Author's Note: This story (formally known as Where is Home) is getting a bit of a rewrite as I prepare to add the second half of the story. If you're a new reader, this won't matter to you. If you are an old reader, you might want to take the time to read again because I've added or changed a few details here and there. Bear with me as I make the changes chapter by chapter. As always, thanks for reading!
Kindred-Part I
Matthew
I had been with my foster parents almost three months. I think it was some kind of record. The Roberts were really nice and Coeur d'Alene was beautiful even though it was crazy crowded with tourists much of time. It was certainly a lot different from Lewiston. I had lived in or around Lewiston for the bulk of my seventeen years. Lewiston wasn't exactly ugly and it was sort of cool that it was a seaport even though it was like a whole state away from the ocean but it had a paper mill and it smelled...pretty much all the freaking time. Lewiston could get pretty hot during the summer and it hardly snowed in the winter. Plus it was super boring. I always felt so bad for the people who came down from Uniontown or Genesee to have fun. I mean, aside from a few restaurants and maybe fishing on the river or something, there really wasn't much to do in Lewiston.
There was a reason people came from all over the country to see Coeur d'Alene. The lake and the pine trees were a really gorgeous combination. I was continually surprised that two places so totally different from one another could be within a three hour drive of each other. Lewiston wasn't that bad, I just didn't really have any good memories of living there. It was really nice to finally have a change. Cicely and Jonathan, my foster parents, had this awesome little house about a block from the water. You could see the lake from the deck upstairs. Every day before the school year started, I walked down to the beach even though it was packed with people and just stared out at the water for awhile. I had never lived anywhere where I could just walk a little while and see something that beautiful. I really loved it.
Cicely and Jonathan were both retired, they had lived in California before, somewhere near LA, I think. I had certainly never been to California. I had never really been outside of Lewiston except for right over the border into Clarkston,Washington (the two towns really were named that and I knew way more about Lewis and Clark than I ever really wanted to) so I had no idea where they were talking about a lot of time. I guess I could have looked at a map but California was just so damn big.
Cicely and Jon's two grown-up kids still lived down there but they were both super busy and didn't visit much. The Roberts' kids didn't seem very much like them, at least they didn't seem that way to me. Jon was always taking me out on the lake in their little boat for no other reason than to enjoy the view. Cicely was always cooking me something awesome to eat because she liked to cook and I liked to eat her food. Honestly, I couldn't think of what I had done to deserve such a great placement. It had certainly never happened before.
Anyhow, the Roberts moved up to Idaho when they retired and got this funny striped cat named Jude. But they wanted to do something else with their lives so they decided to foster some kids. They went through the training and stuff but they got some little ones at first and it didn't really work out too well, I guess. I was their first try at a teenager and we were a pretty good fit. I really appreciated that they didn't nag me for being such a space cadet most of time. They just rolled with things which made me feel really at ease.
It was the first time I had been that happy in a foster home and I had been in and out of them since I was seven. The other places I had lived were okay and I wasn't mistreated or anything. I just was hardly ever in them long enough to get any sort of feeling for my foster parents. At least my mom couldn't claim me anymore. She had finally died the year before. I had given up on my mom long ago, way before she died.
I noticed them for the first time about a week after I started school at Lake City. Seven extremely beautiful people all sitting at a lunch table together. I wasn't really sure how I could have missed them before. But that was me, always off in my own little world. These kids stuck out like sore thumbs in a high school full of ordinary looking people. They were all extraordinary: pale-skinned and dark-eyed. They had that poetic look to their eyes that they give starving artists or people romantically dying of consumption (dying of Tuberculosis was just the height of romance) in period films. They certainly didn't look unhealthy in the least though and they all had beautiful figures whether it was the honey-blond boy or the bronze-haired girl.
Two of them were blonds: a boy and a girl who were both tall and statuesque. Two were black-haired: a boy (a man really) with thick, curling locks and a bear-like physique and a girl who was tiny (shorter than me even) and fey with short spiky hair sticking up all over her head. Two were bronze-haired: a girl with soft curls cascading down her back, flushed cheeks, and warm chocolate-hued eyes and a boy with an untidy, but strangely old-fashioned seeming hairstyle. These two seemed related, there was a definite resemblance between them. Lastly there was the odd man out (odd girl out actually), she was a brunette. Her hair fell to her waist in a shining river. Though the brown-haired girl did not have a twin in hair color within the group, she seemed just as much a part of the family as everyone else, if not more so. They all smiled at her and laughed, touched her arm. The bronze-haired two the most.
The bronze-haired boy was definitely her boyfriend. He always sat next to her and was constantly touching her. It wasn't obscene or anything. In fact, it seemed almost restrained when compared with other couples' behavior at our school, yet the love behind every touch was obvious. I envied their understated affection. The bronze-haired girl's relationship with the brunette seemed almost as close as the boy's. She also touched her a lot, but it was different. It seemed almost...child-like. It was like she saw a mother figure in the brown-haired girl. Not that I would know much about that kind of thing, not many mother figures in my life and it was a physical impossibility of course, the two girls looked about the same age.
There was something about the group, beside the fact that they all sat together at lunch, that made you bunch them together. The only one of them who ever seemed to made contact with the outside world was the bronze-haired girl. The others studiously ignored the goings on of the high school world around them. Each one of them was more than gorgeous enough to run with the popular crowd but instead they were in a league of their own. They seemed almost uncomfortable around others. Even the bronze-haired girl's attention didn't fall where you'd think it would. She tended to make friends with the people you'd least expect her to. A girl with a quirky sense of style that just didn't jive with what was currently popular. A boy who wore outdated glasses because he just didn't care what other people thought. These were the ones who received her enthusiastic greetings in the hallways between classes: the misfits.
It was only after finally noticing them at lunch that I realized I had classes with some of them. The brown-haired girl especially. She was in my British Literature class, she was in my Music Appreciation class, she was in my Physics class. I listened to roll in British Literature for a name other than my own for once. Mrs. Bishop was kind of old-fashioned, she was the only teacher who actually still called roll out loud past the first week of school. I was actually kind of grateful for it for once. Normally it was just a reason for me to actually pay attention when I could have been spacing out. Bella Swan was the brown-haired girl's name and she had a voice like the sweetest bird's call even when just saying "here". It was a delicate and oddly antiquated name for one so young. Although Bella had come into vogue around the time we were born. The combination of it and her last name made it sound much older.
Bella Swan's clothes only added to her old-fashioned mystery. Bella's clothing made her look like she would feel at home in a garden, happily tending a small farm or gathering flowers in a meadow. She wore a lot of loose-fitting clothing: flowing skirts in colors like cream or muted plaids or a pair of faded jeans, over her skirts and jeans she wore long soft sweaters. Her feet were usually encased in wooly looking boots. Not exactly the height of fashion but a definite statement: Bella Swan didn't care about mainstream fashion. Her clothes were about texture and comfort more than anything.
From listening a bit in classes to the conversations around me, not something I usually did, I learned that Bella was most decidedly the reigning princess of the school. She was the girl that most of the guys dreamed about. She was the girl most of the girls liked to gossip about. I couldn't quite figure that out. Bella was quiet, reserved, smart...not the type that was usually the subject of such discussions. Sure, she was beautiful. She was beautiful in a way most girls didn't know how to be and envied. She was beautiful because she was entirely herself. And her boyfriend was the most gorgeous guy in the school, but Bella wasn't doing anything to warrant the sometimes negative attention. Why would her boyfriend go out with anyone else when she was there? I mean, were people absolutely mad?
Bella was a lot like me, she didn't talk to people in classes unless she had to. She didn't seem to have friends other than the people she sat with at lunch and even to my eye, they seemed more like they were family than friends. I had never really had friends (or family, for that matter) and it had never really bothered me, but sometimes it made it hard for me to understand how other people thought. It was easier for me to just live in my own little world where music was constantly playing in my head. I would worry about real life things when the time came. Sometimes just existing was hard enough.
Author's Note: Coeur d'Alene is much of the time considered part of the Pacific Northwest (even though it's located in Idaho) and is a well-known resort town. It is really quite beautiful (I was there the day before yesterday and it was perfect vampire weather) but during the summer it gets a lot of tourists. Lewiston really does have a paper mill and really does smell much of the time (I was there yesterday...it smelled). It really is the farthest inland seaport on the West Coast which is kind of cool. Yes, I currently live in Idaho and it looks like we're going to be here awhile (my husband just got a job...he was working on his Master's before). Although, unlike Matthew, I lived in California (in various areas) before we moved here. If you've gotten this far, thank you! The next chapter will be from a more familiar POV.