99999999999999999999999999999999999999999999

Death to the Non-Believer

Chapter 7

The new day brought with it an entirely new outlook on my situation. Now that I had resigned myself to simply waiting it out, I didn't need to stress over what to do, or whether the arm that poured my coffee was really mine or if it was Bella's, or anywhere inbetween. I took an attitude of excited nonchalance to the entire thing. It would be fun: trying to convince everyone I was someone else, getting to actually be someone else (after all, wasn't that every teenage girl's dream?). If fate was going to cast me as Bella, I would embrace the role like a star actress. I was not going to lose any sleep over this.

Charlie was already gone when I woke up, thankfully putting off the moment when my Bella-act would be truly tested for a little longer.

School was much as it had been the day before. I got to attend English for the first time (hadn't dropped in until Trig the day before), and I found my seat was next to ever-pleasant Mike. English had always been one of my favorite subjects, and while Mr. Mason put bulleted symbolisms for the first chapter of Jane Eyre on the board, my mind wandered to the scene where the crazed Mrs. Rochester visits Jane's chamber in the middle of the night. I thought of Edward Cullen roaming loose somewhere in the woods of Washington and shuddered. I could relate. Government with Jefferson passed in much the same fashion – another of my favorite subjects, without surprises. I spent the period looking at the faces around me, recognizing some from the day before, trying to memorize the others. Mike intercepted Jessica and me in the cafeteria again, and I knew all of Jessica's friends who joined us but one, a lanky, oily boy with the worst skin I'd seen in years. I felt immediately sorry for him: high school was hard enough without being the gross one. His high-pitched, nasally voice didn't help either. To make things worse, he wasn't a bastard who deserved his pariahisms either, he seemed kind: he spent the entire lunch hour helping Angela with a Trig problem.

I wondered without looking at them whether the Cullens – the four that had come to school – were looking at me. I was unsurprised but still relieved when Edward Cullen was absent from biology that day. I stared at his empty chair while I tuned out the lecture. Had he gone to the ends of the Earth? Or just far enough that he couldn't smell me? How far was far enough? I'd read somewhere that sharks could smell a drop of blood from a mile away. Surely Edward was a greater hunter than a fish? He was a thinking, rational being after all. Then what must Edward be thinking of this irresistibly delicious girl who had suddenly collided with his peaceful world? No doubt he cursed my very existence, as I had cursed his the day before. I snorted under my breath. What an ironic similarity. We each wanted the other gone, and we both needed to get out of Forks. I chalked it up to my historically ghastly luck that Edward had partly succeeded and I had not.

I found a drug-style envelope full of cash in Barnaby/Norman/Truman (I needed to find a baby name book for my truck) on the passenger seat after school, which was apparently meant for food. It didn't take long driving on Forks' only main road to find Forks' only grocery store. It was almost like a farmers' market, full of old-fashioned candy jars and grain barrels and happy little old people buying canned fruit. When I got home I quickly set about peeling and chopping: I loved to cook. I had just put a lasagna into the oven when the screen door fluttered shut with a loud ka-chack behind me. I spun around in my oven mitts and apron and faced Bella's father. The moment of truth had arrived.

"Hey, Bella."

"Hey… Dad." The word felt strange in my mouth. "Uh, welcome home!"

"Thanks." He hung his gun belt on a dilapidated hat-rack looking contraption by the door as I tossed my mitts onto the counter and started scrubbing a large pot. I wondered what need he could possibly have of a gun in a Podunk little town like Forks.

"What's for dinner?" he asked.

"Lasagna and garlic bread," I answered. Just saying it made my mouth water. "It won't be ready for a while yet, though." I went back to the dishes, and he hesitated a moment before continuing into the living room and flipping on the vague noises of some other sporting event.

Maybe this wouldn't be as hard as I'd thought.

When the egg timer went off an hour later, I abandoned the book I'd been reading on a chair and called Charlie into the kitchen. He lumbered in as I pulled out the dish and set it on the table.

"Smells good, Bell." It did.

"Thanks."

It wasn't until the middle of his second helping that Charlie started going into typical parental-investigation-mode.

"So," he spoke between bites, "how did you like school? Have you made any friends?"

"Well, I have a few classes with a girl named Jessica," I supplied. "I sit with her friends at lunch. And there's this boy, Mike, who's very friendly. Everybody seems pretty nice." With one outstanding exception, I thought bitterly.

"That must be Mike Newton. Nice kid – nice family. His dad owns a sporting goods store just outside of town. He makes a good living off all he backpackers who come through here." I must have missed the backpacker rush, since I seemed to only run into the same handful of people every day, no matter where I went. I should have known that Charlie would be familiar with every human being in the county back to their grandfathers. Except for maybe…

"Do you know the Cullen family?" I asked. I wondered what he did know about them.

"Dr. Cullen's family? Sure. Dr. Cullen's a great man." I remembered him from the book. He was one of the members of the Cullen brood that I would have genuinely liked to meet. Charlie clearly thought highly of him.

"They… the kids are…" I stumbled for the right words, "a little different. They don't seem to fit in very well at school…"

"People in this town," he sputtered. "Dr. Cullen is a brilliant surgeon who could probably work in any hospital in the world, make ten times the salary he gets here." Which was apparently totally unsuspicious to Charlie. Who wouldn't want to live in the middle of nowhere? With the backpackers! "We're lucky to have him – lucky that his wife wanted to live in a small town." Ahh. "He's an asset to the community, and all of those kids are well-behaved and polite." Mental note: apparently wanting to rip someone's throat out and eat their organs went down under 'well-behaved and polite' in Charlie's book. He was getting louder as he continued. "I had my doubts, when they first moved in, with all those adopted teenagers. I thought we might have problems with them. But they're all very mature." If only he knew. "I haven't had one speck of trouble from any of them. That's more than I can say for the children of some folks who have lived in this town for generations. And they stick together the way a family should — camping trips ever other weekend…" Second mental note: go camping with Charlie. "Just because they're newcomers, people have to talk."

It was a long speech for such a stoic man. It made me wonder what the locals were saying — probably nothing nearly as bad as the truth. I put my hand over Charlie's, which was clenched around his fork.

"They seemed nice to me," I lied soothingly. "I just noticed they kept to themselves." Especially in biology. "They're all very attractive," I added, trying to give at least one honest compliment.

"You should see the doctor," Charlie laughed, his anger dissipated. "It's a good thing he's happily married. A lot of nurses at the hospital have a hard time concentrating on their work with him around." I giggled at the prospect of Charlie standing in a waiting room, watching nurses trail the lovely doctor. It was comfortable, dinner with Charlie. I wasn't used to it — eating a meal together around a table. It was… nice.

We didn't speak for the rest of the night, but Charlie offered to clean up afterwards, which gained him even more brownie points in the Bella-has-awesome-parents book. Of course, I had pretty low standards when it came to parents. I rushed up the stairs to play busy-doing-homework (I was infamous for never doing my homework, I certainly wasn't going to do it now that I actually KNEW all the subjects being taught).

99999999999999999999999999999999999999999999

The rest of the week passed in much the same pattern. I adjusted to the rhythm of school, and by Friday I could recognize everyone in my classes. I began to watch with increasing anxiety for the Cullens to enter the lunch room each day, anticipating the arrival of the fifth 'sibling', but he did not reappear. For all I knew, he had wised-up and dropped out of school entirely. What kind of teenager liked going to school anyway? Besides me. But as Edward's absence dragged on, I found my lunch hour spent less and less worried about him, and more focused on the La Push beach trip that Mike was planning for our lunch group the following week, and which he brought up anew each day. I had been invited, and accepted, though Bella and I shared the opinion that good beach weather was not to be found in Forks.

But no matter how absorbed I became at lunch, when I sat alone in biology each day, I became re-consumed by my own curiosty. I found myself staring at his empty chair, found my thoughts wandering over and over again to Edward Cullen. When I ran out of questions to mull over, I began inventing scenarios in my head: on Tuesday he was wrestling a bear in Oregon, Friday he was chopping wood for an elderly couple up north in exchange for a place to sleep, on Thursday he had massacred an entire town of men, women, and children in his fallen bloodlust. At the end of the day, though, he was always homesick for his family and full of hate for me. He was much like the cursed prince from Beauty and the Beast in my imaginings: standing aloof from the world that would no longer accept him; trying to prove he wasn't just the monster he saw in the mirror. Did Edward long for his humanity again, too? He certainly wasn't as lonely as the Beast; Edward had his family. …Right?

It was a romanticized plot, to be sure. Hell, it was Disney. For all my ponderings, I didn't delude myself: I was pretty certain that the next time I saw Edward Cullen, it would be when he ripped my throat out of my neck with his teeth. I could see it playing in my head, the black, soulless eyes locked on me…

Saturday was a welcome escape from the thought-trap of the biology classroom. Charlie, probably used to avoiding the empty house, worked most of the weekend. I busied my hands to give my over-active imagination a break, cleaning floors, scraping out cobwebs, generally waging war on the dirt and decay of the house. By Sunday it looked positively quaint, compared to the drab shambles it had been when I'd arrived. I packed a week's worth of lunches into the freezer for Charlie, and drove (which I was getting fairly good at) to the tiny Forks library. The selection was depressing, but a nice woman at the front desk recommended that I try Seattle or Olympia, which weren't too far. It was hard to believe that any kind of real civilization could exist within a hundred miles of Forks. When I got home and google mapped it, I found that I was almost right. I would have to plan a day to drive out. I google mapped all of the gas stations along the way, too, and printed it out: I didn't know what kind of gas mileage Darwin/Stanley/What-am-I-going-to-name-my-truck got, but I shuddered to even think about it.

Much to my delight, the rain continued to fall nonstop throughout the entire weekend, and greeted me Monday morning. It was hard for me to be anything but content amidst the gentle thrum of so much precipitation. I noticed it was colder than usual as I made my way from the parking lot to English, or rather I noticed that a number of my classmates had added yet another insulating layer to their many jackets. I, on the other hand, had been gradually thinning my wardrobe. It wasn't as windy in Forks as I had thought it would be, and though the temperature sat around forty degrees most of the day, it didn't drop off much before dark. Fifty was shorts weather for me. I was a California girl though and through: I wore flip-flops when it was colder than this. Unfortunately, Bella didn't seem to have a single pair, and only one pair of shorts, so I had to make due most days with jeans, a short-sleeved shirt, and a jacket for walking from my truck to class. Most of the other Forkians, bundled up like Eskimos under mittens and hats and layer after layer of snow gear, looked at me in horror as I ran hither and thither with bare arms. It made me giggle.

Mike had gotten used to my dressing habits pretty quickly, and didn't look surprised when I stripped down to a single layer next to him in English. The pop quiz didn't have any surprises on it either, though Mike's sullen face told me that he'd neglected his reading again. I clapped my hand on his shoulder, and suddenly realized how comfortable I'd become as Bella — more than I could ever have imagined.

"Cheer up, Mike. It only counts for ten points," I said reassuringly.

"Yeah, but ten and ten and ten and ten and ten add up to… well, not to an A." We chuckled as Mike opened the door in front of me. "Hey, it's snowing."

I stopped dead in my tracks.

"What did you say?"

"It's, uh, snowing?"

My eyes lit up, and I rushed past a startled Mike. Beyond him, the world was a sea of white, as if all of Forks had been dusted with powdered sugar like a giant lemon bar. I stopped in the middle of a huge open plain of white and turned in circles, taking in the glistening sight from every direction. My cheeks began to sting. I looked up and saw the sky full of swirling tufts of snow. They didn't fall straight down, as I'd imagined, but fluttered side to side, uncertain, finally making their way to the ground where they sparkled, reflecting rainbows of the mottled sunlight that made it through the clouds.

"Oh, it's…" I turned to look at Mike, still standing in the doorway. "It's just beautiful!" I whispered, beaming through a cloud of my own breath. "So beautiful…" I stretched out my hand and caught a tiny flurry on the tip of my finger. It looked like a tiny dandelion puff.

"Haven't you ever seen snow before?" asked Mike, coming up behind me.

"No," I breathed, still entranced, "never falling." The closest thing to snow I knew was brown, mushy slush frozen together in a lump. I had been to all sorts of places where it snowed, in the snowy season, but I had a knack for getting there just when the snow had ended and the freak heat waves began. It was a talent.

Mike continued to watch me, fascinated at my wonder. The wet thwack of ice into the back of his head finally broke the spell.

"Nice shot, man!" I called to Eric over Mike's shoulder. His back was turned as if oblivious — walking away from us nonchalantly, but in the opposite direction of his next class.

"Hey, where's your loyalty?" called Mike with mock indignation. The snow on top of his head began to melt down around his ears, and he shivered before shaking his head out like a dog as we both laughed. Maybe he really had been a puppy in a former life. Mike turned to find Eric still in range and stooped to grab a handful of the icy ammunition as the bell rang for the next period.

"I'll see you at lunch, okay?" I said, still laughing as I took a step towards government. He waved me on with a grin as he silently hurried after Eric's retreating figure. I skipped to class, dipping my toes in the piles of fluff and tossing them up in the air in front of me, giggling and shouting in delight with each step like a five-year-old. I could feel eyes on me, and saw the few people I passed stare with worried expressions. They could stare all they wanted, I was in Forks, and it was snowing! I smiled at them began singing out loud to myself with total abandon, throwing my hands up in the air and snow-dancing my way through Forks.

99999999999999999999999999999999999999999999

A/N: I need names for Bella's truck! Stat! Leave a comment with a name, even if you think it's stupid. I'm glad this is the last of the Edward-less chapters. It's just not the same without him. Also, the more I write Mike, the more I like him. He was kind of pathetic/annoying to me when I read Twilight. lol