Twilight belongs to Stephenie Meyer. So does Life and Death.
I had never given much thought to how I would die.
Maybe that was why I was still going strong at 103.
When I decided to move to Forks, Washington to escape all that damn sun, I also decided to try going to high school. I had never done it before; I had been going to school in a monastery as a kid, and after I almost died of the Spanish influenza at seventeen I just never returned.
The high school in Forks welcomed me, even if they were a bit puzzled. I told them I was trying to stave off dementia, hoping to God talking about it wouldn't bring it on. They had me sit for some tests and decided I could start in the junior class, even though it was the middle of the schoolyear. I guess you learn stuff just from living.
On my first day I went to the office where you get registered and stuff. The clerk was a youngish person.
"Oh, you must be Ed Cullen," they said with a smile.
"It's just Edward," I corrected them. They gave me a puzzled look.
People often gave me puzzled looks when I corrected them. Maybe it was something about my voice.
They handed me a schedule and I left without saying good-bye.
My first class was English, and the teacher seemed friendly enough. I found myself a seat in the back and looked over the reading list. Chaucer, Falkner, Shakespeare, Brontë… mostly authors I had read at some point, but it was starting to be a while ago. A refresher would be good. A girl who sat next to me stared with her mouth open. I gave her a halfway friendly smile that I hoped communicated "please leave me alone". Not that I believed everything they said about teenage girls, but I had no particular desire to befriend one either.
Next class was government, and the teacher made me leave my cane at his desk, which meant at the end of the class I couldn't get up until I caught the git's attention and made him bring it to me, so I was late for my third class, Trigonometry. This vexed me, as I found the subject quite fascinating. I'd had enough machine jobs in my youth to appreciate its usefulness. I forgot what my fourth class was because I was so caught up in calculating secants, and then it was lunch.
The cafeteria was noisy and full of young people, so I took out my hearing aid. It didn't help much. The girl from English had apparently been assigned new guy duty. She came over and gestured for me to join her at her very crowded table. I didn't put my hearing aid back in for introductions: I picke up that the girl was Jessica, but missed the names of some golden retriever who looked like Edward Norton, a black kid who didn't like to talk, a sweet girl with long blonde hair who reminded me of a friend's granddaughter, and a not-so-sweet girl with longer, blonder hair and cold, hostile eyes.
Some Asian kid named Eric made a joke about going back to school to get girls, and while I chewed him out by coldly informing him that I had never been that interested in either gender, I noticed a group of people by a table in the corner.
They were all eerily pale, or maybe it was just the shadows playing an optical trick, but that's not what I found odd. They were all adults. No wonder the school had let me in. If they had rejected me and I had found out they had a thirty-year-old enrolled, I would have sued them.
On a closer look I realized most of them were probably in their early twenties or so. None of them had baby fat the way teenagers do. They were all impeccably groomed, not a single pair of jeans sagging, not a gut hanging out. They all clearly brushed their hair. Jessica tapped me, and I realized I had been gawking at them. Rather than making a fuzz about it she just named them all for me. Emmet was the thirty-year-old; his girlfriend Rosalie was the blonde one; Jasper was the one who looked ex-military; his girlfriend was the nearly bald Alice (I wondered briefly if she had gone through chemo and felt bad for her); and the prettiest one, who also looked the most bored, was Bella.
"Bella?" I said, reminded of the scene in MiB where Kay introduces Zzltpr and Bob. Bella sounded like such a modern name, and the others were what my friends' grandchildren would call "grandparent names". Jessica briefly explained that her actual name was Isabella, but that a name starting with "is a" just offered too many opportunities for teasing.
Bella glanced over at us. She didn't say anything. Emmet was talking about killing a bear with his bare hands.
My eyesight is so-so, but my hearing is actually pretty good. I need a hearing aid for close-up conversations, or rather to discern words in a sea of voices and background noises, but if I concentrate I can often do without.
Bella kept staring at me until I looked away. Apparently she didn't like being gawked at. I couldn't say I blamed her.
After lunch I had biology. I got there last and all but one seat had been filled: the one next to someone I recognized as Bella. As I walking to that seat my cane caught in a backpack someone had carelessly thrown on the floor, and I tripped. I caught myself on a nearby desk. When I looked at Bella to ask if she minded if I sat there, I saw her glaring at me with all the hostility someone with blood red contacts and a gothic look could muster.
"Fine," I mumbled, and sat down.
The whole class, which was about cell biology, she remained defiantly silent. I sighed. Most people keep chattering whether you are listening or not. It can be annoying, but at least you feel like you've connected.
The last class of the day was gym. I wondered if I should ask for an exemption form, using the excuse that I thought I had had a whiff of polio when I was young and was now unable to grow muscle. I dismissed the thought as defeatist. Instead I asked the teacher if I could lift weights in the corner instead of playing a ball game, and he let me.
At the end of the day I went home and read my biology text book. Then I went to bed. Maybe this going back to school thing wasn't such a good idea.