Please read my note at the end of this chapter.
Chapter 11
20th May 2009
We were still in Forks, we hadn't left after Addie was born but we were unsure as to whether or not we were going to leave again. Everyone was planning to have a big celebration with the wolves to celebrate Addie being born, Seth imprinting, and a going away party for Aimee. She had been staying with us for the past month as she had some mild complications from her pregnancy and c-section, but they were all fixed now, except of course the rather large scar that was left across the bottom of her belly.
The party was going to be on the cliff in La Push and I really wanted to go cliff diving again, as did all the wolves and my family. We were allowed on La Push without special permission now, we had completely reworked the treaty because of Addie and I; it was just too hard with all the imprinting. I was also excited to see Emily and Rachel, as they were both starting to obviously show, and I was excited for them to be starting their families. And of course there was Claire, she was a lot younger than me now but that didn't mean I didn't like spending time with her. I was nice just to play around like a little kid.
Everyone except Emmett, Rosalie, Aimee and, of course, Addie, had decided to run to the beach while they took the car and I was using this as a chance to see how fast I had gotten. I was starting to grow quite fast again, and Mum was sure I was about to have a big growth spurt and Poppa agreed with her. I was having a race with Nanna and Alice and I was holding my own, I wasn't beating them but give it a couple of months and a few inches of growth and I could probably beat them. That was exciting; my vampire nature was starting to show more, I was stronger, faster and tougher than ever.
We arrived at the beach at about the same time as the others did in the car, we had given them a head start, and I could see the party was already underway. The boys had gathered a pile of driftwood to have a fire and the girls had each made some food. There were hotdogs, and burgers, and plenty of salads as well as a pile of wire coat hangers to cook the food on. The pack were all standing around by the edge of the cliff, obviously wanting to start jumping while the imprints and other people in the know where sitting on the large logs set around the wood pile.
Within half an hour of arriving the party was in full swing and we were about to do our first cliff jumps. The air was cool, but the cold never affected me, and I was too excited about jumping to even care about the temperature of the water. Only the humans and my grandparents didn't want to have a dive, which was understandable, so we left all of our clothes with them (we had worn our bathers underneath).
Everyone then ran towards the cliff and we all jumped in, a few at a time and then swam out of the way so we didn't get landed on. It was a magical experience to free fall the hundred or so feet. It wasn't quite as fast as sprinting, but it was different, uncontrolled, and you just had to hope you landed well and it didn't hurt. Of course all of the vampires landed very gracefully, and the wolves in a kind of graceful tangle of limbs. Rosalie, Alice and Mum landed the best in a beautiful swan dive that they did in perfect synchronisation, thy really were like sisters and it was hard to believe that there was a time when Mum and Rose didn't get on.
We all stayed in the water for about an hour, often making the climb back up to the top and diving again, and sometimes just swimming around or floating. After the first few times that I complained to Dad about climbing back up the cliff he and Em came up with a pretty good way to get back up there; Dad would be at the top and Em would throw me to Dad. That was just as fun as the diving. We eventually made our way back up to the top to have some food. I loved coming to these parties that the pack sometimes had, like the one on my first birthday, and I loved picking up the wire hanger and cooking your own dinner on one of them. Aimee was really enjoying this, she said it reminded her of the bonfires they used to have on the farm when she was a kid. She seemed a little sad about not having the same relationship with her family as she used to, and that made me hope that nothing would ever get in between me and my parents. I would make sure nothing would happen to drive us apart.
I could also tell that Aimee was absolutely devastated that she would not be with her daughter all the time, and she would miss out on so much of her life. Addie had yet to talk or walk, and she was aging at a steady pace rather than the extremely rapid rate I grew for a while. She was growing at the rate of a year every three months, the same as what I grew now and we thought this was because instinctively my body knew I needed to age and by growing so rapidly I was ensuring my survival when the Volturi came. Addie however doesn't need to age so rapidly and she is aging steadily, where I had a massive growth period and then stopped for a few months before starting at my current rate.
The party was amazing and lasted well into the night. It was great to see everyone and not have to worry about what was going to come and disrupt our way of life next. Probably the best part of the night was when Aimee brought out a dish she had made; even though she had been telling us for the last month that she could not cook. She called this dish fairy bread, and it was simply slices of white bread with butter and coloured sprinkles all over the top. We all loved it so much; especially the boys and I decided I would need to make it for any other party I ever went to.
….
The final week of Aimee staying with us all happened very quickly. We made plans with her to come back for a month next year for Addie's first birthday, and we set up all sorts of different ways to stay in touch so she could see Addie grow up. It was going to be very different from now on and we were going to try and give Addie a semi-normal childhood.
We also needed to choose where we were going to live now. Poppa had to quit his job to be able to come back to Forks, and because he did it so suddenly it would be difficult to live back in Whistler but my aging hadn't quite slowed down enough for the family to move somewhere and start the High School process again because I wanted to go with them the next time and you couldn't start school looking like you where eleven and in a matter of months look like you where fifteen or sixteen. After hours of heated discussion about where we should go and even more time researching different places to live, and a few visions from Alice we finally decided to move to Kalispell, Montana. Kalispell averaged just over one hundred days a year with clear weather, and almost all of those days were from June to August, so really this was a perfect place for us to live. After an hour of researching on all different real estate agents websites we found a nice bit of land to build a house on and this then decided what school we went to. The land was just off of Lower Valley Road, along the Flathead River and was about ten acres, so we had plenty of room for whatever we wanted, and completely secluded and blocked off from view by forest. The nearest school to us would then be Stillwater Christen School, just north of where the house would be. Stillwater Christian School had three hundred and four students ranging from pre-k to High School Seniors.
After all the plans were set, and Nanna had rung the real estate agent to arrange a meeting about the block of land, Mum raised a possible issue with the way we lived.
"This is all good that we have this planned out, but you do know that you really don't fit in at all, right?" She asked.
"What do you mean Bella?" Poppa asked.
"Well, when I first moved to Forks, I knew you were all different, you looked the same, with the eye colour and pale skin, but you hair was all different and your features were all slightly different. So I think we need to plan this a bit better, and it was also a bit strange to have so many teenagers who were all adopted, around the same age, and yet not related at all." Mum explained.
"How would you suggest fixing this?" Poppa asked.
"Well, we could separate ourselves into a few families of two or three children, and then maybe use wigs or contact lenses to make some of the differences less obvious." Mum replied.
Some people weren't too happy at having to change how they looked, mostly Rose, and then we had to decide how to split us into 'families' but also take into account the couples and who looks like who. After far too long discussing it, and thinking of all the other stories they had used in the past, we finally had a solution, and it looked pretty good.
As Dad and I looked very much alike, and the resemblance was only getting stronger as I grew, we were going to be biological siblings, and as Nanna has similar features, she was going to be our older sister who became our guardian after our parents became ill and died. Poppa, Rose and Jasper were all going to be related as well, with Rose and Jasper being twins, and poppa being their uncle who had been raising them for the last eight years, and he and Nanna had met at a support group at that time and had been together ever since. They had then decided to adopt Mum, Emmett and Alice who were also related after three years of marriage, and then two years ago they had adopted Jacob and Seth, who were again brothers. We were then going to say that their reasoning for adopting so many children is they wanted a large family, and they didn't want to have families split up. As long as people didn't pay too much attention to how old Nanna and Poppa were, or rather how young they are, it would be a better explanation then just adopting a lot of kids.
In addition to this the 'Masons' which was my 'family' were all going to wear green contact lenses to go with our reddish brown hair, the 'Cullens' with blonde hair were going to wear blue contacts, the 'Swans' which was Mum's 'family' were wearing brown and the 'Blacks' were going without contacts. This would hopefully help with the story and with people only seeing the superficial details they hopefully wouldn't ask too many questions. And like we did with me when we were in Canada and Forks, Addie was going to hide and try not to be seen in town too often, so people wouldn't see the speed of her aging. And if Aimee came she could be a cousin, but we probably wouldn't need to explain her to many people.
Once this was sorted we decided on when we were going to move, and decided on waiting for a while. I was turning three in a few months, which would make me appear about twelve, so we would have to wait until the following year before I could start school. Because of this we decided to build the house gradually, and move in the summer before I turned four and then start school and work like a normal family. This would be both easy and hard, because we would have to go and build the house, bit by bit, and leave bits of half finished-house there and we would also need to stay hidden here in Forks because too many people would remember us. But in the end it would mean we have a more normal life for a few years.
After our series of family meeting to organise where we were going to live we let Aimee spend her last week living with us by bonding with Addie and enjoying being a mother. It was going to be devastating when she left, for both her and her daughter, but in the end it was the best thing to do. I had overheard Nanna saying to Rose that it would almost be kinder on the both of them if they had never had the opportunity to see each other, but that in itself created all sorts of problems. By the two of them having this short month together, and then keeping in touch it was the lesser of two evils.
…..
Today Aimee was leaving. It was sad to see her go, but it was necessary. We all needed to continue on with our lives. Seth, Rose, Em, and Addie were driving her to the airport to fly to Seattle, then to Paris, and then home to Australia via Singapore. It was necessary for her to go to Paris because she could show that she did actually go to Europe, even if it was only for a few hours, and this would help to explain her two month long disappearance. We all wanted to see her off, and originally we were going to, but then we experienced our own little emergency. A new wolf.
Yeah, no wolves for years, and none for the whole two months we have been her, and then, BAM! Out of the blue a wolf. And guess what? It was another female wolf. It was Embry's little sister Anna, she had been trying to find Embry, he was at Seth's, and she walked into the house, and Mum, Dad and I were there, and she got angry when we couldn't tell her where Embry was. Then she started shaking because she was about to phase, so we took her out the back, into the woods, and she phased. The whole pack was then needed to help her calm down and teach her all the pack stuff. That took a lot longer than anyone thought it would and as a result none of us could go and see Aimee off.
…
I has now been nearly four months since Aimee left, and I was going to be turning three in a few days. Addie was physically a bit older than one, but she was mentally older. I liked to say that she had a mental growth spurt. She could talk in whole sentences now, like a three or four year old, but she was still getting the hang of walking. It was quite strange, because she was talking to us about how she knew how to walk, her body was just not able to do it yet. Aimee and Addie called each other at least once a week on Skype, and I would quite often talk to her as well, it was nice to see her and find out what she had been doing. She missed us all, especially Addie, and she had moved into her own flat, nearby to where she was going to go to university, and she had almost completely stopped seeing her family, she still spoke to her brothers, but that was it.
We had started planning the new house; well really new houses as we had decided it would be better to have a central house and a couple of little cottage type rooms elsewhere on the property. The central house was going to have a bedroom for every couple, plus one each for me, Jake, Addie, and Seth, and then the kitchen, living rooms and bathrooms, and then every family or couple was going to have a cottage with bedrooms, a bathroom and a sitting room. With this we could then at least pretend that we had some privacy from the rest of the family, even if we would probably spend all of our time in the main house.
But, for the next few months while it was all being built all we could do was waste some time in Forks, plan the designs for our new bedrooms and plan a family holiday. We were looking to go to Isle Esme again and take Aimee with us, probably in mid-January so that she would be on summer break. This way, even if Aimee wasn't able to raise her daughter she could still do things with her, like family holidays and teach her how to swim.
So, we had a year to kill, and then life would be a bit more interesting. We would start a new life in a new town, with a new story, and new identities. But first we had a year in hiding, at least we were in Forks for now, near our family and friends.
A.N. Hey everyone! I'm sorry that this chapter has taken so long to write, I have had an extremely busy semester at school. I'm in year twelve (senior year) and this year decides what I do with my life, and it has been very stressful. This semester I had a breakdown, didn't sleep, didn't eat and kind of just gave up on life- I don't cope with stress very well, and I have also developed anxiety and have had a few panic attacks, so I just need to focus on remaining calm. I have twelve weeks of school left, so I know I won't post again in that time.
This is the last chapter for this instalment, I will pick up about where I left off, and finish up the story in the next one, so add me to your favourites or just keep an eye out for it. I hope you have enjoyed this story so far, I know I have enjoyed telling it to you.
Daisy
xx
