Chapter 7 – Behind the Mask

I sit down on the porch step, resting my elbows on my knees and my chin in my hands. "You shouldn't have done that. You've spoiled Esme's garden."

Rosalie looks behind her at the flames. "I suppose I did." With a soft sigh, she comes and sits beside me on the step. "I have an unfortunate tendency to vent my feelings in destruction."

Summer roses and sugar cookies and mine. The best thing in this new world.

"I'm sorry. I wish I hadn't done it; I hate that I've made you feel bad." I chew at a fingernail.

"I should have stopped you. I should have been more alert – I would have known from the minute the car turned into the drive that it wasn't Carlisle and Esme coming home if I'd only been thinking. I should have…oh, so many things!" Rosalie shakes her head in frustration. "I know there's nothing to be done now, but I'm sorry. You shouldn't have been put in the position to have to resist like that without being ready for it, and it's my fault that you were. I'm sorry."

"Don't apologise. It wasn't your fault…and I don't want to argue about it!" I say quickly, holding a hand up as she opens her mouth to speak. "It happened and it was terrible, and I hate that I've let you all down. But now I just have to work out how to live with it."

"Easier said than done." Rosalie plays with a length of her hair, wrapping it around her fingers and then letting it slide through them. "When you kill someone, it changes everything and it changes nothing. You're still the same person you were this morning, and yet you'll never be the same again…and there's no going back."

She stares at the dying flames and is silent for a long moment before she speaks again, her voice low. "I've killed, and not like you. It wasn't an unexpected temptation and I didn't feed on them. It was premeditated, and it was merciless, and doing it broke something inside me. Broke me and healed me…but it left a scar all the same."

I look at her, seeing in her beautiful face a kind of fierce and terrible strength that just about breaks my heart.

I wish you could let me love you.

"What happened?"

"My human life was quite different to yours. We lived in the city, in Rochester, and my father was a banker. We were very comfortably off, but my parents weren't fully satisfied with that – they had ambitions for a much higher social position. They had money, they had connections through my father's work…and then they had me." She smiles bitterly. "A beautiful, marriageable daughter can be quite an asset in the right circumstances and I was the key to my parents getting what they wanted. The right clothes, the right education, the right parties, and then the introduction to the right people…I can't lay all the blame on them though. Not when I wanted it too."

"You wanted to get married?"

Of course she did. You are a fool Eleanor!

"Oh, I wanted it all! The rich and handsome husband, the elegant house with my own pretty babies to fill the nursery, the social status and the envy and admiration of everyone who knew me. I was silly and shallow and vain, but even so…I don't think it was such a terrible thing to want."

"It's not terrible at all," I say. "Marriage, family, home – lots of people want that."

Rosalie winds a ribbon of hair through her fingers. "My parents contrived an introduction between me and the son of one of my father's business contacts. The Kings were one of the wealthiest and most powerful families in Rochester, and after just a single meeting Royce decided that he wanted me. There was a whirlwind courtship, he proposed on my eighteenth birthday and we immediately started planning a lavish wedding. It was everything my parents had ever hoped for, and I thought I was going to have everything I ever wanted." Her fingers tighten on her hair. "I couldn't have been more wrong."

I know that this story doesn't have a happy ending. She wouldn't be sitting beside me now if it did. But still my stomach tightens at the dread of what she's going to tell me next.

"The last night…it was only a week before the wedding. I'd been visiting a friend and I walked home alone, even though it was late and dark. I never expected trouble – it wasn't far and I'd walked that way dozens of times before. But I came across Royce and a group of his friends, and…I still don't understand it. They were all drunk and I tried to walk away, but Royce grabbed me. He wanted to show off his beautiful prize, and I said no and…I don't suppose I have to spell out what a gang of men is capable of doing to a girl alone. Enough to say I wasn't so beautiful once they were done. No prize at all."

"They left me in an alley, broken and bleeding and halfway to dying. I would have died, if Carlisle hadn't smelled the blood and come to investigate. But he did, and for his own reasons he brought me home and changed me. When I woke and realised what he'd done, what I had become…I wasn't exactly grateful." She gives a dry, humourless laugh. "The only thing that made any of it bearable was the knowledge that I'd be able to exact revenge. I dwelt on it to the point of obsession. Every time the thirst burned and I thought I couldn't stand it, I thought about what they'd done and knew that I had to. I thought about how he had hurt me, and I knew I would bear anything if it meant making him pay. That's what drove my determination to abstain from temptation – not compassion or morality or empathy like the others, but sheer hatred and a desire for vengeance. And it worked. Long before anyone expected it I'd mastered the thirst and was perfectly controlled around humans, and then I went after them. I killed them all. One a night, leaving Royce for last so that he'd know I was coming for him, and might feel just a little of the terror he'd made me feel. I even killed the two guards Royce had hired to protect him, just because they were in the way – I didn't hurt them, but they were innocent and they're dead all the same. As for Royce and his friends, I was brutal, and cruel, and utterly without mercy with what I did to them."

"They deserved it," I say, and my voice is shaking. The thought of what she endured, what every girl secretly fears might befall her, is like a black hole of horror inside me. "What they did to you…they deserved everything you gave them."

"I think they did, and I'm not sorry that they're dead," Rosalie says slowly. "But as I said earlier – it broke me as much as it healed me. I don't tell you about it because I want you to feel sorry for me, but I thought it was only fair for you to know what I really am. And I wanted to tell you because…whatever you did today Eleanor, and however badly you feel about it, don't for a moment think that the rest of us haven't done the same or worse."

From the house behind us I hear the soft murmur of Carlisle and Esme's conversation, and then the scrape of the piano bench being moved as Edward settles in to playing the piano. I listen to the music, my eyes on the dwindling embers of Rosalie's bonfire.

"Thank you for telling me all that," I say eventually. "I'm glad that you feel like you could trust me with it."

"It's changed the way you see me though," she says, and I don't miss the trace of regret in her voice.

"Of course it has," I say. "But not in a bad way! I mean, I already knew you were pretty fucking kickass – look at the way you carried me back here while I bled all over you without even taking a moment for a snack, and you don't take any of Edward's crap, and you're so smart and…well, everything." I stop for a moment, glad that my vampire skin can't blush as I think about everything else I want to say to her but can't. "So there was all that. But now I know how hard you had to fight and how much you had to overcome and…you're just about the strongest person I ever knew."

Rosalie turns sideways on the stair, leaning against the railing to face me directly, and without thinking about it I mirror her.

"I didn't know if you'd be horrified by what I did, and condemn me for it," Rosalie says. "Or just think what a shallow, stupid girl for getting myself into that situation in the first place."

"You didn't do anything wrong," I say. "It was a bad choice of man, admittedly, but wanting to get married and have babies is hardly unreasonable. You didn't deserve anything that happened to you."

"Edward always makes me feel like it was so superficial," Rosalie says. "Or maybe he just means I was, for caring about money and status and the way things look."

I'm surprised to hear her say that like she cares what he thinks.

"He couldn't be thinking too badly of you. And while money might not be the most important thing in the world, having lived without it all my life I certainly wouldn't underestimate the importance of it! If you do happen to fall in love with a rich man, why not be glad of an easy life?" I shove a curling hank of hair back off my face. "As for caring about the way things look…well, I can't say as I ever pay it much mind, but maybe if I were as beautiful as you I would?"

Rosalie's face lightens as she laughs. "Flattery will get you everywhere with me! Thank you. But you shouldn't talk yourself down, you're pretty and with the right clothes…" She breaks off with a shrug, looking at me in puzzlement. "But honestly, somehow you make those overalls look like they ARE the right clothes. It doesn't seem to matter whether your hair is done or full of hayseeds, or your clothes are bloodied up or torn…you look like that's just the exact way you're supposed to be."

"My sister Scarlett surely wouldn't agree with you about that. Good lord, the grief she gives me over everything comfortable I ever wear! And my mama doesn't mind the overalls for home and working, but it's a skirt for town and a dress for church and given half a chance she'll be stabbing so many hairpins into my hair to try and control it that anyone would think I'm a hedgehog. It doesn't work, I think it'd take rubber cement to make my hair stay where it's put, but Mama does insist on trying."

Rosalie is laughing again. "At least she let you wear what you wanted at home."

"Oh, she gave up that battle long ago! When I was a little girl I'd just take the dresses straight off and run around in my bloomers – she figured that letting me wear Patrick's old pants and overalls at least kept me decent. And she's always on my side really. She fixes up the boys' old duds for me, and never insists on frills and fussiness for the rest of it. As long as I'm clean and neat – well, as neat as I ever get – then that's enough."

Rosalie looks wistful. "You still talk about them in the present tense…you say is instead of was," she clarifies at my blank look.

"Oh! I suppose I do, but it's all…I guess it is in the past now, isn't it? Mama isn't going to say boo about my clothes again, is she?" I gnaw on a fingernail and lapse into thought.

"I'm sorry," Rosalie says. "I didn't mean to bring up something painful for you. It was just that I noticed you still speak of them like they're part of your life…and I suppose it made me wonder when I stopped."

I know that it's only been two years since her transformation. Her family are most likely still living on in much the same way as they did when she was part of it. But thinking about what she said I realise that it's true – I speak about my family like they're right here with me, and Rosalie's few references to her human life and family sound like something impossibly distant.

"Have you ever thought about going back and looking them up? Not so they'd see you, but just so you'd know."

"I've considered it. Carlisle offered to try and find out any news; he still has plenty of contacts in Rochester. I won't say never…but right now, I can't open that wound again. I couldn't go back to what used to be mine and see it all, so tantalisingly close and yet so irrevocably gone."

"Are you really so unhappy with this life?" I'm disturbed at this evidence of Rosalie's bitterness and regret. She's been biting and disdainful sometimes as she's taught me about what we are and the way we have to live and she's been open about the downsides, but until tonight I hadn't realised how deep her emotions run.

"Unhappy?" Rosalie shifts restlessly. "It's an impossible question. I hate what I am, I hate what I've lost – yes, I'm unhappy! But I also know there's no point in even thinking about it, because nothing can be changed. I have to learn to live with it…but I just don't know how! I don't know how you could have so easily accepted this life! Even now, after what happened today, you're not turning yourself inside out with anger over what I've made you into."

"Like I've said, it's not your fault," I point out. "You seem to think I must hold you personally responsible for my life now and hate you for everything in it, but that's just not the way I feel about it. Sure, there are downsides but there's an awful lot to like too. We might have to put up with that thirst, but no one ever goes to bed hungry. You all seem to be rolling in money, no one is busting their ass to make rent knowing that they're one breath of bad luck away from disaster. We can run so fast and jump so high and far that it's almost near flying, and there's never going to be any sickness or injury or death. We've got all the time in the world to do whatever we want, to learn or work or play – this is an extraordinary life we've got here. Even if it's maybe more of a death than a life."

And…there's you.

"And you can just…accept that?" Rosalie stares at me. "It's that easy?"

"Well, I've always seen it as there are things that are worth worrying about, and things that aren't," I say. "No point getting all ruffled up about things that you can't change! Life happens, you may as well look for the best as the worst and enjoy the ride."

"Even this?"

"Even this," I say. "I do feel bad about that man today. How could I not? He's dead and it's my fault. But in all honesty, in that moment I could no more have stopped myself than I could hold back the sunrise and beating myself up isn't going to change anything. I've just got to get it under control for next time, so that it doesn't happen again."

"We'll work on it," Rosalie says. "You can do it; it will just take focus and practice. We'll all help you."

"That's the good part about today," I say a little hesitantly. "That even though I did this awful thing, even though I killed a human and put everyone at risk, the family came together to help me. I'm not being thrown out on my ear because I let you all down. It makes me feel like…like I'm really one of you. Because up to now everyone's been real nice, but it's felt a bit like I'm a guest and you've all been using company manners and the good china, so to speak. But now, after today, well maybe now I'm feeling a bit like I belong."

And I can't say it, but you've opened up to me tonight in a whole new way and that feels like a gift. You've given me a glimpse of what's behind that perfect mask, and even though it was dark it's made me fall for you even more. How could I not, with all that strength and determination and tenacity backing up how beautiful you are?

Rosalie smiles reminiscently. "The good china - that takes me back! My mother and her prized Wedgewood china set...I broke a teacup once and she threatened to send me to an orphanage." She looks over at the scant embers that are all that remains of her bonfire and says softly, "I'm glad you feel more like you belong with us now. It's hard to explain, because you can't know how we were before, but you've made such a difference. It's…easier…with you here. I know we can't possibly make up for the family you've lost, but for my own sake I'm glad you're here."

"I meant it when I said I'm not angry about this," I say, waving vaguely around me to indicate everything. "I miss my family, and sometimes I feel a bit flummoxed about things, but it's such an adventure – how can I resent it?"

"An adventure." Rosalie quirks a lip at me. "That's one way to look at it. Although I'm not sure how much of an adventure it's going to feel like tomorrow, when Esme makes me replant the garden that I've just burned to a cinder. I loathe menial chores."

"I can help you," I say. "I'm getting soft, it'll do me good to do some solid honest work for a change."

Rosalie laughs. "I won't say no. And after that we can do some work of a different kind, and start to get your vampiric tendencies under control. You're one of us now, and we have to help you learn to live like it."