Author's Note:

Hey guys! I am soooo sorry for not posting anything for a while and you can all blame my computer. Have you ever had your computer crash? There's a first time for everything. I lost my stories. I had it all written and then I just had to go back and rewrite everything. Not just for this story either, I lost the next chapter to "Finding the New Tinkerbell" too, so I'm rewriting that one as well. For your steady patience I wrote 2 chapters for this one (because you guys deserved to watch Iz meet Edward). Thanks so much and as always please review!

Chapter 1

I start my story one day before I left for Forks. I did have friends, plenty of them, back in Phoenix. In fact, that last day in town was our very last movie night as a group.

Usually, we had it on Friday's at Kim's house but everyone decided we needed to have one more before I left which made the last one on a Sunday.

Rob was our movie guy, which meant no one really ever WATCHED what he brought. As Kim's boyfriend he tended to lean more toward the "weird" side of nerdy and his movies pretty much showed that. Documentaries on tornadoes, slasher films, and strange "new age" "three guys sitting in a room for three hours talking" movies were what he preferred. Now while that sounds oh so fabulous, these weekly gatherings didn't actually suck that bad. Maybe it was the fact that Juliet was the kind of person who- when in doubt- created games on the fly. Even if the only supplies she had were a bottle of Pepsi, clothes pins, and a Kleenex box. It could have been that Sky's family was rich and she always brought the food, and it was always unhealthy which then spurred Kim to rant about fat for a good hour. Or that Sky's boyfriend Alex had a tendency to say what everyone was thinking, even if no one else had the guts to voice it. Whatever the reason, these times together were never perfect but they were the closest thing any of us had to a social life.

I didn't get there until ten, halfway through what looked to be a documentary about what was REALLY happening in hospitals, but I new once they saw what I had brought no one would really care.

Rob was transfixed as a woman on the screen clacked her heels down the bleached hallways hunched to seem invisible. Ally was in the rocking chair texting the guy she met at work only a week before.

She had been cleaning tables and heard him behind her asking the girl at the front desk for an application form. After one conversation and a lot of staring she declared him her new target, even after Juliet, Sky, Alex, and I had declared him out of her league after a run for curly fries and shakes one afternoon. Of course we never point blank told her that, that would have been bitchy to the extreme, but we started dropping hints every now and then.

Kim and Sky were in the kitchen, Kim giving her practically mandatory lecture on how she didn't eat anything with sugar or anything deep fried and how great she felt because of it. Her already squinty eyes got even squintier as she got to the part about how she wished everyone here lived the way she did because we would benefit so much. My favorite part was how she always forgot that the reason she was so physically fit was not because she avoided sugar, but because she was on the track, tennis, and volleyball teams at school. That much exorcise is just not healthy for people and she's example A.

Juliet was on the floor, back to the couch, surrounded by three 2 lbs. dumbbells, a bottle of honey, a box of Cheerios, and a handful of bobby pins. God only knew what game would come out of all of that.

Alex was using spray cheese to cover his bowl of popcorn as he watched his girlfriend and Kim argue. It never got very heated, mostly because we knew it would happen all over again the next week, but it was always a good show while you avoided the movie and waited for Juliet to save the day.

And like usual I did what I do best, I took pictures. Unlike usual, it wasn't in the hopes of finding a subject worth adding to my portfolio, it was silly pictures of my friends doing what they did best. I didn't bother attaching a flash or making sure I used the correct lens. I didn't question whether I should take it landscape or if it should be in black and white. I simply let the pictures come out however they wanted to.

"Oh no, hand it over," Sky said, glaring at my going away present with her arguing forever saved inside of it. I grinned and slipped the strap off from around my neck.

"You break this and I will forever hate you," I warned her, passing it over.

She scrolled through the few photos and deleted the one I just took. "And if you ruin this," she gestured at herself without looking up, "I will forever hate you."

No one said anything for a second as Kim and Alex leaned in to look at the other pictures with Sky.

"…could there be aliens patrolling these halls we call safe, experimenting on us as we are unconscious? We met up with Pat Moren for more on the story…"

"Aliens? Really?" I called to Rob.

"I think we all should know what's in our hospitals." He said without moving his eyes off the screen. And yes, that does seem terribly ironic now that I remember it, but then again, most things do.

"I think they're called doctors." Ally said, not taking her eyes off her phone.

"Where's Lucas and Jack?" I asked the group in front of me.

"Hmm? Oh, they're coming later, they were taking some girls from East to turnabout." Kim said.

"What is this? A tire?" Sky mumbled, twisting the camera for a better angle.

"I think it's playground dirt." Alex corrected. He looked up at me. "Wow, Bells, these pictures are terrible."

"Alex!" Sky nudged him.

"I know," I laughed. "I'm totally stuck right now. My talent is gone."

"No, you still have talent," Sky prodded. "Remember your fifteen pictures of leaves? And those were all so REAL, you did fifteen and not one of them was boring or the same."

"You still have it," Kim added. "You just need to find the right subject."

"And I'm sure there will be plenty of subjects in Forks." Sky encouraged.

I laughed. "Yeah, sure. So how's it coming Jules?"

Juliet glanced up. "Almost done."

I nodded. This was pretty much every movie day summed up in one. Eventually, Juliet set up a game where the barbells ends were stood up and coated in honey, the bobby pins sticking upright to ring-toss the cheerios onto. Sky snuck some sprite into Kim's water causing her to spit it out over all of us. Rob never moved his eyes from the TV until the movie finally ended and Ally snuck in with "The Heat" to finish the night. Classic is what I would call it but the night was too off because of my move the next day to feel completely legit.

It was a little past midnight when I pulled the pictures out of my bag. Sneak attacks that I had gotten of all of them the week before. It was my going away present, a funny reminder that there had once been a ninth to the little group. They did what they did best, what I knew they would do. Ally would not look away from her stack, pretending to be so absorbed she was indifferent. Rob kept glancing from the photos of one of us to the real thing in front of him, mentally comparing. Sky begged me to send her all of the new pictures I would take in Forks, but I knew it was more for my sake than something she really wanted. Juliet told me to come over the next time I was in town, no matter when that was. Kim burst into tears about how nothing was going to be the same with me missing but we all knew that was a lie. The group would still meet every Friday to avoid whatever Rob chose to show. Kim and Sky would still get into fights over fat and Juliet and Ally would be blissfully unaware as they tended to their own distractions.

There was only one person my going away truly affected, and he caught up to me as I was halfway down the driveway with my keys in my hand.

"We still have a deal, right?" Jack's tone was casual, unconcerned. I tried to see around it to the part that said my answer mattered to him.

"I don't know," I hedged. "It doesn't seem like you want them that badly."

"Iz-" Jack, the only person on this planet I allowed to call me Iz. He shot me a look, the one that said 'let's be serious for a second, mmmkay?'

I turned to look at him full on, hip cocked, hands fidgeting with my keys. The moon was full so I could see every feature of his face and I suddenly started to panic that he was going to kiss me. I've only ever been kissed once before and it was by him. We were all hanging out, going bowling, when the guys went to go get food. The conversation went- like it usually does when the speakers are all girls- over many different topics until we finally came to our first kisses. Kim's was after her first date with Rob, outside her front door as he dropped her off. Sky's happened as a fluke because her first boyfriend, Tony, didn't know that he was going to be her first kiss.

He saw her after school sophomore year (before Sky's parents struck oil and bought her a car), waiting for a ride, and told her she could get a ride home along with his four brothers. She had had a crush on Tony for a while and followed him up to the van. It was as she tried to climb in that Tony's oldest brother, Charlie, stated that he would not drive anyone else home. Tony whispered something to Charlie, which we later discovered was the complete lie of Sky being his girlfriend, and Charlie demanded that he prove it. So, he leaned out towards Sky and kissed her. It only lasted a second before he pulled back and helped her into the van with Charlie's approval.

It was after this story that everyone turned to me. And Ally said, "Oh, I forgot, you're a kiss virgin."

"You've never been kissed before?" Jack asked from behind me. Because, yes, the boys had just come back with pizza.

I tried not to blush as I turned to face him. So what if I had never been kissed before? It's not like I was the only 16-year-old girl who had never had the experience.

"No, I haven't," I said.

"Oh, ok," he said. And then he bent down and kissed me, right there in front of everyone. I was a little shocked, and I went stiff. Jack was a great friend and I had checked him out a couple of times, but I had never gotten this far with my fantasies of what could happen between us. He pulled back and smiled at me, as if he did this every day. "Now you have." He said simply, reaching over me for a slice of pizza before he finally sat down across the table.

We'd never talked about it. I'm sure it didn't matter to him, but it took up every spot in my mind when he talked to me. Instant replay forever.

"We have a deal," I told him. A set of my pictures mailed from me to him every month. To keep me focused, to give me a goal.

I still hadn't figured out how he would benefit from it.

He smiled and reached out, gave me a playful tug on my arm. I loosened my stance and he stepped forward, burying me in his chest.

I'm not a touchy feely kind of person, if you want to know the truth. When the theater kids all rush to hug and hang on each other after every class period as though the world's ending I cringe away. It's awkward having someone suddenly pull you up against them. And most people cannot give good hugs.

But Jack, Jack knows how to hug me in a way that doesn't make me stiffen up and cringe away. His chest was warm under my cheek and he rested his chin on the top of my head. He didn't strangle-hug in a bear-like way as most people do. He reached one hand across me and rested that hand on my hip the other one pressing on the small of my back, pushing me towards him. If safety needed a picture this was it.

All too soon he let go, draping one arm across my shoulders as he walked me to my car. We didn't say anything on the walk over or after he opened and closed my door for me. There was nothing to say. Tomorrow I would be no more than monthly pictures in the mail.