A/N: I believe it is now the weekend so here is your chapter. My week of deadlines is finished and I am relieved. Anyway, I'd like to give to a shout out to . I read your new chapter and you've inspired me. Without further ado, TADA!

Disclaimer: I am not Stephanie Meyers. I own nothing.

An Ode to Silence

As I pried open my sleepy eyes to view my silent world, something struck me as odd. This wasn't like the other mornings. It was… clearer somehow. Warily, I got up and moved to the window. Snow. That disgusting stuff had formed a thin layer over everything. That included my truck, the driveway, the roof, and the trees. Don't get me wrong, it was an amazingly beautiful sight to behold but with my balance, I wouldn't make it five feet.

This was going to be simply awful, I thought as I trudged downstairs for some breakfast. My eyes seemed to want to close even more after seeing the snow so everything was rather blurry but I managed to get myself a breakfast of cereal and orange juice.

Unfortunately, when my mouth closed over the first bite, I realized with dreadful clarity that I'd accidentally poured the OJ in the cereal and the milk in my cup. My face twisted in a look of discontentment but I swallowed it down and finished up my breakfast. After that culinary experience, any hope I had harbored for the day was dashed.

I wondered if I should just say I was sick, go back to bed, and hope for a better day tomorrow. I fantasized about how good that would feel to crawl back into bed but my feet still carried me toward the front door, my hands still grabbed my new black jacket and my other hand still reached for the knob.

As I carefully made my way across the deadly slick of the driveway, my thoughts drifted toward Edward Cullen. He was an odd boy to be certain, perhaps even bi-polar. As he sat in my memories, he and all of his siblings were more pulchritudinous (Which means beautiful, gorgeous,) then anyone I'd even seen, even among all the professionally beautiful and ultra thin supermode- Slip!

My body smacked against the ice with a painful thud. On a side note, the sky was almost pretty today despite the fact that there was still no sun to be seen. The full overcast was in shades of gray, dark blue, an odd purplish-blue and even some highlights of silver. Every cloud has a silver lining? Well now, I can see that.

After a while of laying there on the icy ground, I started to get cold so I attempted to get back to my feet. In typical Bella fashion, I slipped another couple times before I wobbled to a standing position. There were black dots swirling around in my vision with bits of pink, green, blue and hints of red. It was a verifiable rainbow flashing and throbbing in my eyes. Although, if I were to say that it was pretty, then I would also have to say that it was annoying. Just like Edward.

It would seem that I was even more brain dead and easily amused today than was usual but maybe that had something to do with the fact that I had orange juice in my cereal. I stood precariously unsteady in the middle of the driveway while my vision cleared enough that I could scramble to the safe harbor of my faithful truck but I remained dizzy for sometime after.

My thoughts during the drive were originally focused on the mystery of Edward Cullen but I put a stop to that after a couple minutes and began musing over Mike and Erik and how different they reacted towards me than the boys in Phoenix. I had my bets that it was partially because I was the deaf girl. I was willing to bet that much of the rest of their reasons focused on how I wasn't pretty enough for them. There were other fish in such a large pond.

Stepping out of my truck when I arrived at the high school, some snow-caked gleaming silver caught my eye in the back of the truck. Charlie. He'd put on small silver chains on the wheels this morning for me. Biting my lip, I moved closer to inspect the diamond shaped crisscrossing chains while trying desperately hard not to fall again.

My eyes misted with the wave of emotion Charlie's snow chains had brought but with practiced diligence, I swallowed it down and felt the sea of emotions that I didn't wish to tap into, begin to ebb and fall away. As soon as it was sufficiently covered, I looked up. There was a sea of faces staring at me with wide, terrified, and shocked faces. Edward Cullen stood out among them four cars down.

What are they looking at? I thought, panicking when I noticed a dark blue van skidding towards me. It would impact with the back of my faded red truck and I was standing right smack dab between the two. I didn't even have a prayer or a moment for my life to flash before my eyes.

As some instinct prodded me, I instantly glanced back toward the kids staring in horror to see something of a white and bronze blur racing at me before I felt something ram into my numb body. I fell away like a rag doll but the impact didn't come from the direction I thought it would come from. More importantly, I was still there instead of dead like I thought I would be. What happened to dead upon impact?

My head hit the icy ground for the second time that day and those familiar black dots swirled in my vision when I noticed something solid and cold pinning me to the ground. I didn't try to struggle against it. What I saw would confound me for days afterward and would haunt my musings in my free time but I was sure my eyes were deceiving me or I'd hit my head harder then I'd thought.

The van skidded toward me again as if fate was unhappy to be thwarted. Two white hands came into my vision and slammed into the side of the van as it shuddered to a stop not more then a foot from my fear-struck face. When the blurring hands came away, there was a deep dent in the van's body.

One of the hands fit under the van while the other swung me around and out of the way. Finally, the van settled where my legs had been only a moment ago.

Everything seemed frozen, hushed, awed for that one moment. My heart was thudding in my chest so frantically that I could feel it with each beat. My breaths came in shallow pants before the frantic hysteria started up. People began hurrying my direction with relief and worry etched similarly everywhere I looked. Their mouths each formed words that I didn't try to decipher with my blurry vision and tired mind.

Surreptiously, my gaze felt grasped by a magnetic force to Edward, the one who had pulled me out of the way. His perfectly sculpted lips were moving like the rest and I stared confusedly at him, my lip reading skills forgotten in some box in my mind that I'd moved away from in this moment of crisis. This seemed to make him even more worried and he continued speaking until he held up two of his long, pale fingers in front of my face while his lips still moved but in more rushed movements.

With concentration that made my head ache, I picked out the words he was saying. "Bella, Bella? Can you tell me how many fingers you see?" My features rearranged themselves into an exasperated appearance. "Two. I'm fine," Unbeknown to me, my voice was even muggier then before. His face was disbelieving and concerned but he let it go.

I tried to sit up, only to find that he held me firmly against his body in a strong grip. I struggled a little bit before looking back at his lips, "-your head pretty hard." I only managed to catch the end of whatever he was saying. Still, even as the throbbing ache above my left ear was overcoming my senses, I grimaced disapprovingly in an attempt to dislodge his thought about my head.

Then it hit me, figuratively of course. "You were four cars away," I stated confusedly. His expression changed to a serious, yet innocent one. "I was standing next to you," his lips formed the words. Why was he lying? That white-bronze blur, was that him? And what about his hands vs. the dent in the car? Was I just really, really messed up? I didn't know but I was more inclined to believe what I saw instead of assuming that I'm crazy.

When I managed to sit up, he slid away from me and my eyebrows furrowed. I opened my mouth to say something else but the mob of people stole my attention. They all had tears streaming down their faces and their lips were all stretched wide which indicated screaming that I couldn't think about in my current condition. I wouldn't want to try and decipher that even without the pain in my head.

The teachers were now taking charge and different adults said something here and shouted something else by the van. I blinked and turned back to Edward. "You were by your car. Not next to me." You were that white-bronze blur, I silently added. His jaw set and he looked at me with his eyes in a hard stare. "No, you're confused." He tried to write me off.

Stubborn as I was, I wasn't about to let it go. "I saw you." I protested. "You must've hit your head too hard." He stated, his eyes pleaded with me. "My head is just fine." On, and on the battle of words raged until I spoke again, "Will you explain it to me later?" I asked. His perfect eyes narrowed, "Fine." A small sense of victory pulsed through me when that one word registered on my mind.

When the ambulance arrived, I tried to slip away and fade into the crowd of panicking students but a firm hand on my shoulder prevented me from getting so much as two feet away. I frowned as the stretchers were brought to us by the EMTs and held up my hands to say 'no'. Unfortunately, after Edward said something to them, (probably about my lack of response earlier) it was a lost battle and they picked me up and set me on the humiliating thing.

I wanted to sink inside my skin and hide when they even put a neck brace on me in front of what must've been the entire student and teacher body. I saw Edward step into the front of the ambulance to ride while they carted me up into the back. What an infuriating situation. Still, the back of the ambulance didn't have that horrible unnerving feel most people felt in it.

I'd spent far too much time in one of these and in the hospital to not feel anything but normal among the machines and EMTs. For a split second, I almost convinced myself that I was back home in Phoenix, going to the hospital yet again because I'd suffered a concussion in gym but then the rain began to fall outside the windows of the vehicle. I was in Forks and I was overcome with the insane notion that Edward might not even be human.

A/N: Okay, I'm really beginning to have fun with this. What happens when Bella plays a ridiculously clueless human while piecing things together in silence? Since Edward doesn't know what goes on in her mind and how perceptive she really is, might he give more hints than if he were on guard for her watch like he was in Twilight? -Waggles eyebrows-

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