The Twilight Saga and all of its characters belong to Stephanie Meyer. We're only having a little AU fun

I managed to find the main office in this maze they pawned off as a school. First period was a bust, but luckily the school administration was understanding about their terrible wayfinding. After fawning over the color of my hair and my new parents, the secretaries sent me on my way with a map of the school and form for all of my teachers to sign that I was to bring it back at the end of the day.

Once I found my second period Government room, I handed a large, balding man sitting at the teacher's desk my form. Swamped with papers, he barely registered what he was signing before he sent me to the back of the class and took attendance. He wasted no time introducing his new student and his monotoned lecture lasted until the bell rang.

After he released us for third period, a pretty girl with wild, natural curls popped up next to my side, "Hi, I'm Jessica Stanley!"

I nodded, "Edward Masen."

"Wait," her eyebrows turned up in confusion, "Didn't you answer to 'Cullen' during attendance?"

"Uh, right. Edward Cullen."

"So, you were just adopted by the Cullen family?" she confirmed.

"Yeah."

"Oh my god!" she gushed, all her previous apprehension gone, "You have no idea how lucky you are!"

Yeah, Jessica, dead parents and fifteen years of foster care were sure signs of fortune's favor.

"Is it true that your parents are like twenty-five? I bet it's so much fun there—just like Gilmore Girls."

"Um…"

She brushed her curls over her shoulder, "What's your next class?"

I pulled out my schedule. Jessica plucked it out of my hand and reviewed it herself, "Oh! You have Trig next. Lemme text Lauren, she has that class too. Don't worry; I'll let her know I called dibs," she winked at me. "Follow me. It's near the fencing room."

Dibs? Fencing room? Where am I?

Jessica had already walked away with my schedule, so I had no choice but to follow her like a wayward puppy. As we walked, she reviewed my schedule with me, informing me who I will be sitting next to in each of my classes and where I should meet her for lunch. When we got to a door halfway across the school, she handed me off to a girl with cropped blonde hair.

Throwing the girl a fierce warning glare, Jessica wished me luck in Trig, "At lunch, you'll be all mine again," she promised.

I wasn't too sure how I felt about that.

The girl with the cropped hair turned out to be Lauren. And Lauren made it clear she was not going to respect Jessica's dibs, and made it clearer that I had no say in the matter. We had the next two classes together before lunch. The entire time she had her arm twisted around mine, asking me about the family I had met only yesterday.

"Does your sister still throw parties?" She asked while we stood in the lunch line, "I heard they were legendary. I was only a Sophomore when she was a Senior, so I never got an invite, but I've heard the stories. Apparently, she turned your basement into a ball pit once, and when your mom found out, instead of getting mad, she had your dad bring her a pool float and a margarita and chilled the rest of the night."

I was starting to think I would never hear a sentence about my new family that sounded relatively normal, "It's a gym down there."

"Yeah," Lauren agreed, "You have your own gym; it's how your brother stays so massive. I heard you have a private yoga studio down there, too."

Did everyone know as much about my house as I did? "Yeah."

"Mmm, I love yoga. I could teach you my favorite flows. It would be an honor to help you with your flexibility," she purred.

"I'm more of a runner."

We got our food and I followed Lauren out to an outdoor courtyard. At Forks High School, we were crammed into a dingy, badly-lit cafeteria with our frozen applesauce and questionable chicken sandwiches. The kids at Harvard-Westlake enjoyed their made-to-order quesadillas and fresh salads outside with an ocean view.

I spotted the girl from the parking lot immediately—as if she had some sort of pull towards me. She sat with a large group of people at a long table along the perimeter of the space. No—not quite. Despite the overcrowded table, the seats directly across and next to her remained empty. She had the secluded, little corner all to herself. There was no food in front of her, but there was a book in her hands.

Lauren led me away from the girl to a table in the middle of the courtyard near the fountain, "Everyone, this is the latest and greatest member of the Cullen family: Edward."

Jessica pulled me into the seat beside her immediately and smiled at Lauren who had to walk around to the other side of the table. I wasn't going to like that at all. She pointed out the other members at the table and informed me I would have Physics with Angela after lunch and Spanish with Ben after that. She patted my hand, "You'll be taken care of for the rest of the day."

"An official Cullen, huh?'" A blonde boy with a perpetual baby-face named Mike asked, "I heard your new mom only adopts teenagers because your dad wanted kids, but she's afraid of children."

"I wouldn't know."

"Mike!" Jessica scolded, "That's an awful rumor. Everyone knows she adopts teenagers because when she adopted her niece and nephew, she got freaked out about the low adoption rate for older kids."

Mike shrugged, "po-tatoes, po-ta-toes."

"It's because their mom is just a pushover for a sob story," Lauren added, "She'll let them do whatever they want as long as they bat their sad, little eyes at her. So, play that up, Edward. She'll never say no."

These people knew I was adopted, right? They acted like being a Cullen was a hot, new trend that I managed to work my way into, rather than the outcome of detrimental loss. All throughout lunch, they only asked questions to Edward Cullen, not Masen: Was it true Carlisle only adopted attractive youth for appearances? Did we all hook up with one another? Was Esme as crazy as everyone says? My answer to all of these questions was very much the same: I don't know.

An Asian boy with long hair named Eric was the only one not asking about Edward Cullen because he was too busy asking after Rosalie, "And Rosalie definitely doesn't have a secret boyfriend or anything?"

I was getting tired of the third degree, so my reminder came out a bit harsher than I intended, "I met her yesterday."

"Right," he laughed, "We probably know more about your family than you do."

Obviously.

When lunch was finally over, Jessica reluctantly handed me off to Angela and Ben. The pair seemed like the most pleasant ones at the lunch table—they both had kind eyes and welcoming smiles. They didn't hound me with questions at lunch, choosing to listen or occasionally exchange whispers and giggles with one another.

"So," Ben started once we parted from the group, "Where did you move here from?" It was the first question I had been asked that didn't involve the Cullens.

"Forks, Washington."

"I have a cousin in Seattle," Angela stated, just to have something to say, I imagine.

"It's about four hours west of Seattle."

She nodded. "Small?"

"Miniscule."

"You miss it?"

"Not yet," I admitted. I didn't think it sank in that I was here with this absurd family permanently quite yet. Nothing in my life had ever been permanent—the thought of staying with one family for the rest of my life would take some getting used to. I wondered how long it would be until I stopped waiting for a phone call with the news that I was about to switch houses, again and whisked away to the next location. I doubted it would ever go away.

"That's fair," she agreed, "You've been here for only what? Three days?"

"Two."

"It kinda sucks that you had to start school in the middle of the year like this," Ben noted.

The Cullens had planned to get me in August, but it took eleven months rather than the expected six for the paperwork to go through. I expected it had something to do with moving to a different state or inspections of all their other kids. I shrugged, "Adoption is weird."

"Well," Angela placed a thoughtful hand on my bicep, "We have a lot of the same courses, so if you feel lost or behind, you can always come to me. For anything."

"Me too," Ben agreed.

"In fact, Ben and I usually do our homework together in the coffee shop down the street after school. You should join us today."

Ben looked like he wanted to say something but decided to keep whatever it was to himself.

I simply nodded; I didn't want to fully commit to the offer, but I didn't want to be rude to the first genuinely kind people I've talked to all day.

"Well, this is us," Angela grabbed my wrist to stop me from walking past a classroom door. Ben's class was only a few doors down and agreed to meet me after class so he could lead me to Spanish. His eyes were fixated on Angela's hand on my wrist the entire time.

Inside the room, Angela waited for me in the front of the room for the teacher to sign my slip. I looked around the room and saw long, dark hair fanned over a hunched figure doodling on a notebook. My breath hitched in anticipation that it could be her. Angela said something to the teacher, but I didn't catch it. My eyes were locked onto the graceful movement of her hand as she doodled.

Angela took my hand and led me towards the table. She called the girl's name, but when she looked up, it was not the girl with the truck. Her eyes were too close together and bright blue, rather than the deep, rich brown eyes of my dark-haired beauty.

"Tara, Mr. Banner says you're going to work with Tyler so I can be partners with Edward," she held up our intertwined hands like they were proof.

The girl with the deceptive hair nodded and Angela led me to a lab table closer to the front of the room.

"I'm happy you're here, Edward," she smiled.

I nodded, not quite sure what to do with that information. Her smile grew and she pulled out her textbook to show me what the class was working on.

The afternoon with Ben and Angela was marginally more relaxed and comfortable than my morning with Lauren. I managed to evade Angela's invitation to do homework with her and Ben with the simple excuse that my new mom would want me home early. Besides, I had the feeling that Ben preferred to have that time with Angela all to himself. After dropping my slip back at the front office, I began the hike back to my car. I hoped I would see the beautiful girl with the truck again. Sadly, the old truck was already gone by the time I got there.

After an exasperatingly long drive home in LA traffic, I was ready to spend the rest of the day playing Otis Redding so loudly, I wouldn't be able to hear my own thoughts. As I walked through my closet to get to my bathroom, I was surprised to find it completely full. When I had left for school this morning, it was still empty. All of my clothes fit nicely into the dresser drawers—I had no need for my walk-in closet.

Someone else did, though.

"Uh, Mom?" I tentatively called out.

But it was Alice who popped her head into my room, "Oh! You're home!" She held her hands up and waved them around, "Surprise!"

"What?"

She pointed to the clothes hanging in my closet, "Surprise new clothes, silly!"

"Uh…"

"I hope you don't mind. I happened to notice that you were hopelessly unprepared for LA in the clothes department, so I took the liberty of getting you a few filler pieces to bulk up your wardrobe."

I turned my head to look back at the "few filler pieces" practically bursting from the rod, "Uh, thank you."

"No problem! It's what sisters do!"

"I'm pretty sure it isn't."

Alice laughed. The sound was high and light and matched her personality perfectly—I liked it. It made me smile in return. "Well, whatever, it's what this sister does."

Shoving me aside, Alice began explaining the clothes to me, and what to wear with what and when to wear it. "Harvard-Westlake is the only private school in LA that doesn't have a uniform, so you gotta exploit that shit!" she said, holding a green button-down up to me. No, no. It wasn't green. Alice had corrected me earlier—it was sage.

"I'm so happy with this one. It looks great with your hair. I want you to wear it open with this T-shirt and these shorts, though. You don't want to look too formal," she sighed adoringly at the outfit she hand hanging on the door, "Soon, you'll have every girl at school swooning."

I felt my ears get hot. "Oh, uh…"

"Have they started already?" she giggled maliciously, "Edward, are you a womanizer?!"

"Definitely not," I swallowed loudly, "It's them. They're a bit… much."

"I'm not surprised to hear that. The kids at Westlake have zero chill. They will fight tooth-and-nail to get on top," she stopped abruptly, and her grin grew wider, "and it looks like they want to get on top of you." Her smile was smug—she seemed quite pleased with her little joke.

I gave her a side-eye. "I'm not sure how I feel about it."

"Don't worry, it'll go away. You're the new, hot commodity. In a few weeks, someone will get a new car or a new internship and then they'll all have something new to obsess over."

That wasn't the most comforting assurance. "Sounds tiring."

"It's how it's always been. Everyone there has been raised to believe that they're the best, so they all have to constantly find a way to prove that they're actually the best," she offered as an explanation.

"From what I've heard today, you four have done a fairly decent job at being the best."

She giggled, "Yeah. We did make quite the name for ourselves. Emmett dominated in the sports—he carried the baseball team, wrestling team, and lacrosse team on his shoulders. Jasper blew everyone away with his art—they say no one can capture and recreate emotion like Jazz can. He's incredible—they let him do the mural in the courtyard. Not only did I set every trend for four years straight, but they said no other class president raised more money for the school than I did from all my fundraising ideas. And now, Rosalie is killing it in academia—she's on track to be Valedictorian and I'm pretty sure everyone hates her for that. We'll have to find something for you!"

"I'm already prepared to be the family disappointment."

"Oh, Edward! Don't be like that!"

I shrugged. It was true. I didn't have many interests and didn't particularly exceed in any of them. I liked to run, but I wasn't all that fast. I liked to read, but that would hardly win me any awards. I liked the piano, but there was never any around for me to play. Besides, the Cullen family didn't need another overachiever—they needed an underachiever that they could all come together and criticize at every family gathering. I was more than willing to play that role.

"Well, I'm not going to let that happen," she crossed her arms. "This family will not have a disappointment. And if it does, it's going to be Emmett."

oOo

Every day for the next two weeks, I parked in the same ancillary parking lot, but each day that old Chevy would be parked on the grass before I arrived and would be gone before I left. I wasn't able to get any more information about the girl, either. Every time I could work the truck casually into conversations, everyone seemed to have a different idea of who its owner was. Some thought it belonged to the maintenance worker or the groundskeeper. Others said it belonged to the sophomore boy whose family only owned antique cars. Not one person mentioned a breathtaking, brunette girl.

With no other way to find out any information about her without outright asking after her, I tried to make myself known to her, so I could at least introduce myself. I took the extra effort to walk across the courtyard to throw my lunch out in the trash cans closest to her. I even began taking different routes to my classes, hoping just one of them would put her in my path. But she remained a distant stranger.

There were a few things I learned about her on my own, though. She had five sexy freckles on her left ear—each one I wanted to kiss. She wore a sundress every day. All of them billowed around her small frame as she walked. My favorites were the white one from our first encounter and the light pink one that enhanced the blush across her cheeks. She was painfully shy. She never spoke to anyone, or even looked up from her book, for that matter. She was a fast reader. Every day at lunch, her nose was buried into a different tattered paperback. We even had similar taste, it seemed. If she wasn't reading classics like Bronte or Poe or Dickinson, it was nonfiction.

At lunch one Friday afternoon while I watched her read her third Agatha Christie novel that week, Jessica bushed her fingers up and down my arm.

"Edward, you have the best forearms."

I wasn't in the mood for this. "I have dainty wrists."

She laughed a bit too loudly, "Nonsense, your entire arm is perfect. Lauren, isn't his entire arm perfect?" she smirked at the blonde across the table wedged between Mike and Eric.

This was typical. Jessica and Lauren were constantly vying for attention that I didn't want to give them. It was getting frustrating. The two of them were discussing me like I wasn't even there like they usually did, but I didn't care enough to pay them much attention. Across the courtyard, the girl glared up at the sky and packed up her stuff earlier than usual. That was new. Maybe I could follow her into the empty building, innocently strike up a conversation…

A foot sliding up at down my shin brought my attention back to my own table. Across from me, Lauren was staring at me, looking as if she was ready to pounce.

"I would like to taste—," she started. Thank the Lord in heaven above, a fat raindrop fell from the sky and landed on Lauren's cheek, effectively ending that sentence prematurely. "—fuck!" she nearly screeched.

Soon, all hell broke loose as everyone raced for the building, most of them ditched their half-eaten lunches in a rush to stay dry. I frowned as I looked around—I would never find the girl in this mess. Every single student but me was out of that courtyard in a matter of seconds. Taking my time, I stacked the trays for everyone at my abandoned table and took them to the drop-off. By the time I was done, my hair wasn't even entirely soaked through.

These LA prep school kids wouldn't survive five minutes in Forks.

When lunch was finished, all the other kids were already in their next classes or lingering in the hallway in small clusters. As I passed the library on my way to meet Angela in Physics, the most exquisite sight caught my attention.

The girl.

She was there. Sitting. Alone and entirely approachable.

Almost by its own volition, my body turned away from my scheduled physics class and towards the library. No one really needed to know that much physics, anyway. I got the gist.

For longer than could be considered normal, I stood in front of a stack of books, silently willing her to look up. I didn't think I was this kind of person. Someone who would get this keyed up over a stranger they barely knew. But here I was, standing in a library I didn't need to be in pretending to look at a stack of books I had no interest in because it gave me a chance to look at her.

And looking at her was like looking modern masterpiece. Mysterious, unique, and incredibly, impossibly beautiful.

As she read, I enjoyed watching her reactions probably more than I should. I liked how I could tell she was at a suspenseful part of her book. Her teeth were embedded in her bottom lip and her dark eyes seemed to get wider with every word she read. When something in the book caused her to actually flinch and cover her mouth with her hand, it was too adorable. I couldn't stand it. I had to meet her.

The only question now was how stupid was I willing to look to capture this girl's attention?

Incredibly stupid.

I unscrewed the cap of my water bottle ever-so-slightly and walked over to her table. On the way, I made sure she had no papers or personal belongings scattered across the table. The coast was clear: she sat at an empty table with her book safely in her hands.

When I walked past her table, I let my hip bump the corner, causing my water bottle to spill on the table. She jumped back in fright so forcefully, her chair fell out from behind her and landed on the ground.

I immediately felt like an ass; I hadn't expected such an extreme reaction.

"Sorry!" I placed my belongings on the table beside hers, "Sorry!" I removed the button-down Alice had purchased for me to reveal the t-shirt underneath and used it to mop up the water.

She stared at me with enormous eyes.

"Honestly, sorry. I didn't mean to frighten you." I soaked up all of the water from the table, "See? All dry. I am so sorry about that."

Cautiously, I bent down behind her to lift her fallen chair back into place. She looked at me, down at the table, and back up to me. I waited with bated breath until she finally sat back down and reopened her book.

I sat down at the table next to hers, ready to chalk this up as a loss. However, my stupid mouth didn't listen to my stupid head and instead, I asked, "Avoiding the rain too, huh?"

As expected, she didn't say anything.

Desperation forced me to continue, "Where I came from, it was always raining. Forks, Washington. You ever heard of it? Of course not. No one has. I never thought I would miss the rain, but it turns out I do. It's too sunny here. Not ideal for a ginger." I rustled my hair.

I glanced over at her. She was still looking at the book, but her eyes were no longer skimming across the page.

"There's too much here, too. In Forks, you were surrounded by trees, and forest, and fog instead of people, and places, and things. You could drive down a mountain road for miles without coming across another soul. But here, not only can you not actually drive anywhere because of traffic, but you can't even take two steps without running into six people and a fish taco stand."

The teeniest curl of her lip encouraged me to keep talking, "I miss the stillness. And the quiet. And the stars. You could actually see stars at night in Forks, not just airplanes. And the cold. I even miss the cold. It's too hot here. I'm always sweaty."

I had no idea where that came from. I felt my ears get hot from admitting to a pretty girl that I was always sweaty, but when I peeked over at her again, she was smiling. Full-on smiling. I felt like I had just won a prize.

After that outstanding victory, I was able to keep my mouth shut. Hoping that my proximity would encourage her to say something back to me, I pulled out my homework. It didn't work, though. We sat in silence past the final bell and into the afternoon. She seemed lost in her book, while I couldn't make it through my first math problem without getting distracted by her nearness.

When the pitter-patter of rain died down, she packed her bag.

"Hey," I placed a hand on the side of her table as she rose. "I'm Edward Masen. Well, now Edward Cullen, I guess. What's your name?"

She looked down where my arm was blocking her path. Realizing how threatening that may seem, I removed it immediately. I hadn't meant to block her, only catch her attention.

"Sorry. Again." I ran my hand through my hair, "Could I please know your name?"

The way she bit down on her bottom lip was so adorable, I could have sworn my heart stopped. Her eyes met mine, wide and imploring, for a tense second before she lowered her gaze and hurried out of the library without a word.

Defeated, I slumped back into my chair.