mamacat20: I'd like to apologize for my review response last week. I'm sure it sounded a little crazy (not that I'm not). I sort of freaked out when you acted so...ummm... negatively towards Tanya. And then Chanelle took out the paragraph where I angrily ranted and maybe cursed a bit. You only got the last bit of the rant.
I'm not planning on doing anything to get arrested (who ever plans that sort of thing? It's spur of the moment). But bowing and self disparaging remarks from you lot will only make me more likely to do crazy things.
I don't think that I will be nearly as in depth here about Tanya and Me or Mike and Bella as people might want. If you really have any questions about Mike, you should just ask Bella yourself. I didn't know him very well.

Avaleigh1: You know a lot about asking to be lied to because people ask you to lie to them, or because you ask to be lied to? Or both?

sprinter1: Is that a deliberate pun? Or am I just seeing those everywhere again?

Alice who is not my Alice: There is nothing in life that I do not speak about more cruelly than I should. Certainly not anymore. On the other hand, if doctors or loving parents could speak like that in jest, surely I would be allowed an offhand remark or two.
I don't take pride in having been there for her. I wasn't there enough. And even if I had been there enough, do we really take pride in doing the bare minimum someone else needs from us?
Oh Alice. She's so perceptive sometimes, and so blind others. I do wonder if I should have been more open with her in the past. How it might have affected her to really see how I felt in some situations.

LilBriarRoseMasochist: The whole world needs more help than anyone seems to give it. I hope everyone who reads this does more to take responsibility for themselves and everyone else.
I'm sorry that I won't be explaining what happened with Tanya on that phone call. But that is sort of the point. The particulars of that incident are irrelevant. I just picked it because I liked how it played with in the story, and how it showed that I am a pissed off little jerk who only cares about Tanya. It was chosen to show my spite, along with her screwed up ness. There are so many stories I have like that. I could just list them for pages, if you'd like.

Leahswings: I don't know if people should feel that bad for Alice. I mean, so she isn't deeply in love with anyone, and her best friends get along better with each other than her. She's still smart, pretty, successful, and financially secure. Plus, while both she and Bella know that I would do just about anything for them, only Alice abuses it on foolish things like having me make a late night snack run for her when it's freezing out.

cshorte: I need to protect Tanya because I love her and she is being hurt. Perhaps others need more complicated reasoning than that, but that is sort of how it goes for me. Someone I care about is being hurt, then I should help.
Tanya just needed to be protected more than most because she was such a perfectly designed victim of all the terrible things that happened to her.

And to Bella: I'm not just a uchicago kid. I am the typical uchicago kid. I am what we are thinking of when we call ourselves uncommon, or make up scav. It makes me one of a kind in a way that seems so normal.
And come on, who really say that I'm normal? Maybe your cousin, but that was on purpose.


A routine. I would have to say that I got into a routine at the end of fall quarter that year. We had more "sleep overs" in my room, until finally Alice didn't come to all of them. Then it was only a sleep over if Alice came. Bella just lived in my room. We talked about a lot of different things. We liked the same toppings on our pizza, and both hated peanut butter. We liked the same books for different reasons, when Alice would come demanding that we read some series that she was sure we would like.

Really, it was good that she was there. I could stay up as late as I wanted still, she never did anything to get me to stop talking to Tanya, but I couldn't sleep through class anymore. I could sleep through every kind of alarm known to man, but not through her asking me to wake up. And when I would get off the phone with Tanya, and all I could think about was how much pain she was in, and what I would do to myself for failing her, Bella was there to snap me out of it. She was the only thing that ever did. I wouldn't even really be self aware half the time. I would just find myself lying there, with my head in Bella's lap, as she petted my hair. Any tears from talking to Tanya were long dry by then.

I was able to help Bella when she was sick, maybe making up a little bit for her waking me up every morning. I went and picked up her antibiotic from the pharmacy, got her food and water, and basically just encouraged her to stay in bed for a while and sleep. Which, given our class schedule, may or may not have been considered helping.

I was there for her too, when she would get off the phone with Mike. Her conversations seemed a lot more peaceful than mine and Tanya's. At least from my perspective. I think Bella was just making sure to be strong for him. To never let him know how worried she was over everything that was happening, what he was doing and the way he was acting. But she would come back to our room, and climb into my arms afterwards. Whatever I had been doing didn't matter then. I would just hold her, not saying anything. I would wonder if this was what she did for me when I had no idea.

She talked about Mike more than I did about Tanya, so I knew that he wasn't doing well. That he might have been a little off the whole time, but that now he just seemed to be getting more and more depressed, and nothing she could do seemed to snap him out of it. Apparently he was kind of like me, both of us loving snippy, sarcastic comments like they are a family member. Maybe a little antisocial, if left to our own devices.

We kept watching Veronica Mars also. It's surprising what you can learn about a person from their reactions to a TV show. I suppose that it is a better show than most. You could tell Logan reminded her of Mike, sometimes. When he was at his best, crazy and self destructive, she would lean into me almost like she had just talked with him, as if she needed that support again. And I learned why Alice seemed to flinch away from any talk of Bella's childhood from the scenes with Aaron Echolls. Seeing her become so still. Not like she was tense or waiting. Just as if there was nothing there, as if emptiness was the way she should be. We finally talked about it as we were going to sleep after watching one episode that featured the Echolls' wonderful father son relationship.

"One of the pluses of a lot of siblings and divorced parents," I whispered, "was knowing that sort of thing could never happen to me. There was always another kid to run for help, and an adult willing to attack at the slightest mistake by their opposite number."

"You make it sound like they had some sort of war over you." That's exactly how it was. There was always a constant balance of power. If one parent wanted to take us to do something fun, the other parent had to come up with a better activity. When my father started attending church again, my mother joined the missions board at her church. No action was uncountered. It was a diplomatic war, but it was a war none the less.

"How many siblings do you have?" she eventually asked my silence.

"Five. Three older and two younger."

"Wow."

"Well, all my parents are divorced and remarried," I said, part of my standard spiel about my family.

"All of them? Wait, never mind." What I had said actually made sense, if you thought about it.

"What about you?"

"My parents got divorced when I was in middle school," she admitted.

"What was that like?" I asked. "My parents were remarried by the time I was in first grade. I don't remember not having two families." I'd been around two, I think, when my mother and father got divorced. My whole life, I had never asked why they split up. It didn't occur to me as a child, and once I was older, how could I ask that when the person they married had raised me just as much as either parent? It seemed like it would be a slap in the face, reminding them that this person they hate used to hold their place.

"It was strange. The house was really empty. But..." she trailed off. I knew what she was saying, but it wasn't an accusation I felt I could make.

"But what?" I asked instead, making my tone as soft as I could.

"My father wasn't really... he was kind of … abusive."

Tanya had been abused as a child too. She'd turned out rather differently than Bella. Where Bella was very tactile and wanted people close to her, Tanya was just confrontational and violent. Not to me, but with her family. And somehow, neither of them was the first friend of mine who had been abused. Is it really that common?

"There are three things that I never forgive people for," I whispered back. "Hurting women. Hurting children. And hurting those I love. How is it that so many people who do all three are still alive?"

"Edward," she said, putting her hand on my cheek. "I didn't tell anyone until after it stopped. I think my mom was in denial the whole time."

Somehow, this didn't make it better for me. I clenched my jaw. I realized that I was shaking slightly. "I would have done anything to protect you. I would do anything to protect you."

"I know," she said pulling herself against me. My arms went around her. It was nice to have her there. It was kind of cold in my room, the perfect temperature if you had a comforter and someone to hold. And right then, when she was admitting to me that she had been hurt, demonstrating how easily she could be, I never wanted to let go. It just seemed like I should protect her. Even if I was only a friend, it killed me that Bella had to go through something like that.

"Do you ever see him?" I asked into her hair.

"Only every now and then. He sends me money sometimes. I think he's kind of trying to make up for it." As if you can ever make up for something like that. "Sometimes people ask me about him, and I feel so awkward. Because I can't explain, but I never see him or anything. I don't know him any more."

"You can't do anything about it now, Ed."

I sighed. "I know. That's what I hate about it. I just... I wish that I could protect you. All these people I care about so much, and when they needed me, I just wasn't there."

"You didn't even know me. You probably didn't know any of them, did you?"

She was right. But it didn't matter. I knew how I was when I was younger, and I'd been a coward. Whenever there had been a tough choice about which parent to spend time with, I had just followed my brother Nick's lead. I hadn't even had the balls to decide that, how would I have possibly actually defended anyone?

"Edward, you were just a kid," she insisted, as if she was hearing my internal conversation.

"What does that matter? I knew what was right and wrong as a child. You can't only have your convictions when you are strong. That's no convictions at all. Like being in love. You love all of the person, not just the easy, pretty things about them."

"Love isn't like that. You don't love all of a person," she said after a while. "You love someone because they make you happy, and because you make them happy. And if they ever have something they need, you help them with everything you've got."

I didn't answer. We both drifted off to sleep after that, just like we did after a lot of nights. The routine continued, as she woke me up at eight in the morning, for my terribly early and GPA-killing introduction Mandarin class. Sometimes I would be staying up way too late, either from talking with Tanya, playing spades, or doing homework. Every time I did, I would head back to my room, hoping that Bella would be there, already asleep. I don't know why I liked seeing her asleep in my room. Maybe I liked seeing her so peaceful, where I can take care of her and know I can protect her. Or maybe I just was so desperately lonely for contact with someone who understood me that I was glad anytime I saw her. But it was what I hoped for any time I stumbled, exhausted, back to my room at three or four in the morning. And when I came back from class, or a meal, or anything else that might have taken me out of the dorm, she was the first thing I would look for. Not that I went searching everywhere for her, but I was disappointed whenever she wasn't there.

So I was happy, obviously, when I came back to my room one day after class, and found Bella sitting there. It was easy to tell that there was something wrong though. Bella never was one to hide her emotions if she didn't need to, and right then she didn't. She was curled up, hugging her knees to her chest. She was still in her pyjamas, even though she had a class that should have been happening earlier in the day (and unlike me, was unwilling to go to class in pyjamas). She didn't even move, or give me a chance to ask what was wrong when I came in.

"Tell me I did the right thing, Ed."


Intriguing? I certainly hope so. Tell me your predictions :)