HAP-HAP-HAPPIEST OF BIRTHDAY WISHES TO HOLLETTLA, the most fabulous friend, beta, and comma goddess there is. Love ya, lady. xo

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February 26, 2013 – Word Prompt: Police. Dialogue Flex: "What's your excuse this time?"

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"What's your excuse this time?" I ask in lieu of a hello when I recognize Alice's cell number on the screen of my phone.

"My excuse?" I can hear the smile in her voice, and I'd almost forgotten what that type of friendship feels like.

"Last time it was flowers and coffee."

"Last time it was wanting to see your sorry ass."

"You say potato."

"I've always hated that expression."

I laugh, and it feels good, to laugh with Alice again. I'm ashamed that I can't remember the last time it happened. "Well then?"

"Coffee again?"

By the time we're in a booth at the diner once more, I'm pleasantly abuzz with the heady sensation of hovering on the precipice of reclaiming things that matter. If only one thing. Alice, true to form, wastes no time in cutting to the heart of it – or, rather, to the heart of me. "You and Edward looked awfully cozy last night," she says as she stirs a healthy splash of creamer into her coffee. I cradle my own mug in my palms, letting it warm me from the outside.

"We were just dancing."

"Uh-huh."

I look up, and Alice's shrewd gray eyes are watching me carefully. I realize, belatedly of course, that she was likely with Edward for hours after I left last night, and that she might be sitting on more recon than simply the vision of us dancing together. A sigh leaks past my lips. "Out with it."

She shakes her head. "You first."

And suddenly, I'm seventeen again, wanting to know everything and wanting to know nothing almost as badly. What is it about hometowns and old friends and childhood bedrooms that can catapult a person back in time with such totality? "We caught up. Said some things that needed saying."

"Laid some old ghosts to rest?" she presses, and the vision of Rosalie, stunning in a dress the color of deep merlot, laughing in the circle of Emmett's arms and chatting easily with Esme, flashes before my eyes.

"Tried to," I allow, and six years or no, Alice is still the master of hearing the words I don't speak.

"She's…nicer," she says, her voice purposely gentle, as if she knows the words themselves are sharp enough. "She's not like she was back then."

"A bitch, you mean?"

My friend's gray eyes are sad, and I feel seventeen once more, this time in the worst way: petulant and bitter and snappish. And I realize with a kind of suddenness that surprises me that Alice and Rose are going to be sisters. I'd thought I could never be more envious of Rosalie Hale, never could have hated her more than I have for the past six years, but I realize in this instant, missing my friend who's mere feet away, that I was wrong. "Sorry," I mutter into my coffee, chastened by her silence.

"You don't have to be sorry," she says, ever my gentle friend. "And Bella, you have every right to hold bad feelings toward her. But – and I think I'm telling you something you already know – Rosalie was never the one whose job it was to look after your heart."

And I've never thought about it that way, but she's right: that was Edward's job. A job he wasn't very good at, as it turns out – perhaps the first thing I've ever discovered that Edward Cullen couldn't do well.

"I don't even know why it still matters so much," I admit, and I hate the almost pleading note in my voice, as if I'm begging my one-time best friend to make sense of the disaster I've let my emotional life become.

"Really?" she asks, and when I look into her face, she looks genuinely surprised.

"It's been six years."

"So?"

I frown. I was expecting more of the "get over it" Alice from before, but she seems sincerely taken aback at my admission. "I just…tons of people get their hearts broken in high school, and they move on. It's like I'm short-circuited somewhere."

She laughs gently. "Bella, you're not short-circuited. There's nothing wrong with your wiring." When I say nothing, she takes a slow sip from her mug before setting it down gently on the Formica tabletop. "It matters because he was your friend first. Your best friend." When I open my mouth to protest, she shakes her head with that same gentle smile in place. "It's okay. I was your best girlfriend. I know that. But he was your best friend. Your soul friend. And when he did what he did, he took more than just your boyfriend away from you." And this is why we were always friends: because Alice gets me as well as I get myself, if not better.

I nod. "That's sort of what I've been realizing."

She mirrors my nod. "Good." Finally, she gives me her end. "I haven't seen him the way he was last night in a long time."

"Like what?"

Her familiar face scrunches up into the same expression I remember from the hours we spent studying together, trying to work something out in her head. "Like…peaceful. I mean, it's not like he was ecstatic or as happy as I thought he'd be at finally getting his hands on you again. But he seemed…relieved. Like someone who was expecting something to hurt really badly and it didn't."

I ask her a question that isn't really even meant for her. "Do you think we'll ever be friends again?"

She eyes me carefully, and I wonder what she's seeing, what she's picking apart in her assessment. "I think it's worth a shot. Because, for what it's worth, I think what he learned from hurting you the way he did is a lesson he only needed to learn once. So I think, if you guys were to become friends again, there's no way he'd risk your friendship by doing something that stupid again." While I'm turning this over in my mind, she reaches across the table and covers my hand with hers. "And Bella, I can't imagine there's anything in the world he'd want more. But really, what matters is what you want."

Suddenly, I'm surprised by the sting of tears behind my eyes. "Yeah," is all I can say, and if she notices the thickness in my voice, Alice doesn't acknowledge it.

. . .

My senior year of high school arrives, and it feels like I'm in someone else's life. Edward is gone, Rosalie is gone, that entire class of people is gone, and as I move through the familiar hallways, they feel oddly empty, considering the student body is the same size it always has been. Nobody speaks of them, and it seems bizarre that such a buoyant and all-consuming group of people can suddenly be so completely absent; it must always be like this when a class graduates, but I've never cared enough in the past to notice. A part of me thinks I should be grateful, but all it does is make me feel as though I've been torn apart by a dream, as if everything that was so concrete was, in fact, a mirage. There are no green eyes trying to catch mine in Trig, no sad half-smiles as we pass in the hallways, no intent gazes from across the cafeteria. He's gone, well and truly, and it leaves me feeling as if I'm being haunted by my own imagination.

In October, the Homecoming dance looms large in the near future, and Jacob Black asks me to be his date. I say yes, because saying no has already cost me too much. I say yes a lot over the course of the school year: to parties, to extracurricular activities, to more parties. When one of Charlie's deputies drives me home in his police cruiser near the end of April, I realize that I may have pushed it a bit too far. And yet, despite all of the times I say yes, there's still a fortress of "no" around my heart.

There's a voice in the back of my mind telling me that I got burned by the one high school boy I never would have expected it from and that to willingly place my heart in the hands of another would be foolish. I make a not-entirely-conscious decision to wait: surely the boys of colleges are calmer, less hormonal, less reckless. I wall myself off, get through it, repeating to myself that love can wait.

Love would have waited.

It didn't, so I will. I'll wait for it to be worth it.

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