chapter four

bedtime by mustard service

"So, Tatum, let's see. You were rejected by Columbia, Boston University, and Rhode Island School of Design, NYU and UCLA."

I give Mrs. Sandy Michaels a tight smile. "Yeah, I was. Thanks for the reminder."

She shakes her Caesar salad around in its little container, lettuce hitting the plastic with a sound that echoed around in my ears. I think it must be sad to be Sandy Michaels, sitting in this tiny, square office with snot colored walls and a cramped desk, listening to students complain all day about stupid bullshit she couldn't give a fuck about. And then to go home and have her limp dick husband boss her around? I'd be a nasty hag too. "Well, the good news is you got into University of Washington, go huskies! And University of Portland."

"University of Portland has a seventy-five percent acceptance rate."

Sandy purses her lips tightly and leans forward, head titled down at me. "It's a good thing you got in then, isn't it?"

"Okay great! So we're done?" I ask, arms tight around my books. I don't wanna be here. I don't like teachers and I don't like guidance counselors and I think that somehow they like me even less.

She's not gonna let me off so easy, though. "Have you made a decision yet? About what you wanna do next year?"

"No."

She sucks in air through her teeth and leans back in her little swivel chair like she's negotiating with me. "Well, no pressure Tatum, but the clock is ticking."

"That sounds like pressure."

Her salad is flung over and she's stabbing her fork over and over and over and fitting as much romaine lettuce as she can on that little plastic fork. "If that's what it takes to get you to make a decision, then fine, consider it pressure."

Wes greets me in the hall, arms tight around notebooks and textbooks and he's giving me this sympathetic look like he knows it went poorly. "Michaels give you a hard time?"

I give him a look, matching his step as we march off to lunch period like drones. "Michaels always gives me a hard time. Michaels wakes up in the morning and thinks, what can I do to make Tatum Copeland's life worse? I hate them so much. I hope Tatum Copeland dies today before my meeting with them."

He pauses, tilts his head, and says, "Well, at least she doesn't misgender you."

"At least she doesn't misgender me," I agree, thinking of the dozens of teachers who like feminine pronouns slip through their tongues on a daily basis. I think it's pretty sad that I've gotten used to it.

Lunch today is just me and Wes. I like it like this. I like Wes. I think he might be my favorite person. A title that previously belonged to my brother, but now that I feel like I have no idea who he is or what he's all about, I'm latching onto Wes. I think he can tell too. I'm always blowing up his phone now and asking him to hang out and bothering him every time I think there's a chance I might be alone. He doesn't seem to mind, though. He never really has. "Are you leaning towards anything?" he asks, sitting across from me. Again, two people at a table meant for seven. But I think this time I don't mind it as much.

I shrug, pulling a sack lunch of a peanut butter sandwich and a red apple, classic and elementary. "What I really wanna do is not go to school. I didn't get into any of the schools I wanted and I don't wanna waste all my time and money going to a school I didn't care about. Probably just take a year and apply again, I guess."

Wes is already chewing loudly on his lunch, lips smacking together when he says. "You wanna join my band?"

I can't help the snort that escapes me. "You're in a band?" I ask, incredulously. All I see is Wes, lanky and awkward, in his sweaters and cuffed up jeans, standing on a stage and playing for a crowd of crossed-arm indie fucks. He nods proudly. "I dunno how I didn't know that. What'd ya play?"

"Drums," he says. "My friend Griffin is on lead guitar and this guy Forrest does rhythm and lead vocals. We had a bass player but he was a douchebag but we kicked him out. He fucked Griffin' s girlfriend."

I sound disgusted when I say, "You're in a band with two dudes names Griffin and Forrest? God, what'd you play? Garage indie rock?"

He leans back in his chair and stretches his limbs out. "We're like a combination of Dead Kennedy's and Joyce Manor."

I take a bit out of my apple. "Title Fight."

Wes halts. "We're not that good." And then, after a moment, "But we could be, if you joined as our bassist."

I picture it for a moment. Me, onstage with my instrument, plucking the E string until my fingers bleed. Crowds of fifteen. People pushing each other to the ground and slamming into walls at the sound of the songs we play. Trying to sell Sandy Michaels a ten dollar C.D after I tell her I didn't go to college after all. It's appealing. I toss it around in my brain. "Maybe," I tell him. "Let me meet your guys first, alright?"

My notebook is empty in front of me and it's quiet. Quiet except for the wind and quiet except for the crashing of waves on the shore and quiet except for the heavy laughter that is carried in the wind and dropped at my feet.

My notebook is empty in front of me and I can't think of anything to put it in. I can't think of anything except for the fact that, after ignoring me for so long, my brother is toppling over the side of a cliff, shirtless in the freezing cold. He knows I always come here, whenever my head is too full and I need to empty it. He doesn't know I'm here.

I don't care.

I don't care about the way he laughs as he's falling over the side of the cliff for the fifth time and I don't care that he looks happier without me around. His laughter rings in my ears. I wonder if he lost pieces of himself the first time he jumped.

The rest of them are up there, laughing with their heads peering off the edge, watching as my brother disappears into a splash of ice cold ocean water. I examine them. Noting all the ways they are similar. Noting all the ways they are different. I don't know them. I don't know anything about them but suddenly, for the first time in my life, when my eyes are trained on the one with rough cut hair, I am filled with such an intense and overwhelming feeling of hatred, I start to feel like a different person.

I smell the ocean in the air. It seeps into my skin and dries me out and I'm wondering what I'm doing here, sitting in Jake's garage, feeling invisible.

I'm not really sure what compelled me to accept Bella's invitation to join her down at the Black's house and I'm even less sure as to why she would invite me in the first place. I think that maybe she saw the way the bags under my eyes were hanging heavier and figured I needed something to distract me from my thoughts. But there's nothing distracting, or even remotely fun, about being ignored by two people who seem completely unaffected by my presence.

Bella was by my side, sending me warm glances and comforting statements until the second Jacob Black was in her line of sight. She was in his arms, giggling and getting twirled and squeezed and immediately forgetting about me. From then on it was like I wasn't there.

They actually didn't talk much. Jake worked on the engines in silence while Bella watched with careful eyes, fixated on the way his hands moved without much thought. And there was something about the way she watched him that had me transfixed, too. I never really gave Jake any extra thought or gave him any special considerations but Bella's eyes lingered on him, warm and glossy, that made me think there was something special about him.

It was almost the opposite of the way I felt when Bella used to look at Edward with those wide eyes of wonder. It didn't put me on edge. It didn't make me wanna step in between the two of them or bare my teeth at him until he disappeared but instead it made me feel that Bella was safe. When she looked at Jake, Bella looked like someone who had just seen and felt the warmth of the sun after a long and biting winter.

Occasionally, she would ask him what he was doing and what the placement of certain screws and the removal of others meant. Jake would explain, simply and briefly and in hopes that she would understand. And I don't know if she ever did, but I definitely didn't.

And because they're so entranced in each other and their movements they're so oblivious to me and I wonder if they'd notice if I left or not. I think about it. About just getting up and leaving and going off to do something else somewhere that's not cold and soaked in salt water that dries my skin. Because I have a lot to do and a lot to get done and it's been almost two hours of me being ignored and it's beyond a waste of time. But everytime I will myself to stand and leave, I stay.

I stay, sitting on my fingers and staring on the grey floor of the garage. I keep replaying the last time I saw my brother in my head and I keep trying to think of all the different ways it could've went down. I imagine different words falling out of my tongue and my eyes remaining dry and he would introduce me to his friends and they would become my friends and he would give me some sort of explanation for his distancing and we would mend this, whatever it is.

Em and me had always been close. And we never really fought as kids; I mean, nothing beyond petty disputes over couch territory and coveted front seat dibs but there was nothing that ever divided us this deeply. Me and Embry were a team, a brother and sibling force united against unstable parenting. And I couldn't imagine anything that could've split us so suddenly. I can't think of anything I had done that was so offensive and so abhorrent that it turned my brother into this person with such knotted anger.

My father didn't seem to care. Lane Copeland, with his sullen eyes and sunken cheeks and faux wisdom just shook his head and told me to leave Embry alone and to give him time to adjust. And I think maybe I was stupid for ever asking my dad for help in the first place.

The only thing keeping me from drifting off into the clouds is the cold. It's numbing and thick and layers deep; soaked into my jacket and my sweater and my jeans. I don't know how Bella and Jake stay out here all day with their fingers exposed and working against cold metal.

Dry and cracking lips. Biting cold air. Metal grinding on metal. That persistent feeling that I'm intruding on a moment not meant for me. I don't wanna be here. I don't dwell on it for long, just stand and grab my board and walk outside and I expect that no one will notice enough to stop me but it still twists me up when no one says anything. I walk out into the open and then stop. I turn back around.

"Hey, I think I'm gonna head home," I call to the both of them, and they whip their heads back in my direction. Their eyes are wide like they just remembered I'm there.

Bella takes a couple seconds to react to this, emotions clear on her face as she goes from confusion to guilt and she asks, "Oh, are you sure? If you wanna go I can just give you a ride back home. You don't have to wait for me."

Jake frowns, and he looks at me with this pleading eyes like, please say no, and I think that it was stupid for me to come out here in the first place. Because I guess I had always had an idea that there was something more between the two of them that she was letting on, I just really had no idea how bad it was until I saw it with my own eyes. So I hold my board above my head and say, "I like this way more. I'll be fine."

"Hey, can you do a kickflip?" Jake asks suddenly, talking to me for the secnd time today.

I scoff, dropping my board on the ground and riding out of his garage with an eyeroll. And as soon as I'm on four wheels the ice cold air is worse, pinching and burning my cheeks and my nose but the gravel is smooth and I'm gone.

I like the streets on the res. They're smooth and paved better than the pot-hole ridden streets of Forks.

I don't hate my hometown. I've never been the type to lust after vertical cities and exposed brick and indie coffee shops on every block. And even though I've been kicking myself for not getting into NYU, I'm homesick at the idea of being across the country for eight months out of the year. I didn't take after my mother, in that way. There was something about the familiarity and tightness of Forks that appealed to me, but it never satisfied me. Like I never really belonged there. I felt more at home on the res and I wonder what my life would be like if my dad stayed at his home instead of drifting for a woman that couldn't stay in one place for more than a year and I wonder if he knew this is how it would be.

My hands are deep in the pockets of my jacket and I'm staring at the smooth ground in front of me, head down to block out the wind. The streets are empty and there's no sound but my wheels against the gravel. I sink back into that feeling, that comfort of wonder that only comes from the wind tangling my hair behind me.

I feel best when my thoughts go silent and I'm lost in the way everything feels. My eyes close. I feel the salt in the air sticking to my skin. I feel the roots of my hair lifting and the ends knotting and whipping. I feel the breath of clouds fanning out over my cheeks. I feel light. I feel weightless. I feel my nose slam into some hard. I feel my board whip out from under my feet. I feel my ass hit the ground.

Groans fall my from lips as I run my head and think what the fuck is that? Where the fuck is my board? And I think my nose might have broken and I think that maybe I slammed into a tree that grew in the middle of the street. "What the fuck?" I asked myself in a low voice while pain vibrates from my nose.

And from above me, he speaks. Voice deep and rumbling and filled with something that reminds me of my brother. "Fuck, are you okay? "

The first question I ask myself is, Holy fuck that was a person? The second is, again, Where the fuck did my board go? And the third, when I look up towards the source of that low voice is again, What the fuck? I think I say it out loud but it's gentler, coated in something thick.

I think I'm falling again when I look into his eyes and I don't know what's there to catch me but I never even land. For a second I forget who I am and what's going on because when I look into this kid's eyes this like the world's settings got jacked up. He's rough. He has pale scars on his face and this lingering snarl on his lip but I'm examining his eyes and they're soft and widened and there's this gentleness to them that leaves me thinking that this is the most beautiful person I've ever seen.

And then it's not just his eyes but the fullness of his lips and the point of his jaw and the way his nose hooks out from his face and I think, for a moment, that I could spend all of my time staring at him. In this instant there's nothing more I wanna do than ask him questions. I wanna know his name and his sign and I wanna know what he does when he's bored and what he wants to do in two years and how he likes his coffee and I forget, for a second, the throbbing in my nose.

But then he speaks.

I almost don't notice when that serenity in his eyes vanishes, replaced a pained disgust that nearly snaps me in two. He says, to me or to the world, "Not fucking you."

And then it's all gone. It was only there for a second but that fascination was so strong and so instant that that harshness of that rejection spreads through me like a fire and I can hear the word insufficient echoing around in my head. I'm blinking and I'm struggling and I'm stuttering. "What?" I finally ask, too aware of just how stupid I sound.

He trembles, unreadable. He shakes his head and looks back and forth between me, balled up on the cold ground, and the line of trees on the opposite side of the street. And then, with this groan like he's being forced to do something, he leans down and wraps his hand around my arm and I can feel the warmth from his hand even over all these layers and he's flinging me in the air and onto my feet. I feel breathless and confused and there's something painful I can't make sense of. "Just," he starts, and then sighs, "just watch where you're going, alright?"

He's gone just as soon as he's there, running away from me and as he goes I examine the roughness of his hair, unevenly chopped and I know who he is and I still think he's a dream.

My board is split in half, resting in peace at the bottom of a fir.

Moon's flipping through dark hoodies with distaste, manicured fingers barely touching the fabric as she skims through the selection. "I can't believe people still dress like this. This one says, pop punk and pizza. I wasn't aware it was still cool to pretend eating pizza is unique."

"This is the only place that sells halfway decent boards. And I found out the hard way that duck taping two halves of one board does not a skateboard make, so unfortunately I have to give this establishment my money," I inform her, eyes skimming over the different displays. I'm thinking about just jumping over the counter, grapping one, and tossing cash their way.

"Why don't you just order one online? You could probably find one super cheap. Way cheaper than jacked up Mom and Pop prices."

I roll my eyes. "Mom and Pop prices are jacked up because of online shopper. And, by the way, I'd rather spend more money than get a cheaper version that was made in some Chinese sweatshop. I prefer to shop guilt-free."

Moon snorts and abandons her sweatshirt examination. "Whatever. Some of us don't get money from out absentee parents and don't really have a choice as to whether or not we get to shop guilt-free. Congratulations on being rich, though."

I flick the side of her head but I don't say anything because she's right. My mother may have abandoned my but her bank account didn't. And every month it fill up with fifteen hundred more dollars and I wonder what the fuck she's doing out there to be making that much money. And while I'm over here getting paid for nothing, Moon serves tables five nights a week to help buy groceries for her five younger siblings.

She doesn't bring it up often. It's embarrassing, she tells me, and we both pretend that I don't help her pay for her shit all the time.

"Why don't you just make that dreamboat guy that's totally real and not made up pay for it?" she asks, casually, and I throw daggers in her direction. "What? I just think it's more plausible that you busted trying to do some wild trick than you ramming your face into some shirtless male model. Besides, knowing you, if he was real, you'd probably track him down and demand payment in cash."

I don't know if I would or not but I know that I'm not going to. "He's one of Embry's new friends. And I guess because Embry now thinks I'm a self-centered piece of shit, I can't imagine what's he's managed to convince his new buddies about me. He probably thinks I'm some blood drinking they-demon."

"God, you can be so cringey sometimes."

I know what board I want and I just want someone to show up and take my money so I can get the hell out of here. I definitely don't want to be in this too-hot store with Mooney asking me details about him. She wasn't helping the fact that I couldn't stop thinking about him and how unbelievably furious it made me. I had barely spoken to him. He shouldn't have had this much on an impact on my life. But I kept replaying the moment his eyes narrowed in disgust when he realized who I was. The way he spit out his words at me. The way it made me feel like something ripped. Something that I didn't know was there before but now that I know it was, I mourned the loss of it. He hated me, from the instant he saw me. Took in my appearance. Registered my face. And hated me.

And that made me hate him. Because more than anything else, I felt humiliation. Humiliation that, for a second, for a moment, I was so deeply enamored and so deeply mesmerized that I forgot a life outside of him. Humiliation that I was in awe of someone who hated me before he ever saw me. Hated me so much that when he recognized who I was, he exclaimed in disgust, "Not fucking you."

His voice echoes in my head, low and soothing like the cords I play and I wish I could get it out of my head somehow. I don't even know his name. All I know is the rough and jagged cut of his hair and his hatred for me.

Someone familiar shows up, skinny and pimply and they hand me the board I want and ask, "Do you know how to attach the trucks?"

He asks me this every time. And every time I throw my cash on the table, grab the board, and snarl, "Yeah, I know how to attach the trucks."

i know it seems like im creating this weird romance buildup between wes and tatum but i promise u i am not. they r just tight bros. i wish i had more time to write! but no, all i do is work and get tired and complain about work. anyways, how did we like this chapter! it happened ! that moment! it did not go well lol

-incorrect quotes-

paul: tatum has only been my imprint for one day but if anything happened to them i would kill everyone in this room and then myself

jacob: i lost tatum!
bella: how did you lose tatum?
jacob: oh give me a break they're like 2 inches tall

embry: can we go to mcdonalds
tatum: no we have food at home
embry, wiping away a tear: i hate this fucking family

tatum: i am DONE talking about this
tatum, two seconds later: ...and you know what else?!

tatum: my kink is being right and that's why i'm turned on all the time