I posted ten chapters before I stopped writing; those chapters have been CONDENSED and REWORKED into the first seven chapters. So you might want to start reading from the beginning, to refresh yourselves and check for anything that's changed.

The Spinner In Forks: Twilight

A year and a half ago, Maureen Stanley moved to Forks. It's been a peaceful place, if one ignores the angsty, patronizing vampires at school. Surely no one can be stupider than that. But someone new is coming to town, and our little Mary Sue is in for a rude surprise.

Forks may be an apathetic town, shallow and contrived. But it has very specific ideas about who matters and who doesn't, and a very specific plan for those people. That plan is about to unfold.

This story is preceded by my fic A Place Where No One Lives. It begins right on the heels of where that fic ends. Go to my author page to read it, if you want a full explanation of who Maureen Stanley is, and how (like most Mary Sues) she's not just an ordinary human.

A Poor Introduction

Months passed. A year went by. And second by second in the numb town of Forks, Maureen Stanley lived.

Her dislocated shoulder felt bruised and achy for a time, but by the end of December it was like it had never happened. Maureen was glad…excessively so. If the dislocation had been the only part of her incident, she would have merely regarded it as a warning for the future. But because of the result of her injury, the pain had been a reminder that she'd allowed a web of pointless drama, spun by idiots, to disrupt the peaceful life she was trying to make for herself. Now it was over and done. She could go back to ignoring the things that didn't matter to her, and focusing on those that did.

Her birthday was in January. Maureen went to a nice restaurant with her Aunt, Uncle and cousin Jessica, but she decided against having a large celebration. As much as Jessica protested, ("come on, it's a great reason to throw a really big party!") Maureen didn't like the idea of inviting a horde of high schoolers into the house, most of whom she didn't know very well.

She still didn't know anyone very well. But Maureen did have some friends at school, acquaintances whose company she valued. She and Mike Newton would sometimes team up on school projects if they shared a class, and when she felt lonely she would hang out with Jess, Beth and Angela. Maureen had no illusions. These people were friends of necessity, people she spent time with just because she wanted people to spend time with—not because they shared similar interests. This didn't make them lame, or inferior. They just were who they were.

She got her intermediate driver's license in the middle of March, and was allowed to drive Jessica and herself to school. But Aunt Joan, while willing to let the girls borrow the car to get to school, expressly forbid anyone else under twenty getting in the car. Despite her 'illegal' trip to the Quileute reservation with Mike, Maureen upheld this rule. When Mike pointed it out, Maureen admitted her hypocrisy and confessed that she simply didn't want to risk it, now that it was her behind the wheel.

"Tell you what, Mike." She said. "If you need a favor, I'll break the rules and give you a lift. But no one else."

Jessica, who got her own license three weeks later, discretely broke the no-driving-other-teens rule on a regular basis. Maureen reminded her of the penalties of being caught, but didn't rat her out. This proved beneficial in the long run—Jessica was deemed a 'safe driver', and her parents helped her buy a used white Mercury. Now it was much easier for Maureen and Jessica to go places without parental supervision.

I'll get a car for myself one day. Maureen thought. Later. Not now.

They passed the 10th grade, and Maureen got to watch the monochrome tones of Forks in Winter explode into a mass of color as Spring went into overdrive. Admittedly, the mass of color was mostly shades of green. And everything was still muddy, wet, and frequently cloudy. But the air grew warmer, the flowers bloomed, and the world came back to life.

Maureen spent her summer in a flurry of activity. Without school, all her days were free. She would hike through the wilderness, starting at dawn and returning at dusk, foraging pack full of fiber plants. She drove herself to a sheep farm and bought bags of wool, freshly sheared and in desperate need of washing and carding. She signed herself up as a vendor at a crafts fair in Port Angeles, and sold enough of her work that she decided to set up her own website, in order to keep making money the whole year round. She was forever dressing hemp and nettles, spinning and weaving and knitting and sewing. The days flowed together joyously, and Maureen was deliriously happy.

This is what makes life worth living. She thought. She barely noticed the occasional blur of a Cullen running through the woods as she foraged for plants.

September brought the splendor of summer to a screeching halt. Maureen suppressed her frustration as best she could. She was a Junior now—only two more years until she was done with high school forever. She could handle that.

The classes were much the same—some different teachers, some slightly different subjects, but same old schedule and same old kids. Mike came back with a tan—he'd spent part of July and August in California with his grandparents. He was immensely pleased with his new color, and grumbled loudly as the Washington cloudbank turned him pale again. Maureen patted him reassuringly on the back, then told him to shut up already. Jess had gotten slightly more mature over the summer. She was better about not blurting out the wrong thing, though she still loved to gossip...and pester Maureen about please putting in a good word for her with Mike.

Everyone else was more or less the same—Angela Weber was still pleasant, Lauren Mallory was still a bitch. And of course, the Cullens were exactly the same. It boggled Maureen; how nobody noticed that the five of them were completely unchanging, physically as well as emotionally. Maureen hadn't really spoken to any of the Cullens in months—the last time had been in December, when she'd cornered Rosalie so she could return Alice's fashion prints. Rosalie had thanked her, and asked how she was. They'd made small talk, but the conversation was short. And of course Maureen had talked with Edward…they shared some classes, and occasionally had to collaborate. But their interactions had been exceedingly formal, polite to the point of being painfully awkward. Maureen assumed Edward was trying to suppress his distaste of her—certainly none of Maureen's thoughts were particularly nice, especially regarding Edward himself.

This new school year proved to be somewhat different. While the Cullens still sat alone, and considered Maureen an outsider, she was distinctly less of a stranger...as if her knowing they were vampires made it okay for them to sort of talk to her. They greeted her in the halls, with a casual 'hi' or 'hello', and Jasper would give her a thin-lipped, painful smile. If one of them had a question, there was a better chance of them asking her, then simply getting Edward to read her mind. And Maureen and Edward seemed to have developed a better kind of truce. She knew he still thought she was a rude bitch, and she still thought he was an absolute douchebag. But when class activities required them to speak, there was less repressed hostility. Like neither of them had enough cause or energy to really hate the other.

Halloween passed. Then Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's. Maureen's life continued in pleasant routine. The website she'd set up to sell her crafts was doing nicely. Although most of what Maureen sold were the hats, scarves and whatnot she'd made on her own, after people began asking her for specialized items Maureen started accepting a certain amount of commissions each month. It was enjoyable work, and although the profit she made was neither large nor consistent, Maureen was content with it. Occasionally she would receive e-mails from people suggesting or outright telling her that she should expand her store, start churning out popular items in mass production. Maureen wrote back that she had no desire to stress herself in that way. Eventually she stopped responding to those people, or to most of the people who e-mailed with various complaints. The most baffling email was from a woman who complained that the sweater she'd bought from the site looked 'homemade'. Maureen wrote back that it was homemade, and if the woman wanted a sweater that looked store-bought, she should go to Wal-Mart.

January came around again, and Maureen turned seventeen. It was another quiet party, just with her family. Uncle Thomas had wondered about inviting Maureen's Father and stepmother to come up from Sacramento and visit, but Maureen had persuaded him not to call them.

"If they can come, they'll call." Maureen said.

They never called. That had been one of Maureen's hopes, in coming to Forks…that her Dad and stepmother would slowly start to emotionally forget her. The California where her parents lived was a long way away from the Washington where she was. The fact that they'd sent Maureen to live with her Aunt and Uncle of their own free will had made the transition smoother. Maureen would be more easily misremembered, until they would cease to worry about her at all. She would miss them, Cathy and her Dad. Maureen knew that. But it was another tie cut, another step towards freedom. Freedom that meant living here, in Forks, devoted to her work. Maureen continued to spin yarn, to knit or weave it, and sew clothing on her machine. She ignored Jessica's constant gossip, did her homework and kept herself busy. She narrowed her world to a comfortable size, to school, acquaintances, chores and her fiber crafts. In this numb town of Forks, nothing more was necessary.

The day after her birthday, Maureen woke up with the sudden urge to smile.

Forks is happy. She thought, seeking a reason for her good mood. It's happy, and it wants to shout it to the skies.

Maureen was baffled. Forks was many things…apathetic, peaceful, choosy, preachy. It had even been excited once or twice. But it had never been happy.

Maureen sat up in bed, chewing on her thumbnail as she concentrated.

This place is happy. She thought. Very happy. But it's also intense: excited and desperate at the same time. Those are negative emotions. Except it…it doesn't think of itself as being negative in any way. All is positive.

Maureen didn't like it. It wasn't the vaguely numb feeling she was used to. This place was normally like touching your tongue to anesthetic. For it to be so worked up was unsettling.

"Calm before the storm." Maureen muttered to herself. "Or the storm's already here, and no one knows it."

Maureen drove herself and Jessica to school in the Mercury, trying to will the world back into numbness. It didn't work. Maureen spent the whole day looking over her shoulder, as if she expected something to jump out behind her.

"You've been jerking around like crazy." Jessica said at lunch. "Have you got some kind of nervous tic?"

"She's been looking at your face!" A boy hooted from a nearby table. Jessica chucked a balled-up napkin at him, there were more whoops and cackles.

"Idiots." Jessica said.

"I'm fine." Maureen said. "Not sure why I'm sitting with you for the third day in a row, though."

"Because you've been lonely, and we're cousins, and we need to bond." Jessica said.

"And because you leave your science homework sitting defenseless on the table while you knit." Lauren Mallory said, sliding Maureen's notebook back across the table.

Jessica looked sheepish. Beth giggled. Angela, ingénue that she was, was blissfully listening to a CD player, and had not heard Lauren.

"Don't mess up my papers while you're cheating off of me." Maureen said casually. "Or I will make you regret it."

"You don't care that I copied the answers?" Lauren said, raising an eyebrow. It was a trick she'd learned during Fall semester, and she kept showing it off. "I thought you didn't want to be my friend."

"I don't." Maureen said. "Make no mistake—it's apathy, not the desire to curry favor from you. Honestly, it's your loss. I coast, but at least I do my own work. You're the one who's going to leave here totally ignorant, not me."

"I don't need to know about cells and junk." Lauren said. "I'm going to be famous."

"Not for the Nobel Prize in Science, that's for damn sure." Maureen muttered, half-absorbed with the honey-colored scarf she was knitting.

Maureen arrived at Biology II early, before her desk mate (or most of the class) had come in. She dropped her book bag on the table, then leaned diagonally across the aisle and tapped Edward Cullen on the shoulder. It was like tapping her forefinger against a cement block.

"Sorry to disturb your highness." She said. Despite her choice of words, she kept the sarcasm out of her voice. "Does Alice see anything strange about to happen?"

Edward turned around, glaring at her patronizingly.

"No." He said. "Why?"

There was no way she was explaining it to him.

"Nothing." Maureen said. "It's probably just PMS."

Edward's eyes narrowed.

"Please stay out of our business." He said.

"I am just talking to a peer at school." Maureen hissed. "I don't care if you're worried that being chummy with me is a threat to your family. I'm unappetizing, remember? This whole school is more of a threat that I am. And yet you and your siblings come to high school day after day, even though it's dangerous, even though you all hate it. Want to play at being teenagers without having to bitch about it? Say you're being home schooled."

"Home school isn't the norm. We are trying to blend in." Edward said, speaking low enough that Maureen had to strain to hear.

"Well you're doing a piss-poor job, given your other motive is to keep people away." Maureen said.

"At least I'm not letting a girl I hate copy off my homework." Edward retorted.

Oh, go fuck a duck! Maureen thought angrily, sitting back down in her seat. Bad enough Edward dismissed her whole personality as cruel and acerbic. He still insisted on using his telepathy to validate his dislike of her.

Maureen felt Forks readjust itself slightly over the course of the afternoon and evening—she tasted the numb feeling on her tongue again.

This place is still unsettlingly happy. She thought. But I can ignore it if I want. Thank goodness.

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