call my father." Rose dug her heel into my ribs and I started seizing on the ground. I had never seen a seizure and certainly never tried to impersonate one, so I hoped what I was doing looked passable.
"Hold your breath," Alice whispered and Emmett hefted me into his arms, walking us quickly to the nurse's office.
"So close," Emmett said, a subtle grin tugging at his cheek. "Maybe next time."
I turned my head into his chest and bit him on the shoulder.
"Bitch," he whispered.
I didn't quite feel like joking. I had nearly exposed my family in a room full of hundreds of teenaged witnesses. The best I could do was wait for my father to come clean up my mess.
Carlisle had showed up quickly, shooting off medical jargon and collecting my siblings and I from the office.
We did what we could to cover our asses, but it was hard to convince the school of my preexisting condition when it, well, didn't exist.
That was all it took. Suspicions were arose and now we had to leave.
So for me, Chicago it was. I wouldn't utter a single complaint considering I was the catalyst behind the move. Add it to the list, I thought miserably.
I owed my family so much more than I could ever repay, even in the lifetimes that stretched out ahead of me.