Chapter Two:

"Lucy, can you pass me that box?"

Lucy rolled her eyes at me, but passed me the box. "Listen, Bella. It's not like we have to get all of the unpacking done in one day. I mean, it's our first day here! And plus, why can't you just do it at 'super speed'?" She made a face. "Seriously, it's embarrasing to have a mom who is the same age as me, has the freaking hottest body and looks, and can do practically everything better than me!"

I narrowed my eyes. "Will you be quiet! We really don't want one of the neighbors to hear you!"

She didn't say anything, just kept unpacking from the back of the mover's van. I sighed, remembering the old days when she was so young and unobservant...when she didn't know what had happened to me.

The memory brought the pain, as if I was experiencing it all over again.

The moment after I stepped off the plane and had gotten out of the airport, I carried Lucy in her baby carraige off to the side, where no one could see me, and just cried. I cried for myself and her, not being able to think of how I could possibly raise a baby by myself with the little money I had. I realized how foolish I had been-how foolish I was to think that I could do anything right.

I cried for Lucy for all of the pain and suffering I was going to bring on her. She would grow up alone, with only me and my own problems. She wouldn't have a father to take care of her and help her, to help me. She wouldn't get nice things or anything special with only me working and not even having a college degree to prove I could do a serious job. And, I was barely over eighteen with a baby!

While I was crying, someone jumped on me.

It was a female figure, surely, and hard as a rock. She leaned down and whispered into my ear, her voice low and smooth. "Please, Bella, it's for your own good, I'm sure of it..."

And she bit me.

I groaned, thinking of the pain for three entire days, writhing in a hotel room bed God-knows-where wishing I would die. All sense had lost my brain there. I didn't think of anything-I didn't think of my problems. I didn't think of him or Lucy, or how I was going to get along. And, oddly, even though I was in the most horrifying pain possible, my heart wasn't aching.

For a while Lucy was oblivious to the way her mother never seemed to change. She just thought she was so lucky because her mommy was the prettiest of all her friends'. At parent meetings all of the fathers stared and the mothers glared. They would whisper about me, saying how pretty little Miss Swan neevr married, never went to college. They made their own stories up about how I had a boyfriend and got pregnant and ran away from home. They said I had always had problems. I was probably abused by my parents, they said, and my boyfriend was forceful on me-didn't even care when I had the baby.

They said that I was irresponsible and had made the wrong choices growing up, and that I "wasn't that pretty, anyway." But inside, they were lying. I could tell, from the feeling I got inside me.

...I suppose you could call it my power. And the most useful thing, too, as each mother would say.

But as Lucy got older, she questioned my inhuman beauty and never-changing age. "Hey mom?" She had once asked at age thirteen. "Why do you always have pale skin, even in the summer? And your skin...it's always so cold and hard, like rocks in the winter..."

And then I told her.

She took it surprisingly well, and didn't have much of a reaction. But times changed, and as she was nearing my age, at almost sixteen, she was more like a younger sister than a daughter. So I just told her to call me Bella.

"You know I can't do that, Luce. And will you just stop about me being prettier than you-it's not even that true. You're beautiful."

But Lucy didn't need my power to know the truth. "Okay, so what if I am pretty? It's not even close to-ugh!" She groaned, trying to pick up a box containing a television. "Why is this stupid thing so heavy? And why aren't those guys helping us?" She frowned, looking toward the big man in the truck with the nametag reading "Larry".

And then, if it was possible, my heart stopped.

A boy stepped next to Lucy. He had beautiful auburn hair and the most goreous features. His skin was pale and even through his polo shirt you could see the defined muscles. His eyes were a piercing darkened gold, and as he spoke to Lucy, he looked directly at me-in his eyes a mixture of sadness and shock and happiness and anger-every emotion visible only in the depths of his irises.

"May I help you?"


Author's Note: Okay, if you don't know who this is, there is seriously something wrong with you.

Heather