Sorry for the late update! I just got back from visiting Mexico. Not the parts where people are being decapitated and having their body parts chopped off. FYI, Mazatlan, Mexico. Which is safe and totally beautiful. The next chapter should be up sooner, as I'm not going to be out of the county. Thank you everyone who reads and reviews. I love you. But anyways, A/N over. On with the chapter.

..

C H A P T E R T H R E E — B U R N I N G

The screams are what haunt me the most when I sleep.

The smell of flesh, I'm used to. The smell of flesh is familiar. Flesh burning reminds me of my seventh birthday when I wanted to light the candles on my birthday cake and wound up lighting my dress instead. Flesh burning reminds me of the smell of James, dead, Alice holding his head between her small delicate fingers.

Don't even get me started on the familiarity of the sound of bones cracking. The small hospital in Forks, WA had a room reserved for little Bella Swan.

But that was before, before my mom decided that spontaneity could not be found in a place like Forks. Before she woke me up in the middle of the night, before she tossed me the Hello Kitty duffle from Mr. and Mrs. Webber and told me to pack my things, my life into a small suitcase. Before I was sleepily grasping my BFF necklace between my chubby fingers, wishing I could say goodbye to Angela, as my mother drove us to the airport.

..

Angela used to live in Newport. She'd later tell me she knew there was something wrong with Mr. Nikoli Wolf. She'd later tell me he was skinny and twisted and evil. Like this petrified tree that she had in her backyard as a kid.

And I'd retort, "aren't we all skinny and twisted and evil." Because there was a time when we were innocent, when I'd pricked my finger on a tack in the sandbox that rested in the backyard of Mr. and Mrs. Webber's new backyard, in Forks, WA, and Angela had licked the blood away, kissed my wound and told me it would all be OK. But my innocence was washed away in the fire and the events following.

Because the truth is that youth isn't wasted on the young, it's wasted, eternally, on the dead.

..

I sit in front of my vanity mirror.

The phone is pressed between my silky smooth hair and my hard sinewy shoulder.

Angela is on the line. She's honestly the only one who puts up with my shit anymore.

"I feel so scrumptious," I tell her.

"Goody for you," she snarks back.

"You know when a boy kisses you for the first time and it feels like your entire body is on vibrate?" I wonder aloud.

I play with the Zippo that I found in Jacob's garage when he was still talking to me and hadn't begun pretending that I didn't exist.

"Yeah," she deadpans.

"It's like that."

"Well that's nice," she says. "Me, I'm still a little bit depressed about, you know, the giant, smoldering funeral pyre in the middle of town."

"Move-on-dot-org, Needy. Life is too short to be moping around about some white-trash pig roast."

The words are coming out but my mind is far off. My mind is remembering the searing, burning feeling I felt on my birthday when I was turning seven. Remembering the smell.

"That's sweet Bella," her tone says anything but.

"You know I tell it like it is," I tell her. "And besides, you know what? You should be happy for me because I am having the best day ever since Jesus invented the calendar."

I watch myself in the vanity.

"Jesus didn't invent the calendar," she says.

"Whatever," I roll my eyes at the mirror.

I move to raise the lighter to my tongue, a beeping sound distracting me. I watch as the lighter falls, my lightening fast reflexes recover the lighter before it reaches the ground.

"Fuck," I exclaim surprised.

Angela's voice tells me how someone's on the other line.

My voice tells Angela to blow it off.

Angela's voice doesn't say anything, but the beeping noise that signifies the changeover in lines tells soo much more than Angela ever could.

Angela has blown me off instead.

I wonder if this is what we've been reduced to.

Listening to "Through the Trees," come out of the cellular, I grind my teeth together.

The beeping signifies that Angela has decided to grace my lowly self with her presence.

"I gotta go," she says.

I tell her, "I am a god."

Distracted, ignoring me, she tells me, "I gotta meet Ben at McCollum park."

And the phone, that ringtone, her thinking Ben is more important than me. I grind my teeth. And playing nonchalant tell her, "You know Ben is looking really cute to me lately. So tell me, is he, uh, like, packing some serious pubic inches? What's the story down there?" The words are out my mouth before I can stop them. And part of me is glad that I am reasserting my power over Angela. The other part realizes with a stab to my heart, that Sandbox love does in fact end. Painfully.

"I gotta go," she repeats, but doesn't hang up. The sound of sirens wailing outside catches her attention. "Why are the cops at your house?"

I mess with the lighting mechanism. Alternately flicking it open and flicking it closed.

"You mean besides the obvious?" I question. My father is the Chief of Police after all. She doesn't dignify that with a response and I continue on. "They're not. They're at Mike Newton's place."

"Why? He try to sell fake peyote to the eighth graders again?"

"No Needy. He was murdered."

"What?"

"Yeah. Someone ripped Mike limb from limb in the woods behind the school. They ate parts of him. No one's even supposed to know yet, but my dad just went over there, and well having the chief of Police as your dad has its perks. His mom is, supposedly, like, catatonic. She's just staring out the front window like a zombie mannequin robot statue." Like me when Edward left, I think. But I don't tell her this.

Instead I raise the lighter higher up, closer to my mouth. To my face.

"This can't be a coincidence."

"What are you going on about Needy?"

"A fiery death trap last night and now a cannibal psycho takes down the biggest guy in school? Come on. It's freaktarded. Well, the bad luck's gotta be over, right? I mean, it can't get any worse, right? It can't. I mean, you agree, right?"

"I gotta go," she presses on, not waiting for an answer. I can tell that she is shaken.

I light the contraption, raising it further, sticking my tongue out as far as it can go. Pressing the flame to my tongue, expecting everything, and yet feeling nothing.

The beep signaling a changeover from her position as my BFFL to Ben's rings in my ear.

I watch as my tongue turns black, crackling. As the natural texture and pink color return to the previously burnt appendage.

"I am a god." I say again. But this time Angela isn't on the line and I am the only one listening.

..

The days marched on as usual but most of us were to numb to enjoy ourselves.

Most of us, anyways.

To the rest of the world, we were famous. We were saints.

The closest thing to a bar in our town had burned to the ground and our town's star linebacker was somebody's Snack Pack.

The whole country got a big tragedy boner for Forks, WA.

And the press? God, they couldn't get enough of our little world of shit.

Still we were healing. Most of us were anyways.

Like Needy, most people figured things could only get better.

They had faith.

They were fucking idiots.