Disclaimer: I do not own anything from the collective works of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight Saga
Jasper from the Planet Babe
Louisa took as long as humanly possible to walk to her Spanish class. Dottie would have grumbled about her taking three months to walk from the cafeteria, but that was an exaggeration. It probably only took her twenty minutes. Her reluctance to make an appearance did cause a bit of a problem, however, when Louisa was the last person to arrive to class. By a quarter of an hour. Everyone, including the teacher turned to stare at the blonde as she shuffled her way into the classroom.
"Lo siento. Me perdí," Louisa replied, dryly.
The teacher looked dubious at Louisa's claim of being lost, but didn't comment. The teacher was correct in her assumptions, of course, but Louisa wasn't about to rat herself out. She simply handed Louisa a syllabus and directed her to take a seat. Never one to disagree with authority (well, within reason), Louisa slunk through the tables of staring teens and plopped down in an empty seat at the back of the classroom.
Mrs. Goff finished up her interrupted lecture before instructing the students to introduce themselves to their neighbour. Louisa, who had no partner at the isolated table in the back of the class, began to pull her chair to the next table over, where two bored looking girls had begun to explain their summer vacations in broken Spanish.
"Miss Collins, a word, if you please," Mrs Goff said, halting Louisa's movements.
The young woman in question ignored the smirks she was getting from her classmates and straightened her spine as she walked towards the teacher. Apparently, Mrs Goff had a reputation as being a bit of a hard-ass. Never one to back down from a challenge, Louisa strolled right up to Mrs Goff, close enough that her knees were rubbing against the woman's wood desk.
"I noticed from your transcript that your Spanish is rated at an advanced level," the woman began. She fixed Louisa with a stern look over the top of her wire-rimmed glasses, giving off the vibe that she was thoroughly unimpressed with Louisa thus far.
How best to play this? She could act cocky and unconcerned, but Louisa did have another two years at this school if the move became a permanent thing, and Forks was a small town. Did she really want the reputation of being a troublemaker? The teen took in the teacher's appearance: married happily enough; two children, though both adults; mother recently passed away; one cat, most likely tabby; teaching for at least twenty-five years. Mrs Goff would be a hard teacher to get an upper hand on. Best play it safe.
Louisa settled for a shy smile. "Am I?"
"Yet your entrance exam indicated that your proficiency was lower intermediate, at best."
"I wasn't really feeling well when I took the test," Louisa said, suppressing the desire to sigh heavily. She really should have known that someone would catch onto the charade. Louisa had actually considered getting every question on the exam wrong, but that would have taken a lot more effort to learn all of the correct answers. There was also the possibility that the school thought she had been cheating in her previous courses if she failed too spectacularly, so Louisa had to settle for taking a class that was only slightly below average in terms of difficulty.
Mrs Groff's stern gaze softened drastically. "Yes, the school psychologist made your teachers aware of your situation." Poor girl.
Louisa felt her skin crawl at the look on Mrs Goff's face and felt the words die in her throat. She had actually had been going more for the 'Test Anxiety' angle, rather than 'Traumatised Teenager'. Did the entire school know about her history?
Probably the whole damn town, if the small town myth was to be believed, Louisa's mind provided helpfully.
"You can take the test again if you want," Mrs Goff said quietly, in a way that indicated that Louisa had gone white as a sheet. "Perhaps afterschool this week?"
The last thing Louisa wanted was for her teachers to think that she was going to break. "No thank you, ma'am," Louisa said in a wooden sounding voice. "It will be nice to review the basics." Louisa felt a weird sort of guilt well up in the pit of her stomach: the teachers would assume that she was having trouble adjusting to the death of her mother and her baby brother, and Louisa wasn't about to correct them, even though they couldn't be farther from the truth. By staying silent, she was using her mother and brother's deaths as an excuse to… what? Not take a harder class?
She was a shitty person.
Completely oblivious to Louisa's inner turmoil, Mrs Goff smiled and leaned forward to pat her hand. "I'm going to pair you with Mr and Miss Hale for the rest of the year." They are probably as nearly as qualified as I am to teach the class. "Perhaps the three of you could challenge each other?" Louisa nodded numbly and followed behind the older woman to a table where a boy and a girl were sitting, and a let Mrs Goff explain to the two what was happening while she dragged a chair over.
Louisa slid into her seat and nodded stiffly to the teens in front of her. The girl was blonde, incredibly beautiful, and wore her disinterest in Louisa like a very expensive scarf. The boy was also blond, and though he was just as attractive as his sister, his features were marred by a look that one might wear if they were constipated.
"I'm Rosalie, and this is my brother, Jasper," the girl rattled off in rapid Spanish. "Over the summer we visited our family in Alaska."
Louisa nodded and provided her own name to her new partners. She hesitated, unsure of what to say about her own summer. While being held hostage for nine hours was undoubtedly the most interesting thing that happened, she figured that that line of conversation would make her new classmates uncomfortable. Plus, she wasn't even supposed to talk about it legally, so it was a moot point anyway. Louisa settled for describing her family's recent move to Forks instead.
Rosalie didn't seem to care all that much anyway. "In my spare time, I enjoy fixing cars. Jasper enjoys reading and playing chess." There was something incredibly annoying about how Rosalie spoke. It was as if this conversation was so below her level of intelligence, and she couldn't believe that she was being forced to interact with mere commoners. This was something Louisa was familiar with; she could easily deal with a bitchy and entitled person, as she had been doing so since she was in kindergarten.
"Can Jasper not speak for himself?" Louisa snapped, a single blonde eyebrow hitching up in annoyance.
There was a soft chuckle, and Louisa's gaze slid over to the other occupant of their table. "Jasper can," he replied, his voice still soft. It took everything in Louisa not to shiver when he spoke. It was a pleasing baritone that was so smooth Louisa could almost feel it wrapping around her, without even the slightest of scratches you usually heard in teenage boys. Even from the little he had said, Louisa was of the opinion that Jasper sounded like walking sex and she desperately wanted to hear more.
Louisa angled her body towards the young man so that she could look more closely at him. She decided that, when his face wasn't screwed up in pain, Jasper Hale was actually insanely hot. His blond hair stopped right before his shirt collar, but instead of looking scruffy, Jasper looked like the more attractive older brother of Heath Ledger in A Knight's Tale. He had similar golden eyes to his sister's, but his looked much less homicidal than hers, and therefore much more pleasant to look into.
"Social anxiety, introverted, or shy?" Louisa asked. Upon further reflection, this was probably not the best question you could ask someone who had any of those characteristics, but what was done was done.
"Neither, he just doesn't like you." Normally, Louisa would have found Rosalie's constant interruptions rather sweet, in a weirdly protective sort of way, but it did make it difficult for any sort of flirtations to be exchanged.
Louisa didn't even bother to look over at the girl. "I thought we already decided that Jasper can speak for himself, Miss Hale," she said as she continued to observe Jasper. His body was lean and muscular, and the casual way he reclined in his chair reminded her very much of a lion. His posture was much too relaxed for him to be considered anxious. He was probably just introverted. Louisa could work with that. "So, Alaska, huh?" Louisa said, leaning back in her chair. "Are you from there originally?"
Rosalie gave an irritated huff. "Where else would we be from?"
"Well, I don't know about you, Miss Hale, but I would have assumed that Jasper here hailed from the planet Babe." Jasper pressed his lips together and looked down, his wavy blond hair obscuring his face. Louisa could see a silvery scar peeking out above the collar of his button front shirt. "Or Texas. I'm still undecided." She could definitely imagine Jasper riding a horse.
The moment the words left her mouth, there was a change in the atmosphere. Rosalie still looked like she was considering throttling her, and Jasper continued to recline in his wooden chair like he was a Roman aristocrat at a dinner party, but the way the two watched her made Louisa's skin prickle. They seemed far more interested in her glib comment than Louisa had anticipated.
"And what makes you say that we are from Texas?" Jasper asked, his voice still soft, almost hypnotic.
A small part of her brain was screaming at her to shut up, that she had said something very, very wrong. "Oh no, just you," Louisa found herself saying. "Your, um, sister, isn't from Texas."
Was Louisa imagining it, or was there the sound of wood splintering coming from Rosalie's direction?
A tiny smile flickered across Jasper's lips. "Why do you think I am from Texas?" He amended.
Louisa could see that she had dug herself into a hole. She wanted to panic. She wanted to laugh and tell Jasper that she was just messing with him. She wanted to change the subject. But she also had the overwhelming desire to… impress Jasper? Yes, impressing the very attractive young man in front of her sounded incredibly appealing. "Your Spanish is unaccented. Hers isn't." Should she also tell him that she knew that Rosalie was married? Or that he should be careful the next time he worked with newborns so they don't bite him?
No. She didn't want to scare him. Not everyone was impressed with her deductions.
"I just study more than my sister," Jasper replied with an easy grin.
Yes, that was definitely it. Jasper and his sister. They had lived in Alaska with their family.
Louisa nodded, her head swimming as if she had stood up too quickly.
Jasper resumed his lounging. "Tell us about your family?"
"I live with my father and my younger sister, Dorothy." Dottie. Hadn't something happened to Dottie today?
"Rosalie and I have younger siblings too. How old is she?" How could one man's voice be so compelling? He sounded like walking sex.
"She's fifteen. She's a sophomore."
Jasper's smile was charming: it was small enough so as not to make him look deranged but big enough to display what was either the result of good genetics or a skilled orthodontist. "How interesting. Edward and Alice are both sophomores. I wonder if they have any classes together."
Edward. She knew that name. Had he been the one to upset Dottie? Louisa's eyes slid to the blonde who was currently scowling at her brother. "Are you rude to everyone you meet, or just people who come in close contact with?" Louisa blurted out, shaking off the dazed feeling in her head.
Rosalie's face contorted in anger, though she still somehow managed to make it look beautiful. "What are you going on about?"
"You're behaviour towards strangers, Miss Hale. I can't really tell what your deal is. Maybe you are in a bad mood today, or maybe you are just overly protective of your family. All I know that you upset my sister this morning," Louisa said, leaning forward so that she was facing Rosalie fully. "And like you, I don't appreciate it when people mess with my family."
Louisa didn't have any proof that Rosalie was the one to upset Dottie, of course, but she had a funny feeling that it was the statuesque blonde before her that was the source of the morning's drama.
Rosalie opened her mouth to respond, only to be cut off by Mrs Goff, who was calling attention to the class. Louisa gave the two Hale siblings a mock salute before slouching off back to her seat.
Louisa somehow made it through the rest of the day, though she had no real recollection of this happening. She vaguely remembered a massive guy in her English class whose bicep was the circumference of her head… Emmerson, or something. One of the odd Cullen Bunch. It was hard to remember around the thick fog that had encompassed her after meeting Jasper the Babe.
This was of itself was an odd occurrence, as Louisa never so easily distracted by attractive people. Petya, for instance, was conventionally handsome, and she had no problem whatsoever staying focused around him. Of course, Petya was a massive dork, so any attraction she could have felt had evaporated shortly after she had met him. Plus, she was pretty sure that he had a crush on Dottie.
It was sometime between Spanish and Gym, however, that the headache started. It wasn't the worse she had ever experienced (that prize went to the one from falling off a cliff, but that's a whole other story), but it was bad enough that it made reading incredibly difficult. It had begun as a small pinch behind her left ear and had spread with a bizarre warm, throbbing sensation to encompass the entire left side of her head.
When the dizziness started, however, Louisa was convinced she was dying. She'd had migraines in the past, but nothing to this extent. Maybe she was having a stroke?
By the time school was finally finished for the day, Louisa couldn't even be bothered with having to drive home; she merely tossed her sister the car keys before climbing into the front passenger seat and tucking her head between her knees. Louisa ignored Dottie's protests to driving in favour of taking deep breaths and not puking all over the floor mats.
Focus. Compartmentalise. Put the pain away.
She had met too many people today, obviously. She was just overstimulated.
"Are you unwell, Miss Collins?" A male's voice came from outside of the car. Louisa sat up slowly to look out through the windscreen, where the semi-familiar form of Edward Cullen stood next to Dot. Edward was apparently the same age as Dot, though he towered over her by nearly a foot.
"Oh, hi there," Dottie replied in shock. "I'm fine I suppose. It's my sister. She's not feeling well, I think, and she wants me to drive."
"And that is a problem for you?" Edward asked, his head tilting like a confused puppy's.
Dottie's cheeks heated up. "Well, I don't know how to drive," she tried to explain, without sounding like a total loser. "I only just got my permit a few months ago."
Edward nodded in understanding. "I see, you require assistance."
Dottie's eyes widened and she waved her hands in front of her. "No, that's alright. I'm sure she just needs medicine or something."
"You don't even have medicine with you." The girl in Dottie's art class appeared next to Edward. Alice, if she recalled correctly. Her light brown eyes were squinted in concern. Where had she even come from? "If you can't drive, and she's unwell, you seem to be stranded here."
Behind Alice stood what could only be her other siblings, each wearing an expression that ranged from confusion to outright anger. The tall blonde girl from the office was standing next to a big scary boy, a scowl etched on her face. The big scary boy gave her a grin, though she wasn't sure if it helped his appearance any. Behind them stood a blond boy, as if he were hiding behind his sibling. He shuffled from foot to foot, evidently uncomfortable by having to interact with a stranger. Somehow, the Cullen family had cornered her and some little part of her brain was informing her that it might be a good idea to get the heck away from them.
"I'm sure we can figure something out. I'll just call my dad," Dottie said, hoping that she didn't look nearly as panicked as she felt. She took a step back, only to find her legs bumping into the front of her car. Dottie glance back at her sister, who was sitting up and watching her through narrowed eyes. Why did Louisa have to choose now to be sick? Louisa was much better at dealing with people.
Alice gave Dottie a smile that was probably supposed to look sweet but reminded Dottie more of a shark. "Nonsense. Jasper can drive you home."
This seemed to surprise the last Cullen sibling just as much as it surprised Dottie. The boy with the wavy blond hair started when he heard his name and looked at his sister as if she had suggested he strip naked. "I can?"
"Yes, Jazzy," Alice said slowly as if she were addressing a toddler. "Rose can still drive Edward and I home, and Emmett can pick you up after you drop Dottie and her sister off. It will be fine."
Every instinct was telling her to refuse them. But then Louisa slumped forward in the passenger seat, possibly unconscious.
That was how Dottie found herself in the backseat of their little Prius and giving a total stranger directions to her house. Louisa, if she had been coherent enough to understand what was happening, would have mentioned how this would either be the start of a horror movie or a really cheesy rom-com. But as it were, the oldest Collin sister had her eyes screwed tightly shut, with few thoughts in her head beside the immense pain she was in.
Well, there was one thought that occurred to Louisa, right after Jasper opened the passenger side door and picked her up, though she wasn't entirely sure what it meant.
All she knew was that newborns didn't have teeth.
"As soon as I saw you I knew a grand adventure was about to happen." ― A.A. Milne
(A/N: Hey there! I hoped you enjoyed this chapter! School has been really busy this semester, so I haven't had the time to update sooner. But leave a comment and let me know what you think, yeah? -CheckAlexa)
