A/N: Here it is! Bella's point of view.

Chapter 25- I Should Tell You

It was Tuesday evening, around seven thirty, and Abra was in bed and asleep. She wouldn't wake up until the next morning, not even if the roof came crashing down around her. Well, maybe then. Just maybe.

Someone knocked and I checked who it was. Alice. I opened the door, and she pulled me into a hug. "How are you doing?"

I shrugged. "All right I guess."

"Do you want to talk about it?"

I nodded. "Sit down, I'm going to have to start from the very beginning."

She sat down on my bed, and I sat down in my single chair, facing her. "The very beginning?"

"I think you know that I was a week old when my parents abandoned me."

Alice nodded. "Yeah."

"Okay. They abandoned me on the steps of the Jewish orphanage in San Francisco on June 2nd 1980."

"Did they name you there?"

"Yeah. They called me Hannah Adina."

"Hannah?'

"I changed my name."

"Why?"

"Well, you're not exactly supposed to leave foster care until you're eighteen."
"And you were?"
"Fourteen and a half. I ran away."

"And how did you come up with Bella Swan?"

"I have always thought that the name Isabella was pretty, and I've always liked swans. I wanted a name that wasn't one you would see every day, but that wasn't too unique. I didn't want to stand out."

"You never do want to stand out."

I shrugged. "True, anyway, when they found me they figured I was about a week old, and so they gave me the birthday of May 25th. Supposedly I was well fed and healthy, and no one saw my parents or had any idea who they were. No one came looking for me, and I lived at the orphanage until I was seven months old."

"So you have no idea why they abandoned you?"

"Not really. Maybe they were young and weren't ready for a child, maybe they just didn't want me. But when I was seven months old the orphanage closed down and I was sent to the state orphanage in Sacramento. A Spanish family from Los Angeles took me in as a foster kid a month later, and I stayed with them for about eight months, until I was seventeen months old."

"They didn't adopt me?"

"No. I don't know, some foster parents just take kids in for a little bit, and then send them back to the orphanage. I guess I wasn't the perfect baby they wanted. Supposedly I cried a lot."

"Did Abra?"

"When she was younger, yes. She's a lot better behaved now."

"She seems to be. What happened next?"

When I was seventeen months old, the family that was fostering me moved to Arizona, and because I was in the state system of California, I couldn't go with them. I went back to the state orphanage for a week or two, but I was young and cute, so I got a new foster family rather quickly."

Alice nodded.

"This family was German and French, and those were the two languages spoken there, in contrast to the Spanish and English that had been spoken at my last foster home. They had another foster kid, boy of about six, who spoke Spanish, and so those three languages were my first. My first memories are of them…" I trailed off.

"What?"

I looked down. "They never really… cared. They fed me and clothed me, and gave me a bed to sleep in, and I was allowed to sit in the playroom and play, but they didn't love me or even really like me. They just regarded it as their duty to take care of children without parents, I guess. I don't really know what they thought."

"Oh Bella." She came over to me and hugged me, pulling me down to sit on the bed next to her. "Are you going to be okay talking about this?'
"I have to Alice. I want to tell someone."

"Okay, if that's really what you want to do."

I nodded "They moved too, a month after my third birthday, and I went back to the state orphanage. After I stayed a month at the orphanage, I was fostered by another family, the Mardels, who spoke English and German." I bit my lip and stopped talking.

"Bella? You can stop if you want."

"No, no, It's just, well- this isn't the easiest thing to talk about. Remembering all these people and what it was like then. It's hard."

Alice nodded. "I would say I understand, but I guess I really don't. I wish I could understand-"

I shook my head. "You don't."

"I don't what?"

"You don't wish you could understand. It's better you don't. Anyway, every morning they would send me to the library, and I would read all day."

"Like Matilda?"

I grinned. "Kind of. Except in English and Spanish and French and German."

"Multi-lingual Matilda." She giggled.

"I guess. But continuing, they must have gotten my age down wrong on the foster parent forms, because just after my fourth birthday, I went to kindergarten. I remember having a lot of fun, and the teacher being really surprised when I brought a novel to school to read."

Alice giggled.

"I think it might have been in German, too."

Alice shook her head, a smile lighting up her face.

"So yeah, she asked me whether I could read in English too, and I said I could, and in Spanish and French as well. She looked like she was about to faint. Once she figured out where I was she gave me stuff to do separate from the class, first and second grade math worksheets, books to read, projects to do."

"What was that like?"

"It was okay. No one really liked me because they thought I was so much smarter than them, so I didn't really make any friends, but she made school fun for me, which it wouldn't have been if it had been to easy and I hadn't had friends. I guess she's one of the reasons that I'm at Harvard today."

Alice smiled. "Wow. Do you remember her name?"

I bit my lip. "Mrs. Tallis, or something like that. Not really. I stayed with that family, the Mardels, until the end of the school year; when they dropped me back off at the orphanage."

"Why?"

"Probably because I was smarter than their son, and it was lowering his self esteem to have a younger kid, especially a girl smarter than him, or something like that."

"How old was he?"

"A second grader, I think. Their dropping me off turned out well though. I was at the orphanage for only a few days until a Spanish family fostered me. Mr. and Mrs. Hernandez were the only foster parents I really had who ever felt like parents."

"These were the ones you told the doctor about who got you your shots?"

I nodded. "Yeah. The Hernandez family. They were an older couple, in their sixties I think, they'd never had any children, just a long string of foster children. Mrs. Hernandez taught me to cook, and helped me with my Spanish, and Mr. Hernandez knew about all sorts of things, astronomy, biology, mythology, ancient cultures, and geography. I'm pretty sure he knew the capital of almost every country in the world. Together they taught me so much I was able to skip fourth grade."

"Wow. It didn't last?"

"No. When I was nine, and in the sixth grade, Mr. Hernandez had a stroke, and they moved from San Francisco to Florida to live with his younger sister. They didn't want to adopt me, because they were so old, and so they sent me back to the orphanage to get another foster family."

"And who was the next family?"

"They were a German Jewish family, and pretty much all they ever did for me was get me learning for my bat mitzvah."

"That's all?"

"They made me work a lot, I guess that the father's father had been rich, and he had had a maid as a kid, but they didn't have the money for a maid."

"So they took you in?"

"So they fostered me. And because they weren't at all nice to me, I focused my energy on doing well in school to keep my mind off my life at 'home'."

"So did you skip another grade?"

"No, but I got really far ahead of my grade. When I was eleven, one of the foster care inspectors came unannounced and found me doing my work unsupervised while the rest of the family watched TV, so she removed me, and took me back to the orphanage."

"So how many families is this so far?"

"The Valdez family, the Salmonds, the Mardels, Mr. and Mrs. Hernandez, and the Steinezerns. That makes five so far. There's one more."

"And who were they?"

"The Arhadens, an Israeli family. The father was a rabbi, and he was very caught up in his work at the synagogue, and the mother was a lawyer, very caught up in her work as well, but they were both very nice people, and they cared for me well. With all of the getting ahead I did with the family before them, I took a lot of high school classes in eighth grade, and I took ninth and tenth grade in the same year. In May of that year, I turned thirteen, and they gave me my bat mitzvah. The next September, when I began eleventh grade, the mother's half-brother, who was out of work, moved in. He- he was scary."

"Scary?" Alice looked a bit confused.

"Yes. Scary… he would be all nice and kind whenever his half-sister and his half-brother in-law were home, but when they weren't he was scary. He would get mad really easily, and he was so violent. He would hit me, and their two little sons. He would threaten us with death or other things if we told what he did. I finished both eleventh and twelfth grade that year, and graduated from high school a couple days before my fourteenth birthday. A week or two after I graduated, he got… adventurous, I guess you could say, and-"

"Did he- you know?"

"No, he's not Abra's father. He just let his hands roam, if you get my meaning."

Alice nodded. "So you ran away?"

I nodded. "I left them a letter telling what had happened, and ran away. I had been accepted to Columbia with a full scholarship, so I went to New York, changed my name, and lied about my age to get a job."

"Wait. Edward said once that you looked a bit familiar when he first saw you."

"He did? Wait, where did you guys grow up?"

"In Forks, Washington."

"On the Olympic Peninsula?"

"That's right."
"Oh yeah! Here's why. The rabbi had a sister who lived in the Seattle area, and she took us out to La Push to go hiking on the beaches and in the mountains out there. She had a friend who had kids in public school in Forks, so I went to school for a day at the high school there when I was in ninth grade."

"And Edward would have been a senior, I think"

I nod. "I guess that's where he recognized me from. He has good memory."
Alice grinned. "He does. Anyway, go on. I want to hear what's next."

"Where did I leave off?"

"You ran away to New York."

"Right. So I ran away and went to live in New York. I didn't know anybody, and my scholarship depended on my getting good grades, so I worked hard in my classes, taking extra classes each semester, and taking summer semesters to get further ahead. Just before the summer semesters began, the spring semester would have graduation and lots of extra people would be on campus. Huge numbers of friends and family members of graduates would stay in the dorms, even though they weren't supposed to, and once you had a key to one dorm room, you could get into every single one. So it was just before spring semester graduation, a few days before my sixteenth birthday that-" I stopped.

"What?"

"You know."

"I don't. And you need to tell me. Have you told anyone about this, ever?"

I thought. "No."

Alice shook her head. "Bella, you've got to tell someone."

"Some guys, a lot of them, they were probably drunk, broke into my dorm room. I was tired, I had had a really long day, and I never really got enough food, so before I could do anything they pinned me down, and"

"And?"

"And when my period didn't come on time, and I remembered what had happened I went and bought a pregnancy test from the drugstore."

"And it came out positive?"

"Yes. I graduated from Columbia in August, and I gave birth to Abra the next February."

"By yourself?" Alice rubbed my back, and looked profoundly sad.

"The nurse refused to hold my hand because she didn't want her fingers to be broken. And I probably would have broken her fingers too. I came to Boston in March and found an advertisement for Abra's daycare in April. I started at Harvard that May, when I turned seventeen. I've been here ever since."

"But didn't Edward meet you on a plane coming back from Hawaii?"

"I was there this summer for a summer course there."

"And when are you graduating?"

"May."

"This May?"

"This May."

"So you'll be…?"

"Eighteen. I'll turn nineteen a few days after graduation."

"And do you know where you're going for your residency?"

"I might go back to San Francisco, or I might go to Seattle. There's a place in Vermont I'm thinking about going to as well."

"Why did you run off when Edward was dropping you off from the date?"

"He tried to kiss me. I got really scared, and I ran into my room and locked the door. It wasn't really his fault, he didn't know what had happened, but it was really scary for me. Even though I knew he wasn't going to hurt me, I thought he would. I was just- scared, surprised, I don't know. Maybe if he had asked to kiss me it would have been okay." I shook my head. "And also, I'm not really used to depending on anybody, or trusting people, with the way I grew up and everything"

Alice nodded. "The way you reacted makes perfect sense when you get the whole picture. It's just when you don't have the whole picture it doesn't make a lot of sense. Oh, and one last thing, how did you learn to play the piano so well?"

"Practicing, obviously." I grinned. "No, the music teacher at whatever school I went to would usually let me practice before and after school. Some even gave me lessons, but that stopped after sixth or seventh grade."

"Why?"

"Because I was better than them already."

"And you were how old?"

"Nine or ten."

Alice shook her head. "So do you think that you're talented?"

I shrugged. "A little."

"A little?" Alice looked incredulous. "You speak four languages, you're going to graduate from medical school at the age of eighteen with a two-year old daughter, and you play the piano as well as a virtuoso, and you're only 'a little' talented?"
"Five languages. English, Français, Deutsch, Español, and Hebrew."

"My point proven further."

I shrugged. "Whatever."
"Are you going to talk to Edward about what happened?"

"No."

"No?"
"I wrote him a letter explaining."

"Okay." Alice stood up and hugged me. "I hope that helped a little bit. Sleep well."

"You too. And thanks Alice."

She nodded to me, and left. I went to bed.

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A/N: Chapter rewritten. I didn't like the monologue-ish way it came out before, so I changed it. I hope it's better. :D