A/N: Sheesh, what am I thinking? I'll probably delete this. Tomorrow. Unless somebody likes it, which is doubful.

I know what you're thinking. Why would this Edward guy even bother?

Believe me, I was just as surprised as you. I'd come from Arizona, where 90% of everybody was tan and amazingly good-looking, and while I'm not grotesquely deformed or anything, I'm not gorgeous, either. I'm just Bella Swan: fish-belly pale, on the skinny side, and about as toned and fit as a flatworm.

So here I was, first day at Forks High School, and suddenly the boy next to me, with goldish-brown hair and even paler skin than I had, is giving me an intense glare. It wasn't anything romantic. More like, aha, there's that girl who was in front of me in the lunch line and got the last tamale! Bitch!

I knew who he was already; his whole family had paraded in during lunch that day, all dressed in whites and pastels, sitting at their own table like they had better things to do than mingle with other high-schoolers. Or maybe they were just shy. Or maybe, like this boy, this Edward Cullen, they were all psychotic.

Who're they? I'd asked my exceptionally-new friend, Jessica Stanley--four feet ten inches of curly hair, smiles, and garrulous enthusiasm. The ones who look like they're dressed like angels or something.

She'd taken a quick peek to confirm who I was talking about and giggled. The Cullens, she's said and smiled like she knew a secret. She'd named every one of them, which I thought was pretty impressive. I couldn't name anybody but my friends back in Phoenix. Our classes were huge.

And then she said they were all adopted or foster kids or something who never talked to anyone.

So that left me, here, with one of the Cullens.

At first I was just kind of uncomfortable, waiting for Mr. Banner to begin talking about...I don't know. Whatever stuff they talked about in Biology II. The life cycle of the cicada. Turnips. Anything.

But Mr. Banner was turning out to be the laid-back kind of teacher who waits two thousand years to start class after the bell's rung, and anybody I knew at all was sitting with their partners across the room. Like Jessica, the short girl who'd showed me around this morning. I would have adored having Jessica as a partner. I mean, I got the feeling she was only being nice to me because I was The New Kid, but I liked her anyway. She was chatty, she was fun.

And, unlike some partners, she wouldn't have been staring at me like she had laser-beam vision.

"Okay," I finally said in exasperation to the boy next to me. "You're Edward, right? Jessica was talking about you during lunch."

He paused, then nodded the most pathetic nod in the world. His head might have moved a centimeter.

"Um, can you talk?" I asked.

He paused again. "Yes," he muttered.

"So, would you mind telling me why you're staring at me like I ran over your grandma?" I asked without bothering to be polite. I mean, okay, it was rude, but he was staring at me. Politeness had kind of gone out the window already. "Or are you just spacing out?"

His knuckles clenched on top of the table, so they turned from mostly-white to entirely-white, and he quickly stowed them underneath the tabletop, in his lap. "I suppose I'm...spacing out," he murmured.

Well, I wanted to say, you look like you're a superb creep. An admittedly very good-looking creep, but a creep nonetheless.

You'd think he'd quit being weird after twenty, thirty, maybe forty-five minutes...but no. He was silent and frosty toward me the ENTIRE TIME. And not in an "I'm paying attention to the teacher" kind of way. He made a big deal out of scooting his chair as far away from me as possible. Then he leaned to the side and practically held his nose like I smelled bad.

Normally, I'd be really embarrassed, because this rather attractive guy was implying that I needed to shower. But I knew for a fact that I smelled fine. If you were going to a new school for the first time, wouldn't you take a bath and put on deodorant like six times and even wear a little scented body spray? Yes. You would. And so did I. In fact, I smelled a lot like a ripe strawberry by now.

But maybe Edward Cullen had an aversion to strawberries, because the millisecond the bell rang, he jumped out of his seat and scrambled for the door.

"Sheesh," I muttered. "What a drama queen."

I hadn't expected anybody to respond, but somebody did: a male somebody.

"Yep," this guy said. "Don't worry about it--Cullen's always been like that."

I turned around to see a pretty cute boy, with blond spiked hair and blue jacket, giving me a wry smile. Maybe there was hope. Maybe Edward Cullen was the only boy at this school who hated strawberries.

"So it's not just me?" I asked.

"Definitely not," he grinned. "If I'd been lucky enough to get a spot next to you, I wouldn't have acted like him. Trust me," he picked up my books, which I didn't particularly appreciate because I wasn't into chivalry, but it was still really nice of him. "You're Isabella, right?"

"Yeah. Friends call me Bella."

"Maybe we should be friends, then. Isabella's kind of a long name."

"What's your name?" I asked as we headed out the door. "Nicodemus?"

"Mike," said Mike, satisfied with himself. "I win the name-shortness contest."

If you forgot how melodramatic my lab partner was, I was having an exceptionally lucky day. Mike Newton and I both had P.E. next, so we got to walk together, and true to his word, I got a new friend. It sort of seemed like most of the people in Forks had lived here forever, but Mike, like me, was a new kid once upon a time. He lived in California until sixth grade.

"So you had to move here in middle school?" my face turned genuinely sympathetic. "Yeesh. That's awful. Middle school's bad enough without moving to a new state."

"It was all right," he shrugged. "People here are friendly, more friendly than my old school. It's nice that everybody knows each other, you know?"

As you can see, it was pretty comforting to talk to Mike.

Continuing my lucky streak, I didn't have to even play volleyball with everybody else, because it was my first day (good for me, because I sucked), and it finally stopped raining by the time the last bell rang, and Jessica, who looked like she had about ten zillion friends anyway, decided to walk to the parking lot with me instead. Should've known it was too good to last.

We tugged on our coats as we passed under the fluorescent lights of the hallways, and for once, Forks didn't seem so bad. In Phoenix, you could never feel this cozy. It was always just...heat. But I still felt a little guilty about all the attention I was suddenly getting. I mean, it was terrific, but still. Something was nagging me in the back of my mind.

"Hey Jessica?" I asked as we walked. "If I ask you something, will you promise not to think I'm weird?"

"Well, duh. Go ahead," she said, but her face wasn't making any promises. She was already looking at me like I'd spilled tomato sauce down my shirt.

I bit my lip. "It's a dumb question...but uh, do you think people would still be this nice to me and stuff? If I wasn't the new kid?"

Jessica was silent. Which was weird for her. "Mike was looking at you a lot during P.E.," she said stonily.

"I know, and I'm not exactly beautiful," I said. "I'm thinking it's 'cause I just got here. So, if I'd been at this school forever, would you still be walking with me and all?"

She considered this. "You think Mike has a crush on you?" she asked.

"Not at all. I'm just different because I'm new."

She grinned, much happier. "Well, yeah, of course I'd still be friends with you."

"For real?"

"Yeah. I mean...if you were like Janice over there, probably not," she jerked her head toward a sullen-looking girl with pale skin and a skinny frame, leaning against the doorway and reading a book by herself. "But you're, you know, not. We'd be friends anyway, don't you think?"

I was about to give her a hey-not-cool look for being mean to Janice, but something stopped me. We were passing by the office, and my least-favorite person in the world was in there. Talking. I guess he wasn't a mute after all.

"Hold on, that's my lab partner," I muttered with distaste. "Want to see what he's up to?"

"Oh, I don't know if we should really be spying..." she told me without much conviction. It didn't matter, anyway, because in about five minutes we were perched against the back wall, peeking around the side window.

"What, does he have a huge crush on you, too?" Jessica said, irritated.

"He hates me," I said cheerfully. "He acted like I smelled bad all through biology today, and didn't say a word to me."

"Oh. Well, you smell fine," she told me, going back to staring at the Cullen kid. "Speaking of biology, he's trying to quit the class."

"Terrific!" I cheered under my breath. Except then, something hit me. "Wait a sec...you don't think he's trying to be all dramatic and drop out just because of me, do you?"

"That'd be embarrassing," she said with a giggle. "But maybe he can't stand how normal you smell."

I frowned. "Hold up, she's not letting him switch."

"You should go talk to him," Jessica urged me, still giggly. "Tell him what a jerk he's being."

"Okay, that sounds like a terrible idea."

"So you'll do it, right?"

I sighed angrily as Edward turned around and saw me. He gave me this awful glare, even worse than in biology class, which just pissed me off. I mean, what did I ever do to him?! I'd never find out if I never asked. "Yep," I told Jessica, stepping out from our hideout to face Edward head-on.

"So. Trying to drop biology?" I asked, being as friendly as possible. No, really. I was smiling and everything.

He gritted his teeth together and avoided looking at me. "Yes. I've already learnt the material. To take the class is a waste of time."

"Well, I took biology last year, too," I said, trying to sound sweet but confident. I also couldn't believe this guy just used the word learnt. "But it obviously doesn't make me smarter than anyone else. It's not like you're the world leading expert on biology, you know."

His face was a weird mix of hate and surprise. Edward wasn't glaring anymore, but his nose was wrinkled, like, what does this chick think she's doing?

"Plus, you still want me as a partner, of course," I said, sarcastic but a little less certain. "Right? I mean, I'm not a genius or anything, but--"

"Are you...always this talkative?" he interrupted quietly.

I looked at him stupidly. "Well. Yeah."

He stared at me with another strange look on his face (man, this guy never seemed to run out of those). "I have to go," he said suddenly.

"Where?" I asked.

The bastard didn't answer me. He just stormed out of the room like I'd insulted his perfectly-gelled bouffant.

Jessica, of course, thought this was all roaringly funny, and teased me about it all the way back to my car. I probably should've felt insulted--okay, I did feel a little bad--but as I turned on the ignition of my spunky old '53 Chevy, I realized that maybe this wasn't a bad thing.

So this weird guy had found me inexplicably repelling. Splendid! With any luck, I wouldn't have to deal with him ever again. At least, not outside of the bio classroom. And maybe he had a point, I thought in the middle of listening to an old classical music CD. I was a little on the weird side, what with my beat-up truck and…interesting musical taste. If he didn't want to associate with me, fine.

When he didn't show up the next day, I considered it doubly splendid.

And the day after that--tripley splendid.

When he didn't show up the rest of the week, I thought I'd gotten used to it. So what if I didn't have a bio partner, right?

But he stuck around in my head, popping up when I didn't want him to. I'd be lounging around the school lawn with Mike, laughing about some stupid made-for-TV movie we'd both seen, and pop, the Edward kid would zip into my head. Or I'd be taking my first math test at Forks High School, racking my brain for the formula of an elongated conic section, and pop, I'd think of Edward Cullen insead.

I didn't know why. I hardly knew him. I wanted to wipe him away from my memory, which would hopefully stop him from taking up valuable brain space that could be used for remembering conic section formulas.

But, looking back, it probably didn't matter how hard I tried to forget the Cullen kid that first week.

I didn't know what was coming on Tuesday.