It was pretty different for me at lunch that day. Alice had asked me where Bella generally sat and I had told her. So Alice wasn't there. Rosalie and I, well, we kind of agreed to disagree, so she wasn't exactly a candidate for conversation. Then there was Emmett, who's focus was taken by Rosalie. Jasper wasn't really that social with anyone but Alice, so he wasn't much fun to talk to either. I suddenly found myself wishing that I hadn't offended Bella. Even talking about biology homework would be interesting with her.

Lunch felt ten times longer. I found myself looking at the clock constantly, the second hand seeming to slow down the more that I stared. I just wanted to get out of the awkward silence of the cafeteria.

Bella's seat was empty when I walked into the Biology lab. I sighed as the I realized that what I had said might have had a worse effect on her than I had thought. I resolved that if Bella came to class, I was going to set things straight. I slammed my books on the corner of the table.

I was glad that Alice decided to pay a visit to Bella, though. She deserved a friend like Alice. Someone who wouldn't pry, but listen. Someone who could cheer anyone up simply by being there.

I wondered what they could have talked about during lunch. I wondered if Bella ranted about my unacceptable behavior. I wondered if Bella had chosen to tell Alice the story that she had told me.

Most of all I just wondered about Bella. Most girls would cope with most things by eating chocolates, crying, and sleeping in until three in the afternoon thinking that their life was over. Bella made it bluntly obvious that she was suffering. She barely touched her food from what I had seen so there was clearly no chocolate binging, and considering she was at school, which got out at two thirty, she definitely wasn't sleeping in until three. Instead of complaining and moaning and insisting on being lazy in her depression, she moved out of state to try and escape, to find peace rather than to wallow in her suffering.

Bella stumbled into the room clumsily, dropping her books. Her cheeks automatically turned a deep red in embarrassment. She knelt down to pick her books up, keeping her eyes on the ground the entire town. It wasn't until I felt my stomach drop at the when she lifted her face that I realized there was more than just wonder that I felt for her. Adoration. Admiration. The first two words that popped into my head.

I shook the feeling off immediately. The odds were against me, they always were. The more I had thought about love, the more I thought it impossible. How were you supposed to find one person in the world that fit you? There were billions of people in the world. There was no way to possibly meet everyone and determine whether or not it's meant to be that you spend the rest of your lives together. And even if you could, you're probably too old at that point to have much of a life left. Love was a pointless hope.

And even if I did admit that I was falling in love with her, it didn't matter anyway. She only believed in one love per lifetime, and she had already redeemed hers. She wouldn't even look my way if I wanted her to.

Despite my negativity, I couldn't help but notice every good thing about the girl who was just now taking her seat beside me. She always smelled nice. Whenever she flipped her hair over her shoulder, I caught the scent of strawberries. Though I'd never seen her spray herself with perfume, she always seemed to smell like freesia, or some other floral garden. Her brown eyes, despite their darkness, seemed deep. It went with her personality. Her skin was fair, soft looking, like she was a fragile porcelain doll, which probably was true now more than ever.

She was silent for a while, pulling out homework from another class. Her brow creased in confusion. It reminded me of the intuition behind the deep eyes. Her disappointment when she couldn't figure out a difficult math problem brought the memory of her depression, her past, and her attempts to slither away from pity for a chance at another normal life.

One would have thought that, in studying her face so intensely, I would have noticed her staring back at me. But it wasn't until she had said something that I noticed her gaze.

"Hello? What are you staring at?" she inquired.

"Nothing in particular," I replied with some honesty. After all, I was looking at more than one feature of her face, not focusing on a specific one. That could be classified as nothing in particular. "Just staring off into space, I guess. You know how things get by the end of the day..."

"Well, um, I wanted to tell you that I'm not offended by what you said. Your sister told me that you felt that way. I actually think it was enlightening to see things from another perspective and I should really thank you for it," she admitted. "So, thanks," she added awkwardly.

"You're welcome. I hope it helped. How was the rest of your day yesterday?" I questioned, trying to show, in case she still didn't believe me, that I wasn't a jerk, that I wouldn't go telling everybody all of her secrets. After all, I hadn't even told Alice, the most supportive of my siblings.

"Actually not that good," she confessed. "I was thinking and I got really confused...but that was probably because of all of the times I hit my head..."she trailed off. She didn't even say what she had been thinking about or what she had hit her head on. It was starting to make me confused.

The bell rang then, making it impossible for me to ask what she meant by that last little bit there. I wasn't sure if I wanted to know either. A lot of girls tried to hurt themselves when they were depressed. But then, I reminded myself, Bella wasn't like most other girls. Plus, had I not just seen her stumble into the classroom? She could have hit her head by accident. And she didn't say anything about all of the head injuries happening last night. She could have been referring to the collective, multiple hits on the head accumulating to last night's confusion.

Anything was possible with this mystery named Bella.

When I got home, I was pretty much quiet all day thinking about my revelations of Bella. I marked off my fascination with Bella as my curiosity. Though, in that moment, I had only thought of adoration and admiration, really it could have been amazement. I was amazed that she had been able to distinguish herself so differently from most other girls, create such a fine line between herself the the majority. How she was able to change my mind about how all girls were after the same thing out of a rich, good-looking guy.

Bella didn't mope, didn't care what people thought of her...it didn't even seem like she put on much makeup. She wasn't desperate to date anyone, if fact, she was the complete opposite. She was unpredictable and predictable at the same time. She didn't like it when fortunate people complained. She held tight to what she believed in.

I had heard somewhere that when you deny something, it's really true. At least about internal things. Not like denying that you killed a guy when you didn't, because that's the truth and it can be proved through evidence. It only works with denying things going on in your mind. It was like saying that you weren't crazy meant that you were, because people generally thought that what they were doing was crazy, so being crazy was normal. Therefore, if you say you're normal, you're really crazy. Yeah, it confused me at first, too.

I wondered if that's why I was so eager to deny how powerfully Bella had captured me. Did denying that you were in love mean that you really were? That didn't make sense, though. I severely hated some people. Saying I didn't exactly love them didn't mean that I was about to ask one of them to prom or anything.

But, I reasoned with myself, my love for them was never in question. I was never asked if I loved them. It was always so clear. Having to clearly think about whether or not you love someone, and then denying it, what did that mean? What if I was contemplating their flaws instead of their beauty? Weighing the pros and cons before deciding whether or not a certain person was even worth my time, or deserved my love, and whether or not I wanted to give it to them? Did that mean that finally deciding it wasn't worth it meant that it really was?

That was when I realized that I wasn't contemplating Bella's flaws. I really didn't see any. I just thought of her uniqueness and every beautiful feature of her, both inside and out. But I could stand in awe of her without devoting my life to her right? I could kind of compare her to a good-looking philosopher. Her ideas and beliefs impressed me and she wasn't hideous. But I didn't think that Bella was a waste of time. I cherished every moment I had with her, enjoying her company.

And recently, I had been getting bored whenever I wasn't around Bella. The only thing that was ever on my mind was trying to figure out how hers worked. And without Bella to answer my questions, I quickly reached bricks and had to stop hypothesising, taking my passtime away.

I could admit that she had become an obsession of mine, but was I really in love with her? She had just moved to town. I'd spoken more with people I hated than I had with her. It seemed more like being fixated on some sort of new challenge. You're determined to figure out everything about it, and solve it. It doesn't mean that you love solving puzzles. It's just natural to be curious about it. How can I possibly know after slightly over a week that I loved her?

And what about my lightning theory? Sure there has to be one out of the however million people that gets struck, but there would be no way that it would be me. I already had too much, and I didn't deserve it. I had won the one in a million lottery once already when Carlisle and Esme took a chance with me. And "lightning never strikes twice," as was the case with Bella. I didn't have a chance. The lightning theory was a double negative against me.

...

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But in theory, a double negative is a positive...