AN: I feel like I'm spoiling you, giving you two updates in less than 24 hrs. Oh well… you deserve it for having to wait for so long. I wrote like a Mad Woman (Hatter) to get this all out and done with for you. Hope you appreciate it!
I slept. My dreams were tangled up in each other, each just as confusing and fleeting as the last. Some made no sense at all; I was grocery shopping in Toronto and was frustrated at the quality of Canadian dead man's blood. Then I was sitting in a giant umbrella, floating down a river, accompanied by a smoking caterpillar; we passed an empty tequila bottle and I asked where we were, he laughed and blew smoke rings. Some were snippets of my life mixed together at odd places so that everyone I'd ever loved who'd left ended up talking all at the same time, each trying to tell me something important, each drowned out by the other. They all shouted to be heard, what they had to say I needed to hear, but the voices were too much until finally I sank to my knees, my hands over my ears, screaming at them all to shut up, just shut up! Surprisingly they did.
A figure stepped forward, until he was out of the shadows and standing right in front of me. Gently he took my elbow and hauled me to my feet, peeling my hands away from my ears so that I would listen.
"Finally," he chuckled. "I was wondering when you'd lose your cool. It's good to see you getting back in control Bells." I wanted to grab him and never let him go, but I couldn't. I was rooted to the spot, unable to reach out and touch him. He noticed my distress. "Yeah, that's part of the downside to the dream world. No feeling. You can try to touch all you want, but you won't actually feel any of it." He smiled apologetically, shrugging slightly, such a Dean thing to do. I nodded wordlessly. Me talking right now might break the dream, shatter it in pieces, and then where would I be? "So I guess I died then huh? And you ran away." I glared at him then, because he should know by now that I don't run 'but you did run this time. You ran so far away you might never come back.' A tiny mean little voice in the back of my skull hissed. But Dean just chuckled, "Okay, alright, so you didn't run. That's cool. Just so long as you don't forget who you are. You're Isabella freakin' Swan. You're a hunter. For people like Sammy that's something to escape. For me it's just the way things are. For you? Being a hunter just fuels everything else. You can do so much more with yourself. You can do shit I never even dreamed of. And all because hunting is a part of you. You get me Bells? Cause right now I'm not making a whole lot of sense, I know." He waited for my nod and then continued. "What I'm saying Bells, is you gotta live. No matter what. Live and don't ever stop. Break rules! Cause a revolution! Fight the evil sons of bitches whoever they are! Just live." His hand reached out to me, and I wanted nothing more than to take it. His calloused palm cupped my cheek, his fingers brushed hair away from my eyes, but I couldn't feel any of it.
"Dean-" I started to say something but as soon as his name left my lips the entire dream began to crack and flake away, like some kind of ancient painting that hadn't been taken good care of.
And then it was all gone and I was sitting bolt upright in a bed that I hadn't slept in in ages, in a house that I hadn't set foot in in years, in a town that I hadn't lived in with any sort of permanence in sixteen years. Crazy Charlie was right; my old bedroom had changed very little since I had last been here. The house had changed even less. The town? That was a mystery that I didn't care to explore now, if ever.
Blearily I turned to the old Barbie alarm clock that graced my bedside table. If the numbers were any indication it was three o'clock. AM or PM I couldn't tell. I guessed AM from the darkness of the sky and the crispness of the air. As my breathing slowed I noticed that it was freezing cold in the room, probably in the whole house. I hiked up an old quilt around my shoulders before bullying myself to the edge of the bed. The soles of my feet protested as soon as they hit the cold wood floors, but I persevered, keeping all of my muscles scrunched up and my back hunched over, as if that could ward off the cold. I hobbled to the door and from there to the stairs, the quilt dragging behind me like a fool's cape, my steps hobbled due to the frigid air.
I could see that the kitchen light was on as I stumbled down the stairs, though what my father was doing up at three in the morning I had no idea. The fluorescents in the kitchen glared into my eyes, causing me to wince and blink rapidly, but I could see enough to know that my dad was sitting at the dinner table with a mug of what was either coffee or whiskey, surrounded by papers.
"Hey dad," I croaked, my voice sounded terrible after hours of disuse, "Whatcha' up to?" I searched through obnoxiously yellow cabinets until I found the mugs and poured myself a cup of coffee so strong it bordered on being tar. I settled myself on a counter next to the stove, not quite comfortable sitting across the table from Charlie yet.
He looked up, blinking owlishly, before moving some papers around. "Nice to see you awake Bells." He took a long swig out of his mug before looking back up at me. "Damn sure thought you were gonna pull a Rip Van Winkle on me there. Didn't want to have to call you in absent on your first day." He took another long swig from the mug before turning back to his papers, as if what he had said made perfect sense.
"What?" My question came out garbled from the coffee, but I knew that he could understand me.
"You've been asleep for damn near twenty-four hours Bells," Dad chuckled, "I was gettin' worried!"
"Not that Dad, the part where I hallucinated a little bit and thought I heard you say I had a first day of something to attend. Repeat that part. Only without the first day bull shit." I waved my hand in the air, gesturing for him to continue. He just chuckled again.
"I stopped by the high school while you were asleep yesterday and signed all the paperwork. Everything's all set up; you just need to have your old school fax your transcripts and files over. Classes start at 7:30, but you'd better get there early just to make sure everything runs smoothly." He smiled at me, almost as if he expected me to just run with this insanity. I almost did for a minute. Then I remembered that I wasn't actually still dreaming.
"Are you CRAZY?" I exploded, jumping off the counter, "I mean, of course you are, but this is NUTS, even for you! Did you actually think this through though Charlie? May I remind you the last time I was ever actually enrolled in a school was when I was FOURTEEN? I barley have a MONTHS' worth of high school education and you want me to what? WALTZ right into the place and pretend that I've been a STAR FUCKING PUPIL for the last THREE YEARS?" I stood in the middle of the kitchen, panting after my little outburst, not really sure how to continue. "I mean come on Dad; my old school thinks that I'm a murderous raving lunatic. I haven't hung out with anyone my own age in years. I've got tattoos and a bad mouth. Dad, there is no good that can come of this." I looked at him pleadingly, silently begging him to understand.
He returned my gaze steadily, not glaring, but also not backing down on the school thing. "Isabella," He said, and I knew I was about to get some sort of well-reasoned argument that I couldn't back out of, "Forks here is a small town. We don't get visitors very often, especially not supposed-to-be-dead-teenage-daughters-of-police-chiefs. In order for you to blend in and not attract too much notice, you need to high school, just like every other seventeen year old girl. Now, you asked me if you could stay in my house, and I agreed, but living under my roof means following my rules. What I say goes. And I say that by 7:00 you'd better have all your papers in order and your story straight and you'd better be standing in that school office. Clear?" His gaze continued to burn holes through me until I nodded silently and reseated myself on the countertop.
"So," I sighed, "High school."
"High school." He laughed a bit at me. "I hear it's pretty bad. You ready?"
"Yeah, yeah, Yuk it up," I pretended to be sour, but truthfully the idea of going to school sounded intriguing… distracting. "I've seen Mean Girls, I know what to expect!"
Charlie just rolled his eyes and snickered. "Go pull together a transcript. I'll bet if you bring it in by hand they won't want a copy faxed over." He waved me out of the kitchen and went back to his papers, every so often circling something in red and reshuffling them.
+++++ HELTER SKELTER +++++
Back in my room I got to work. High school transcripts weren't among the numerous fake papers that I carried around, but they were also fairly easy to come by. That being said, I had to sift through hours of internet crap before I came up with a decent file example and transcript record. I was an average B student, with a couple low As and a single sorry C, who had seen her fair share of the detention room and had been suspended once for giving a student a black eye. I was, to sum it up, a troubled girl who could become a trouble maker, which was why I had been sent to my Police Chief Father, Charlie.
With all of this troubled history came troublesome paperwork of course, forms that had to be filled out in triplicate, certain documents that had to be signed, scanned, and reprinted to make them look like copies of the originals. There were writing samples, essays that had been particularly good or bad, notes from teachers and an evaluation from the guidance counselor. All of it was busy work of course, but still who wants to compile an entire high school record at four in the morning?
By the time I was done and had everything rubber-banded together in a giant manila file folder I was ready to go back to bed for another twenty-four hours. Instead I hopped into my first warm shower in about five months and mentally prepared myself for the experience I had only heard about.
Sure I'd seen the movies about high school. There were the cheerleading movies where if you didn't love football and didn't have a big blond head filled with air you were royally screwed. There were the musicals where theater was everything and all the students had mad dancing skills. There was the movie about the super Christian high school that hated sex and of course Mean Girls, where everyone of the female persuasion was missing a couple thousand brain cells and had a huge stick up their ass sideways.
Perhaps scariest to me though were the stories I sometimes caught on the nightly news about high school drama gone horribly wrong. Some kid had walked into school one day with a rifle and shot everyone he could get his hands on. One girl knifed another because she thought her boyfriend was cheating on her. Then there was the kid who was bullied for being gay and got so depressed that he offed himself in the bathroom. I quit watching the news after I heard about him.
Did I really want to spend a majority of my waking hours at a place where all that shit went down? Apparently I would whether I wanted to or not.
The water around me started to run cold and I shivered violently, hurrying to finish washing before jumping out of the shower and toweling dry. From my duffle bag I pulled out my only other pair of jeans besides the ones I had worn last night, a black cami, and a worn out green checked flannel button down. I had to rummage around for a minute or two before I found an almost fresh set of underwear, but another few seconds told me that the search for socks would be fruitless and I was running late. I huffed in frustration before throwing on my clothes and yesterday's socks, lacing up my boots. I really needed to do some laundry. Looking in the mirror I decided what would really finish off the grungy invisible-yet-still-slightly-there high schooler look I was going for was some eyeliner and a bit of mascara, just enough to outline my eyes, not enough to remind me of the chicks that hung out in biker bars trying to pick up love and inadvertently picking up STDs.
"BELLA," Charlie's voice cut through the air, reminding me to get my ass in gear.
"Coming!" I called back, leaving the bathroom an absolute disaster zone in my rush to grab everything I needed for school. Tattered, half used up note books, a few spare folders and several Bic pens were thrown haphazardly into my old backpack, and I chucked out everything else that might be considered dangerous: knives, guns, and ammo; or disgusting: a jar of dead man's blood and a couple hex bags. I scooped up my newly made school records on my way out the door, pausing just long enough to kiss Charlie on the forehead and promise to get him back for making me do this. Then I was off.
AN: So this one's a bit shorter than the last… but I did write it in a day, so Don't Complain. Or Better Yet, REVIEW! and tell me how you Really Feel. Questions? Comments? Concerns? I can't promise I'll reply but I can promise I'll read! Update coming soon so long as I stay in my Mad Writing Mood! LOVE ~Rosie!