Disclaimer: do not own, nor do I pretend to own anything you recognise in this. I do own Lauren and Eden and the plot.


Whenever I saw him, I became nervous and didn't know what to do. I only ever felt confident enough to talk to him if he spoke first.
This happened very rarely and only in English. It was as if I didn't exist outside of that room. In the next English class, Jasper asked again what we were going to do about our project. I told him that I thought a computer presentation would be different and might fetch us a good grade because not many people would do it. He agreed, surprisingly.
"Lauren?" he called after me in the corridor after class. I stopped and turned to him, ignoring the scowls from the other girls and also trying to suppress the hopeful bubble which was trying to inflate inside me. I could almost hear my heartbeat as its rate increased, "I'm going to be away for a few days, so I wrote some notes down for you, our project will be due soon after I get back and it's not fair on you if you do all the work" his tone didn't give any idication that fairness mattered to him in the slightest. I blushed deeply and turned my face to the floor, annoyed with myself for my impossible thoughts, my heart now beating slower than usual but harder, thudding dejectedly against my ribcage, I could feel its rhythm in my throat. "uhhh, yeah, thanks...sounds, fair" I said, trying not to sound too disappointed that I would be working alone...He frowned slightly at my reaction..."I'll see you later then" he lightly touched my shoulder, and then he was gone.

Oh my lord. What was I doing?
I was always emotionally, as well as physically drained on a Friday...I needed to sleep. Yeah, that was why this insignificant guy....Jasper....that was no different to any other was having this affect on me. I walked out of school that afternoon, head held high, I was not going to let his strange behavior affect me...
But his behavior wasn't strange was it? I only said he was acting strangely because that's what I wanted to believe, I wanted to think that he would act differently towards me than any other guy I had ever met, but he didn't - I wasn't special to him, and he wasn't anything out of the ordinary...

On Saturday morning I pulled 'Frankenstein' out of my bag, the plan was to research for our project but I just sat and thought about Jasper.
His handwriting was very neat, almost cursive, like you see on those romantic letters of the 1800's. My writing was quite loopy and neat...I also noticed that some of the points he made mirrored mine exactly...so we thought in a similar way about fear and suffering? Ok, I admit I was scraping the bottom of the barrel when it came to looking for similarities but, in my moment of desperation that was all I could manage.
I had drawn up a rough version of each slide of the presentation but that was the extent of my work for the weekend...what was happening to the serious, studious girl that I was when I arrived here?

In school on Monday, I found out that he, Jasper, had been adopted by Carlisle and Esme Cullen when he was 16 along with his twin Rosalie, Esme was their Aunt. I had also made a friend, the source of this information, Eden Leste (whose surname, she said, meant East...so you wrote her last name 'East of Eden', she told me with an embarrassed smile on her pretty features, her father was from Galicia in Spain, and was a fan of Steinbeck it seemed). She told me everything she knew of the Cullens during lunch after I told her I was working with Jasper for our English project.
I had no classes with Eden, but she promised she would sit with me at lunch and help me out with anything she could, I was instantly grateful that the one friend I had made so far seemed to be the nicest girl in the school. . .and normal.

At home that night I pushed myself to do as much work on the presentation as I could before I went completely insane and stopped working all together. Once I felt that I had done a substantial amount, I made my way downstairs to start on dinner. Moussaka seemed to be the only thing that I could make with the limited (and yet widely ranged) supply of food which was contained within the kitchen.
When I had finished, without any disasters luckily, I went to my room and retreated into my childhood once more by listening to America's song "Man's Road". This song never failed to relax me,

"I'm hungry, weary, but I cannot lay me down
The rain comes, dreary, but there's no shelter I have found
It will be a long time till I find my abode"

how well those lyrics seemed to fit my current predicament I smiled ruefully, yes, I did wish that I could at least find some security in one thing in my life....as it stood, I couldn't even say I had shelter in my relationship with my mother....even that would make the transient homes seem somewhat more bearable. I sighed and turned off the music, just as my Mother called up the stairs to me, I realized just then that the dinner was still in the oven, I half shouted a greeting as I rushed to the kitchen and pulled the almost burned moussaka from the oven....ok so almost without disaster.
"Honestly Lauren," My mother said, "I don't know what you've done with yourself since we moved here....but you've changed..."

I didn't know either....I was swiftly becoming a different person, and for no good reason.


Hope you liked it. R+R?