Edward POV
We all tended to attract certain kinds of admirers at school. Rosalie made entire football teams trip over their own feet just by walking down the hall. Jasper tended to attract the caregiver types and the occasional danger-seeking idiot. Emmett's were more of a mixed bag: anyone with a sense of humor who also happened to be at least five-foot-eight qualified. My tormentors were usually the quiet ones, the daydreamers who sketched dragons in the margins during class. Alice's admirers—the fewest in number—tended to be on the weirder side.
It was just a hazard of the job. We were all used to it by now, even Alice and Jasper. Even when someone's interest was enough to get them past their own self-preserving sense of alarm, our standoffishness usually kept them at bay. When that didn't work, we said or did whatever it took to get them to move on. Of course, some of us liked to drag out the game for a while before breaking the requisite hearts, but the end result was always the same.
Alice was having some trouble this time around. The petitioner in question was a worm of a high school junior named Jason, a mediocre athlete who liked to skip his post-workout showers so everyone would know he had just been in the gym. His parents owned an endless string of vacation rental properties just outside of town. It kept them too busy to raise decent human beings, presumably. Jason was a slipshod student, a lousy friend to his teammates, and a lousier son. But his worst quality was his habit of pushing his attentions on girls who were isolated, shy, small… anyone who lacked a support system and self-esteem, generally, so he could do what he wanted. His intentions weren't even that nefarious; I just thought he was a scumbag because it was the thought that counted.
He'd picked Alice this time around, which was something of a mystery because not only was Jasper right there, but so were the rest of us. In any case, Jason had refused to take the hint for a good eight months now. It was practically a record.
Alice had declared she was sick of his attempts, but she was nursing a well-buried sense of pride too. She rarely entertained self-conscious comparisons between herself and Rosalie, at least not when I was around to overhear silent phrases like "my stick-like body," but there was something about this whole scenario that she found cathartic. For once, she had a human who found her so attractive he hadn't moved on to someone else in eight months. Or maybe it was the fact that Jasper was starting to get a little more… vigilant, I supposed the word was, than usual. He was striking a sweet spot between protectiveness and amused forbearance that Alice definitely enjoyed. He was enjoying it too, in a pleasantly irritable sort of way. At least, he would enjoy it as long as Alice did, and probably not a second longer.
But like a good telepathic brother, I pretended ignorance of that part of the story when I took Alice aside one day and tried to explain why she should try significantly harder to dislodge her admirer. I also didn't say anything about the fact that there was something about Jason's mind—just around the edges, a haze of shadowed potential—that reminded me of Royce King. I'd seen enough young humans try on and discard those shadows to be generous when nobody was in danger. And besides, making Jasper and Rosalie short-circuit would probably be overkill. I just gave my little sister a timely lecture on the importance of obscurity and the benefits of mercy-killing a certain teenage ego before it got too out of hand. She politely told me to buzz off.
So when I heard Alice's sort-of-exasperated thoughts and saw Jason's familiar smirk looming in her immediate future, I only let out the most inaudible of growls and stayed put on my stool. Today's two-hour chemistry experiment was testing the pH of various vegetables, after all; I wouldn't want to miss out on the thrill. Alice could take care of herself.
The bell rang to end sixth period and the hallways filled with pedestrians, but I had a second hour of tedium. The scrap of red cabbage in front of me didn't exactly require my full concentration, and my lab partner's inane conversation was easily handled on autopilot; I merely took a perfunctory dip into Jason's mind just to make sure Alice had fended him off again.
But Jason was in a belligerent mood today. Something about his father and money and a sizeable dent in a bright blue sports car—his mind was garbled on a good day, so I couldn't be bothered. Whatever the reason, he decided he wasn't taking no for an answer this time. He'd caught Alice in the crowded main hallway with her back to the lockers. She was doing her best to ignore him while backing away as much as she could, but there wasn't much room. He was energized by her supposedly timid response. He liked girls who were unsure of themselves, he decided. Nothing new there, but he was enjoying the realization for himself now.
Scumbag.
Nice, he thought. … more like it… just need to send her weird boyfriend running. Why does he always have to appear out of nowhere like that?
Jasper's shoulder edged into Alice's field of vision. He normally didn't bother to react—visibly—to Jason or his predecessors, but it was time for an exception. My gift swung out into some of the nearby minds so I could watch the scene from every angle. This ought to be good.
"She's had enough, man," Jason was saying. Having to look up to glare at Jasper wasn't helping his mental state. "Anyone can see she's sick of the way you hover. I think you should find a new hobby."
"And I think you should walk away," Jasper replied, "while you still can."
"Wait, for real?" Jason laughed. "This is the first time I've ever heard you speak and you already wanna go?"
Jasper shook his head minutely. "I don't, actually. So move along."
"Just ignore him, Jazz," Alice said. "I always do. Let's get to class." Oh, here we go. Great. A new possibility fizzled into being.
"Bathroom break," I informed my lab partner. I slipped out of the room at human speed. Once I was sure the coast was clear, the rest of the long hallway passed by in a tenth of a second. Of course the main hall was still a traffic jam. I was soon pushing my way through a sea of thudding hearts and overstuffed backpacks.
Jason was still running his mouth. Jasper had switched back to intimidating silence and was trying out one emotion after another to see what it would take for Jason to get lost. I pushed a little harder at the wall of backpacks without much luck. To all human appearances, Jason and Jasper were squaring off; the promise of a fight drew adolescent humans faster than a splash of blood drew sharks.
Or vampires, I thought in a panic. The possibility of spilled blood—and far worse—was definitely in the forecast now. I looked over everyone's heads to find a teacher, but the nearest one wouldn't get here in time. Of all the days for Rosalie and Emmett to skip school!
Jason switched tactics. He shifted to the side, trying to catch Alice's eye around the wall of Jasper that separated them. "Look, I just don't like the way he treats you," he told her in a whisper loud enough for everyone to hear. "Some guys would actually let you breathe, you know, decide things for yourself?"
"What I can't decide," Alice replied frostily, "is whether it's worse having to see you every day or having to smell you every day. There are these things called showers."
Well, that did it. It wasn't so much the insult as it was the titters of laughter and assenting nods that ran through the crowd. Jason turned an unhealthy shade of red, drew back his fist, and threw it toward Jasper's jaw. No…!
Jasper began to dodge the punch, but Alice yanked him back. "He'll bleed if he hits the locker hinges!" she hissed under her breath. Jasper swept up his hand and caught Jason's fist instead—at an almost human speed, I was pleased to see. The blood and the inevitable carnage evaporated from Alice's mind instantly. Crisis averted.
But new visions popped into place just as Jason's fingers crunched against unyielding vampire skin. Not a catastrophe, it seemed, but bad enough. Images strobed in quick succession: Jason clutching his hand, howling in pain. Both Jason and Jasper in the nurse's office. The nurse carefully examining Jason's hand. The whine of a siren. The nurse examining Jasper's hand under a bright LED lamp with a horrified look on her face. Two policemen talking to Carlisle and Esme on our front porch, a van with "Child Protective Services" on the side door… things got a little blurry after that. Long drives with packed cars shifted into an image of the Eiffel tower, which in turn blurred and shrank down to become a cabin in some nameless forest.
Edward! Alice shrieked. We have to do something!
Do what?! The nurse was obviously going to see the bite scars on Jasper's hand if she looked close enough under a bright light. We hadn't even known that was a possibility! I couldn't care less about Jason's mangled bones; we just needed to take Jasper out of the equation somehow. And fast. Any millisecond now, Jason's sluggish brain would register the pain and it would begin.
One of my lectures from medical school took over. It wasn't just his brain that was slow; it was the entire neural pathway, the succession of nerves that had to transmit the information at a finite speed from his fingers to his brain. I could move faster than that.
"Let go—quick!" Alice whispered to Jasper.
I plowed through the last row of backpacks right into Jason, gently pitching him headfirst into the lockers at the exact angle Alice's visions gave me. He threw his hands up at the last moment to catch himself and the pain hit just as his fractured hand slammed into the cold metal. Now the crisis was averted, I thought smugly as he began to howl in pain. He clutched his hand and stared up at me in terror.
It was a look I hadn't gotten from a human in a long, long time. The old instinct surged to life, driving me to finish the meal, but I kicked the monster back into his cage easily enough. The heady scent of adrenaline-laced blood was rising around us, but not enough to make it difficult. Jason's unbroken skin made for an odiferous barrier to temptation. And the hilarious turn of his thoughts—my sudden attack reminded him of spiders, not monsters—eased the tension. He was mortally afraid of spiders.
"What's the problem out here?" the vice principal called out. He began to make his way over.
"No problem at all," I called back. I looked back down at Jason and dropped down in a Spiderman-style crouch until I was at his eye level. I tilted my head to the side with an insectoid snap and let myself—for a full second—imagine what it would be like to finish the job. "Do we have a problem, Jason?" I said.
The color drained right out of his face. "No," he said in a rush.
I stood back up, sparing only a glance at Alice and Jasper's bemused expressions.
"Stay away from my sister," I told Jason, staring down at him until he gave me a shaky nod, and then I walked away to thunderous applause.
.
.
.
"Tell me again," Carlisle said, pinching the bridge of his nose like he had a migraine. "Tell me again why you threw a human into a wall of metal lockers and exactly why this was supposed to have been a good idea."
I tried to give him the muddled story again, but Alice and Jasper were interrupting every other word and Emmett's hooting approval drowned out everything anyway. Esme had insisted on everyone sitting at the dining room table for this, and for once it wasn't because tempers were frayed. Our debriefs after troublesome incidents weren't usually this enthusiastic.
"All I'm saying is that you might get a call from the school or possibly the police, but you probably won't," I said once I was able to get in a word edgewise.
"I can't BELIEVE I missed this!" Emmett groaned for the third time. He collapsed back into his chair, making it skid backward into the chair rail. "Do you think anybody took any pictures?"
Jasper shook his head. "You say that like you want there to be evidence—"
"—should have seen his face!" Alice shrieked. She leaped over the table and landed in Jasper's lap.
"—really shocked at you, Edward—" Esme was scolding. "And what was that about spiders?"
"Well duh, we'd have to confiscate any evidence," Emmett was saying to Jasper. "And blow it up to poster size and hang it in the living room—maybe put it on our Christmas cards—"
"We don't send Christmas cards," Esme said.
"Well, we should now!"
"—all those lectures you give about us not drawing attention!" Rosalie shouted at me from her end of the table. She was having the time of her life. I shot her a grin and shrugged.
"Everyone, quiet!" Carlisle said, holding up his hands. "First things first. Alice, will this involve any sudden travels?"
Alice stared out at nothing for a moment. "Nope, still good. Jason's not going to say… hold on." We all waited, finally silent, while she dug around the future a little more. "He'll come to school in a cast tomorrow. A Jet Ski accident, he'll tell everyone." She laughed gleefully. "He's down at the docks right now, pretending he just got hurt."
"He hasn't gone to the hospital yet?" Carlisle asked with a frown.
"His mother is taking him soon," I said, watching along in Alice's visions. "I don't think she'll believe his story either, and she isn't going to do a thing about it."
"Good for her," Rosalie said smoothly.
"This is probably my fault," Jasper admitted. "I had only a split second to dodge his fist and stop it from hitting the locker, and shock absorption wasn't the first thing on my mind."
"How can something so glorious be anybody's fault?" Alice said happily. "Anyway, it was my body odor comment that made him throw the punch." She buried her face in Jasper's shoulder. "My hero."
"Hey!" I protested. "Who showed up to defend your honor and vanquish the enemy?"
"I can't BELIEVE I MISSED THIS," Emmett moaned again. Then he blinked, thinking for a second. "Now, you better watch out, Eddie—"
"Edward," I growled.
"—'cause you may have scared away Alice's admirer, but you're going to have a whole new crowd of admirers yourself after this." Emmett gave me a broad smile and a wink, imagining droves of girls cheering and sighing as I walked into school tomorrow. Oh no…
I ran my hand back through my hair. "I didn't even think… Alice?"
She took a second to peek and burst out laughing again. Great. Just great.
"Well, you deserve it," Esme said, coming around the table just to squeeze my shoulders. "No good deed goes unpunished, after all. You also deserve it," she added sternly. "What were you thinking, anyway?" Alice was still cackling into Jasper's shoulder, watching more of the blockbuster going on in her head.
Maybe I could drop out of school, I thought stonily as Esme tousled my hair and then began to fuss about un-tousling it. Any story would do. Teenage runaway. Drug bust, prison. A surprise inheritance that took me to Europe to settle my estate. Anything but the blushing, attentive smiles that filled Alice's visions. Each of those smiles threatened months of daydreams in which I was the heroic protagonist.
"Was there really no other way?" Carlisle said. He was still frowning. "Surely between the three of you, you could have come up with something." Of course he was staring right at me.
"He was already injured anyway," I explained for the third time. "And I didn't have a choice. They would have opened up an investigation about why your foster kid is coming to school with bite marks all over him!"
"In that case, I think Edward's theatrics were perfectly in order," Rosalie put in. "That moron needed to be taken down a notch. I'm sure nobody planned to create a spectacle"—a sharp look over at Alice and Jasper—"but it turned out all right."
"Thank you, Rosalie," I said primly. Theatrics, indeed.
"Very well," Carlisle sighed, standing up. "What's done is done." He checked his watch. "I need to get to work."
"Hold on," Jasper said. "What about my scars being visible in the first place? I thought humans couldn't see them."
"That's what I've always assumed, too," Carlisle admitted. He stepped back toward the table. "It may be the LED technology or just the fact that she was looking very intently under a bright light in general." He paused. "This close call has given us a valuable warning. But it can't be helped, I'm afraid—you'll just need to be careful, Jasper."
It was a sobering thought. I felt a phantom tingle in the two scars on my back. I had never had a reason to go shirtless around my human peers, and now I wondered whether there was any danger in doing so beyond the usual danger of sunlight. I doubted it; both the scars were so irregular that no one would associate them with teeth or weirdly abusive foster parents, surely. And those were the only scars I had. Jasper wasn't so lucky.
He looked down at his hands, turning them in the weak light of the chandelier that hung over the table. To all of us, the damage was glaringly obvious. And some of his scars were far worse than mere bite marks, though at least most of those were hidden.
Back when Jasper had first started going to school with the rest of us, he had been pretty concerned about any of his ruined skin being visible to human eyes. Carlisle couldn't offer him any reassurance, either, because he'd never had to deal with that problem before. Only Alice's visions promised that it must be all right because she saw him in school for years to come. Jasper had warily begun his eternal student career despite his scars and his shaky self-control, and everything had been fine.
Mostly.
Carlisle got his bag and headed on out to the garage. Esme went to see him off. I smiled fondly, following along in my mind. This was one of those times when they needed to share a discreet, exhausted embrace and to grumble, for just a moment, about how they needed a vacation from their brood of eternal teenagers and our antics. Preferably on a certain island off the coast of Brazil so that an entire continent could stand between us and them. Fair enough.
"Should've broken more than his hand," Emmett grunted once Esme was out of earshot. "He's had it coming for a while."
"Believe me, I wanted to," Jasper said. He laid a kiss on the back of Alice's neck, holding her a little tighter and imagining a pleasant scenario in which he was allowed to beat Jason to a bloody pulp instead of merely leaving him with a sore hand. We all knew where that would end up—although Jasper was enjoying that scenario, too.
"Enough is enough, Alice," I said.
"Agreed," she said with a sigh. "I'll shoo him away if he tries again. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted."
"Fun?" Rosalie snorted delicately. "He's a Neanderthal. And he smells. Why would you want that anywhere near you?"
"I just said I didn't!"
"No, you just said it was fun."
Alice abruptly shoved her way out of Jasper's lap and climbed right out of the window. Half a second later, she was in the woods.
"Real nice, Rose," Jasper said harshly. He followed Alice out.
Rosalie stared at the window for a second. "What did I say?"
"Nothing!" Emmett insisted. "Weirdos."
"Oh come on, you two," I growled. "Use your heads. How do you think Alice feels about…" I hesitated, trying to decide if this was one of those times it was better to break a confidence than to keep it.
"About what?" Rosalie asked. "Spit it out."
"Fine. How do you think you would feel if your sister looked like a supermodel and you looked like your nobody creator had snatched you from some impoverished orphanage?"
Rosalie was taken aback. "She really thinks about it like that?"
"Word for word. And for God's sake, don't make me talk about bra size because I won't. Now compare how many admirers you have every time, and how many she has. And now she finally had one that really stuck to her, and he's not good enough for you? Setting aside the fact that he is absolutely not good enough, you just scoffed at the one time she had this. Believe me, she knows that if you were the one in this story, you wouldn't even notice a bug like that lurking behind all the varsity athletes lined up to catch your eye—"
"I get it!" Rosalie hissed.
"Rose," Emmett began.
"She doesn't know anything," Rosalie said, sliding to her feet so fast her chair crumbled away in three pieces. She slammed her fist down on the table. "She doesn't know what looking like this can do to someone—what it makes other people do! And neither do you, so you can just—"
"That's not the point this time, Rose," I said, "Of course she doesn't know what it's like, the good or the bad. How could she? All she knows is that you have something she never will. She finally had a glimpse this time and even had a little fun at the end, and that's still not good enough."
"I get it," Rosalie said, more thoughtfully this time. "I get it. Just…" She folded her arms tight across her belly, a favorite thinking pose of hers in tough spots. She was trying to see it from Alice's perspective, at least. "I'll talk to her when they come back. Although I don't know what I can say." She stewed a little longer, then looked at me grudgingly. "What am I supposed to say?"
"How should I know?"
"You're the one in her head, not me!"
"No way. I'll already be in hot water for saying this much. And in any case, I genuinely don't know."
"Well." She gave me another grudging look, this time with a hint of a rueful smile. Anyway… I hope Alice isn't too hard on you for blabbing. You really are a decent brother sometimes.
I knew better than to acknowledge that out loud.
Rosalie made her way around the table—she wasn't going to hug me, was she?! But she scrunched herself up in Emmett's lap instead, exactly the way Alice liked to do with Jasper. She nuzzled her way into the crook of Emmett's neck. "You've never beaten up any humans for me before," she murmured.
"Wanna stage something?" Emmett said with a feral grin. "Next time around, maybe we do First Sight but you say no to me at first. Lead the humans on for longer, let one of them think he really has a chance…" He cracked his knuckles, dreaming up scenarios of his own.
"Give it a rest, will you?" I said irritably. "Humans aren't toys."
"Okay, Spiderman," Emmett said. Then he decided he'd like to get a good taste of Rosalie's neck, and that was my cue to leave. Anyway, a song was tickling at the back of my muse; this was a good time to unplug my keyboard and take it out into the woods.
I steered clear of Alice and Jasper and found a nice big cedar about a mile out. I climbed up and wedged the keyboard between a couple of branches. Then I took out my Walkman, my brand new noise-canceling headphones, and a mixtape I'd made of various kinds of white noise so I could blast it in moments like this. Perfect.
How to write this one? Telepathic omniscience notwithstanding, I really couldn't put myself in Alice's place. I could try, but what would it sound like, musically, to be a skinny little slip of a girl—woman—who lived with someone as stunning as Rosalie? Alice was certainly beautiful, thanks to the airbrushing assistance of her creator's venom, but her beauty was more… otherworldly, I supposed, in a fragile, pinched, fairy sort of way. I'd always thought she would look just right if she were three inches tall and had a set of wings.
She had no memory of anyone being attracted to her in her human days. None of our vampire friends had shown any interest in that sense either; who would dare to, with Jasper in the picture? He certainly scared off plenty of her would-be admirers without even trying. And even Jasper himself… theirs was a magical sort of love, but that wasn't always a comfort to Alice. Sometimes she wondered how things would have gone if their gifts hadn't made everything click. If she hadn't had years to practice exactly how to conduct their first meeting, a meeting in which she basically informed him that he was about to love her. She hadn't ever gotten to fall in love or have a suitor—or a friend—in a way that even approached normal. Normal and Alice didn't belong in the same dictionary at all, but there were times when she quietly ached for it. Normal for our kind, at the very least.
Let her be a fairy, then. My fingers drifted up to the higher keys—no. Normal first. I brought it down an octave and let the melody work itself out in a plodding, predictable sort of way. I was satisfied within the hour and let my fingers drift to the right again. The keyboard's limited range was a frustrating obstacle, but I hummed what I couldn't play. The melody was distorted here: too thin and hesitant in some places, outright dissonant in others. She would have a whole movement all her own, too, since normal really couldn't compare. I thought about adding a bass component to represent Jasper as I had in their other songs, but this was about Alice. The little fairy fluttered on alone, sparkling and zany and happy but, occasionally, wishing for a little more.