The forums are fab; the OT is a giggle and UU is my sanity.
Everwondering is my Twi'ed beta, Maylin is my pimp queen alpha.
Our concrete fears are of spiders and snakes and clowns, but we are haunted by rejection, and pray for our children.
I own the poetry, Stephenie owns the people. Jimi owns Little Wing.
Bella:
"Could someone please explain what the Olympic Delta Blues Festival is?" I asked, carefully keeping my voice steady.
There was dead silence in the car, and then Jasper spoke like he was quoting a pamphlet for tourists.
"The Blues Fest is a competition that showcases musicians in the area. It gives local groups a chance to play a pro gig and get some notice. The top four bands play a concert with full tech support, and one is sponsored for a summer tour. A ton of talent scouts and label reps show up, and a lot of opening acts are signed out of it."
"We were in the top ten last year," Alice said, her voice pitched unusually high.
I said nothing.
"They have a fish fry cook-off, too." Jasper said, helpfully.
I looked at Edward, and waited. He drove, staring straight ahead, gripping the wheel so hard I could almost see the bones through his skin.
"How many people are there?" I asked, clutching my backpack to my chest like a pillow.
"It depends on the weather," said Alice. "There's an outdoor amphitheatre, but only the first third is covered."
"How many people?" I repeated, enunciating as clearly as I could.
"There are fifteen hundred seats. The rest is all blankets and tail-gating, but if it rains only the die-hards stay," said Jasper.
"A lot only stay for the food," added Alice.
I waited. The silence in the car pressed in on my body, and I bit my lip to keep from screaming.
"Over five thousand," said Edward, finally. His voice was quiet, but it echoed through the car.
I took a deep breath, and picked the one thick and bulky envelope off the dash, leaving the two skinny ones there.
"Could you drop me off at the police station, please?"
Edward looked me, brows knitted together, and nodded. Two blocks from school, he pulled into the lot, next to Charlie's car, and I was out of the Volvo before he even put it in park. Alice said my name, but I ignored her, not looking back as I walked up to the building. I heard them pull away as I shoved open the door. I marched into my father's office, and threw the envelope on his desk. He raised his eyebrows, made excuses into the receiver, and hung up the phone.
"Shouldn't you be at school?"
"How could you let me do this?" I yelled at him.
"Do what?" he asked, picking up the yellow packet.
"The recording with James. You knew exactly what this was about, and you signed off on it!"
"You seemed to know what you were doing, Bells."
"I thought I was recording a demo, not committing to get up in front of five thousand people!" The words tore through the tears in my throat, and I clenched my fists, shaking with my father's betrayal.
"You did fine Friday night."
"That was in front of two hundred, and I knew half of them, and I was with-" I closed my mouth. I was with Edward. I took a deep breath. "I was with my friends. And I wasn't being judged."
"Did this James kid lie to you?"
I'd wondered that ever since I opened the envelopes; but of the three people who had entered my name, he had been the most truthful.
"No, not really." I admitted, still resentful, but calming down a little. "I mean, he glossed over some details, like the whole entire festival, but he did say it was for a competition. He told me they were just release papers."
"They were, technically. You didn't read the forms yourself, before you signed them?" Charlie asked.
I shook my head and looked at my shoes, feeling tricked and stupid.
"Then you can't blame this on me."
I nodded, embarrassed that I had yelled at him.
"I'm sorry." I mumbled.
"You'll do fine, Bells. It's a good time, and the food is great. Jake and his crew are going, too."
"What?" I looked at him, my anger rising again. "I'm not actually doing this. No way!"
"I think you should. You gave your word to the guy that you would. It's not fair to him for you to back out because you wouldn't take the time to read what you signed your name to. If you were an adult, you could be sued for breach of contract."
"I can't. You know I can't!"
"Isabella, sit down." I took the chair in front of his desk and folded my arms across my chest, glowering at him.
"Look. When you were six, your mother thought ballet lessons might be a good idea-"
"Yeah, we know how well that went. My first and only performance I threw up all over the first row of parents, remember?"
"I was there. Back in the third row, thank God, but, Bella, you probably don't remember Renee letting you eat almost a whole chocolate cake before we left for the recital."
"What?" I let that sink in, and my brain started to feel like jelly in my skull.
"Don't you think that might have had something to do with it? But ever since then, you decided you were afraid of crowds. And your mother let you believe it, because it was easier than facing her own guilt for having no parenting skills."
"I remember you arguing at the dance studio." My stomach clenched. It was the only time they'd fought in front of me. Renee had packed us up and we'd left Charlie that same weekend.
Dad looked down at his desk, and fiddled with a pen.
"I often wonder if some of your anxiety issues didn't manifest out of that, too." He sighed. "Bella, your mother didn't leave me because you didn't do well on stage that day."
"I know that!"
"Maybe you do now, but did you understand that when you were six years old?"
My mind was scattered six ways of stupid, trying to reassemble what I knew of myself.
Charlie looked at me and smiled under his moustache. "Listen. I saw you Friday night. You loved it up there, and not just because of who you were sitting with on that piano bench."
The oblique mention of Edward cut through my inner turmoil and I blushed. Charlie gave me a long look.
"Just give it some thought. Now get to school."
I shouldered my backpack and left, feeling dazed, like part of me had been reborn.
Edward:
We watched Bella walk into the police station. As I pulled out, Jazz snaked a long arm out from the back seat and grabbed the envelopes off the dash.
" 'Dear Ms. Swan, we regret to inform you that your entry for the Olympic- blah, blah, blah -has been rejected due to failure to complete the necessary submission forms. All minors who wish to participate must have signed parental consent –blah, blah, blah.'" He held up a disc, labeled A+B: ICCN.
Alice snagged it from his fingers, and turned an unpleasant shade of beet. She shoved it back in the envelope.
"'Dear Ms. Swan, we regret to inform you- blah, blah, blah –due to failure to meet the specified deadline for all entries.'" He held up another disc, labeled B+E+A: Angel from Montgomery. "Look, there's a post-it with a cute smiley face: This is very good, please try again next year." He put the envelopes back on the dash. "Dude, you lied about her age?"
"Yeah, it was stupid. Don't ask." I sighed.
"Okay. Listen, both of you," said Jasper. "You have the social skills of inbred amoeba! Just because you two don't have to speak to each other to know what you are thinking doesn't mean that you don't have to talk to the rest of us! We can't read your fucking minds!"
"You told me I shouldn't interfere!" Alice protested.
"No, I told you that your idiot of a brother was the only one who had the right to tell her that he was head over hard-on in love with her, not to stop being her friend; you've practically ignored her since they started screwing."
"I'm not-" Alice and I spoke on top of each other.
"Yes, you are," he said to her, "When was the last time you two actually did anything girly-like without us? And you, brother, need to stop being an asshole. You haven't let yourself care about anyone or anything since your mother died, and you're finally alive, man. This girl has you by the short and curlies of your soul. And you need to tell her."
"Fuck off," I said, from between clenched teeth. "I was trying to say that I wasn't just screwing her."
"Does she know that?" Jasper was almost shouting as we pulled into the school lot. "This isn't just about you! The band was about to go to shit, and we got some new blood that gave us a shot in the arm, and were finally clicking again, and you're going to fuck it up because you won't talk to the girl." He and Alice crawled out of the back seat.
"Hey Jasper, you haven't asked her to join the band yet, either, have you, you self righteous fuck?" I called back to him, seething.
He glared at me.
I turned, squealing the tires and drove the two blocks back, pulling up to the station as Bella was walking out the door. She got in before I had a chance to get out and open her door. I was relieved; I'd figured she'd be pissed as hell at me, and we'd have to do some big dramatic thing where I would have to follow her in the car while she walked on foot with me screaming apologies like a douche.
The two rejection letters slid across the dash as I turned onto the street, and she left them there. We rose in silence for the two short blocks. Her eyes were distant; I was desperate to know what she was thinking, but she wasn't acting like she wanted to punch me in the face, so I wasn't going to wreck the moment by saying something inane. We walked into school, side by side, but she said nothing.
She stepped neatly around me between second and third period, like I was any nameless student, her eyes unfocused, lost in her own thoughts. I reached out to touch her, but my fingers grasped at empty air.
Alice and I walked to the auditorium, and found our usual corner in the balcony. She rummaged in my backpack, found my flask, and swallowed several times before I could snatch it from her hands.
She sat down in a seat and pulled out her chemistry book and opened it, flipped some pages and tapped on a notebook with a pencil.
I watched her, and checked my phone. Ordinary_Girl hadn't written, and I'd been so wrapped up in Bella this weekend that every line I started to write seemed obscene.
Alice continued to stare at her book, and after several minutes I sighed, and sat down next to her.
"Talk to me," I said.
"I'm studying."
"Not with your book upside down."
She flung her books away and drew her knees to her chest.
"I sent the cd in because I wanted to prove that I was good, too," she said. "You and Jazz and Em and Rosalie, you're all real musicians, and I'm just this hanger-on, the back-up chick who screws the bass player. And I know I shouldn't have done that to Bella, and we recorded it high, which was wrong, too, and there is no way I could manage to play an entire set, but I thought maybe if we'd gotten the demo accepted as an entry, I could show you guys I was worth something."
I stared at her, appalled. Her eyes were dull and puffy with tears.
"And now I've screwed things up with my only friend."
I sat down next to her and hugged her over the armrest.
"You're not just a back-up chick, Twin, and you know it. And damn, the things you have been doing on the harmonica, lately? It's phenomenal!"
She shrugged. "It was Bella."
"What do you mean?"
"We were in my room, and she was looking at the dress forms and my sketches, and she said I was a designer. That it was my nature, and so I needed to design my own sound, not try to follow along with what everyone else was doing, it would be as foreign as tracing someone else's artwork. And I know that sounds weird, but it made sense to me, and so I just started playing, and it came as easy as drawing."
"It isn't weird." It was perfect, and also ironic. Jasper and I had been trying for years to figure out how to unlock Alice's raw talent, and in one conversation Bella hands her the key.
"We need her, Edward."
"I know."
Bella sat with us at lunch when Alice rescued her from Jessica's talons, but she ate in silence, barely following the conversation.
Biology was the same way. Her distance was starting to unnerve me. I caught her staring at me, toward the end of class, her eyes intent as she assessed me. I felt guilty and awkward and looked away.
After school, I took her home, and walked her to the door. She was fumbling with her keys, struggling with her books and her laptop, so I took them from her hand. When we brushed fingers, the spark snapped through our fingers, and she looked at me, startled. I realized that this was the first time I'd touched her today. I opened the door, and she muttered a thank you.
"Bella, I'm sorry." The words rushed out of me. "It was stupid and wrong. I wasn't thinking. I knew it was past the deadline, I just hoped, maybe, that they would let it slide."
"But why did you send it?" Her eyes were huge, and her teeth were tearing at her lower lip. I reached out to make her stop, but she jerked her head away from my hand. I took the keys from the doorknob and dropped them into her outstretched palm, without touching her again.
"I thought you might like to sing with us, rather than James." My voice stayed steady.
Emotions flickered over her face, and then she finally nodded.
"See you tomorrow?" she asked.
"I'll be here," but it was really a question, asking if she still wanted to ride with us in the morning.
She nodded again, and I tried to hide my relief. Her distance was impenetrable, and I didn't know what it meant. She was so damned hard to read.
I wanted to kiss her, but she was already inside.
When I got home I went running, fleeing the frustration that was eating at me, letting the muscle ache punish me for my stupidity. Two days ago she'd been in arms, clinging to me like I was the only man in the world for her, and fuck, I wanted to be that man more than anything else, and today she was as far away as the stars.
The house was quiet when I got home. Rose and Emmett were in the dining room, looking at some kind of form.
"More paper work from the festival?" I asked. Usually Alice filled that stuff out; she had the best handwriting.
Emmett looked up, startled, and then slid the papers together, his movements furtive.
Rose looked away.
"What are you doing?" I demanded.
"Nothing. Don't worry about it." Emmett looked guilty.
I grabbed the papers out of his hand. They were college application forms.
"What the fuck, Emmett?"
"Look, Bro, it's just a back-up plan, you know? Just in case nothing happens. I'm not sayin' that it won't, but we need some options."
I tossed the papers down and stalked off to my room.
I took a shower, rinsing off the sweat from the run, and I contemplated jerking off, but the only image that filled my head was Bella's face as I said goodbye this afternoon. She'd looked angry and confused, chocolate eyes unfocused, and it inspired a pathetic need for forgiveness rather than a desperate selfish orgasm.
I dried off, and my iPhone chimed with Ordinary_Girl's update alert.
There was no title:
Defining ones future
By an errant piece of past
Chocolate cake
Seems like unjust desserts.
I tapped my thumbs over the little screen: Cryptic words. I am curious.
I feel like a circus girl in a German wheel, spinning with arms outstretched, in a cage of my own making. –Ordinary_Girl
Can you escape?
I think so, I'm just not sure how. –Ordinary_Girl
Ask your boy for help.
I'm too dizzy for words. You write some. –Ordinary_Girl
Bella:
I woke to an update alert from Debussy_88, two minutes before my alarm went off.
She
She is complicated
as a spiderweb,
as distant as the moon,
and I would follow her
to the stars
and wait for her return.
She is hope
and innocence,
woman,
love and time,
I would go to her
with open hands
and beg her to be mine.
I wrote: Could I have another helping please? This longs for a second verse.
When I came out of the shower, there was a response:
Maybe. Let's see what she says, first. –Debussy_88
What is the melody?
Light, easy keys and a very distant harmonica, no strings attached. –Debussy_88
I didn't realize I was running so far behind until Alice blew in the door, grabbed my hairbrush out of my hand, asked me to forgive her for entering me into the festival, texted the boys to go get us coffee, cut my least favorite jeans into my most favorite capris, found the mangled brown ribbon and smoothed with my rarely used curling iron, invited me to go shopping tomorrow in Port Angeles, tied up my hair in a ponytail and hustled me out the door as the boys pulled up with a cardboard tray of hot drinks.
"Thank you so much," I told them.
"We got Alice a double shot," whispered Jasper.
"I love a good caffeine rush during first period!"
Edward snickered, but said nothing to me. He glanced at my hair several times, and I became so self-conscious I checked it in the visor mirror.
The morning passed quickly, and I was glad; I'd forgotten to grab anything for breakfast, and the coffee jittered through my bloodstream uncomfortably. By lunchtime I was ravenous. We sat at our usual table, me with my constant pizza, apple and lemonade. Edward sat across from me, trapping one of my feet between his ankles. I felt stiff around him, and shy, but when I tried to pull my foot away, he locked his legs tighter, not letting me go. I wished we could go back to this weekend, where we lay naked in his bed, wrapped in sheets and the other's fingers, listening to music for hours.
Emmett and Jasper were having a heated debate regarding the abilities of Jimi Hendrix, Jack White and Jimmy Page.
"Okay, guys," said Alice, "there is only one way to settle this!"
"Kill, fuck or marry," said Rosalie.
"Ugh, not with guys," whined Emmett.
I looked to Edward for an explanation. He just grinned.
"Kill Page, marry Hendrix, and do Jack, but only if Meg was in on it, too," said Jasper.
"You'd marry Hendrix? Why?" Alice asked him.
"He'd have the best weed out of the bunch."
"Kill Hendrix, fuck Jack, and marry Page," said Emmett, "but I get Meg, too."
"As long as I get her first, you nasty mother fucker," said Jasper.
"You don't get to fuck the one you marry?" I asked Edward.
He shook his head 'no'.
"Kill Page, fuck Hendrix, marry Jack," I decided.
"Why?" he asked.
"Because you know Jack can play all the other two's stuff, and 'Little Wing' is pure foreplay."
His feet tightened around mine, and he gave me a long look from under his lashes.
"I'll have to remember that," he murmured.
"Your turn, then, Sister-Lover," said Emmet. "How about the Bitch Brigade?" He nodded to the table two rows over.
"Kill Jessica, fuck Lauren, marry Angela," said Rose, immediately.
"I'd watch that," said Emmett.
"I'd kill Lauren, fuck Jessica, and marry Angela," said Alice.
Jasper wrinkled his nose at her. "You'd fuck Jessica?"
"I bet she could teach me a few things, you know?" she replied. He shuddered.
We all looked at Edward. He squirmed in his seat, and looked at his tray.
"Kill Jessica, fuck Angela and marry Lauren," he said.
"Really?" said Alice.
He shrugged. "Lauren's loyal, and Angela's hot in a geek-chick way."
"I'd watch that," I said.
"Me fucking Angela?" he asked, brows knit.
"No."
"Me marrying Lauren?" he said, even more confused.
"No."
Everyone chuckled, and the bell rang. Edward walked with me to Biology, hand on the small of my back, and the heat from his palm radiated up my spine. The laughter at lunch had eased some of the tension between us, though whenever I glanced at him, he was always looking back.
When he took me home, he parked in the driveway and walked me to the door, but stopped me before I went inside. He stood with his hands in his coat pockets, and I could hear the slight metallic clink of his keys as he toyed with them, and I wondered what he was thinking.
His eyes were emerald and fathomless in the late afternoon sun, but there was a hint of a smile teasing his mouth.
"Bella, if I had asked you to sing with us at the festival, would you have said yes?"
"No," I said.
"If I had asked you to sing at Aro's with us, would you have said yes?"
"No," but I was a little more hesitant with my answer this time.
He pulled on the end of the ribbon in my hair, releasing the loops of the bow, but not my ponytail. The brown grosgrain curled down, tickling the side of my neck.
"Would you go out to dinner with me?"
"Yes," I said.
The Bitch Brigade: who would you kill, fuck and marry?