Disclaimer: I do not own anything from the collective works of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight Saga
Chapter 10: A Night to Dismember
"It's too high on the right," Rosalie drawled, taking her eyes off her nails long enough to look at the backdrop for the photo station that Louisa was attempting to hang between a volleyball pole and a basketball hoop.
Louisa, who was standing on a chair, batted a candle that had been suspended from the ceiling out of the way so she could glare down at her partner. "You could help me, you know."
"And have Cody Williams try to look up my dress? Pass."
Louisa shifted her gaze to the boy in question, a portly freshman with a wispy moustache that really needed to be shaved off, who was watching Rosalie in a way that was bordering on leering. Louisa called out to him and demanded that he help the students decorating outside the building. Once he had shuffled away, Louisa hopped off the chair.
"You're taller than me, you do it," Louisa snapped.
Rosalie surveyed the set up in front of her, which consisted of a photorealistic, hand-painted backdrop of a graveyard (courtesy of Alice) and several foam tombstones. "Why can't you just use a ladder like a normal person?" Rosalie replied. "We'd probably be done with this by now."
"If you want to use a ladder, knock yourself out," Louisa said. "I'm not doing it."
"What, is the great Louisa Collins afraid of heights?" Rosalie asked, throwing a smirk over her shoulder at Louisa, who looked unamused. "I promise I won't let you fall."
"How reassuring," Louisa replied. "Now, are you going to hang the backdrop or not?"
"Again, I'm wearing a dress," Rosalie said, motioning down at her body. "I'm not climbing a ladder."
"I don't see why I have to suffer from your bad decisions," Louisa snapped, rubbing her temples in frustration. "Why are you even wearing that? You weren't wearing it during Spanish."
"It's my costume. And it wasn't my decision. It was Alice's. She chose all of our costumes," Rosalie replied, remembering how the little terror that was her sister had forced her into the long-sleeved white dress and thick heels the moment the final bell rang. "Well, all except Edward. He never said what he was supposed to be."
"He is coming though, right?"
"Of course he is. If I have to suffer through this, he does too."
"That's the spirit!" Louisa cheered. "Now, speaking of costumes, hang up that backdrop while I go change into mine." She all but threw the painted sheet at Rosalie and sprinted off in another direction, leaving Rosalie alone in the gymnasium.
Rosalie looked around, checking for security cameras and humans. Seeing none, she jumped up to the basketball hoop, tied the string to metal rim, and landed on balls of her feet, making sure not to break the heels of her shoes. They might be ugly, but Alice would throw a huge fit if they were damaged. After arranging the tombstones in front of the backdrop, Rosalie wandered off, following Louisa's scent to the girls' restroom. She found the girl sitting on the floor in front of a mirror dressed in what could best be described as tan rags, brushing her hair.
"You need a haircut," Rosalie pointed out, moving to lean on the wall next to her.
"Nah, I need all of them cut," Louisa replied.
"That wasn't even funny."
"It actually was. It's not my fault you have no sense of humour."
"What are you even supposed to be?" Rosalie asked, watching as Louisa attempted to wrestle her long hair into some sort of up-do. "A vagabond?"
"I knew you were uncultured, Rosalie, but I didn't realise that it was this bad," Louisa said, turning to give her an impish smile. "Have you not seen Star Wars?"
Rosalie recalled Emmett being excited about the movies when they came out, back in the late seventies, but had never watched them herself. "No."
Louisa's head spun around so quickly Rosalie could hear the joints in the human's neck pop. "Like, at all?" Louisa asked, her eyes wide. When Rosalie shook her head, the girl gasped. "We need to rectify this. We're having a sleepover."
Of all the response that Rosalie had expected, it hadn't been this. "A sleepover?"
Louisa nodded, sending her hair flying out of its bun and down her back. "Yeah, it's when friends get together, watch movies, gossip, and do each other's hair," Louisa said. "Speaking of hair," she thrust a print out of a dark-haired girl with three buns tied at the back of her head. "Do mine."
Unsure of what else to do, Rosalie sank to her knees behind Louisa and began to carefully pull the girl's long hair into a style similar to the picture, moving slower than she would if she were doing her own hair, so as not to rip Louisa's hair from her scalp. "I know what a sleepover is, by the way," Rosalie grumbled as she tied off the last of the hair. She glanced up, meeting Louisa's dark grey eyes in the reflection in the mirror.
"When was the last time you were invited to one?" Louisa asked, her voice curious.
Rosalie couldn't remember much of her life as a human, but she was certain that she had never been to a slumber party before: not only would her parents never permitted her to, but Rosalie could distinctly remember that she had never had many friends. Be it her beauty or her award-winning personality, females had often been intimidated by her. Then she was turned into a vampire, and girl's reaction to her became even more severe: they hissed snide comments about her character behind her back. The comments were always loud enough for her to hear, even if she had been human. But this had been happening practically all of Rose's life. She was used to it. Her heart became colder and she learned to block out the whispers. Humans held no interest to her, could offer her nothing. So what was it about Louisa's question that made Rosalie want to open up to her?
It wasn't so much the question itself, Rosalie decided, but the way Louisa had asked it. There was no malice in her tone, no suggestion that it was somehow Rosalie's fault that the other girls in their class pushed her away, nothing that implied that Rosalie was a bitch (even if she totally was) that deserved to be excluded.
"It's been a while," Rosalie admitted.
Louisa nodded her head, her grey eyes compassionate as they roamed over Rose's face, and giving her the impression that the girl in front of her knew exactly she had been implying by her answer. "Then we'll have to have one soon. You can teach me how to do a French braid and I'll introduce you to all of the pop-culture things you apparently have missed."
Rosalie felt the corner of her mouth twitch up into a smile. She stood, offering her hand to Louisa, who heaved herself up. "You don't know how to braid your hair?" She led them out of the restroom and they made their way back towards the gymnasium at a leisurely pace where they could hear a pop-song coming from. They nodded to some of the committee members who were putting up the final decorations in the hallway. Rosalie had to admit that it looked far less tacky then what she had imagined when Louisa first proposed the idea.
All but the emergency lights were off and an alarming amount of fake cobwebs were stretched across the ceiling and down the walls. Fake spiders had been liberally tucked into the webs and hung from the ceiling, giving the hall a claustrophobic feel, as if she were a fly walking through a spider web. Not only was it eerie, but it also served the purpose of keeping students out of most of the classrooms during Manhunt.
Louisa shrugged. "Mom always did it better than I could so I never bothered to learn. It's usually Dottie who does my hair if it's necessary."
"Where is your sister?" Rosalie asked, trying to steer the conversation away from anything too touchy-feely. She had reached her girl-talk quota for the day and didn't particularly want to crack open the dead mother subject.
Louisa's brow furrowed. "She said that a friend was taking her home so that she could get ready for the dance."
"And that's a problem?"
"No," Louisa replied slowly, trying to put her thoughts into words. "That's not the problem. She said her date was going to bring her. She wouldn't tell me who it was," Louisa said before Rosalie could ask any questions. "And normally I would butt out, but something feels wrong."
"Has she ever been on a date before?" Rosalie asked opening the door to the gymnasium. When Louisa shook her head, Rosalie gave a little shrug. "That's probably it then," she said.
Louisa gave a non-committal sound in response. "Perhaps." Louisa didn't have much time to dwell on her sister's predicament, however, because the moment she walked through the gymnasium doors, she was swamped by last-minute decoration questions. Rosalie gave her a mocking salute and left her to wolves.
The last few hours before the dance started were hectic and stressful, to say the least. Bonnie Willson tripped and knocked over most of the decorations in the haunted carnival section. The photographer for the photo station caught a flat tire and was running late. Michael Chew yelled at Taylor Long so much that she ended up crying. Louisa was just pleased that she didn't have a coronary when she caught a group of juniors smoking weed behind the gym ("Not on school grounds, morons!") instead of decorating. Still, the end result was definitely worth the grey hairs she had probably sprouted when all was said and done. Most of the planning committee had raided their family's Halloween decorations, giving the group a plethora of material to work with, despite the small budget allotted to them by the school.
The building that contained the gymnasium was decorated like an old, abandoned graveyard, complete with empty coffins for students to take selfies in. In between headstones, there were wire humanoid structures, though, in the rapidly fading light, the structures were nearly invisible, making it look like the clothes that covered them were floating. Lining the path, there were fake skeletons, holding trays of glow bracelets for students who wanted to participate in manhunt later in the evening.
The committee had agreed that the inside of the gymnasium should be kept as a 'spooky-free' zone for students who weren't as keen on scary things. The overhead fluorescent lights were exchanged in favour of green mood lighting, which contrasted surprisingly well with the flickering yellow LED lights from the fake candles that had been suspended from the ceiling. In one corner, there was the photo station with a table of props, and in another, a table full of mini bottles of Gatorade. In the centre of the gym, there was a large open space for dancing, not too far away from the DJ and his sound system. Leading out of the gym, however, if students were to walk towards the classrooms, they would encounter the hall of spiders, where they would be able to hide during Manhunt. Out on the blacktop, they could find Pennywise the Dancing Clown hosting carnival games for them to play in between dancing and manhunt.
When the first wave of students began to trickle into the gym, Louisa walked out onto the blacktop to help the school chemistry teacher who had been kind enough to dress up as Pennywise for the evening and chaperone the dance.
"You make a horrific clown, Mr Hewitt," Louisa called out as she drew nearer.
Mr Hewitt turned around and gave her a smile. "I wouldn't let my seven-year-old see me because I was afraid it would give him nightmares," he admitted. "But I'm glad that at least one kid finds me scary."
Louisa laughed. "Do you just keep that lying around in your house, waiting for the chance to wear it?"
"I tried to wear it to the premiere of the movie, but my wife wouldn't let me out the door," he chuckled.
The two exchanged pleasant conversation before a steady stream of costumed students wanting to play games made it impossible. Louisa was in charge of the ring toss and spent a large majority of her shift chasing down errant throws. Nearing the end of her shift, she trotted back over to the game after retrieving a particularly wayward ring and handed the rings to a tall, curly-haired blond in a grey flight suit, an orange vest, and a pair of glasses that would have been considered fashionable had it still been 1975.
"Thank you, rebel scum," the boy intoned in a deep voice.
Louisa paused for a moment, taking in the boy's appearance. "No problem, Kylo."
The boy's lips quirked up in a smile before he resumed a neutral expression. "You must be mistaken. My name is Matt and I'm a radar technician. I'm nowhere near as shredded a Kylo Ren."
Louisa threw her head back and laughed raucously. "Well then, 'Matt,'" she replied. "When I finish up here, we'll need to get a picture together."
The boy gave her a charming smile and accepted the rings, their fingers brushing. It was at the moment, Louisa realised that she knew that smile very well. She had, after all, been trying to coax it out of the boy daily. "Jasper?" She yelped in surprise. Jasper merely winked a tawny eye at her and tossed the rings at the witches hats, all three hitting their marks. Stunned, Louisa handed Jasper his raffle tickets and he strutted away, looking far too attractive in a flight suit.
"What happenstance!" cried a tiny dark-haired girl dressed like Mavis Dracula, who Louisa recognised to be Alice Cullen. "That you and Jasper should match. You didn't plan it, did you?"
Still too dazed to offer a coherent response, Louisa shook her head. She hadn't planned to coordinate with Jasper at all about their costumes, and as much as she wanted to write it off as a coincidence, she could feel something shaking in her mental library, trying to get out. Louisa turned away from Alice to retrieve the rings that Jasper had thrown, trying to recollect her wits.
Obviously, either this was one hell of a coincidence, or Alice was psychic.
It wasn't my decision. It was Alice's. She chose all of our costumes.
Louisa shook her head and tried to eliminate impossible theories. Psychics fell very firmly in the impossible category. Louisa chuckled to herself as she turned back towards Alice, pushing away her unease and handed the girl the rings. Alice accepted them with a wide smile, showing off her pointy vampire teeth, and tossed the rings just as accurately as her brother had. Louisa reciprocated her large grin and handed the girl her tickets, who skipped off after her brother.
Not too long after the Cullen kids had departed, Louisa was relieved from her station by another committee member and wandered off. Her original plan had been to seek out Jasper and his sister when Louisa realised that she had yet to see her own sister. She made her way into the crowded (or as crowded as it could be in Forks) gymnasium, searching for a familiar head of blonde hair.
"Looking for someone?" A musical voice asked far too close to her left ear. Louisa jumped in surprise, only to find Edward Cullen staring down at her in amusement. He was dressed in his usual button-down shirt and trousers, though he had added a necktie and a bright red cardigan to the ensemble.
"My sister," Louisa replied, having to shout over the music. "You haven't seen her, have you?"
Edward shook his head before pressing his body back against the wall when a pack of freshman girls passed by, looking at him interestedly.
Louisa joined the youngest Cullen boy against the wall and extracted her cell phone from her pocket. She considered calling the home phone, but if Dottie had already arrived, she didn't want to cause her father any alarm just because she couldn't find her sister. She decided on a text message, quickly sending one before shoving the cell back into her pocket and turning to face her companion. She looked him up and down for a moment, taking in his appearance.
"Okay, I give up. What are you supposed to be? A wallflower at a high school dance?"
Edward gave her a crooked smile in response. "No, I'm Mr Rogers," he explained. He lifted up his right hand to show her a sock puppet that looked like a sad, deformed goat a small child might create. "This is Silas."
Louisa blinked rapidly at the puppet, waiting for her brain to catch up, a rather unfortunate occurrence she often experienced when confronted with a Cullen sibling. She glanced up at Edward who grinned and nodded at the puppet. "Uh, hello, Silas?"
The puppet's mouth shifted from side to side, causing the poorly attached horns to wiggle precariously. Then its mouth opened and released a deep, guttural screech, causing Louisa to jump backwards in surprise. "Hello, Louisa Collins," the puppet said in a voice that could only be described as demonic. "How are you today?"
Louisa glanced up at Edward, whose mouth hadn't moved.
"You never mentioned that you were a ventriloquist, Edward."
"Edward is dead. Only Silas remains," the puppet intoned menacingly. Edward offered a pleasant, if somewhat vacant, grin in response.
Louisa grinned and shook her head. She wasn't sure if she should be amazed at his talent for ventriloquy or his ability to keep a straight face whilst delivering his lines. "It's incredible you're still single, Edward."
Edward smiled sweetly at her but stayed silent. Louisa felt her phone vibrate in her pocket and pulled it out again, reading her sister's response.
Decided to show up fashionably late. On my way now.
On my way? Was she by herself?
There was a brief pause before Dottie responded, I forgot that date and I were meeting there.
Louisa furrowed her brow, certain that Dottie had said that her date was going to pick her up. Something wasn't sitting right with Louisa about Dottie's tone.
Louisa turned her attention back to Edward, who was gazing out across the horde of dancing teenagers, his lips pursed with annoyance. "You know my sister, right?" When Edward gave her a sharp nod in response, she continued. "Do you know who her date is? She wouldn't tell me."
Edward jerked his chin in the direction of a dancing couple. "Tommy Garner," he replied through thin lips. "He asked her out for a dare."
Louisa felt her blood run cold before it began to boil. She followed Edward's gaze towards the boy in question and surveyed how closely he was dancing with the girl. If one could even really call it dancing. Grinding was a more appropriate term.
5'11'', large thighs, left arm more muscular than right. Baseball player. Pitcher. South-paw. Full-ride scholarship to college. In a relationship. Sexually active.
Louisa tilted her head at this before turning her attention to his girlfriend, who she recognised as a theatre kid in the school's upcoming performance of Othello.
"Does the girlfriend know?"
"Yes. And the whole of the baseball team."
Louisa didn't bother to ask Edward how he knew this. She dodged under Edward's arm when he moved to catch her and slipped into the throng of students, towards her target.
"Watch where you're going!" Garner snapped as she brushed passed him.
Louisa flipped him the bird before disappearing into the crowd. She pushed her way towards the front building, clutching the stolen cell phone tightly in her hand, and walked outside. She slid down against the brick wall, sitting on the ground, the wet earth soaking her clothes. Louisa didn't notice this, nor did she stop to think about how she knew Garner's passcode to unlock his cell phone.
Louisa tapped on the messages icon and looked at the recent messages.
New Girl: Hey, where are you?
New Girl: Is everything alright?
New Girl: We're still going to the dance, right?
He had stopped responding a week ago to Dottie's enquiries.
Louisa took a calming breath and pulled up a new conversation on his phone, a group chat between what looked like the entire baseball team. Garner was sending them screenshots of Dottie's texts, mocking her. Another conversation was between him and a 'Spencer', who was berating Garner for treating Dottie this way. Louisa made a mental note to look up Spencer later.
She continued to scroll through Garner's text messages until she found a conversation between him and his girlfriend. Sexually active indeed. A twisted grin spread across her lips as she took a screenshot of part of the couple's most recent conversation on his phone. Louisa went back to his conversation list and pulled up the one labelled 'Birth-Giver' and attached the screenshot in a new text and sent it with the words: "dude, she's pregnant. What do I do?"
It took approximately fourteen seconds for Garner's mother to respond. A feeling of schadenfreude washed over Louisa as she watched Garner's phone light up with the barrage of text his mother was sending him.
A car door slammed and Louisa peaked around the tombstone she was hiding behind, only to see Dottie leaning through the passenger side window of their father's car. Louisa turned off Garner's phone and rose to greet her sister, only to walk straight into a boy dressed in clothes reminiscent of the 80s.
He pointed at the phone in Louisa's hand which she was attempting to shove into her pocket. "That's Tommy's," he said simply, his light brown eyes calf-like.
"Is it? I just found it," she replied, coolly.
"I don't know what you did, but he deserved it," the boy said.
"You wouldn't happen to be Spencer, would you?" Louisa asked, taking in his short, wavy hair and gangly body.
The boy raised his eyebrows in surprise. "You're a fast reader."
"You need better friends," Louisa replied.
The boy nodded in agreement and turned to face Dottie, who had stopped in front of them, a confused look on her face. "Lou, what's going on? Do you have another headache?"
Spencer, who turned out to be Spencer Garner, jumped in before Louisa had the chance to speak, telling her all about what his brother had done. Louisa heard Dottie let out a tiny, 'oh,' in response, and looked away from the two, blinking rapidly. Louisa felt her temper spike again, her whole body shaking in anger.
She was about to reach forward and pull her sister into a hug when Spencer began speaking again. "If you still want to go inside, I'd be happy to accompany you though. It's really cool inside," he said, and even in the dark Louisa could see his cheeks flushing. "Or not, if you don't want to. You could go home. Or we could go and get ice cream. Girls eat ice cream when they're sad, right? Or we can go to this really cool bookstore near here. Books always make me feel better. Or we could —"
"Spencer," Louisa said, amusement breaking through her haze of anger. "Let her reply."
Spencer blushed and bit his lip, looking down at the ground.
Dottie glanced at her older sister in confusion. "Are you going home?"
"Only if you want to," she replied with a shrug.
Dottie looked back at Spencer, who was toeing a pebble on the ground. "You don't happen to be dressed as Mike from Stranger Things, do you?" She asked.
The boy looked up with wide eyes. "Yes! Nobody could figure out who I was. I don't need to ask who you are, you're El. Did you know—" Dottie tossed her older sister a bemused expression over her shoulder as she allowed her newly acquired date to whisk her into the gymnasium. Louisa stood outside, taking deep breaths and letting the night air cool down her burning cheeks.
Dottie was strong. A lot stronger than Louisa gave her credit for. She would be okay.
The door to the gymnasium opened again, and a familiar curly blond head poked out. At the sight of Jasper the Babe, she felt her remaining anger wash out of her body, leaving her feeling strangely tranquil, which was not an emotional state she usually felt when she was around her hunky Spanish partner. He gave her a hesitant smile and stepped outside to join her, pushing his hideous glasses up his nose.
"Everything alright?" He asked as he approached, his tawny eyes raking over her face in concern. "Edward said you looked like you were off to start a fight in an empty house."
Louisa laughed in response. "I very much doubt he said anything of the sort."
"Not in so many words, no," he replied, his grin returning. "If everything is alright, I believe you owe me a picture?"
Louisa reached out to take his offered arm. "That I do."
"Every man has his secret sorrows that the world knows not; and often times we call a man cold when he is only sad." –Henry Longfellow
A/N: Hey there! This chapter turned out a lot differently than how I had planned, but I really like the finished project. What did you think of it? Let me know in the comments. For those of you who are curious about Rose's costume, it was the woman in the white dress from the famous picture Kissing the War Goodbye which was taken by Alfred Eisenstaedt. Emmett's costume was the sailor from that picture, but I couldn't figure out how to naturally fit it into the story without the chapter seeming like a fashion show. Also, if you didn't understand the reference to Jasper's costume, look up the SNL skit Undercover Boss: Star Killer Base. I think about that video a lot. Anyway. Lots of love, CheckAlexa