PLEASE FUCKING NOTE OR YOU WILL BE LOST. This EPOV chapter (with the exception of the flashback of course) takes place AFTER Bella smokes up in Carlisle's house. And BEFORE Edward pranks Bella in the gym. That's about a four day window. An explanation of why I'm backtracking will come after the chapter.

Huge thanks to jfly and acireamos and withthevampsofcourse who were wicked –yes, wicked- supportive during my hiatus. Withthevamps is the mastah betah.

Meyer's universe. Not mine.

12 years old

"Did you catch Smallville?" Bella asked.

"That show's weird," Edward responded. "I don't like that Clark Kent and Lex Luthor are friends."

"They're only friends before Lex turns evil."

"You just don't turn evil. There are signs. Clark had to have seen them in Lex."

"Of course he sees the signs."

"How can you be friends with someone you know is screwed up?"

"I dunno."

Bella was thinking of an incident that had occurred the previous weekend at her dad's Fourth of July barbecue. Her younger cousin –who was nine- had been following Jasper and Edward around, yammering about ice hockey. The older boys had party poppers and kept shooting them at her cousin. He ran to her crying, one eye red and puffy from a party favor that exploded too close to his face. Rainbow streamers littered his hair, and he smelled like gun smoke.

"Do you think we could ever be enemies?" Edward asked.

She shrugged. She wondered it herself sometimes.

"I hope if we are enemies, it'll be epic like Lex and Superman," he joked. "Who would be Lex?"

She didn't answer. Naturally, she assumed he would be the Lex. No one assumed they would be the bad guy.

"Well, if I'm Lex, I hope you come after me," he joked.

She rolled her eyes. "'K. If you get a big bomb in your locker- you'll know why."

EPOV

"Who the fuck put milk in here?"

Emmett leaned over my shoulder and looked into my locker. A carton of expired milk sat on top of my books. The smell of spoiled ass filled my nostrils.

The date on the label read that it was six months old. Someone hoarded revenge milk for six months. "Who the fuck-"

Three sophomore girls giggled guiltily to my left. I turned to- to do something- but two of them were wearing braces. One chaired Key Club. Another was in Adaptive P.E. because of spina bifida. They were lambs.

"Heffers," I nodded to them.

Bad milk stench flooded the hallway. Emmett pulled the collar of his shirt over his nose. "Hey girls-" He turned to the sophomore chicks. "We like our milk fresh. From the source." He made squeezing motions over his chest.

The trio winked and laughed and ran away. Pinching a corner of the carton with my forefinger and thumb, I picked it up and tossed it into the trashcan.

Emmett was holding an uncapped stick of deodorant under his nose to conceal the smell. He was dramatic. Got it from our mom.

"Bella copy-cats," he said. "Nice."

"Dude."

"You should really start locking your locker."

"Dude."

He held up his hands, his shirt still pulled over his nose. "Just don't start obsessing about them now, too. You've been moody as a bitch since that locker shit happened."

"Don't worry. I've got something. For tomorrow- for Spirit Day."

"Naw. It's like, too intense and shit. Just ignore her."

"But you wanted me to fuck Bella-"

"Oh my fuck, they are starting up the golf club again." Emmett pointed to a neon yellow poster on the wall. "Dude, we have to do that. Dad said they used to get off school to go to competitions. We can toke up on the greens, during school hours, ride golf carts…"

"Edward, we're doing something silly," my mom informed me later that day. She smiled coyly. She was wearing the denim shorts that she only wears when she's doing Habitat for Humanity shit or varnishing the floors.

I sighed. "Let me get Emmett, then. He's your silly son."

She rolled her eyes and flicked her wrist at me. "Come on, little hard ass. We're bonding. I need to see if you have any tattoos or piercings…"

"Only gay dudes get piercings."

"Your father got a piercing in college."

"Gay."

"In his tongue."

"Really gay."

She held her hands up as she stepped out onto the back patio. Emmett got that gesture from her. "I think it's very conducive to hetero activity."

"Ew."

"Well don't attack your father's masculinity. It insults my taste."

"Hmm."

Rectangles of wood and cans of paint were neatly lined along the back end of the picnic table. Two hammers and two boxes of nails and two plastic cups full of water guarded both ends, and a set of horse hair brushes fanned out in a half circle across the center of the table.

"We're building bird houses," she explained. "I'm showing my youth group how to make them on Saturday, but I need to bring some examples."

I traced my finger over the wood. It had been sanded down until the grains were extra fine. Too fine. A gross tickle titillated the pads of my fingers as they ran across the board, making me cringe. "'K. Let's do it." I wrapped an arm around her neck and pulled her into my chest. "Maw maw."

She grimaced when I called her that. She hated that nickname. The sunlight hit the caramel highlights in her hair and a blush fired in her cheeks. I laughed at her.

The next hour was a little torturous. My poor mother knew nothing about carpentry. She smashed her thumb three times under the hammer, eventually flicking the bloody acrylic thumb nail over the side railing and into the ferns below.

"You're just gonna get blood on them and terrify your kids."

She exhaled in agitation. "My children are fine. Thank you." Her hammer came down on her pinky.

"Hell- Maw-" I grabbed her finger. "Why don't you let me handle this?"

"I hate it when you call me Maw Maw. It's annoying as shit. I'm not a damn grandmother."

Her beeper went off on her hip. It was the third time this hour.

"Why do you insist on having the beeper?" I rubbed the corner of my eye with the head of a nail. "It's anachronistic."

I read that word today. I've been repeating it, trying to commit to memory. It's a hard word to work into conversation.

"If I had a cell phone, I would never have a moment's peace." She looked at the pager and slapped a palm against her cheek. "Oh. Oh lord." Her hand slid down her chin and rested against her throat. "Edward, look. They need me." She held the pager for me to look at, but I was staring at the angry red mark she inflicted on her cheek. Like, it was really red. People don't usually leave marks when they slap themselves during idle gestures. But she does. She can be dramatic.

Dramatic women. Are silly.

And like that, I was thinking of Bella. Doing dramatic Bella shit.

"Go… do your thing, Mom. I got this." I waved the pager out of my face. I didn't care who required my mom's attention.

Esme told me good-bye. I closed my eyes as she kissed my cheek.

After she left, I just stared at the half-finished bird houses and scratched my head. When Mom was here, I had the desire to assist and to give to charity by helping the children and to revel in the simpler pleasures by building a freaking bird house. Then she left, and I was left staring at a half-done gay bird house.

Can't I just help the children?

Then I noticed that there was no wooden dowels to make bird perches. I rubbed my brow and frowned. How the hell do you forget the bird perch? Without the bird perch, it's just a little house. Nothing distinguishes it for birds. It might as well be a doll house.

I have no idea why I was so annoyed- but it was really thoughtless of my mom.

When her sister got cancer, Mom donated her bone marrow for a transplant. When her nephew's kidneys failed, she offered him one of hers. Her offer was denied. But still.

Most people would feel strained by having such a diseased family. Mom felt blessed.

"If someone's family must endure these calamities," she would say, "let it be mine. Because I can handle it."

She would cut the plastic on the soda six-packs so dolphins don't smother when trash gets dumped in the oceans. Donated her blood plasma (for free) until it ruined her veins. After a protest rally in college, she made the cover of Time magazine for charging a riot control officer. She got her fucking nose broken. But it was the right thing to do.

She's that woman. Her goodness was as boundless as the ocean.

Some men look at the ocean and feel inspired by its vastness. Others feel minimal in comparison.

Dad would never admit to feeling the latter. What good man would? Hi, I really don't like that my lovely wife is better than me. And Dad was a good man. He was a doctor at an ER. One time, a kid was rushed into the hospital; his neck crushed in a train accident. Orthopedic decapitation- only his spinal chord was still attached. Esteban Jorge Ramirez attends Chesterfield Boarding School now, a faint white scar around his neck. He paints stitches over it at Halloween, pretending to be Frankenstein. All ER doctors should be canonized.

My Dad resented his wife for her magnanimous spirit. What kind of asshole does that make him? What could he do? He was married to his belittler. I promise to keep being belittled in sickness and in health, forever and ever, until death do we part.

When I was five, mom adopted a girl from Nepal. All I remember were the strange sounds of alien language coming from her mouth. I thought she was an instrument- not a person. She came with a parasite that killed her in three months. Dad thought it was the flu. After she died, Esme removed Carlisle's medical from the front foyer and stored them in basement.

Dad bought an air hockey table and put it in the cellar with his degrees. He pinches my weed and goes down there, playing air hockey and online poker for hours. Mom says he used to hustle guys at poker in college. That's what he does, every night while Mom's saving all the kittens in the trees.

Sometimes, I wish someone close to me would die.

I feel like mourning something, but there's nothing to mourn. I want everyone to sit in a parlor that I don't have, nibbling on hors d'oeuvres we can't taste, and be sad with me. It would get boring and emotionally exhausting. I would shoot my jaw off. But I still crave it.

Anyway, when I think of the departed being mourned over in this hypothetical parlor, I always picture it being Dad. Since I was fourteen, I always pictured Dad as the dead man.

He taught me baseball. How to measure the distance between stars using parallax. Before he hurt his back, we went running cross country.

He was a good man.

And he was the dead man.

Mom came home that night with Chelsea, one of the girls from her youth groups. During half time at my football games, Chelsea spun flips over the heads of her cheer mates.

The girl was sorta really- what? Thin? Skinny?

Willowy, maybe. Like if someone laced a string from her nose to her toes, you could play a violin using her as the bow.

I love skinny girls. But skinny isn't willowy.

Chelsea came here for math help, but as a child Chelsea had suffered from mild dyslexia. Esme began to tutor her weekly for reading. Dyslexia can mess with your eyes. After my Mom's sessions, her pupils always looked constricted and engulfed in pale blue irises.

"Hi, Edward," she greeted me. A smile warmed her pale face, and she clutched a book bound in dark red clothette to her tits.

Behind her back Emmett was scowling on the couch, his feet propped on the coffee table. He really dug her. She never seemed to care.

"Hey …Chelsea… what?" She was pretty, but she was staring a little too intensely at me. "What's up?"

She smiled wide. "I just wanted to thank you all for having me at your house."

"Oh. It's no problem. It's my mom-"

"She's a wonderful woman."

"Yep."

"Thanks for letting me borrow her." Chelsea winked.

"You can keep her," Emmett hollered, his mouth full of carrot sticks.

She gave a long-suffering sigh and then grinned again. "Oh, Emmett. Why don't you come to one of our youth groups? It's really amazing to see your mom work with-"

"So I heard the school is about to compete in the cheerleading regionals," I said, gently grabbing a hold of her elbow and steering her toward the couch.

For some reason, I just didn't like to hear my mom's projects talk about her. Something inside of me turned ugly when they acted like they knew her.

I listened to Chelsea talk about cheerleading stuff- and it wasn't boring. She talked about how one girl on the cheer squad went Tanya Harding on a talented freshmen and broke her ankle. Chelsea wasn't dumb. Over her shoulder, Emmett mouthed "make" and "pass" while pantomiming throwing a football. I should. No one in Forks had been giving me any since Bella had bombed my locker.

But Chelsea wrote an article for the school newspaper called The Lure of Virginity. She talked about the promotion of teenage abstinence in right wing America. In a culture as sexually desensitized as ours, "no sex" was the most tantalizing thing out there. "There is no aphrodisiac like innocence" was one of her quotes.

It was not well received by the faculty. All the guys wanted to fuck her raw. No one knows if it's been accomplished.

I pictured Chelsea running pantsless into the woods. Tripping over logs and skinning her chin in the dark. I should think about fucking, not that. Fucking Bella.

The conversation slowed to a crawl. Eventually she opened her book and started gazing at a page, and I watched T.V. with Emmett.

I heard sniffling a few minutes later. A funny commercial with a drunken penguin was playing on the television.

Her head was tilted over the book, spilling hair the color of ash across the pages. Some hair was pulled behind her ears which were long, narrow, tapered at the top, elfin. Another sniff followed. Girl was crying.

"Uh… what's up Chelsea?"

She glanced up at me, cringing and shaking her head. "You wouldn't understand."

The header on the page said Ancient Greek Folklore: Animals bleh bleh… Chelsea was completely right, but I didn't appreciate her assumption. "Try me."

"In Greece, they had swans that never made noise." Sniff. "Except for when they died." Sniff, sob. "Then they had made this beautiful song. Called 'the Swan song'." Sob, sob.

"Sure. Uh- Schubert, the composer- had a posthumous collection called Schwanengesang… uh, which means 'Swan Song'." She smiled and thank god for that. When girls smiled, they don't cry. So I decided to flirt- girls don't cry while flirting. Right?

"I love your dimple." I poked the dimple in her cheek.

"It's not a dimple. It's a scar." She stopped smiling and the dimple stayed.

"Oh."

"It's okay. You didn't know." She shrugged and laughed, and her laughter shook one more tear from her eye.

I had to get out. Willow Girl was crying over swans.

Every time I went over to Leah's house, I brought in the mail for her. I don't understand how a house full of people forgets the mail, but they do.

She was sitting at the kitchen table, reading the obituaries. Forgets the mail, remembers the newspaper.

"You have: American Lung Association Weekly, American Cardiac Association Weekly, National Medical Association… Oh, St. Jude's Hospital is having another fund raiser…" I read off the stack addressed Leah Clearwater.

"Thomas Robertson died today at age twenty nine. Cause unknown." She snorted, leaning over the newspaper to study the black-and-white picture more closely. "Whenever they say 'cause unknown', it's either suicide or murder."

"Well, how many fucking details do you want, you creep? This guy lost seventy-five pints of blood and cried to the 911 operator while he bled out. Disembowelment."

"When I die, can you arrange for my obituary to say that?"

"I don't think your mom would like that." 'Cause Leah just knew she would die before her mother.

"But I want to be remembered, my dear Eddie." She folded up the newspaper neatly, running her thumb and forefinger along the creases. "And putting 'death by disembowelment' is one sure way of being remembered."

I put my hands around her neck and massaged hard.

I could have really liked Leah, if she wasn't so hard. But she's hard and cold and bitter and sometimes it hurts to look at her.

She shrugged my hands off her neck and stood up to make herself a drink. Water. Two Alka Seltzers. Let it fizz. Vodka. Tonic Water. The resulting mixture stank, and the medicine formed clots at the top. I gagged and looked away.

After her father died of stomach cancer, she started experimenting by making these cocktails. She wanted a drink that was more agreeable with the stomach lining.

"I think I'm on to something. This Alka Seltzer is lime-flavored. It's like a medicinal margarita," she said.

"Well aren't you a badass."

"Shut up, drug mule."

"Put some sour mix in it. That might make it more palatable."

She nodded and retrieved the tub of mix from the cupboard. It was crusty and she dug at with a spoon.

Chicks shouldn't be so hard. They shouldn't choke down Cancer Cocktails. They should be… whatever. But unfortunately, it seems like only the hard chicks are tolerable. The soft chicks, well, they talk a lot. Or they are virgins. Virgins like Chelsea freak me out. When a chick I'm whatever'ing with tells me she's a virgin, I feel like a bull in a china shop. I can't wait to get the fuck.

She pinched her nose and slammed back the drink. Then she refilled the cup under the faucet and took five different vitamins to boost her immune system.

"Alright lover." She unbuttoned her blouse. "Let's get this show on the road."

"Oh baby. Who can resist that?" I knocked my knees together while leaning forward and kissing her on the nose.

She pulled back and ducked away. With a prissy turn that whipped black hair into my face, she turned toward her room. "You brought condoms? I'm out."

Hate and fear and need warred within me. I mean, I was afraid of this chick. Because she was rude and bitter and a hypochondriac and that's disgusting. But I liked being around it and that was fucked up. So I hated her.

Fuck it. No, no- fuck her.

Later, in bed, we were coiled like around each other. We lie on our sides; my face pressed into her neck. She's playing with herself down there while I'm fucking her, and there's a mirror next to the bed so I can see her make chimp faces. Then she clenches up and she makes the blood curdling cum scream she does. Did you know that the French call an orgasm the little death? Her eyes were shut, so she doesn't see me raise my hand to the mirror and cock it like a gun. I shoot the mirror and make a "pow" noise.

There's a continuum of chicks in my life. Leah was on one end with her Cancer Cocktails, Willow Girl was on the other.

I pulled out and Leah was turning on the television on her dresser. Snow crackled through the picture.

"Adjust the antennae," Leah said, waving the remote at the bunny ears on top of her T.V. set.

I wondered where Bella fell on the spectrum. I doubted there was a nice spot on that spectrum.

"Have you ever pulled a prank on somebody, Leah?"

"My dad. Before he died."

"What about on someone your age?"

"Um. Once. But their response sucked. Totally wasn't worth it. They didn't care. Fuck- get mad, laugh- prank me back. They were just a douche though. Did nothing. My dad though- he always pranked me back. He rocked."

"Wow. That sounds… yeah."

Dad and daughter pranking. That sounded intimate. Emmett's maxim, "It's like, too intense and shit. Just ignore Bella."

A funny commercial with a drunken penguin was playing. Leah started laughing and it was shrill and her lip curled over her large gums. Her face contorted into the orgasm'ing orangutan face. And despite everything, I don't think I've ever missed Bella more than in that moment.

If you were wondering when this chapter took place… you should read author's notes. "There is no aphrodisiac like innocence" is a quote from Jean Baudillard.

I know this might not be what you expected after the long wait, and I am really sorry about that. For the past two months, I discovered that I couldn't proceed with the story until I explored Edward a little bit more. This is what I came up with. I think it provides some insight into Edward, and… I wanted to post something while I was writing the second part of Tyler's house party.

There's an awesome Twilight Fan Fiction Competition coming up- The Eddie Award & The Bellie Awards- hosted by Limona, the fabulous writer of "Hiding in Plain Sight". Link is on my profile. Go nominate your favorite stuff!