A.N: Happy Sunday!

This chapter very much explains some of the reasoning for why Eve thinks the way she does. Lots of religion in this chapter and if anyone is confused or wants more explanation, please ask.

It is not the be-all/end-all of this topic, nor can I really explain it in loads and loads of detail but this is how Eve understands it. And she's 16.

ALSO: Excitement. Expect an interlude chapter this Thursday or next Thursday along with the regularly scheduled update. The 10th commenter took me up on my little challenge and so there'll be a little something extra :D

Oh, and hello again Jamila Jamie. Thank you for the 2 reviews! I expect at some point, there will be a conversation between N and her dad...that would just be an unfinished plot point if there wasn't. Those aren't very satisfying.

FOURTEEN

who hunger

Eve sat in front of the twins at Sue's diner. They'd decided to get some food on their way back from the beach seeing as they were always hungry. Always. She'd still not managed to crack down on why that was, but she refused to believe that it was just Growing-Child-Syndrome. That was an insult to her intelligence.

They got there and Eve waved hello to Sue. The woman wasn't always around, but she was there more often than not. Eve had heard that her husband had died of a heart attack a few months ago and so she always made sure to leave a nice tip and try and be a good customer. There was nothing worse than dealing with the loss of a loved one and having to carry on with the rest of your life.

She'd not spoken to Seth Clearwater seeing as he was in the year below her, but she made sure to smile at him whenever she did meet him at the library or around the town. He seemed to be handling things well enough, but she knew more than anyone how well people could put on a brave face.

"What are you getting today?" Brady asked her as they sat down. The waitress brought them all menus but none of the three needed it.

"Pancakes," Eve said without thinking.

"Short stack?" Colin asked, from behind the menu.

She was getting better at telling them apart when they were side by side. It was still difficult to do when they weren't next to each other but she knew that, by the end of the year, she would have them figured out.

Then they wouldn't be able to do their nonsense twin pranks.

"I'm not a human bin bag like you guys," she said.

Colin snorted. Then proceeded to order his usual large amount of food with the waitress. She seemed to be used to it, considering she didn't baulk at the sheer amount of carbs that Colin alone was going to consume.

Brady placed his own - ridiculously large - order. There was no way they were that sick all the time if they ate like that. When it was Eve's turn, she just asked for the smaller pancakes.

She'd grown to like them. They were still too much half the time, but they were good people.

She was quiet while the twins bickered, and they noticed. Eve smiled when she had to but was nowhere near as involved in the conversation as she usually was.

"Alright what's up?" Brady asked.

"What?" Eve said.

"You've been off for a few weeks but today you're totally out of it," Colin added.

Eve looked at the two of them. She hadn't realised that her anxiety had been so visible and as she looked between the two of them she wanted to tell them. About the guilt, her dad, Naima - everything.

That was one of the benefits of having friends. Being able to just blurt out the things you couldn't keep to yourself.

So she did.

It had already been a few weeks and she hadn't seen anything going on. Naima wasn't acting any different to how she had been and Eve was starting to get frustrated by constantly having to make excuses to hang out with her and Sam. It was not fun.

And she was spying on her sister.

Was that what her life was going to be for the foreseeable future? Spying on her sister?

Eve was caught up in her story, but not enough to notice that the boys kept looking at each other throughout it and she wondered what they were thinking. But she said nothing, and neither did they until she was done and the food had come.

"Why is your dad so worried?" Colin asked.

Eve shrugged and cut into a piece of her pancake. "It's difficult to explain," she eventually said.

"We can probably handle it," Brady remarked.

Eve nodded slowly. "Well - ok there are a few different reasons for this and I'm going to try and explain them as best as I can." Eve waited until the boys nodded and then she took a deep breath. "Right. So historically, women have always had less power than men and therefore less of a chance to take care of herself. In Islam, it's the man's job to care for his family anyway."

The twins nodded. They were still eating, but slowly like they were paying her all the attention in the world. Eve felt a sudden onslaught of panic. If she screwed up this explanation they would think that her dad was just...crazy. And he wasn't. If she had to guess, he was just really worried about Naima.

"So back then - and even now probably - if a woman got pregnant there was no way to be able to look after her baby, her reputation was ruined and she may have even got shunned by her family. That's a historical reason for why it's better not to."

"Ok," Colin said.

Eve could see that they wanted to talk, that they didn't understand, and that roiling panic came back. She was screwing this up. She bit her lip and took another breath, then a bite of her pancake. Maybe the syrup would give her some courage.

"Sort of similarly, it's a protection to the family structure. Within that context of marriage you can raise a family more steadily and that's important - in theory, that's what happens anyway." She had to add that last bit because she knew where their minds would go. There were definitely circumstances when raising children with the mum and dad present was not good for anyone.

"Ok," Brady said carefully. "But that's the same thing in Christianity. But there are plenty of Christians that will sleep with people and not be married to them. So what does it matter to your dad?"

"And there are contraceptives now," Colin said.

There were. And that was a whole other thing. Eve remembered learning about the dos and don'ts of contraception at the Islamic school her parents had briefly sent the two of them to before realising they were a bit more extreme than they'd wanted.

"Yeah, but that's not the point."

"What do you mean?" Brady asked.

Eve blushed at what she was about to say. It was cheesy and probably far too much a romantic notion to say out loud - and now she sounded like Naima. Romantic notions? That was so lame. She took a sip of the water that was too cold because the waitress constantly forgot not to put ice in it. Who wanted ice when temperatures were 11 degrees - or should it be 50-something now that she was in America. That still confused her.

The water didn't do much to help. "It's also...the scholars say that it's more valuable when it's done only between a husband and wife. It - it…has a different energy..." she trailed off.

Colin raised an eyebrow and Brady seemed like he was holding back a smirk. She knew it would sound lame!

"That's sorta sweet," Brady said. "But it doesn't explain why your dad is so concerned about your sister's sex life."

Eve scrunched her nose in distaste at even having to think about that.

Brady continued despite the face she pulled. "So why is he making you spy on her and Sam?"

"The simplest reason is that having sex outside of marriage is Haram - not permissible. I.e. God would be very unhappy," she said.

"And your dad has to make sure she doesn't?" Colin asked.

"No - not really. She's accountable for her own actions," Eve said.

"So why can't he leave her be?" Brady asked.

The analogy came to her in a moment and she felt relief at having something to compare it to finally. "It's like when we're at school. There are rules the principle or the governors have set for whatever reason; our safety, to help up do better in the class, whatever. We don't always agree with some of the rules, or they don't make sense, but there are rules. But if you break the rules, you get sent to detention."

Brady leaned back in the booth and crossed his arms. Eve wasn't sure whether he meant to or not, but the position made him look defensive and the tiniest bit aggressive. "Sure, but detention isn't going to send us to hell if we break the rules.

"No," Eve agreed, "but if you keep breaking the rules and you keep getting detentions, it winds up on a permanent record. And that can have a whole load of consequences that you might not even think about."

Colin hummed. "I guess that sort of makes sense. There are things you may want to do but can't because what you believe says you have to do something in a specific way. Or there are consequences."

Eve noticed Brady tense up and glare at Colin. She wondered what that was about.

Brady looked at Eve and, though she could tell that he was still angry by what Colin had said, he wasn't being as standoffish with her now. "Fine - cool. But if it's not your dad's business, then why are you spying on Naima for him?"

Eve didn't say anything. She couldn't. Why was she doing it? It was one thing to have said yes to him - she still felt incredibly uncomfortable about that - but saying yes didn't mean she had to do it. She could have lied.

All the times he'd asked her over the last five weeks, she could have just told him she hadn't seen anything - because she hadn't even seen anything. Nothing really was going on between Sam and Naima except for that odd intensity that she couldn't figure out.

"You have a choice here, Eve. And you don't have to do what your dad tells you because he thinks he knows best." Brady's gaze was intense as he looked down at Eve. She found herself staring back and wondering what he was thinking.

"He's just worried about her," she said quietly.

"Maybe. But he shouldn't be asking you to sneak around and report back to him. If he was really worried about her, he'd talk to her himself."

Eve swallowed involuntarily. It was the kind of reflex that happened without you knowing until you were mid swallow and then it sort of stuck in your throat for a second. It was the kind of swallow that happened when someone said something that struck true.

"Brady," Colin warned.

"He's not wrong," Eve said.

"Yeah but he didn't need to be so blunt about it," Colin said as he punched his brother in the shoulder.

Brady yelped in pain and Eve laughed at the two of them. Things sort of fell back into their normal and she was very grateful for that.

The waitress came and asked if anyone wanted a refill and it struck Eve that they'd had this entire conversation in a diner . Was she just that unaware of the things around her, or had she just been that desperate to talk to someone about all the stupidness that she'd been dealing with?

And despite now feeling anxious about potentially having to tell her dad that she wasn't going to follow Naima around anymore, she was grateful to the twins for just sitting and listening.

She'd been scared, she realised, of what they would think of her if she talked about Islam. It was enough that she was so visibly Muslim in a place where there were mostly white people. But Eve and her family were the only people there that looked like they did. Sounded like they did. Acted like they did.

Eve pretended not to notice the odd and sometimes mean looks that followed her when she came out of an empty classroom at prayer time.

She'd felt like an outsider for so long. Even in her own family sometimes. Naima was always the one that had been good at school, that had been personable and able to get along with most people. She was able to get people to see her point when it mattered in a way that Eve had never been able to do, despite trying.

That was something that she had grown to accept. She and her sister had different skills. They were better at different things - even if it seemed like Naima got all the useful things down to pat.

But now? Well, she looked different too. London, as big as it was, had hundreds of women that looked like her - that wore a hijab. But in Forks, there was only her.

Only her.

And Naima was able to get away with just having different hair and different skin colour.

But the twins didn't look at her weirdly unless she was being weird. They laughed with her, not at her. And even at its most tense, Brady hadn't attacked her or her religion. He'd just asked questions.

"Thank you guys," she blurted out.

"For what?" Brady asked.

Eve wondered if she should tell the truth, but then she had already said so much that there was no point in lying, was there? "I - people don't always react well to things about Islam. And you didn't make a big deal out of it."

They seemed to understand what she was saying without her needing to elaborate any more.

"Duh," Colin said. "As if we don't understand prejudice."

"Besides, people are fucking morons."

"Morons?" Eve said, raising her eyebrow. That was not a word they used very much.

"It has a good ring to it." Brady shrugged.

"Of course it does. It has nothing to do with the fact that my insults are superior."

"Nope," he said. "Now, are you gonna finish that short-stack?" he asked.

Eve rolled her eyes and pushed the soggy pancakes towards him. How he wanted to eat those was beyond her. Honestly, the thought of it made her feel a little nauseous. "Have at it, bin bag."

She watched him shovel it down his throat in disgust, and then, very disconcertingly, the twins both turned their heads to the door a split second before it opened. In walked Jared and Kim - his new girlfriend.

It shouldn't have been that odd, except it reminded Eve of when a cat twitched its ears while it was sleeping. Something about it was odd and she was confused at how they'd even managed to hear anything over the hustle and bustle of the diner - and it was now getting to dinner time so the rush was coming in.

That wasn't normal, was it?

A.N: I want to thank you all for the comments and the follows and the favourites. It's so lovely to see the engagement and it makes writing exponentially more fun. Next week's post will be on the 27th so I hope everyone has at least a break on the 25th. I myself am looking forward to some good lamb and better company.

Seasons greetings - whatever you celebrate - from Ahsilaa