Chapter One
It started, embarrassingly enough, in high school.
Bella was just an average girl.
She was the most unique girl in the world.
It all depends on who you ask.
She had average brown hair. But it was so dark it was almost black when she was outside at midnight or after she had just stumbled out of the shower – spiraling thickly around her shoulders and brushing against her long, graceful spine, finally stopping just short of her waist – and warm red in the sun. It crackled with electricity during summer and inflated in any humidity – which was an unbelievably hellish curse because living in Forks, Washington meant that humidity was constant.
She had average brown eyes. But that's only what it said on her driver's license. Her eyes were an unclassifiable color between yellowish-orange in sunlight and hazel in the dark. They were only truly brown after she'd been crying. They were never red-rimmed or bloodshot. Just brown.
She was an average 5'4". But she was never estimated to be that height. She had always refused to wear flat shoes and with her long proportions, many suspected she was taller. Yet she hunched her shoulders when she walked, always staring down at the ground, so she was just as often assumed to be short.
She worked at a neighborhood fast food restaurant. It was blatantly ordinary. And boring. She came home exhausted every night at ten, smelling of grease just like any other teenager.
She was very uncoordinated. The type of uncoordinated that pretty much guarantees you the last possible spot on any team sport. The type that ensures you drop your books and trip over your feet and fall out of chairs. But of course, it would be far too easy for Bella Swan to be simply and utterly uncoordinated. No. In fact, she could dance like an angel and sometimes even the way she fell was graceful – like falling stars or snow or leaves. She didn't know it, but every time she stumbled, she bit her lip. That subtle act was seductive enough to prevent all of the boys in school from breaking her fall. They were too star struck.
Her father was Charlie Swan, the police chief. He was an ordinary man, a structured man. Every morning, he ate breakfast at the diner at 7:34 sharp. He ordered the same thing every day. Lunch and dinner were the same way – almost ceremonious in their never-ending, rigid sameness. Every morning, every afternoon, and every evening, he ate and stared at the wall. Cut, chew, swallow. Cut, chew, swallow. He thought about his wife then, and the man he had been with her. It was the only time he allowed himself to reflect on the spontaneity that had once given him an ura of life and of progress. He had proposed a mere hour into their first date. Because Renee had been it. The one. And he had known once he heard her voice for the first time. Now, every time he heard Bella's melodic soprano, he remembered. He never let it show on his face then, he hid the sadness in his eyes, the age in the lines of his mouth when he was near her. It was a strain, but he'd never complain. It was only here, only in the diner that he let it show. Cancer. It takes from us only the most important thing – life. It leaves behind the memories. The shadows. And Charlie was afraid of his own. Every day. Cut, chew, swallow. Swallow the life he had thought he would have. Swallow the ambitious hope that had once made his smile so bright. And open his mouth for another dream. Every day.
It was her senior year. She was voraciously applying to colleges in New York City, knowing her grades were her only ticket out of small town anonymity.
That's when it happened. She was handing out fliers for the drama club, the debate team, and the choir all at once at the freshman extracurricular fair the first week of school. Cue the bad chick flick slow-mo scene. Her red-tinted hair was blown into her face by a meddling breeze and one of the fliers flew from her juggling grasp. She sighed and pushed it out of her face with one hand while grabbing the wayward handout from the feet of a boy. But it wasn't just any boy. It was Edward Cullen. And the only thing she could think as he smiled at her crookedly, his blue eyes hurtling through her orangish ones and clawing through her heart, was "oh shit."
