Chapter Five

I got home with dry eyes and a lighter heart. Alice had been right, of course. Everyone needs to cry sometime. And now I felt immensely better.

Charlie wasn't even home yet, so I hurried up to my room, grabbing the laptop that was sitting at the foot of my bed and powering it on, intent to remove all of my personal information from it. When internet history had been erased, cookies deleted, and documents transferred to a jump drive I kept in my backpack, I grabbed the charger and headed back out the door, reaching the Forks Post Office just before it closed. Goodbye, laptop. I'll miss you.

Over a dinner of pot roast and potatoes, I asked Charlie if there was a computer in the house that I could use for school. He had a netbook that the station provided for him, but that was for work purposes only.

"What about that Dell I saw up in your room, Bells?" Charlie asked through a mouthful of roasted potatoes.

"It... broke. Just this morning. The motherboard fried. I threw it away."

"Well, that's a shame. Look, I'll ask around the station and see if anyone has a used laptop they'd like to-"

"That's alright, Charlie. I'll just go to the library and use theirs."

"You sure?"

"Positive."

And that was the end of that.

Last night I dreamed about the Forks High cafeteria. I sat at a big round table in one of the more dimly lit corners, with Edward at my right and Alice at my left. There were three more people at the table, people I didn't recognize, but they shared Edward and Alice's pale complexions and they seemed friendly enough.

The dream shifted, and now I was standing in the school parking lot fumbling with my keys. A loud screeching sound filled the air, and I looked up just in time to see a large SUV spinning out of control, headed right towards...

I woke up sweating and couldn't go back to sleep. I paced the room, thinking, planning, trying to find a way to stay home from school that day, or maybe go home early. I had seen people all over the parking lot... it looked like it happened at the end of the day. I didn't want to get hit by a car. I didn't want these dreams...

Like the night before, I ended up sitting cross legged on my desk, cradling my locket in my hands and watching the wind blow through my tree. No matter how much my eyelids drooped, I did not permit myself to go back to sleep. I didn't want to see anymore. Not tonight.

When the sun began to rise, I started getting ready. I took an extra-long shower, deep conditioning my hair just to kill time. I brushed my teeth and rubbed lotion into my skin. Heading back up to my room, I noticed the sun hadn't gotten much higher, and I went right back into the bathroom and blow dried my hair out of desperation.

Visions of that car skidding towards me filled every part of my awareness. As an exercise, I tried concentrating on the scene that had played out before the parking lot. I tried to notice what was on the table in the cafeteria, what Alice was saying next to me... but every time I would get close enough I'd hear the tires squealing again. I eventually gave up.

Back in my room, I dressed carefully, selecting clothes that I had not seen myself wearing. I opened my window and stuck my hand outside, shivering when I realized that it was quite a bit colder than the day before. I would have to wear a jacket. My only jacket. I wanted to cry when I realized that today's weather basically guaranteed the necessity of the outfit I wanted to avoid. Biting back a sob, I pulled on my heaviest pair of jeans and the long-sleeve purple thermal that was my only warm shirt. I yanked on my only pair of sneakers, brown canvas ones that had the tendency to absorb any rainwater in a five mile radius. I really needed to go shopping. If I was still alive...

I looked in the mirror attached the the back of my door for what felt like a year. I took stock of the situation. I had dreamed about getting hit by a car. Not all of my dreams were prophetic ones... sometimes I dreamed in the abstract. But this hadn't looked abstract. Still, it might not happen. And I would try to avoid it anyway. I knew there was no way I'd be permitted to miss my second day of school, but maybe I could make myself sick while I was there. Or maybe I could get a pass to miss last period gym. Or maybe I could avoid the parking lot altogether... I could hide in the school library until everyone was gone...

A branch snapped outside my window, and I was brought back into myself. I was familiar with the nature of destiny at this point. Anything that wanted to happen would. All I could do was sit back and allow it. I would take every precaution to avoid the parking lot today, but fate had a way of making itself known. There was ultimately nothing I could do.

I sighed, brushing my hair out of my face, catching the movement in the mirror. And I looked at myself, really looked, for the first time in... ever. I looked at myself the way I'd looked at Edward yesterday, and I realized that Edward was the first person whose appearance I actually noticed. I'd always taken in the details of people, hair color, prominent features, but never combined them into an entire person. But Edward... Edward I saw as the sum of his parts. And I wondered how he saw me.

I had long brown hair. I knew that. But I really looked now, scrutinizing. It was a deep brown, mahogany, like my desk. It hung past the small of my back, and I wondered when it had gotten so long. It had a wave to it, which I knew would get more defined once I stepped out into the damp Washington air. And it was shiny. Very shiny, actually. Probably a by-product of my thorough conditioning job earlier.

I had brown eyes like my mother. I remembered that hers had tiny flecks of green in them, and I moved closer to the mirror, noticing that mine had them, too. I had long, thick eyelashes. When I concentrated, I could feel them dusting my cheeks as I blinked. A memory surfaced, unbidden, of my mother jokingly calling me "Bambi" before we moved. I smiled against my will and then thought about something else.

My cheekbones weren't as nice as Edward's, and my complexion wasn't as even, but my cheeks had a natural blush to them and my face was a nice shape. My lips weren't as beautiful as his, but they were full and soft, thanks to almost fanatical Chapstick application, and when I tried smiling for myself, I decided I liked the way it looked.

I took a step backwards. My driver's license said I was 5'7", and I took it at its word. I started with my legs, noting for the first time that they looked a bit silly encased in the baggy denim of my too-big jeans. My purple shirt was just as big, sitting shapelessly against my torso. After I'd met Mark, I had taken to dressing nicer, buying things that I felt fit me better. If this was better, I wondered what I had looked like before.

Edward's details combined to make him beautiful. His eyes, his mouth, his impossible hair, even the pale, graceful fingers I'd noticed twitching against the lab table, they all combined to equal Edward. I took stock of my own details, my hair and my face and my body, and decided that I could probably be pretty if I tried. I needed new clothes anyway, things that would withstand the dampness and chill of Forks winters, so why not buy clothes that looked better on me? Maybe Alice would help. We're friends, after all.

Every noise at school made me jump. Every backpack dropped carelessly to the ground, every desk scraping across the linoleum, had me huddling in fear, waiting for the truck to hit me. By the time I made it to lunch, I was a bundle of raw nerves, but Alice, as was her way, saved me.

She met me at the door to the lunch room, tinkling on about her day and the weather, telling me that I looked nice in purple and I should wear it more often. Which reminded me...

"Alice, do you think you could go shopping with me this weekend?"

I never knew a girl could jump and clap that much.

"YES! Oh my god, Bella, I thought you'd never ask! We'll go to Port Angeles and we'll get you all sorts of things! It'll be amazing! Maybe we could even go to Seattle! I'll have to look... I'm so, so, so excited, Bella! You're going to look beautiful!"

So that went well.

While I carefully selected the least wilted salad and the freshest looking slice of pizza, Alice arbitrarily dumped things onto her tray, talking the entire time and not once looking at what she was doing. Still, I wasn't in any position to judge someone else's taste in cafeteria fare, so I said nothing as we paid for our food and I was dragged bodily to a table in the back of the room that I hadn't noticed yesterday, the table I had dreamed about last night.

"Isabella Swan, I'd like you to meet my family," Alice crowed, gesturing around the table. Edward wasn't there yet, but the others were, the one's I'd technically met last night.

"This is Emmett," she began, pointing to a giant of a man with wide shoulders and short, curly hair. "Rosalie," she continued, pointing to one of the most beautiful women I'd ever seen. She had ice-blonde hair just a touch shorter than mine, and some rather pronounced and intimidating cleavage peeking up from beneath her v-neck. "And this is my Jasper," Alice finished with pride, wrapping her arms around the wiry boy next to her. He had chin-length, wavy blonde hair similar in color to Rosalie's, and, though he smiled at Alice's embrace, he seemed uncomfortable overall.

"It's nice to meet you guys," I offered, trying to smile as I moved into my seat. "How are you guys related?"

"We're adopted," answered a smooth voice next to me, causing every nerve in my body to vibrate in anticipation. "It's wonderful to see you again, Isabella."

Edward dropped gracefully into his chair and smiled at me, a wide, genuine, lopsided smile that made my heart race and my palms sweat. There was something about his proximity that did crazy things with my brain, but with how focused my thoughts had been on the car wreck all day, I welcomed his presence and the reprieve it brought me.

"You too, Edward," I murmured, hyper-aware of how close his arm was to mine on the table. I closed my eyes for a moment and tried to catalogue the things his nearness were eliciting from my body, but I suddenly realized what he'd said when he first sat down. "Adopted? All of you?"

"Jasper and Rosalie are twins," Alice explained, "their mom was Esme's sister."

"And Alice is my twin, and Emmett our older brother" Edward continued. "Our father was Carlisle's cousin."

"Carlisle?"

"Our dad. Esme's husband."

"So... what happened?" I asked, desperately trying to follow along but coming up short.

"Our mother died in a car crash when we were twelve," Jasper said quietly, keeping his eyes on the lunch tray in front of him.

"And our parents died when Ali and I were 8," Edward finished, leaning forward to quirk a smile at Alice.

"Carlisle and Esme took us in," Emmett explained in a deep baritone. "They're our parents. And we're a family."

"Big family," I muttered, shaking my head in awe.

"Don't talk about things you don't understand," Rosalie hissed at me, snatching up her things and stalking away from the table, leaving a stunned silence in her wake.

"I... I didn't mean it like that. Of course I didn't mean it like that. I would never say anything bad about your family or anyone else's. Christ, you should see my family! We're as fucked up as you get! I'm so, so sorry, you guys. I didn't mean..."

Alice placed a cool hand on my shoulder and shook her head, smiling.

"We know you didn't mean it like that, Bella. It's not your fault. We're the one's who should be apologizing here. Rosalie's just..."

"Rosie's just a bitch," Emmett offered, a wide smile on his face. "But she's my bitch," he added, smirking, "and I wouldn't take her any other way."

Well now, this was something new to think about...

"Wait... you mean you two..."

"Rosie's the love of my life," Emmett said, still smiling.

"And Alice, you said you and Jasper..."

"We're also together," Jasper confirmed, still looking uncomfortably at the table.

"But how does that work?"

"Carlisle and Esme understand. There are some... house rules, but they know you can't choose who you love," Alice said, studying my face.

"What about Edward?" I asked after a moment.

"I've always been sort of a loner," Edward said quietly.

I was sad, then, thinking it unfair that Edward should have to live in a house of couples, thinking of how lonely it must be being the odd person out...

"Don't worry, Isabella," Alice whispered, leaning into me. "Edward won't be alone for long."

A/N: I know you guys think Renee was a bitch last chapter... that's because she WAS. Maybe Isabella has more than one power... and maybe Renee's behavior when her daughter's at a distance has something to do with that...

Guess, kids. If you get it right, I'll PM you and let you know. :)