This is just a project I thought could be interesting. It's a bit outrageous, I know, but whatever. Not nearly as much dialogue as I normally do, but it's just going to be a short little story (and I mean REALLY short) before I update for anything else. Let me know what you think. Have mercy on me (:

Bella Swan

lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about
us!
Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies!

-Allen Ginsberg, Howl

I first see Edward Cullen through a curtain of wooden beads and pot smoke.

It is one of those times where you kind of see someone from behind or at a weird angle, and you're ninety percent sure they're gorgeous, but then they could potentially face you head-on and wind up being hideous. I narrow my eyes, trying to see him properly through the haze around my face and through the long strands of beading that hang over the open doorframe in front of me. Yep. Definitely gorgeous.

He has this ridiculous hair that looks like a red-brown box color that I used to dye my hair in high school, and his teeth are so ridiculously white that the kid can obviously have never had a drink of coffee or a cigarette a day in his life. He is standing beside Peter, whose house we are all in, and they're doing one of those bro handshakes with slapping and snapping and all of that other unnecessary shit. Peter claps him on the back once, introducing him to the harem of girls that Pete is currently trying to entertain. They all laugh at something Edward says that obviously can't really have been that funny, tossing their overly-processed hair and licking their lips. My fingers claw at the arm of the couch I am sitting on.

"What are you looking at?" Emmett whispers into my ear, his stubble tickling the skin where his lips are moving.

I turn to look up at him, flinching when his rough hand slides beneath the hem of my skirt. Forcing a smile on my chapped lips, I feign ignorance.

"Nothing," I say, leaning into his shoulder like I am expected to. I can't keep my eyes from flickering back through that curtain to the auburn-haired boy standing by the door with his hands jammed in his pockets.

It's the beginning of summer, and we've all come together under one roof like we always do, playing music and catching up and occasionally torching up a bowl or five. The air is hot and thick and the sun is turning the room a deep and vibrant orange.

Peter's apartment is where we always come. He lives in Upper Haight, in an apartment within an old Victorian that had been renovated into four pretentiously hipster living spaces. Pete's dad pays the rent, and we all use the space. The rooms are splashed with paint and random text from books and plays and movies, and the various furniture pieces are so worn in by all of us that the couch I'm sitting on as I watch Edward Cullen from across the room almost perfectly fits the contours of my body.

We've all been friends for what seems like forever-Rose, Alice, Emmett, and me-even though I've lived a different life in a different time before my mother and step-father, Phil, set me free into the world. I like to imagine myself as a free spirit, not to be tied down by anything substantial and to skip through life enjoying it in the way that it was meant to be enjoyed. Of course, this is a fairly recent enlightenment.

I attended private school in Southern California before beginning studies at Berkeley, earning the praise and congratulations of my paternal grandparents, my mother's clients, and my step-father's colleagues. My mom and Phil themselves were disappointed, of course, that I hadn't chosen their alma mater. Stanford University strangely held no appeal to me after I visited Berkeley the spring semester of my senior year. That was the first decision I was able to make against my parents wishes, and it felt good. I was to study English with a double minor in professional writing and journalism, and my conservative parents were proud regardless of the extreme liberal influence of the San Franciscan university.

My childhood had been fairly normal to the naked and uninformed eye. I'd been raised to be able to discern between what was "right" and "wrong" and I knew how to cross my ankles when I sat and how to make small talk with adults that wore too much perfume. I had Lacoste-wearing prep school friends and I was on the honor roll and I took ballet every Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday. But in the sixth grade when my dad decided that he didn't love my mom anymore and that he loved someone else instead, things changed. The divorce was nasty. Phil moved in. I acted normally, and I went through all the motions, but I knew that nothing would be the same anymore.
Thus came the decision with Berkeley.

I knew that I needed to make a change, but I didn't know how to do it. I tried to dye my light brown hair the color of Edward Cullen's my freshman year of high school, and I took art instead of Girls' Choir against my mother's wishes. I called my step-dad 'Phil' even though my mother asked me to call him 'Dad,' and I smoked cigarettes in the mall parking lot with my friends because I thought it was dangerous and rebellious. I had no idea that I hadn't seen anything yet.

I was ignorant and optimistic the day Phil drove us to Berkeley to leave me for good. He and my mom helped carry my suitcases and linens amongst other things to my room, but left without helping me unpack any of it. My mother planted a kiss to my cheek as she floated out the door in patent leather Tod's loafers, patting me in a barely-there hug as I stood there with my mouth open. She left me there in the open doorway without any help or guidance. Just up and left, with a glance over her shoulder as she pushed open the door to the stairway as she said one thing to me in parting.

"We expect great things from you, Isabella," she'd said. I'd heard it eighteen million times and it put a weight on my shoulders like a ton of bricks. They all expected great things. So what would happen if my best wasn't good enough?

I lasted the first semester at Berkeley before I met Emmett.

His younger brother, Jasper, lived in the dorm with me on the opposite hall, and Emmett and I had met one morning in November when I was brushing my teeth in one of four co-ed bathrooms on campus.

My toothbrush was red, and my mother had bought it for me. I had a dribble of toothpaste on my bottom lip.

Emmett was at the sink beside me, washing his face with faded plaid boxers hanging loosely around his hips after spending the night in the dorm with Jasper. He smirked, catching my eyes in the mirror as he patted his face dry with a bleach-stained hand towel. I can remember the way my breath hitched in my throat when he suddenly moved near me, the hard planes of his chest invading the little bubble of personal space I liked to keep. I could smell the soap and this grassy, sweet scent radiating from his warm chest, and he moved so close to me so slowly that I froze like a deer in headlights. His thumb tasted salty when he wiped the toothpaste from the corner of my mouth with it, a lazy smile on his full lips, and I stared after him as he walked from the bathroom without a single word.

It was him. He was that change I was looking for, that edge of danger that I'd wanted so badly for so long. I don't know how I knew this, but it was something about the way that he looked at me that morning like I was something to eat...something about the way so he came so close to me without any hesitation. I even wrote about him that night for a writing assignment-I know, it's creepy. But I sat at my desk until three in the morning, pounding furiously at my keyboard as I struggled to remember the outline of his muscles and the sharp angle of his jaw. I think from that moment on, I was smitten.

I saw him again the next week on Haight Street at The Red Vic, an old resort hotel that had been renovated into several spaces including a tiny cafe.
Haight-Ashbury was a neighborhood in San Francisco that I was learning to appreciate. It was a good walk away from campus, but the area was so rich with history and had been the home of so many brilliant philosophical and musical minds that I felt a little revolutionary just by breathing the air. It had been so famous and so revered and so criticized by people like my parents that I felt a little thrill in my stomach every time I came there.

Okay. Plus I was an extreme nerd. Maybe I still am. But that's beside the point.

It would have been smart for me to turn around and walk right back out when I recognized Emmett at a table with Jasper and a girl that lived next door to me, Jessica. I could have grabbed my coffee and Danish and I could have left without a trace. But of course, with my being so utterly and devastatingly me, I just stared at the kid and his brown hair and perfect brown eyes for just long enough for Jasper to recognize me and wave me over.

He was that kind of guy-the one who doesn't really know you or talk to you, but is interested in saying hello for a minute even if he's seen you only once or twice. But I've had relatively good breeding, and even my supreme awkwardness couldn't have excused me to bolt out of there like I hadn't seen them, so I walked carefully over to the table trying desperately not to trip over my own feet or spill my coffee everywhere.

"Bella," Jasper acknowledged with a smirk. Of course he remembered my name. "Have a seat."

I walked out of the cafe that afternoon with a date and a lump in my throat.

Emmett, I found out over dinner a few days and telephone calls later, was a UC Berkeley drop-out and had big hopes of taking over his father's small branch of insurance companies once he got his shit together. I was fascinated by him, and my young and immature mind admired him for doing imaginary things like following his heart and living in the moment. He was so completely concerned with his beat-up guitar and his perfectly grungy apartment (that was in a space that I knew to be a fortune-per-month) that he forgot to do things like get haircuts and pay rent on time and buy groceries.

Daddy McCarty was left to pick up all the slack. Over half a year later and I still haven't met him once.

Emmett's apartment was tucked away on Ashbury Street directly below Peter, where I am now as I stare at Edward Cullen, and down the street from the former Grateful Dead house. Peter and I became fast friends, and I couldn't tell if it was because I felt that I needed to make him like me to impress Emmett or if I generally enjoyed him on my own. He'd wander down stairs and walk through the door without knocking, tossing Em baggies of ganj and vintage Playboys and blotter papers with little Alice in Wonderland Cheshire cats all over them. I had no idea what they were until a week later, when I popped one on my tongue in front of ten pairs of watching eyes and watched the walls move.

Thus, a new tradition was born. A bunch of twenty-somethings, with the exception of me and Jasper, came together to smoke a lot of weed and play a lot of music, musing about nothing while I scribbled furiously in my notebook. I was trying to carry out life-long dreams that, because of Emmett, might never have come into fruition.

By the end of the next week, my virginity was gone and I'd experienced my third trip with LSD. I'd only ever heard of it in chemistry classes. It made me feel young and embarrassed and like I had something to prove.

My mother started worrying, and when I stopped picking up her calls, she began writing letters. Winter break was approaching quickly. She was concerned. Are you even coming home at all, Honey Bee? she'd written. Your grandparents are coming for Christmas and we'd all love you have you home.

Before now, my homecoming hadn't even been an option. But when I began responding to her emails and letters, she recognized my fervor and excitement over foreign things she'd never heard of and grew worried. One letter sent out on December fourteenth, the day before I was to come home, was a full description of Allen Ginsberg's Howl and its effect on the way that I saw the world. Renee was troubled, to say the least.

I wrote home later that week saying that I was not going to return to the University of California, Berkeley.

I hadn't found a place there, as I'd hoped. I came to San Fran looking to start fresh. College only reminded me of how inadequate I truly was. My place was in the Haight, with Emmett and his fast friends and his fast life, living in a stranger's shoes that were so very different than the ones I was used to wearing.
In life, there are always people better than you, but you never actually think about that. You always want to be the best, even if it's impossible. Berkeley was just a constant reminder that I wasn't.

But still, Emmett was...intimidating. I think fear was part of what drove me into his bed just nine days after the toothpaste incident. Maybe it was a little fear, maybe it was this nagging feeling that everything was destiny. My last received grade before the finals that I didn't take at Berkeley was an A+ on the writing assignment I'd written about him, and Emmett had read it when it was returned and kept it tucked away in his desk drawer. I was flattered that he'd liked it so much. He asked me to move in at the end of December.

Rosalie Hale swiftly became my very best friend.
She wore belly shirts with a hoop shoved through her navel and wore her impossibly long hair wavy and loose. She bought me random presents "just because" and watched old movies with me on the TV set whenever I was on my period and Emmett got mad and went to Peter's because I didn't want to have sex. She talked to me whenever I felt the secretive pangs of homesickness, and she was the closest thing I'd ever had to a real friend. Rosalie made it easier to accept how much my life was changing and she made me hopeful that maybe one day, I would harbor no regrets.

I think part of the problem with Haight-Ashbury, especially with us, was all the history. We felt young and rebellious, like it was our sole job in life to live up to the stereotypes people automatically thought of when they learned what neighborhood we were from. We certainly had a lot to live up to, and we weren't even anywhere close although we liked to believe we were.

But maybe we just liked the drugs, and we liked the music. Maybe none of it was even about the peace. Maybe we were fakers.

Actually, I know we were. Hell, we still are.

Emmett and I sleep on a mattress with a sheet over us even though he and I both know that the McCarty's have more than a few million dollars in the old bank account. But it was and is all about the pretense, and the love we thought we shared for an era that we weren't even alive in. I thought I did the right thing, leaving college, and he agreed that whatever felt right was what the universe had chosen for me. It was all so fucked up, but it was all so thrilling.

I had learned to lose everything about myself.

Alice Brandon was fucking Peter then in his upstairs apartment, and I'd started seeing her around. She was tiny and dark-haired and I liked her a lot. She worked at this crazy lingerie boutique in the Haight that had these giant fishnet-stockinged legs growing out of the store front. Her parents were old hippies that lived in the area, but she was modernized and normal and liked to come down to talk to me whenever Emmett was gone off somewhere.

"I have to tell you something, Bella," she whispered one afternoon in March, keeping her voice low although it was just the two of us in the apartment. "It's a secret, and when I tell you, you have to act normally so the connection won't be made with me."

I nodded with hesitation, wrapping a strand of knotted hair around my finger so tight that my fingernail looked purple. "Okay, spill," I prompted.

She sighed heavily, pulling her tiny legs beneath her on the red couch from where she sat across from me. "The other day, Peter came down here to give Emmett his deck of cards back after the party last week, and he...he heard something."

"What do you mean?" I asked, feeling my eyebrows pull together.

I think that maybe I already knew, but I needed to hear someone else say the words.

Alice scratched her short-cropped hair, running her finger against the row of gold hoops hanging from her ear. "Rosalie Hale was here. She's sleeping with Emmett. Peter knows it for an absolute fact.

I just stared at her cat-like eyes, my stomach turning like a lake in the springtime.

"I'm sorry," she said quickly, her eyes pained. "I just had to tell you. I can't keep watching you with him like everything is perfect when he's slutting around on you. It's not fair."

And at that, she leapt from the couch and out the door without even shutting it.

I stayed on that couch for a very long time, staring at the wall and not doing anything, not even crying.
I knew that I didn't really love Emmett like I told myself that I did. I knew that there had to have been a reason he left me alone so much. But what killed me was that it was Rosalie. Rosalie, my friend.

I had my bags packed within thirty minutes and was riding away from that apartment on Ashbury Street within forty-five. Emmett called my cell phone eight times between then and the next morning as I ignored them from under the sheets of a dirty hotel room bed.

Hey, Bella, where are you? Your drawers are all empty. Did you go somewhere? Pick up.

Hey, what's going on? You're freaking me the fuck out. Where are you, B? Pete's party is tonight. Call me if you're not going to make it on time. Bye.

Bella, it's me. What the fuck happened to you? Peter cancelled. Call me. Please.

Emmett again. I'm coming to look for you if you don't pick up.

Okay, so I know that Peter knows what's going on. And fucking Alice, too. So I at least deserve to know. At least have the fucking decency to pick up my calls.

Bella, it's Emmett. You need to calm the fuck down and stop being so stupid. Alice told me that you think I'm cheating on you, which is fucking ridiculous. Get over yourself. Come back home whenever you're not such a fucking female.

I'm going to bed without you. The door's open. Uh, okay. Um...yeah. Call me, please.

It's me. I need to talk to you. We need to work this out. I can't sleep, so, uh, call me. I need to know you're okay. None of us know where you are. Please, please call. I'll do anything. I, um, I love you.

I wandered back home the next day, weaker than ever, apologizing and kissing him and telling him how awful I felt for believing Alice's lies.

I was bent over the kitchen counter before I could even blink, and so stoned into oblivion an hour later that I can hardly remember any of it.

What an amazing life. My parents would be so proud.

I can't help but remember those phone messages as I feel Emmett touching me so intimately as we sit on the leather couch in Peter's living room. It all happened so long ago, almost four months ago, and I'm different now. He's different, I'm different, we're different.
Alice doesn't approve of any of this. She's standing by Peter and Edward in spite of the fact that she and Peter have been over for a while, shooting dirty looks in my direction. I can't decide if the snears and stink-eyes are directed towards me or Emmett. Maybe both.
She's thinks I'm foolish. She even tried to confront Rosalie about it. But she's only looking out for my well-being. I think.

What kills me is that Rosalie is here, and I hugged her hello. Emmett denied everything, like I knew he would, and I'm sitting here forcing myself to believe all of it even though I found one of her flimsy black bras shoved inside of my pillow case. So...if Emmett is fucking another woman and fucking me at the same time, aren't I allowed to look at Edward Cullen without feeling bad about it?

The answer is no. I love Emmett, and he loves me. He would never lie to me like that. Everything is just a string of nasty rumors. He loves me, and he believes in me, and he was right. I've made all the right decisions, and Emmett and I belong together. And Edward Cullen is just some random guy who wandered in off the street like all of us did once before.