I tried desperately not to be a zombie again. I didn't want to hurt my father.
The broken nose, the splintered facial bones, the glass – Jacob and Paul covered for me, but at an expense that only made me more depressed.
They banged up my truck.
There wasn't enough glass for me to try and sacrifice the motorcycle – even though I wanted to sacrifice that just as little as I wanted to give up the red, bulbous 'senior citizen' of a motor vehicle.
Even though it was infinitely more painful to sob with splints in my nose and the bruises on my face, my sinuses raw, I still did. I cried for hours over my truck.
It was the last thing that was mine, the last thing that was all-me, the last thing I had that made Bella-Swan-before-Edward.
Charlie didn't know what to do with me. Then again, I didn't know what to do with me.
Jacob tried to console me, he tried to be there for me, but I didn't want any of it anymore. I felt dirty, and sick, knowing that I had used Jacob, had tried to bury myself in his affection to escape missing Edward. I felt as though no person was ever as selfish as I was. So instead of taking his comfort, I pushed him away. I pushed everyone away, and Charlie didn't seem to even have it in him to yell at me again – to tell me that pining over Edward was worthless.
All those discussions we had about being a real person again – he didn't seem to have it in him to repeat himself. So he just watched, a sad wary look in his eyes, as I finished out my last year at Forks High; and he tried to smile, hoping, I'm sure, that college held greater promise than his little town.
I chose Seattle – close enough to home that I didn't feel like I was abandoning Charlie, yet far enough away to attempt a new beginning.
And close enough, should Edward ever return.
I tried not to think about him.
Impossible, in actuality.
But it's the thought that counts, right?
# # # # #
It surprised no one that my college career path narrowed right down to gothic literature.
Within the gothic, I was safe from sappy romance – I was safe from happy endings. Here, the poetry of Byron and Shelly made it clear that not everyone gets to live happily ever after. I had darkness (the monster created in a lightning storm), I had macabre (the baby in the peach brandy), and I had real commentaries on social interaction and the society of the Victorian age. I took a few socio-anthropology classes, and delved into the historic threads of my Victorian gothic literature.
I became someone else.
The Izzy Swan that walked the halls these days was a known entity – and she had few friends, but no enemies either. Everyone was either too superficially frightened or simply didn't care.
My skin, always pale, was emphasized by the black tee shirts and dusters I wore over worn jeans. The circles under my eyes reminded me of him – I found I didn't really sleep anymore.
The company I kept was the quiet sort – a boy named Joseph who wore a spiked dog collar and quoted Nietzsche, and an overweight girl named Leigh who painted her lips and her eyes black and dyed her blonde hair black too. She said black was the only color that didn't make her look fat – so she cut everything else out of her wardrobe. We were sometimes joined by a skinny auburn-haired girl with spectacles who had a number of unsettling facial ticks, and wore black skirts and Marilyn Manson shirts. She was named after the girl in The Exorcist.
Joseph and I often got into heated arguments about 'the greater good'.
And sometimes those heated arguments led to unsatisfying sex in his room, my room, his car, my car, the library and several dormitory common rooms.
I kept allowing it, because I suppose some part of me wanted it. But I never felt whole or sated or light and fluffy like all those crappy romance novels my mother read said I should.
I started to smoke – menthol ultra-lights at first, and then gradually less light; never giving up the minty aftertaste. I liked how it burned when I exhaled through my nostrils, my sinuses never really healed from their constant assault of a year of crying and a few broken bones. I was even blessed with fairly regular nosebleeds. It was painful, but it made me feel real. So I smoked two packs a week.
A job opened up working in the writing center, editing other kids' essays, helping them improve their style, their grammar, even their spelling and syntax. I needed money for cigarettes, and I was top of my college writing class. So they let me have it – so long as I remembered that smoking was to take place outside the writing lab.
I was almost a senior before I realized what I'd become.
# # # # #
"Izzy, can you look at this again? I don't know," a freshman named Elise, a pretty blonde, quiet, was unfortunately one of my regulars.
She was smart, and she reminded me of Rosalie – at least in looks, as she was a much smaller girl. However, as great as she was at expressing herself verbally, and had a beautiful style when she was writing, she had trouble getting to the point and sticking to it.
Elise and I would work on single essay that she would have completely researched and drafted weeks before it was due, so that we could spend the time between turning it into something she could actually submit. Generally we started with me taking her draft and using a red pen (it made her cry the first time, but now it made her fierce) to remove over half the text. Then she would remove that, and try to reinsert the information, and I would only have to remove a quarter.
We eventually would work down to a concise seven to ten page document that answered the question, gave appropriate source material, and even had a clear hypothesis and conclusion.
Some part of me felt like a midwife when I helped her with her papers – together we birthed something beautiful.
"Yeah?"
She held out the page in question, where I had insisted once again that she treat her audience as her peer, and not go into depth discussing every step of the fall of Rome. Everyone knew Rome fell. It was the why that we were interested in – we did not need recounts of the battles on each front that collapsed the Western Empire.
My eyes scanned the portion that I had bracketed, but not crossed out. She hadn't really taken anything out. "Okay, but we don't care about Britain. We care about home politics," I said, holding it out to her.
"But Britain was the first sign of sickness within the Empire – they couldn't hold their farthest claim, so they started to retreat, closer and closer to their capital."
"Yes, and we know that. So just say that. Say that the withdrawal from Britain was the first sign of sickness, blah blah blah, but don't talk about troop movements, don't mention what they were leaving behind, don't mention the," I pulled the paper back, "warning of more trouble on the horizon for a young nation as ships from the North came to 'go a wiking' on the shores that Rome left unprotected.'" I held the paper back out to her. "I don't care. Your question is about Rome – and while yes, Britain is important, don't go into discussions of Britain without Rome. Rome's gone. Keep moving with Rome, don't stay behind with Britain."
She furrowed her brow, taking the paper from me, and reached for her pile of multicolored pens to strike out and rewrite her paragraph. I turned to go back to the computer, where I had been wrangled into editing this week's copy of the college newspaper in the absence of its usual editor-in-chief.
"Izzy?"
"Hmm?" I turned back to face her.
"You're a really good teacher," she began, and bit her lip. I almost smiled, because I felt like that little thing made us kindred. "Why are you like this?" She gestured with a green gel pen at me, from head to toe.
I raised an eyebrow.
"Like what?"
"Like that, you know. You dress in black, you're going to give yourself lung cancer, I can tell you never sleep enough, and you're very unfriendly."
I didn't know how to react. No one had ever "summed me up" before.
Unfriendly?
"Unfriendly?" I repeated, and tried not to sound offended. I actually found I wasn't sure if I should even be offended, and a part of my brain wondered why I had to think about such a thing – whether I should be offended, like I'd forgotten how to be a person.
"Well, you're not a bitch right off, but you give off vibes that say very clearly 'leave me alone'. But I know you can be nice. You're very helpful to me, and I've watched you help other people in here. You always say 'please' and 'thank you' and you get into very passionate discussions with Maggie," she nodded her head towards the office of the writing center captain, Professor Margaret Keys, who preferred to be called 'Maggie'.
I just nodded, rather speechless. So I said the only thing that came to mind.
"I won't get lung cancer."
"Yes you will."
I shook my head. "The first time I hear a smoker's cough come out of my mouth, I'll quit."
"But your voice sounds like a smoker's."
"Because I breathed through my mouth for three months a couple of years ago – I still do it sometimes. A lot, maybe. Reflex, I guess. My throat is always a little raw because I can't stop myself."
Why was I telling her this? I didn't know Elise outside the writing center – I knew she always had plenty of history papers, so it was easy enough to guess at her potential major, but we did not frequent the same parties, did not use our chalked IDs to mingle in the same bars. She was a stranger to me.
"What'd you do that you had to breathe through your mouth for three months?"
I stuck my hands in the pockets of my duster, left open in the warmth of the spring air that wafted through the third floor windows.
"Broke my nose. And a few of the bones here," I took one hand out of a pocket to point across my cheek, under my eye, where Victoria had smacked me. "Car accident," I said, feeding her the same lie I'd fed everyone else – the lie that at least half of La Push kept from everyone in Forks. No thanks to werewolf minds and open parental relationships on the reservation, I thought to myself bitterly.
And I found myself thinking of werewolves, of wolf girls, of bonfires and laughter.
"Hey, see? You can smile."
I snapped out of it and looked at Elise; whatever she had seen on my face was gone. I had no desire to continue the conversation, so I said: "Just finish up that bit, and leave your notes. I'll do a few more edits and you can pick it up tomorrow."
She pressed her lips together, but didn't push it. I sat down at the computer and brought up the Page Editor and clicked and dragged and typed my way through arranging short columns around the ever-growing number of advertisement blocks, and re-wording titles so they didn't take up half the column space in their big serifed fonts.
I heard her shuffle papers some time later, and I heard her say quietly "good night Izzy", but I didn't reply, or look at her. I was rude, because she had hit a tender spot.
And I didn't realize I had any of those left.