CHAPTER FOUR: Archetypal
The first week of school quickly established a pattern. Charlie woke her up—because otherwise she showed a likelihood of snoozing her alarm—she got dressed in dark colored baggy clothes, grabbed breakfast, and drove to school.
Charlie had surprised her again with his thoughtfulness, and bought her a used Ford truck, one that Billy Black's son, Jacob, had fixed up. She was ecstatic—a car meant greater freedom, more privacy. She had thanked him profusely, causing him to redden and mumble that it was no trouble. She had a little trouble driving with her broken arm, but the worst of the fracture had healed and she just had to compensate by carefully making the wider turns. Otherwise, she was golden.
If she left early enough, she might have enough time in the morning to fudge her homework into a passable, but mediocre, grade. If not, she simply didn't turn it in.
Eventually she knew Charlie would hear about it and be annoyed, but it was her life, not his. She could do poorly in high school if she wanted.
Her class schedule went like this:
First period was English in "building" 3 with Mr. Mason. The buildings were really arbitrarily selected areas of the one larger building that made Forks High sound much bigger than it truly was. Mr. Mason was the average teacher in a small town, or how she envisioned one would be. He was slightly fat, balding, and seemed to barely be able to stay awake during his own lessons. To his credit, he truly seemed interested in the books they were discussing, as that was the only time he roused himself to look conscious.
Because she had entered school mid-semester, she sat in the back. That was where she would have chosen for herself anyway. Funny, slightly, since her entire school life, she had liked being in the front seat, off-center. Times changed.
They were in the middle of reading The Scarlet Letter, and were supposed to be thinking about themes of the book. She didn't participate in the discussion, and Mr. Mason kindly did not call on her. She kept her head down, furiously scribbling into a notebook that were, contrary to what her teacher may believe, unrelated to class.
The coding problem from last night would not leave her brain. She continued this practice over second period, Economics, in building 6, with Mr. Jefferson.
Really, what did she care about what affected supply and demand?
Third period was Trigonometry with Mr. Varner in building 5. Unfortunately, she couldn't fake relevant note taking when the teacher spent half the class lecturing on a specific technique, and then had them pair up in order to do a set of problems together, which they would discuss as a class after.
Jessica Stanley sat adjacent and turned in her seat with a hopeful smile. Disinterested in forming any connections Bella might be, but she was still a student and a teenage girl. Jessica had been kind to her at lunch, and was in a few of her classes.
Bella's first impression of her was of a happy, go-lucky girl, one she wouldn't normally be friendly with, Jessica was less annoying than some of the other people she'd met. Such a ringing endorsement, but beggars cannot be choosers.
"Want to partner?" Jessica asked.
"Okay," Bella responded, suppressing a sigh, wishing she could work alone in every class.
Jessica scooted her chair closer, and stared at their sheet of math problems. "Um, so sine is the opposite over adjacent?"
Bella stared at her. "Opposite over hypotenuse," she reminded gently. "Think of the mnemonic SOH-CAH-TOA."
"What?" the other girl asked blankly.
"Didn't Mr. Varner tell you the easy way to remember sine, cosine, and tangent?"
"Maybe. I have trouble focusing, and I'm, like, really bad at math," she replied forlornly.
"SOH is sin equals opposite over hypotenuse. So look at the triangle here, and we calculate it that way. See?"
Jessica nodded, and Bella showed her the other two.
They did a few sets of problems from there without trouble, until the more advanced ones. Jessica got frustrated almost immediately, but Bella thought she knew what her problem was.
"You are skipping steps," Bella said unthinkingly voicing her suspicions. "Here, let's write down exactly what we need to calculate, what goes first."
They did. This aided Jessica immensely and she exclaimed, "You are so smart! How did you know to do that?"
Bella blushed, slouching in her seat. "Math has rules and concrete answers. If you follow the rules, you will always get the correct answer. And the more you do it, the more you see the patterns."
Mr. Varner had been walking around and assisting students with the problems. When he reached their desk, he silently looked over their answers and surprised expression came over his features. "Ms. Stanley, these problems were supposed to be completed together. You shouldn't let Ms. Swan do all the work."
While Bella had guided the solving of the problems, Jessica had participated equally. However, the girl's face fell and she looked uncomfortable, not refuting the charge and turning red.
"I didn't do all the work," Bella said sharply in defense, an unwarranted amount of anger bubbling up. "Jessica helped with all of them."
Mr. Varner seemed doubtful, and Bella thought of the trouble with the basic sine equation and inferred that Jessica was likely known as a poor math student. Still!
He wandered off without further comment.
"Thanks, Bella," Jessica said quietly, "but I really am terrible at math, and you did most of the work."
"No," she disagreed, "once I wrote down the steps, you didn't have any trouble, did you?"
Jessica had a lighter shade of brown hair than Bella's, much longer, and straightened almost perfectly flat. She twirled her hair nervously between her fingers, considering. "Yeah, I guess I didn't."
"Exactly," Bella reinforced.
They worked awhile longer, until Mr. Varner eventually went to his desk and immersed himself in whatever was on his computer. Jessica took this as a sign to disregard their assignment for the time being, in favor of another worthy pursuit.
"So," Jessica's tone grew in confidence with only that one word, and Bella felt a sense of foreboding at the oncoming dialogue. "How are you liking Forks? Any boys you are interested in? I can tell you alllll about them. Well, you heard about the Cullen's already, and who cares about their royal snotty highnesses. But Mike, Tyler, Jim, Erik, Ben, Casey—anyone really!"
"Um no, no one," she replied, eyes widening. She definitely did not want to answer either question. "But thanks?" she couldn't help but phrase it as a question.
"Well if you change your mind, I'm the Mr. Miyagi of dating around here. And I know the history of pretty much everyone, good and bad," she boasted with a cheerful smile.
Bella choked back an unexpected burst of laughter at the imagery. Instead of looking affronted, Jessica grinned back at her.
"Thanks," Bella started when she could control her mirth, "but I don't want to date anyone."
"Aww, okay. I was just thinking that maybe you would partner with me for this class, and in exchange I could help you with what I'm good at."
"Oh," Bella said, touched. "How about we do each other the favor of being partners. And you are really good at a lot of things," she had to comment, not wanting any girl to be reduced to being defined by who she dated.
"I suppose," Jessica said pursing her lips. "But I really think you are getting the short end of the stick here, Bella. I'm awful at math, I don't want to slow you down."
"You won't," she said firmly, irritation at the other girl's low self-esteem filling her with the resolve to help. "You are smart, and we will figure the math out together."
"I warned you," but Jessica seemed pleased.
Mr. Varner recaptured the class's attention for the remainder of the hour and went over the solutions—all of which they got correct. Jessica silently cheered and high-fived Bella after class.
Well, at the very least she had one tolerable class partner.
They had Spanish together as well, and then Jessica lead her over to a large lunch table, where Bella was subjected to almost an hour of conversation she did not want to be a part of. Mike and Eric, initially, competed for her attention. But after a few rude comments, and her obvious indifference to them, they mostly ignored her. Just the way she wanted it. And, to her surprise, Jessica picked up on her dislike of male attention and intervened if needed.
Bella appreciated the gesture.
After lunch was Biology.
That class passed the entire week without the presence of her hated bio partner from the first day. She wasn't conceited enough to believe that it was her fault he decided not to show up to class for the entire week, but the thought crossed her mind. She firmly shoved it away, and thought no more of him. The science lessons were easy, Mr. Banner not demanding, and she was able to continue her extracurricular work undetected.
Gym…yeah. It happened. Luckily, her arm got her excused from most of the activities.
Avoided anyone waiting around her locker to chat after school.
Wave to Jessica.
Go home.
Have Charlie heat up a frozen dinner, or buy takeout from the diner in town. He had no way of knowing that Bella used to do all the majority of cooking and cleaning at Renée's, and absolutely refused to fall back into that. She faked ineptness at cooking, even though the impulse to micromanage the, quite frankly, embarrassing food situation almost overcame several times throughout the week.
She conceded inwardly at the end of the week when she couldn't stomach another frozen pizza or diner burgers, and made a grocery list so they wouldn't subsist off poor dietary choices.
Her nights were filled with her coding project, and desperately counting down the days until her stupid cast came off and she could do the other activities she was itching for.
Go to sleep, repeat.
