chapter one

in the army now by joyce manor

I wish I got some sort of reward every time I had to say, "I'm not a girl." Like, if every time someone ignored my autonomy as a person and continued to impose their colonial view of gender on me, God got me an apology present. Or if the gender-imposing person had to dish out an extra twenty dollars my way every time they called me a girl. Then maybe, I'd be a lot more cool with it.

But usually, every time I say, "I'm not a girl," it can go a couple of ways. They can flinch, looking me up and down, examining the length of my hair and the softness in my face and decide that, sure, I'm not a girl. Whatever you say, honey. And then, continue on with their gendered nomenclature. Or, and this is the one I really hate, they can open their mouths with an apology and not shut it for another ten minutes. They get the water works all ready to go and they promise that they'll do better next time and they tell me they're working on themselves every day. They tell me, all red in the face, that they'll never misgender me ever again. They tell me that if they do, I can hit them. I can knock their teeth in and bury them alive. It takes them about five minutes to do it again.

This reporter lady, though, she's a different breed. I forget her name, it's something sad and generic and it probably starts with a C. I watch her. She thinks her role writing columns for the county newspaper is on par with the importance of the New York Times front page. The C-reporter is shrill and her lipstick spills onto her front tooth and she leans back in her chair, one finger looped around her coffee cup and her others right around a pen as she jots down details of my life. She's been asking me about my film and my crew and the actors and there's a way she flicks her tongue that makes me think she's looking for something deeper. "So Tatum," she says to me, wrinkly lips pursed, "how does a young lady such as yourself find herself directing a film with a three-thousand dollar budget?"

"Well," I tell C-reporter, fingers occupied with my own strawberry milkshake, "I'm not a young lady, as I have mentioned. But, in terms of the film budget, it's really all thanks to the community. Everyone just got together and worked as hard as we could to raise the money. We had bake sales, car washes, even auctions. Forks really came out for me," I tell her, smiling tightly.

She hums, tapping her pen against her yellow little notepad. "Now, you say that you're not a girl-"

"Because I'm not a girl."

"Do you feel that the torment over your gender identity has aided you in your artistic endeavors? Do you find that that pain transfers over when you write a script? When you emotionally guide your actors?" C-reporter asks, voice pressing and suggestive.

I wrap my lips around my straw and suck up the remainder of my milkshake, the loud slurring making C-reporter grimace. When the glass is empty, I lean back, hand over my stomach and I say to her, "No," I pause, and lean forward into her once more. "First off, I don't really feel any torment, over anything really. Second, my screenplay is about the American obsession and commodification of tragedy, case and point. It's not really that connected to the lack of torment of a gender identity I'm very comfortable with."

C-reporter halts, holding her coffee to her lips. "Is it possible that you could have just repressed all the pain that comes along with a female identity?"

"Hmm, again, I'm gonna have to go with no." I bit my lip, and my phone goes off, alarm blaring and shrill like her. Smiling, I hold it in front of her face. "Sorry," I say, grabbing my backpack and board out from underneath our booth. "Gotta go." I stand, slapping a ten dollar on the table. And as I'm leaving, I turn to her and say, "Looking forward to the article!"

I can't get out of there fast enough.

Ice makes for a challenge. My wheels are worn down and in desperate need of replacement, just like the rest of my board, so one little patch of ice will launch me back on my ass. I have to weave between the loose gravel and those wet little devil patches. I take up the whole road. Cars love driving behind me.

I kick off the ground, leaning forward to curve with the road. There's always something about skating down the perfectly paved roads of Forks with the icy wind whipping my hair behind me that makes me feel far removed from myself, far more special than I am. It's the hair, I think. It's that natural shade of red that gets you bullied when you're a kid, but with a special little twist. I have this natural white streak that falls in my face. I was born with it, and it's just always been there. So when my weird head of hair floats behind me and gets tangled up and wild, I start to feel like I'm flying. I start to feel a little whimsical.

Everywhere I need to get to is, at most, a twenty minute ride. And even though the cold air rips through me in the winter months, I'd take this ratty old skateboard over some beat up old car any day. Everyone has a car around here. Not everyone can do an ollie.

I'm thinking about all the things I have to do and all the places I have to be when I step off my board and kick it under my arm. And I know that no matter the things I have to do and the places I have to be at, I always make time for this two-story white house. For the past five or so months, I've spent my afternoons there, almost becoming more familiar with this house than my own. Because on the second floor, leaning out that window and staring into the yard, was a despondent and absolutely wrecked Bella Swan.

With confidence, I push through the front door and drop my board on top of the muddy and wrinkled old boots. The noise of some game of some sport is booming from the living room. Kicking my own shoes off, I make my way over to the living room and lean against the doorway.

Charlie Swan leans deep into his arm chair, can of beer in his hand. He doesn't turn around but, as if he can sense my magnetic presence, he says, "Copeland. I see you're here. Again. You left your skateboard outside, I hope."

Charlie's my favorite dad, including my own. "What's up Charlie?" I ask, moving to sit in the couch across from him. "Did you have a good day imposing the will of the ruling class on disenfranchised communities?"

"Well, that depends," he says, shifting around to throw me a disapproving look. "Is the will of the ruling class picking roadkill off the sidewalk? Because if so, no, I did not."

"How's she doing?" I ask, crossing my arms and leaning back into the couch.

This makes him sigh. Bella's his favorite kid, which is fair, because she's actually his kid. I can see the worry he has for her on his face. It makes me look tired, worn down. "You know how she's been," he says, frowning. "Her mother and I, well, we're thinking about sending her down to Jacksonville."

"To live with Renée?" I exclaim. "No, c'mon Charlie, Renée's a terrible mother. " And it's true, from what Bella's told me, her mother was far more concerned with whatever whim she decides to act on than the well-being over her own daughter.

"Watch it."

"You can't do that to Bella. For real. If anything that'll just make her more depressed," I assert. "You think it's not possible but trust me, it'll happen."

Charlie looks at me, lips pursed tightly and hands up, like he's given up. "I don't know what else to do here, Tate. Look, I don't want her to leave either. But the way she's living, it's not healthy. She never sees her friends or leaves the house. And maybe if she could get some separation..."

I stand. "Give me a chance to get her living again," I argue, panic starting to set in at the idea of Bella moving to live with her mother, who is incompetent at best, in Florida, which is the worst state. "How about I take her out this weekend? We'll go see a movie in Port Angeles and have some good, clean Kosher fun."

He sighs. "If it works, it works."

"Great," I tell him, but I'm already bounding towards the stairs, taking three steps at a time and thinking about how the fuck I'm gonna convince Bella to leave the house after all these months.

Bella Swan moved next door to me about a year ago, coming up from Arizona with nothing but a cactus and a bad attitude. And from the moment I met her, awkwardly getting pelted with volleyballs and unrequited advances from the boys in town, I knew that she would be my best friend. I've always liked Bella. I like how she's so smart but also so oblivious. I like that she's quietly funny and a little bit judgmental. And I get along with everyone. I get along with stoners and preps and jocks and quite kids who keep their nose in their trig homework. I get along with the sharp and standoffish Lauren Mallory. I even got along with the scowling blonde Rosalie Hale and her giant boyfriend Emmett before they up and left. But Bella was reluctant to engage. Becoming her friend was a challenge, one that I conquered through persistent requests to hang out and randomly showing up at her house. And eventually she started driving me to school. We ate lunch together and occasionally, we'd venture out of the town limits together.

The more time I found myself spending with Bella, the more I realized that I didn't just like her because her initial indifference towards me was an exciting challenge, but because she was refreshing. She was different from everyone else in this town, from everyone I've lived with my whole life. Anyone could tell that she wasn't from around her, and it was nice to be around her, cause I always felt like I was the odd one out in this town. Me and Bella, we could be different together.

And even when Bell started dating moody and reserved Edward Cullen and started spending far less time with me, I wasn't really that bitter. I had a lot going on. I always do. I still bothered Bella with my presence as much as I could.

But then, he left. The whole family just up left, and I never figured out what happened. But I knew that Bella was wrecked and empty and left with nothing from it. Bella Swan stopped being the scoffing girl with a half assertive attitude, but the person who lay in front of me now.

Her eyes are heavy and they weigh down the rest of her face. Her arms are skinny and tight around her chest and while I'm staring at her, I'm thinking that I can't remember the last time she moved from that spot. She's withering away in her own room, and I can't ever imagine loving someone so much that them leaving would kill me like this. But Bella really loves Edward, so much so that I think that, even if he left, he couldn't have been that bad.

"Hey, champ," I greet her, moving to sit at the edge of her bed. She doesn't move, like her dad, and she doesn't acknowledge my presence in her room. I mean, I've been doing this almost every day since she fell into this little depression. By now, she should be used to it. "You wanna go for a walk or something today? Or do you just wanna sit there and let your bones turn into jelly?"

Bella opens her mouth to speak and her voice is croaky and distance. "I wanna stay," she says, eyes trained on the same spot they're always fixated on. I wonder if she sees anything. She doesn't say anything about the jelly bones.

"Hmmm. I figured," I say, and then drop down onto her bed, staring at her ceiling. "How was your day?" I ask her, knowing the answer.

She shrugs, still refusing to make eye contact with me. "This. Did you go to your um, interview thing?" Bella asks and I'm surprised she remembered.

I let out a heavy sigh. "Oh, yeah. But you know how it is. She called me a girl a whole bunch and tried to profit off a fictional gender dysphoria she created, thus proving the point of my entire film." Bella doesn't say anything to that point, just scoffs lightly. "You can still be in it, if you want," I tell her. "I know you don't really like speaking roles, but I'm always in need of people to play dead bodies."

"Nah, that's, um, just not really my things," she responds, and it's the same thing she tells me every time I ask her.

I nod. "Well, maybe you could be my A.D. Wes is great as like, a cameraman, but he really sucks at being my A.D."

"I wouldn't have any idea what I was doing," she admits.

I frown, rolling around my head around on her pillow. It's uncomfortable and deflated. "Your dad says you might have to move down to Jacksonville with your mom."

At my words, Bella's up in arms. She's standing and holding onto her chest and this is the most alive I've seen her in a while. "What? He said that?" And Bella tells me, "No, no, I'm staying, I wanna stay," and she keeps asserting that over and over again and I'm leaning up on my elbows, watching. Bella's strange. She's transfixed on something that is long gone and holding onto the pain as if it is her last tie to him. "Why does he want me to go?"

I tilt my head at her and wonder if she sees what we all see when she looks in the mirror. "He's worried. You never like, go out anymore or see anyone and you don't even have interest in anything anymore. I mean, you gotta admit that it's concerning."

Bella sucks in air and looks at me with worried eyes. "I see you. I see you all the time. You come over like, everyday."

"I don't think that counts."

Bella waves her arms around. "It should!"

"Look, you're my best friend, Bella, and I don't want you to leave either. So why don't you just like, try? Come see a movie with me this weekend, and I'll try to make it fun."

And with a slight nod of her head, Bella Swan confirms, and I grin.

I'm there for a while, forcing Bella to engage with me, one way or another. Sometimes, it makes me feel bad. I know she just wants to be left alone, sitting there in silence, alone with her pain. And for a while, I was fine with that. I thought that she needed her time to heal and to grieve. But that time went from a week to a few weeks and a few weeks turned into a month, I decided she had crossed the boundary from typical mourning to unhealthy obsession. And I'm not even sure if my intrusion was helping or not, but I never felt good about leaving Bella alone like that.

When the sun starts to set, though, I tell Bella I gotta go home. I promise her I'll be back, and I leap down the stairs to give Charlie my goodbyes, and I leave. With my board in my hand and bag over my shoulder, I walk fifty feet away from Bella's house and into my front door.

My house is cute; it's quaint and potted plants line the walkway to our front door. It's painted blue, chipped up with white shutters that makes it look like it should be on some New England shore instead of in a gloomy and rainy little town. It's where I've lived my whole life, with my dad and without my mother.

I feel bad for my dad sometimes. Lane Copeland uprooted his entire life for this tiny little redheaded Jewish woman from Newark. He left the reservation his tribe had lived on for almost all of time, cut ties with his family, and abandoned the live he had always known. And what did he get in return? A divorce just one year later, a fuck ton of debt, and custody over me. I don't know where my mom went, I barely remember her. I just know that her leaving left my dad changed forever.

And, of course, it brought the addition of Embry Call into our family.

I think that Embry was kind of raised on the idea that he was bred from a mistake, and that's a point over which we bond. I came from a failed marriage that ended in a violent hatred and he came from a night of drunken carelessness. And we both know that if our parents had made wise choice and did what they wanted to do, then we wouldn't be here.

My half-brother lives on the reservation with his mom, but he sure as hell loves to make himself at home here. Him and my dad are close, and I think my dad pours so much of his parenting energy into Embry because he wants to compensate for the mistake of breaking his mother's heart. He doesn't seem interested in doing that with me.

They're sitting at the kitchen table when I walk in. They're laughing while something steams on the stove. "Hey Dad, Em," I say, walking straight to the fridge for a cold can of an energy drink. "What's up?"

"Tate, what the hell are you doing drinking an energy drink? It's almost nine" my dad says, watching me pour the content down my throat.

I swallowed. "I need the energy. We're filming a night scene and I'll probably be up 'til like, four in the morning or something."

Embry chuckled. "Do you ever sleep, Tate, or are you always doing something to avoid the hellish nightmare of your reality?"

"Do you sleep, Embry? You look like shit," I tease, and my dad frowns. "That reminds me, you wanna be my A.D? I need an an A.D. My current one sucks."

"No, I don't wanna be your A.D, whatever that is," Embry says. "I have a lot already going on."

"Making out with Jacob Black is a huge responsibility. Does Quil get jealous?"

My dad gives me a pointed look and says, "Tatum, you can't stay out all night. It's dangerous out there. Why didn't you ask?"

"Dad, I'm gonna be with a group of people and I have like, pepper spray, I'll be fine."

"Yeah, Dad, they'll be fine. What's the worst that could happen? They're just gonna wander out into the woods after midnight with a group of incompetent teenagers with nothing but a can of pepper spray that expired a year ago," Embry laughs, gently nudging my dad's shoulders.

"Shut up, Em."

My dad shakes his head. "Just stay safe, alright? And try to stay near the house. Keep your phone on you and-"

"Dad."

"And don't forget, if someone tries to take you, hit them in the throat."

"No one's gonna try to take me, Dad."

Embry adds, "Yeah, you have nothing to worry about. Tatum's too annoying for anyone to kidnap."

With a roll of my eyes, I walk out of the kitchen, trying to ignore the muffled laughter that followed me up the stairs.

"Well that sucked," I tell Bella, walking out of the theater with my hands shoved deep into my jacket pockets. And I wanna rip the head off of whatever pretentious, cannabis filled director and the money-hungry producer for making a movie so catastrophically bad that it might have made me as equally depressed as Bella. "I mean, not to be constantly talking about this, but think about the movie I could make with that budget. Like, sometimes it feels like they're just making garbage on purpose."

Bella nods, but she's far off from here. I feel like she's a step behind me no matter how much I slow my walk. She says to me, "Yeah it was pretty garbage."

Her film analysis skills used to be a bit sharper than this, I note. "I don't think I've seen a movie this bad since we bootlegged that one about the killer Thanksgiving turkey."

She snorts. "Thankskilling. Yeah, I remember."

"I'm glad you came out with me today, even if the movie was a disgusting abuse of cinematic resource," I tell her, smiling. And I mean it. Even though she only let the house under the threat of being relocated to the wettest armpit of the continent, I'm thinking that this is the first step towards Bella being Bella again. I'm hopeful that from here, she's gonna finally start moving on from Edward. It's a start.

"Sure," she says, and I know it's not much but the small, barely visible smile on her face is enough to let me know that this is an improvement. A tiny one, albeit, but still an improvement.

And I'm distracted from this small moment of semi-contentment by the whopping and hollering of a group of men, standing down the street at the bottom of a hill. My noses scrunches up in disgust while the yell towards the two of us, begging for our company and bribing us with booze. "Assholes," I say, looking to Bella for agreement. But Bella doesn't hear me. She's halted, standing still behind me like she's frozen, staring down at those men like she's got a bad idea."What's up?"

Bella's not looking at me but at the group of older men with their bikes and their beers. Her eyes are all glossed over. She's somewhere other than here. "I think I know those guys."

I'm looking back and forth between Bella and the guys and I'm hoping that she's joking. "You mean that group of greasy men in their thirties?" I ask, concern in my voice. I don't like where she's going with this and I don't even know why she's going there.

"Yeah," Bella says, already stepping forward. "I'll be right back," she tells me, and she's headed their way.

In the time that I've known her, Bella's never been reckless. She's been quite and careful hesitant around strangers. And even though she's better at falling than standing up straight, I never would've imagined that during a night out, just the two of us, it would be Bella to put herself in danger. So for a second, I'm just standing there, watching as she trots down the hill and into the group of men that made alarm bells ring off in my head. And then, I'm thinking, holy shit, holy shit, holy shit, while I run behind her, trying to catch up. "Bella! What are you doing?"

She tosses me an easy, "Don't worry about it!" while her hair tumbles down her back and lifts in the wind.

I'm panicking. I'm picking up speed and I don't know how it happened but now, I can't catch up with Bella's pace. "Can we just turn around, please? We can go get like, burgers or something. I don't know, I feel like any other idea would be better than this."

But Bella snaps. She turns, walking backwards while she says, "Tatum, just stop, alright? I'll be fine."

And by the time I catch up to her, she's getting on the bike of some comb-over fuck with a leather jacket that hangs loosely off his gross and old body.

I gape at her, watching in horror while she holds onto his torso and the engine revs and suddenly Bella Swan has disappeared on the bike of some random asshole. And I think, standing in the middle of the street, Charlie Swan is going to kill me.

I'm motionless, standing in the middle of the street, staring at the spot where Bella just was. And then, another one of the biker boys says to me, "What about you? You want a ride?"

"Oh, fuck off."

Music plays in my head. I loop songs in my mind over and over while I lean against a brick wall, trying not to think of what could be happening to her and why the fuck she would do what she did. But no matter how loudly I play it, my stomach still knots up as I imagine sitting in a police interview room, explaining to a bunch of cops why I let my depressed friend get on the motorcycle of some stranger. And the knots tangle even more when I imagine that, but with Charlie.

The most fucked up thing about it is that this was supposed to make Bella feel better. And I'm not a psychiatrist but I figured that Bella being holed up in her room all day might be just a little bit healthier than hanging out with predatory old men on what her father would call a death machine.

So when Bella stumbles back over in my direction, no longer on a motorcycle but on her own two legs, I think I might bit her head off. I rush towards her. "Hey, Bella, what the hell was that?" I ask, struggling to keep my voice low.

Bella shakes her head. "I dunno I just, thought I knew those guys. It seemed like fun."

"Fun? Fun?" I almost scream. "Bella, usually fun things don't involve getting yourself killed by dudes that look like guest starts on To Catch a Predator."

"It was a just a rush," Bella says, and I don't think that she's talking to me but saying it to herself, like she's come to some sort of grand realization.

And I think that hanging out with Bella Swan might end up killing me.

ummm so its here! my paul/oc that im mega super exicted abt. and yes! a nonbinary oc!

this is just the first chapter to establish tatum as a character and a narrative voice and i promise it'll pick up from here! let me know what u think?

also, i feel like in the past, while writing fics, i havent done enough to kind of denounce smeyer's racism when writing native characters (bc shes pretty racist abt it), so im gonna try to do that with this fic. so if things are blatantly different from cannon, thats why. so no more shifting when angry, no more casual racism from the other characters, no more twisting of legends. and no more imprinting on fucking babies cause thats weird as SHIT! so lets just go w the flow on that!

also im writing all the characters different to combat the sexism too! theres a lot different from cannon in this fic so just get ready for that right off the bat.

it also appears im totally incapable of not writing a fic without embry as an important character. he is clearly..my fave. and he deserves a dad so i gave him one.