A reminder that this story alternates between past and present. In the past, Bella is a junior. In the present, she's a senior.
Word Prompt: Cycle
[evil] Scenario: Write a piece using your favorite season as the central theme.
Something True
Cycle
This Fall
By morning, Bella's cyclonic insides unfurl into oppressive heat and humidity and a haze that disfigures the simplest views. It may be fall outside her window, but inside Bella is the weighty kind of summer that Forks never experiences. The kind that makes the air heavy and every breath labored.
Bella and Rose take showers, brush their teeth, and get dressed without a word exchanged. Even when Bella hands Rose a dress to borrow, she doesn't say a thing.
Bella shouldn't think anything of it. Silence is such a normal part of her everyday routine. But she knows that everything is off kilter, that the earth beneath her feet is threatening to scorch everyone she's close to.
While Rose is pulling the dress on, Bella is marking lines on her wall. She has some catching up to do, she realizes. She's skipped some days.
Bella is counting her tally marks and doing the math when Rose interrupts.
"I feel like I'm being torn in half by my best friend and my boyfriend."
Bella stands up, chalk in hand. "What do you mean?"
"What happened yesterday. On the phone. Royce says you're trying to break us up, and I didn't want to admit it to him, but I couldn't deny it could I? Because you are."
Bella places her chalk in her bedside drawer, pushing it to a smooth close. She hopes her answer to Rose will be as smooth. "I can see how he treats you, and how you let him treat you. Am I supposed to close my eyes and look away, Rose? I hate that. I've done enough of that and it's never turned out right. He's not good for you."
Bella already suspects that Rose won't listen to her. People don't tend to think that Bella knows enough, is experienced enough, to have any kind of truth important enough to share.
As Bella expects, Rose drops the subject, and just like all that heat, Bella feels the weight of it on her shoulders and her back.
Though the heart is in the center of your body, belonging only to you, it is not a self-centered thing. A heart can crack like a windshield, shatter in a thousand places, and not only for yourself, but for others, for people you know, sometimes for people you don't know. And while a windshield can be easily replaced, shiny and new, the heart can not. The cracks may repair overtime, but scabs and scars are left all over. If Bella were to draw the image of the heart from her perspective, it certainly wouldn't look like the pink thing with wings that Rose painted on Edward's wall. It would look much more like the literal heart, with blood and bumps and ridges—A-symmetric, uneven, and swollen.
Bella walks over to Rose and hugs her, speaking low into her hair, "I'm sorry, but I'm not going to ignore this."
In her mind, Bella longs for that one cool breeze to cycle around that can clear up the haze.
...
Bella misses Edward, and she misses Biter. But this doesn't take her to his cottage. Not even when she's forced to breathe the same stifling air as her mother, or when she has to see her father treating her mother as a loved one should, does she escape to Edward's. Instead, she shuts herself in her room trying to draw.
She lays the large drawing pad out on her bed, lines the pencils up, experimenting with shading. She watches videos on the internet about composition. She's not good at people or portraits. The proportions of anatomy are too hard for her, she discovers. Landscapes are her thing. She sticks with those.
Wednesday after school, sweating over her drawing under a sun that couldn't possibly be in her room, she decides to get herself out. She walks along the ruins of her forest.
As always, she steps over the spirit of her fallen tree. She continues all the way to where the Lakeview Restaurant used to stand. Its leftover pieces have been piled aside, and the ground has been smoothed and flattened out. There are two bulldozers sitting off to the side. The restaurant owners must be getting ready to rebuild. She wonders how long it will take, if it will be ready by summer.
"Where have you been?" Edward's voice comes from behind her.
"Biter!" She runs over to him and starts roughing up his fur, petting his snout, conceding to the fact that she's going to get bit. His tail is whipping back and forth, he's jumping on his hind legs like crazy, and he seems to have learned not to bite so hard. He mouths her. "Good boy!" she says. She looks up at Edward, who's grinning. "He's gotten bigger. It hasn't even been two weeks. His paws are lighter." She lifts up a paw that has turned brown.
"You haven't been over."
"I didn't know if..." She stands up. "I wanted to give you time."
"Time for what?"
"Angela. Are you still talking?"
"She wants to be friends."
"Do you?"
He shrugs a shoulder. "I told her we could try."
The dog is still jumping around, straining against the leash to get closer to Bella. Edward tells him to sit, pointing a finger at his rear end, and Biter listens. Bella's eyes widen in amazement.
The dog sitting, panting at Edward's side, Bella and Edward look at each other.
"You want to come over?"
Bella nods and walks with them down the hill toward the lake, branches crackling under every step, the scent of wet earth around them. Biter is in the lead, knowing exactly where they're headed.
Bella tells Edward she's been drawing.
"Show me sometime," he says.
He tells her that Angela wants to come over. Not wanting to be alone with her, he's asked Rose to invite some friends on Saturday.
"You'll be there, won't you? I mean because I don't need time."
Edward throws an arm over her shoulder and her breathing pauses. She peers up at him. He's looking straight ahead. Bella doesn't like this ambiguous stuff. She doesn't like the haze that's continuing to thicken inside of her, how the feelings in her stomach call in part for her to remain under Edward's arm, and in part for her to twist away from him.
In the cottage, she takes off her jacket and attempts to explain how all week has felt like the hottest, ugliest summer. When she fails at articulating this, Edward nods and says, "I know what you mean."
"How?"
"I just do." He unclips Biter's leash and the puppy walks in a pant over to his water bowl. "I'll show you."
She follows him to his room where he straddles his bench and composes a melody. "This is what I saw in my head when you were talking about it." He plays it for her while she sits on his bed. Biter comes in and plops himself under the piano bench, his chin resting on his paws.
"And this is your 'love isn't real' sound." He plays something even more melancholy than the one before it. It's entirely new to Bella. She's not sure when he composed it.
Edward turns and points at her. "Muse," he says. "You have to start having happier thoughts before I become the most depressing composer in history."
Bella's eyes drop to her fingers playing with a loose thread on his quilt. "Compose your own thoughts then."
"Wait. I didn't mean..." He moves to sit with her on the bed. "What an asshole." His hand meets his forehead. "Obviously not all your thoughts are depressing. Those are just the ones I compose. That says more about me than you, I think. I really didn't mean it like that."
"I know." She meets his gaze.
"How?" he grins.
"I just do. And I can't draw it for you. Sorry."
"Yet," he says.
Without thinking she rests her head on his shoulder. When she feels bone under her temple, she realizes what she's doing. She closes her eyes and stays where she is, pushing her thoughts out of her way. She likes it better when she doesn't think about every little thing, when she can simply be.
His hand comes up to the side of her head, his fingers treading into her hair. And with her eyes closed, it's like the breeze she's been waiting for. Not everything is clear, but in this moment, none of it seems to matter.
A/N: Thank you for sticking with me. :)
Because my favorite season is summer, and these characters are not in such a happy place at the moment, I had to write about the worst aspects of summer. But summer to me is not about oppressive heat or blinding haze. It's about cooling off in lakes or oceans or swimming pools, water skiing, barbecues, eating breakfast outside, writing and reading in nature and under the sun, the scents of lavender and jasmine in the air. Sigh, one month away.