Jake came over for dinner with me and Charlie on Sunday. It was a lovely day, too sunny for Edward to come over. I made potato salad and jamaica while Charlie grilled some steaks on the chilly back porch. The smell of cooking meat wafted in every time someone he opened the door carrying things in or out. Jake washed and sliced the potatoes while I made the dressing. It felt nice to have him so near again.
"Were you sick last week or something?" he asked, popping a hunk of potato in his mouth raw and crunching it with gusto. "You look way better now."
"Thanks, Jake," I laughed. "Yes, I was...not feeling well." I didn't dare say more, not with Charlie just outside. "I caught a bug visiting my mom. But I'm fine now."
"Good," he said, suddenly intense. "Bella, I want you to promise me you'll be careful with yourself, okay? If anything happens to you…"
"Of course I will," I said, affecting a forced lightness. I couldn't imagine how he would take my news about the pregnancy. I wondered how long I could put it off, but then realized that I would have to tell him soon if I was ever to get him to give Rosalie a blood sample. At least he, unlike Charlie, knew what kind of world we really lived in. I wasn't looking forward to finding a cover story for my sudden changes in shape and size; I couldn't begin to imagine what would be convincing to my dad. Charlie hadn't noticed when I lost fifteen pounds, but he would be sure to notice when I gained the thirty that Carlisle was projecting—and all of it in my uterus.
"Dinner!" sang out Charlie, bearing a loaded plate of steaks into the kitchen where Jake had already laid three place settings.
"Whoa, Dad," I exclaimed when I caught sight of the huge pile of meat on the plate. "Who do you think is going to eat all that?"
"Well," said Charlie very seriously, "I thought Jake could stand to put a little meat on his bones."
"...Right," I said, watching Jake load two steaks and a mound of potato salad onto his plate. And that was just for starters.
Between the three of us, there wasn't a single bite left over.
Charlie went to bed before Jake and I did, though he did clear his throat meaningfully as he said goodnight, to remind us that he would be just upstairs with his gun within reach. Jake and I leaned against each other on the couch, shoulder-to-shoulder. I'd eaten two and a half steaks, which was an embarrassingly huge quantity of food for me. And I was starting to get hungry again.
"How's it going in Jakeland?" I asked.
"I'm okay," said Jake. "I'd be going nuts even if no one had been hurt; turning into a werewolf is kind of discombobulating. But it's getting better. Jae's still a pain in my ass, but I actually think Ard and Tadi're pretty cool. The freakiest part is dealing with this whole never-gonna-grow-old thing. I haven't been able to wrap my brain around it. Ard says it's not so bad, you get to see a lot of cool stuff, but it sounds like a shit gig to me. He says imprinting makes it worth it."
"Go on, Jake," I said cheerfully, "teach me. What the hell is imprinting?"
"It's this wolf thing," he said helpfully, and stopped. I laughed and jabbed him in the ribs, and he went on. "Every so often one of the wolves imprints on a human. It's this close attachment, as close as what a parent would feel, or a brother or a son. Tadi thinks it's like, the strongest attachment we have to humanity, like, you imprint on someone and then because you can't bear to leave them you spend the next eighty years living in their town or tribe or city or whatever, and it keeps you grounded and human. If not for imprinting, wolves probably would never go around people at all, because it's simpler not to get involved with humans who can't know this thing about you. It's easier not to make friends that are gonna die while you're still just getting started. But with imprinting, that all changes. That's certainly what happened on the rez. Tadi imprinted on some little Quileute kid and they all just stuck around until the kid got old and died, and in the meantime they protected the tribe and made the treaty and impregnated married women. Nothing but class."
"I'm sensing some bitterness here," I said.
"I'm not even bitter about that, exactly," he said, sighing. "I didn't know my great-grandparents at all. Who cares what they got up to in their free time? They're both dead now, anyway. I just wish this whole stupid thing had never come up. I don't want to be like this. I don't care how good it feels to go cliff-jumping at a hundred twenty miles an hour, nothing is worth staying on this shitty planet for the next eternity. No offense to mother earth, but this place sucks ass, and it's only gonna get suckier."
"It's not so bad," I demurred.
"I just can't imagine why anyone would want to stick around," he insisted. "Who would do that? Knowing what kind of a world this is, who would do that?"
"I would," I said without thinking. And suddenly, it was like all the air was sucked out of the room. Jake went rigid and shifted away from me.
"Um, please tell me you're joking," he said, all lightness gone. "You can't be serious."
"I'm serious," I said, gathering my backbone. "Edward's going to turn me." Sooner rather than later, probably, I thought wistfully. Carlisle thought L-Day—Labor Day—would probably arrive before my nineteenth birthday. It would have been so nice to get to beer-buying age, even though I had no use for it. Well, maybe I would get lucky and survive the birth intact, although the whole biting-the-grasshopper-out bit made that seem less than likely. "Or Carlisle," I added, "in case Edward chickens out, which he probably will. He doesn't think I should do it either."
"Finally, one thing he's right about," muttered Jake. "Bella, I've tried not to say anything about it because I know everything's fucked up right now, but I have to say this: how in god's name could you get involved with a leech? I mean, I understand if you didn't know about it at first, but obviously you figured it out. Once you knew, why didn't you run the other way like a sane person?"
"Jake, come on, you know full well the Cullens aren't like that."
"A leech is a leech," he said flatly.
"Don't call them that. Besides, if a leech is a leech then a wolf is a wolf. I still want to be friends with you."
"That's different," he said. "I'm still human part of the time. They're stuck like that forever."
"Well, I guess I take a more optimistic view of the future than you do."
"Nothing on earth is worth becoming like them. You may be used to the Golden Boy, but most vampires aren't like that, they're like the worst parts of animal and human rolled into one. Trust me, I've seen it. That one blond guy—You really want to turn into something like that? The Cullens may not be evil, exactly, but it wouldn't take much for them to turn. It's in their nature. Just look at what that ginger bitch is doing to Seattle-"
"They aren't like her at all, Jake. Besides, it's not like I have much of a choice." Tell him. Tell him about the grasshopper!
"There's always a choice," he said angrily. "You would just rather stay young and hot and rich than stick with us crummy humans for the rest of your life. No, no, I get it. I'm sure your dad will get over it. Look, I'm well on my way to being over it already." With that, he rose and shot over to the door. I tried to go after him, but by the time I reached the door, he had disappeared into the night.
This isn't about you, I tried to tell myself, tears not so much welling as gushing out of my eyes. He's just upset about other…things...
That wasn't enough to keep me from crying myself to sleep.
I had misery-induced indigestion that kept me from sleeping more than an hour at a time. I considered calling Edward to ask him to keep me company, until I remembered that he was out with his brother tonight, tracking down leads on Victoria. He and Emmett expected to do some high quality intimidating/bribing to see if they could figure out where she was before she sent the next note.
I changed my tune around three in the morning, when the indigestion stopped feeling like indigestion and started feeling like stabbing cramps. I hunched over, unable to think of anything but the pain. The minute it subsided, I grabbed my cell phone and called Edward.
His phone went straight to voicemail. I couldn't wait around for him to get someplace with cell reception, and I couldn't drive myself to Carlisle and risk another episode while I was behind the wheel. Alice was gone and I didn't know Esme's number.
But I did have a yearbook with Rosalie's number scribbled under her (glowing, flawless, enchanting) senior portrait.
She answered on the first ring, sounding surprised that I was calling.
When I explained what had happened, Rosalie's voice became cool, collected and authoritative.
"Is Carlisle there?" I asked. "Could you put him on?"
"He's not," said Rosalie. "He's in the OR right now. Just sit tight, Bella, I'll be there in half an hour. I'll come up to your room. Drink some water if you can, and try to eat a few of those coriander crackers Esme made. And try to stay calm, okay?"
"I'll try," I said shakily. I gulped down water from my bedside stand and swallowed one or two crackers. Then I sat on my bed rubbing my belly and humming Norah Jones songs, which were the closest thing I knew to lullabies. The grasshopper wasn't moving.
"Come on, baby," I whispered desperately. "Please be okay, please. You have to get born. I want to meet my son. That's you, baby. You're my son, my son…" And then, without even realizing it, I'd given him a name.
"Masen," I murmured, rubbing the place under my bellybutton that sported a perennial pale bruise from his incessant nudging. "Masen Swan. A little bit of Edward, a little bit of me. Maybe I'll let your daddy come up with a middle name for you. Masen Swan is a lot of nouns for one name."
I had no reason to believe Masen could hear a word I was saying, and even if he did, he wouldn't understand it. I'd always found it silly when people talked to their pets and their babies in that squeaky sing-song voice. My voice didn't remotely resemble the high-pitched squeal that babies always seemed to elicit from my mother; this was the way I talked to Jake or Edward when they were stressed out. I'd never talked directly to the grasshopper like this before, and I couldn't explain where it was coming from. I just wanted him to know I was here, and that I loved him.
I was reasonably calm by the time Rosalie knocked quietly on my door. I started; I'd expected her to come in by the window. Everyone else did.
"Come in," I whispered. It was three-thirty-seven, and the sky was starting to turn a lighter shade of black in the east.
"Hello, Bella," she whispered, gliding over to me on silent feet. I saw she had a leather bag in her hand, the big old-fashioned kind that doctors in period films always carried around. "How are the cramps?"
"Better," I said. "But he's not moving much. Usually when I'm awake he shifts around more..."
"All right, let's take a look," said Rosalie. She pulled a stethoscope from the bag and placed it over my abdomen. After a tense couple of moments, during which I became sure that she was going to tell me something was wrong, she looked up with a smile.
"His heart is beating," she said. "It sounds normal."
I felt a wave of relief the size of Mt. McKinley wash over me. "Thank god," I breathed, fresh tears following old tracks which hadn't yet dried on my cheeks. "I thought...I thought…"
"Shh, shh, it's okay," shushed Rosalie, hugging me loosely. "He's fine. Maybe it really was indigestion. Did you eat anything unusual for dinner?"
"I had steak," I said. "Was that wrong?"
"Maybe steak just doesn't agree with him," she said reassuringly. I leaned back against my pillows, and Rosalie tucked the blankets in around me. "Did anything else happen?" she asked. "Anything else you ate? Any unusual sensations or activities leading up to the cramps?"
I sighed, not wanting to remember.
"I had a fight with my friend Jake," I admitted. "Um, you might know him. Jacob Black."
"Oh," she said quietly. "And you think that might have led to the cramps?"
"Dunno," I said. "Jake's one of my best friends. I'm trying to be super understanding, because I know he's just really messed up from all of the stuff with Billy and the wolves and everything, but it's really hard, because I'm so messed up right now. We're both, like, just completely raw nerves, you know? It's really rough. And I keep trying to find a way to tell him what's going on with me, only somehow it always gets derailed before I can get very far. I'm still trying to get him to agree to have some blood drawn, but first I have to explain why."
"Bella, I know it's none of my business, but...are you aware that emotions like anger and frustration might trigger some unwanted reactions in someone like Jake?"
I sighed. "Yeah, yeah, I know," I said. "Edward already told me. Jake is very careful around me. He was really pissed, and he didn't even start shaking or anything. Anyway, it's not like you guys are any safer. Thank god I haven't ripped off any hangnails recently, or I would be really screwed right now."
Rosalie smiled reluctantly. "I suppose so," she said. "For what it's worth, I've been working with so many of your blood samples of late that I think I would be all right, if you started bleeding. At least, I'm sure I would be able to get away in time. Anyway, your blood isn't nearly as alluring to me as it is to Edward. It's not really my preferred flavor, in the grand scheme of things."
"I wonder why it's so good to some people and not others," I said musingly.
"That's one mystery I haven't been able to unravel yet," she said. "I'm sure I'll get to it eventually. Perhaps sooner rather than later, since it seems so relevant to your present state."
"When did you get so interested in science?" I asked. "Were you like this as a human?"
"Certainly not," she said, laughing quietly and bashfully tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. "My mother believed science was for men and catching men was for women—Madame Curie notwithstanding. It wasn't until the Fifties that I began to take an interest. It was the Age of the Bomb, you know, and everyone was simply mad about the atom. That was also when we began going to normal high school, instead of just night school. Half the things I learned in my first senior year math class hadn't even been discovered when I was alive. It was a marvelous time, I can just tell you. You couldn't swing a cat without hitting some exciting new theorem."
"That sounds like a pretty decent silver lining," I said. "Even if you're not so thrilled about living forever…"
"Perhaps it is," agreed Rosalie. "If things hadn't gone the way they did, I never would have known about any of it; I'd have been too busy playing Wife. I keep begging Alice to tell me what Nasa's up to, but she doesn't see things like that. Too many joint decisions involved, she says."
I started to say something else, but a yawn cut through my words. Rosalie clucked her tongue and helped me back down onto the pillows.
"What you need right now is rest," she said. "Would you like me to stay with you, in case the cramps return?"
I meant to shake my head but found myself nodding. I was so unused to this sort of care. I looked after Jake this way—I even sometimes looked after Edward this way—but no one ever did this for me. It made for a nice change. And I might as well enjoy whatever hours of sleep I had left before I became sleepless forever.
When I woke, Rosalie was rocking quietly in the corner, her nose buried in my well-thumbed copy of The Secret Garden. That rocking chair always squeaked when I sat in it, but it wasn't making a sound now. She looked up when she heard me stirring and smiled.
"I used to love this book as a girl," she said. "It's funny, I haven't read it in decades, but I still remember every word Martha utters to Mary. I used to practice my Yorkshire accent, but I was never any good at it until I actually visited." She closed the book and flashed over to the bookshelf to return it to its place. "How did you sleep?"
"I slept great," I said. "Thanks for coming. I...I was really freaking out. I didn't know what was happening. It didn't feel anything like the heartburn I had in the beginning."
"Well, this baby is growing too fast for us to keep up," she said. "But I think you're doing very well—although I admit human biology isn't really my field. I think you should come see Carlisle when you get out of class. I can't guarantee I didn't miss something important."
Rosalie drove me to school in the Thing and promised to drive me home again afterward. Once in school, I struggled not to fall asleep in class. During study hall, I ducked into the library and drafted an email to send to Jake. By the end of a half hour's steady typing and deleting, I had exactly two words to show for it:
Dear Jake.
This was going nowhere. I yawned my way through my remaining classes, missing Alice and Edward more than ever, since I couldn't even explain to Jessica or Angela what was really going on. It was with a massive sigh of relief that I gathered my things at the end of the day. I texted my dad to let him know I was heading over to the Cullens' house and walked out to the parking lot.
Instead of Rosalie, Bree was standing beside the driver's side door of the Thing. She perked up and waved as soon as she saw me coming.
"I have another one for you!" she said, pressing a thick envelope into my hand. I didn't want to take it, tried not to take it, but in the end I took it, because I couldn't leave it with her. That wouldn't make whoever was inside the envelope any less dead.
"Bree," I said, "this has been, possibly without exception, the worst fucking day of my life. Starting last night."
"Then it can only get better, right?" she cocked her head to one side, smiling appeasingly, trying to make me feel better.
"No," I said. "It can't." It really couldn't.
"Well, maybe the check will help," she said. "You should buy yourself a nice cupcake or something. Treat yourself to a one-person date."
"What check?" I stared at her dumbly.
"The check in the envelope?" she said. As in, Duh? "You know, that Victoria's been sending you?"
"These aren't checks," I began to say, but Bree pressed her fingers to her lips and winked.
"Of course they're not," she said.
"Bree," I said, so lost in fear that my voice cracked, "will you please come back with me and just like, have some dinner?"
"I really wish I could," said Bree, "but I know your dad's a cop, Bella. I know you just want to help me, but I don't want the kind of help cops give. I'm sure he would mean well, but I'm so much better off this way. I can't go back. I just can't." Her voice had grown quieter and quieter as she spoke, till she ended on a whisper.
"This has nothing to do with my dad," I insisted. "He doesn't have to know anything about you."
"I think you're really nice, Bella," said Bree with a sad smile, "but I don't really believe you. I'm fine like this. You don't have to worry about me. Honest."
Short of kidnapping her, which I could hardly do on my own steam, there was nothing for me to do but watch her walk away, a bounce in her step.
I opened the envelope and almost dropped it.
Eleven. There were eleven dead girls. A perfect array of races and body types, some perhaps my age, some as young as ten. Some of their notes referenced other girls, and I gathered that some of them had been kept in the same place—a trailer in Cedarwood Mobile Home Park. One note mentioned that one of the prisoners, a red-head named Vicki, was going to try to escape and that if she did she would carry all of their letters and try to get help. So that was it. She pretended to be one of them. That seemed worse, somehow, than the way I'd envisioned it, with Victoria as jailor. She wasn't just trapping them and killing them, she was giving them hope. And then, for them to die at the hands of the one person they'd thought could save them—!
It was beyond cruel.
I carefully replaced every photo, in order, my hands shaking, my heart pounding, my eyes watering. I couldn't breathe.
A few minutes later Rosalie jogged up.
"Sorry I'm late," she said. "There was a…" She trailed off, looking intently at my face, and her eyes dropped to the envelope in my hand. Her face grew hard as stone and she held out her hand. "Give it to me," she said. "Don't even look at it. Not right now. Not after what happened last night. Let me read it first."
"Too late." In every possible way.
Imprinting has been talked to death by now, but that won't stop me from talking it to more death, because that jam is just wacky. In theory, imprinting is beautiful and sexy: the imprinter will never willingly hurt the imprintee, and the imprinter will always be whatever the imprintee needs him to be, meaning that for once the woman in the relationship is guaranteed the authority to call the shots (a rare occurrence in a patriarchal world). I'm liking this imprinting already! Except... When Emily rejected Sam's overtures, he refused her "no" and camped out on her front porch until she gave in. That's called coercion, my friends, and guess what? Coerced consent is not consent. So actually, the imprintee doesn't call the shots. (The fact that she was secretly attracted to him does not make her "no" a "yes".) Furthermore, Sam's manipulation led Emily to destroy her friendship with Leah. This will cause Emily pain and shame for the rest of her life; because everyone now thinks she's a home-wrecker, it is desperately hard for her to make new friends outside of Sam's circle, making him her chief source of emotional support, which is super unhealthy. What's more, he knew this would be the outcome if she accepted him, and he coerced her anyway. So the imprinter can deliberately hurt the imprintee. Lastly, if it was Sam's job to "be what Emily needs", why was she the one to sacrifice her entire support network, her home and her career so that she could live in Sam's kitchen, eternally cooking for him and his friends? What, Emily needed that, did she? In the very first imprinted relationship we see, imprinting's beautiful fantasy is shown to be rotten.
So imprinting is a get-out-of-consent-free card, not only eliminating the need for the man to wait for the woman's enthusiastic, unforced "yes", but also removing any possibility of his own "no". To sum up: if a man imprints on a female, he is allowed, nay, required to have sex with that female. No matter what. There are no exceptions to this. There is no precedent for a platonic imprint.
That takes on extra significance when it emerges that adults can imprint on infants and children. Lip service is paid to the idea that nothing untoward will be going on between Quil/Claire/Jake/Nessie, but why would we believe that? It is immediately established that Quil/Claire/Jake/Nessie will become sexually involved, at some unspecified point later on. Supposedly this happy event won't take place until the imprintee is, er, "ready", but what does that mean? Ready physically or mentally or emotionally or legally? Will he smell her first menses and suddenly view her as a viable mate, or will the imprint magically know not to flip the Ready! switch until she reaches whatever the age of consent is in WA? What if one prerequisite of "readiness" is the ability to grow up not under the expectant gaze of your imprint? Quil is described as being Claire's "ideal older brother"...for now. How many of you out there have brothers? Would you like to date your brother? No, wait, stop vomiting for a second and come back, I haven't finished. This big-brother-cum-lover thing isn't presented as some kind of fun kink, like how the Victorians were real into incest porn. This is just...the new normal.
I can get behind a version of imprinting that is purely familial, because that kind of thing is crazy common in real life. (Example: taking an active role in childcare rewires parents' brains, regardless of the parent's gender, sexual orientation and biological relationship with the child. This rewiring dramatically heightens parents' experience of "vigilance, salience, reward, and motivation...social understanding and cognitive empathy." In other words, it makes parents love their children so much they'll do anything for them. Sounds like imprinting to me! [pnas dot org/content/111/27/9792]) So basically I'm keeping imprinting in the story just to prove a point. Thoughts?