"Edward," I said, furrowing my brow, "if Sally was into girls, how come you kissed her?"
"Oh, it was just on the cheek," he said, laughing. "I kissed her goodbye when I left New York to tour Europe."
"Well, that doesn't count!" I insisted. "Weren't there any real ones in there?"
"Nothing seems as real as you," he said. I blushed pleasurably at this. "I've never been interested in anyone long enough to risk it. I really have tried to do the right thing, you know. Even if I am always doing the wrong thing when it comes to you, it seems."
"And the wrong thing would be what, exactly?" I asked.
"Sticking my face right up against your jugular," he said with a laugh. "A gentleman would never."
"Hopelessly old-fashioned, then?" I asked, smiling.
"Pretty much hopeless, yes," he confirmed. "And that answers that question. What else've you got for me?"
I thought for a moment. There was one thing that I'd been curious about pretty much since I first saw the Cullens, although I'd never quite had the nerve to ask. Well, no time like the present.
"Why are you all so beautiful?" I blurted out. "Is it just coincidence? Is it a vampire thing?"
"Sort of both," he said. "I don't mean to be cryptic—"
"Heh," I said. "'Cryptic'."
Edward rolled his eyes. "You are very, very weird, Bella Swan. I tell you I'm a vampire and all you can do is make jokes at my expense. Most people would be running away screaming right now. You? You pun."
"Hey," I said. "You're the vampire who goes around using words like 'cryptic'. Next you'll be telling me you're just batty about me, is that it?"
"Well, I am batty about you," said Edward, grinning cheekily. "I'm not kidding!" he protested when all I did was laugh. "I'm deadly serious!"
"Oh, Edward," I sighed. "Can't you be grave for one minute?"
"I'm only teething you, Bella," he lisped, reaching across the seat to nudge me playfully in the arm, whereupon I totally lost it.
"You win," I giggled. "Now stop distracting me. I want to know why your whole family looks like a Ralph Lauren catalogue."
"There are a lot of theories," he said, "but no one knows the whole answer. In some cases, the vampire was a very attractive human, so of course they'd be an attractive vampire, too. But that's not all of it. People don't look quite the same after the transformation—aside from the fancy skin and the eyes, their features change a little, too. There are scientists who've looked into it, and what they found was that during the days of the transformation, the person's DNA basically rewrites itself. Well, not rewrites—maybe I should say it perfects itself, becomes the most stable, invulnerable version of itself. That's why vampires don't get sick—or age. There is nothing that can kill a vampire from within; we can only be killed by outside forces, and only very powerful ones."
"What's that got to do with those cheekbones?" I asked, eyeing the feature lustfully.
"I'm getting to that!" laughed Edward. "When a person is changed to a vampire, venom from the sire's bite surges through our bodies, burning away all of our old, squishy tissues and replacing them with impervious vampire equivalents. Of course, while it's doing this, it's taking cues from all that fresh, perfect new DNA. So even though, at the end of it, you still look like you, you look like a perfect you. Highly symmetrical skeletal structure, for one thing, which no human actually has because environmental factors inhibit that kind of symmetry."
He paused, and a shadow of a grin lifted one side of his mouth. "Actually," he said, "you would find most of the vampire world quite unsettling, were you to see them face-to-face. Vampires don't have any particular need to be as expressive as humans. Our eyesight is rather better than yours, for a variety of reasons, and we can detect facial tics that would never even register to a human. In order to fit in, my family makes it a habit to mimic human modes of expression, in all its gaudy, asymmetrical glory." He sounded half-wistful, half exultant as he said this. Strangely, I had always been so focused on the ways Edward left me in the dust that it had never occurred to me that Edward might actually miss being a human. I thought about what it would feel like to give up all of my little facial tics, the lip-biting and the crinkles around my eyes and nose when I smiled, and the thought was a little depressing. Those were the things that felt like me.
"We do try our best," he said. "But there are limitations. Although our features aren't perfectly symmetrical, because things like freckles and facial hair remain more or less as they were, we do end up looking...well, as you said, sort of blandly perfect."
"I never said 'bland'," I protested. The word had never entered my mind. Even if they were a little too predictably beautiful, their mannerisms more than made up for it. Alice had a certain lopsided exuberance which greatly enhanced her charm, though I suspected I would find her much less bewitching if she weren't grinning all the time. Even Edward, so stunning on the page, would have left me cold if he didn't also have that sweetly listing smile, that curious way of looking at me sideways, one eye slightly squinted as if he couldn't figure out what he was seeing. Only Jasper ever struck me as bland, and even I knew that was only because I rarely saw him laughing and joking around; of all of them, Jasper most resembled a model in the pages of a catalogue, his face wiped clean of expression. But he was the exception to what I had seen of his family. Perhaps other vampires were bland; the Cullens struck me as exquisitely idiomatic.
"We're quite blessed, you know," he said. "If we fed on humans, we would find ourselves slipping so far from any humanity that might remain, we would truly become unrecognizable. By living among the living, humanity returns to us in small ways. It was Rosalie who discovered it first: about a year after we began attending human schools, she found herself chewing the inside of her cheek and raising one eyebrow as naturally as she'd done in life. Emmett found a few years later that he was favoring his left leg again. He'd walked that way when he was alive, due to an injury he sustained on some farming equipment. While venom erased the injury that caused the limp in the first place, it couldn't completely erase the gait that resulted from it. What's quite amusing is that Carlisle would have noticed this centuries ago, except that the only time he ever spent around humans was while he was carefully schooling his face to remain expressionless as he informed them that the leg would have to come off. Once we learned that we could trust ourselves around humans, everything came flooding back. It felt wonderful, each of us uncovering physical traces of our old, messy, imperfect lives."
"I'm glad," I said. "Even if I'll never meet Edward Masen, I like to think there's still some of him around." Edward smiled warmly. What a beautiful smile. An old, messy, imperfect smile.
"Anyway," he said, "bland or not, venom does remove most of the physical traits that are commonly thought of as unattractive, although that is a mere side-effect of venom's true purpose. The part of vampire DNA that can't get sick also eliminates any damage from illness or exposure—burns and scars disappear, wrinkles plump up with fresh new collagen, spots disappear. This isn't exactly a blessing for those of us who would have been proud to wear those markers of age and and experience, but humans don't usually consider that angle. Standards of beauty have changed a lot over the last ten thousand years, but symmetrical features and clear skin will never go out of fashion. You know, that's why it hurts so much to be changed: literally every cell in your body is destroyed so that it can be rebuilt. It works fast, too. Three days is all it takes, sometimes less. Venom is the fastest virus on the planet."
"I don't quite get it," I said, trying to keep everything straight in my head. "I mean, I understand about the..." Actually, I wasn't sure how much of it I did understand. "I just don't see where it came from. Why would all this stuff happen?"
"Most vampires prefer to believe it is Darwinism in progress. Everything about us draws our prey in. Our scent, our looks, everything. We are the perfect hunters." There was a sourness under his voice that I didn't like one bit.
"Do you believe that?" I questioned timidly. "That you're just...just a hunter, nothing more?"
"Well, Carlisle doesn't," said Edward. "He thinks the others are stopping short of the real truth, that we are more highly evolved so that we can achieve higher goals, learn more about the universe without the limitations of mortality hanging over our heads. Become perfectly enlightened beings. Others may be content to simply use our alluring pheromones and our invulnerability as a means of getting an easy meal, but Carlisle believes we should be fighting every moment to become better people, more liberated from our base desires. His theory is that no one can be perfect, and so vampires have been given this cross to bear—the cross of constant pain as we resist the urge to feed on humans—as a counterweight to our immortality and our physical perfection. Well, Carlisle was a minister during the Inquisition; is it any surprise he still thinks like one?"
"What do you think?" I asked softly.
"I'm not sure," Edward admitted with a sigh. "It would be so much easier to agree with the others, to just give in to my nature and feed, feed, feed. But..."
"But what?" I asked when he showed no sign of continuing.
"I am more than my nature," he said at last. "That's what Esme taught me. What she's always teaching me. There was a time when I did...oh, just the most horrible things. I wasn't always an animal-drinker, Bella."
I shivered, thinking about the ramifications of this. I wasn't always an animal-drinker...
What else was there for him to drink?
I wasn't always an animal-drinker.
Murder. Edward was admitting to murder. The most unforgivable crime I could think of. And I was letting him drive my car. I had just spent five hours in a meadow with him, far from everyone, and no one even knew where I'd gone! Suddenly my abstract trust of him crashed into a wall. It was so easy to trust a person if you weren't faced with an actual confession of murder. Serial murder, from the sound of it.
"...Bella?" He asked nervously, and I realized I had been silent a long time. "Are you...are you okay?"
"How many people have you killed?" I asked quietly, my fingernails digging into the Thing's vinyl seat. Help me, Thing, I thought a little manically. Tell me what to think.
"Bella..."
"How many?" I asked again, louder.
"Fifty-seven," he said reluctantly. "I'm so sorry, Bella—"
"Did you apologize to them?" I said, amazingly calmly given how I was feeling as I pictured teenagers like myself, so attracted to Edward they would let him get away with anything, get away with murder… Hadn't I already proven he could cross as many lines as he liked, all because of what he himself admitted was an unfair biological advantage? At the time I'd known it was wrong of him to follow me to Port Angeles, but it had been so hard to care as long as I was subject to his scent and his uniquely alluring voice. I'd made it easy for him. Had the others been just like me, traitors to their own standards of self-preservation? Trapped in the web of his beauty? His cold, hard perfection?
"No, I didn't," he said quietly.
"Why the hell not, Edward?" I dug my nails deeper and deeper into the Thing, knowing that if I wasn't careful I would forgive him just because I was in love with him. Are you? a part of myself wondered. Are you truly in love with him? Or are you just the perfect prey for the perfect hunter?
"They didn't deserve it," he said weakly. "They didn't deserve to live—"
"What the everloving fuck—" I burst out, burying my face in my hands.
"Rapists and murderers, Bella!" Edward said urgently, cutting through my hyperventilation. "Starting with the man who drove Esme to her death, I targeted the dregs of humanity. I never went after someone innocent, I never went after someone like you! I was angry at Carlisle for turning me, I hated him for it, and then he found Esme and he didn't need me anymore, and I hated him so much I would have done anything just to prove that his noble theories about our kind were wrong. But all I did was prove him right, because even when I made the decision to give in to the bloodlust, all I could make myself do was target murderers like me, and abusers, and I don't even know if it was about feeding at all, or maybe I thought if I could kill those cursed like me I could kill myself along with them, kill the parts of me I hated—" Edward stopped talking abruptly, and when I peeked up at him I saw that his eyes were screwed closed, and his knuckles were white as paper against the steering wheel. I could hear him breathing heavily, which was weird in and of itself. I never heard Edward breathing.
"When Esme came to us," said Edward, strain evident in his voice, "she was at death's door. Anyone else would have thought she was already dead, but he could hear her heart beating faintly, and he remembered her."
"...Remembered her?" I asked timidly.
"They'd met a few years before," Edward said, and was it just me or was his voice slowly coming back under his control? I wished I had control like that. I was too confused and freaked out now to feel much of anything. My whole body had gone into shock. "Before she married Charles Evenson. And I promise you this, Bella, if you knew about him, about what he was, the things he did to her—"
"Stop, Edward," I said, slapping my hand over his on the steering wheel. Given how messed up I felt, I couldn't handle hearing him talk like this. The hatred I heard in his voice as he spoke the words Charles Evenson—I never wanted to hear that again. "Don't talk about him. Just—tell me what happened next."
"Carlisle remembered her, and when he found her almost dead but still alive, he turned her. And I was just a ball of hate back then, Bella, but Esme came to us and she is not the kind of person who hates. I grew to love her; how could I not? She was like an angel, and I needed her so badly. And then, one day...I heard an errant thought in her, a thought about her first husband, and what he'd done to her, what he'd driven her to do, and I just completely lost faith in humanity, Bella. I rebelled against Carlisle and all his moronic ideas about how man is fundamentally good, I rebelled against Esme, who wanted me to be happy even though she knew firsthand how terrible men really are. I ran away like a coward, and I hunted down Charles Evenson, and I made him suffer ten times what he'd made Esme suffer, and I made sure he knew exactly, and in great detail, why he must suffer. I wanted to jettison my parents, with all their wretched certainty of the goodness of people. I wanted to go crazy and roam the world alone, killing until I was killed. I thought if I did that I could prove that Carlisle had been wrong all along, and at least I would die right. I was so angry back then, I didn't even care what happened to me.
"But something changed when Esme came to us, even if I was too thick to realize it right away. I wanted to become the wanton-killing-machine I'd always known I must be, but somehow I couldn't quite do it. In a crowd of innocents, I could only bring myself to target a certain type of person. The sort of person who waited quietly for a group of girls to stumble drunkenly home from a speakeasy. Or the sort of person who would wait with a derringer for hours until a wealthy couple passed by in the park, all loaded down with jewelry and cash. I never targeted innocents, Bella. I swear I never did that."
"Why did you stop?" I whispered, now caught squarely between horror and pity. "It sounds like you had the perfect system. Why give that up?"
"For the same reason I only hunted men like Charles. Esme believed in me, and I let her down. So after a few years, realizing that my time of self-indulgence had only left me feeling emptier than ever, I returned to them. I confessed to Esme what I had done, and she made me promise never to live like that again. And I haven't, Bella. I haven't touched a drop of human blood since 1931."
"Oh, Edward," I moaned, burying my face in my hands. This day had been so perfect, so unbelievably beautiful in every way. I supposed this must be the counterweight to that beauty: the discovery that the funny, sweet, enigmatic boy I loved was also a...a what, exactly? A murderer, yes, but was there any excusing what he'd done? He claimed never to have targeted an innocent like me—and it was true that he'd resisted my blood, so perhaps he wasn't lying when he said he'd resisted others like me. In fact, I didn't doubt his story at all. I was sure he was telling the truth.
There was a part of me that even believed he might, just possibly, have been in the right. I was against the death penalty, but only because I knew it was so riddled with bias and error. But Edward couldn't err. As a mind-reader, he would always know the guilt or innocence of his victims. And hadn't his actions arisen out of love for his mother? Misguided actions, confused love, yes. But I belonged to a generation that accepted the masked vigilante without much more than a shrug, and it was hard not to think of Edward as simply another Rorschach fighting for justice. Then again, I'd also grown up on Harry Potter, and I couldn't help but agree with Ms. Rowling that the act of murder did damage to the murderer's soul. I didn't want to believe that Edward could become as desensitized to murder as he had to listening in on people's thoughts. Where did that end?
You know where that ends, my brain cawed at me. It ends with him following you to Port Angeles. You know what? Maybe it doesn't even end there. Maybe it ends somewhere worse.
I kept my head in my hands for so long that by the time I looked up, we were already pulling up in front of my house.
"I'm so sorry, Bella," Edward said miserably, and I dared to look at him. His beautiful honey-colored eyes were set in an expression of terrible pain. I swallowed hard and looked away.
"I need time to think, Edward," I said quietly. Slowly, as creakily as if all my joints had rusted, I opened the Thing's door and climbed down. In an instant Edward was beside me, the driver's-side door already smoothly closed and locked.
"I know I can't undo what I've done," said Edward. "But I swear to you, Bella, just tell me what to be and I'll be it. Tell me what to do to atone for this—"
"If you haven't atoned for your own sake," I said sadly, "why would you for mine?"
He looked as if I'd struck him.
Jasper didn't say a word to anyone. Alice had, of course, seen what would happen from the moment Jasper inhaled only yards away from the two bleeding men. And she'd told Esme and Carlisle, who had waited for their children with open arms. Edward, Emmett and Rosalie went gratefully to their parents for comfort, their shoulders bowed under the weight of what they'd seen; Jasper went into the wilderness.
I'll come back when my eyes turn the right color again, thought Jasper despondently at Edward. Don't let them come after me. I can't—I don't think I can bear it. Not even Alice. Especially not Alice.
Edward wanted nothing more than to follow his brother. Alice, wide-eyed and trembling, took to following Esme around the house like an abandoned kitten. Nobody spoke much. After a few weeks, with still no sign of Jasper, Edward left the house at night and followed Jasper's faint trail into the wild. He tracked him for a week and a half, all the way up to Peru. And when he finally located his brother's mental voice from a mile away, he ran at top speed so Jasper couldn't evade him. Not that he didn't try.
"Stop being a moron for a minute and listen to me!" Edward finally shouted in frustration, as Jasper dashed away yet again. "This isn't the first time any of us have seen this, Jas. Who are you hiding from, anyway?"
"I don't know!" moaned Jasper, halting suddenly and sinking to the jungle floor. Edward caught up instantly and crouched beside his brother, struggling to catch his eye. I never been good enough fer you all, Jasper thought despondently in full twang. Alice always said we needed t'all be together, but I cain't never git it right, never, never… Good god, Ed, those poor men, dyin' so afraid like that...
"They would have died afraid anyway," Edward pointed out.
Is that s'posed to make it better?
"Jas," said Edward firmly, realizing that if he followed Jasper into his spiral of guilt and remorse they would never make it home, "don't you want to be with us? Don't you see you're one of us?" As much as Edward was used to being the youngest, and for all Jasper was the oldest vampire among them besides Carlisle, they both could feel it strong and clear: Jasper was nineteen years old. He was nineteen and he'd messed up bad.
He turned miserable yellow eyes on Edward. The red hadn't sunk in too much, at least. Alice is one of you. I'm just the freak with the shitty power. You got any notion o' how much this power's worth? I kin tell you, it ain't worth a crow's fart in a hurricane.
"If anyone's got any notion," said Edward ruefully, "It's me."
Jasper was silent for a few moments. Yeah, mebbe, he thought.
"I get it," said Edward. "Good god, Jas, I feel lonely and out of place approximately one million percent of the time. That isn't you, that's life. That's called being a person. You can't possibly think we don't want you around. Tell me you're not that stupid."
Wish I could.
"Okay," said Edward, sighing. "Here's what's going to happen: you and I will find some boar to eat or perhaps some tree rats. Then we are marching straight back to our family, because they are soiling their figurative pants about you right now and you're being cruel, staying away like this without so much as a by-your-leave. You're going to kiss your wife and then you're going to have a serious heart-to-heart with Mom. For heaven's sake, Jas, how have you lived with Esme all these years without absorbing some of her mothering? What, did you think she was just being nice? You have the worst tunnel-vision I've ever witnessed, Jasper. I don't care if you don't believe me, you have to start believing me, now. Come home. Your family misses you and nobody but me will play chess against Emmett because of how seriously he takes it, and he won't play me because he knows I cheat. And I am getting sick to death of hearing what's going on in Alice's head. Put an end to this, Jasper. Come home."
Jasper looked at Edward for a long minute.
Then he came home.
1. Although it is never made explicit, Edward does indicate that although he doesn't respect, admire or care about humans themselves, he believes vampires have no souls and so acting like a normal vampire makes him even more not have a soul, which makes no sense but whatever. In other words, he refrains from murdering not because he appreciates human life but because he doesn't want to be cosmically punished for it. This explanation is so cold and calculating that it makes no sense in my version of the story. (To be fair, in another author's hands it could have kicked ass.) I want Jasper to feel guilt over his "mistakes" not because it let down his family or because he broke a promise to his wife but because he feels bad for the humans he killed. You know, just like an empath? Also, when Smeyer dedicates pages and pages to describing the intensity of bloodlust, but then has newborn!Bella withstand it with almost no difficulty while Jasper looks enviously on, proving yet again how Special Bella Is, the whole dilemma is reduced to a simple equation: if a non-human-drinking vampire slips up and eats a human, it is because that vampire wasn't good enough, wasn't strong enough, or didn't care enough. But I feel that there is room to explore what it must mean for a vampire to give up human blood, to work hard for years and years, to suffer bloodlust without hope of relief, and to be overcome by it even once after all that effort. Jasper's character offers enormous potential for exploring the intersection between moral ideal and physical limitation.
2. Remember in canon when Edward told Bella he'd murdered lots and lots of people, deliberately and not at all by accident, and this information served as a wake-up call to her, causing her to reflect deeply on her attraction to Edward and her own values, leading them both on a painful yet rewarding journey to a more empowered and enlightened relationship?
Yeah, me neither.
My initial response to Edward's admission was either he was doing society a great and valuable service, or else that killing any human, even an evil one, is as awful and regrettable as he apparently believed it to be. I would have accepted either of these responses from canon!Bella, but instead we were given a third option:
She didn't care at all. Not because she believes that one's choices and not one's species decide one's worth, and that the actions of the rapists and murderers Edward targeted reduced the value of those men's lives to less than the value of their victims. Not because she recognized that Edward's actions had saved countless Esmes and Rosalies from the cruelty of men. But because he was so beautiful that she didn't feel like being mad at him about something she could just as easily ignore. Let's file this under the category of Evidence That Bella Is Too Shallow To Live.