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The Denali Institute for Rebellious and Troubled Teenagers
Chapter Eleven
Friday 12th August 2011
Leah POV
I stood in front of the mirror, twisting a strand of hair around my finger, then letting it drop.
There was no point.
No matter how I styled it, how I dressed, how much I pretended to care—it didn't make a difference.
I didn't fit here.
I'd given it a genuine shot this week. Or… as close to genuine as I could stomach.
I'd tried talking to the other girls—Bella, Rosalie, Lauren, Alice. And, unsurprisingly, they weren't my people.
Bella was too moody, Rosalie too judgmental, Alice was basically a mute, and Lauren… well, she was too busy throwing herself at Edward to even register that I existed.
The guys?
Equally pointless.
I'd thought, maybe, Jacob and I could have some kind of ethnic solidarity thing going on. We were the only Native kids in the year, after all. That had to count for something, right?
But he was… too damaged. Too far gone in his own brain, in his trauma and his silence. And even when he wasn't shutting down, it was clear I grated on him.
Which was fair, honestly.
I had that effect on people.
I was loud, I was honest, and I didn't pretend to be sweet.
If I had to smile through my own misery just to make people like me, then screw it—I'd rather be alone.
But even I had to admit… being alone in this place was starting to suck.
So my thoughts drifted back to the first morning—when we'd first arrived and been shuffled into the cafeteria like sheep in a blizzard.
That was when I'd met Paul, Embry, and Claire.
And weirdly enough?
That had been the only time this week I'd actually felt like I could just… exist.
No trying. No weird girl group dynamics or complicated social hierarchies.
Just food, a bit of sass, and people who didn't flinch when I spoke.
That had to mean something.
I walked in alone, as usual, letting my eyes scan the room quickly.
They were easy to spot—Paul, Embry, and Claire, settled at one of the tables on the left side near the windows.
They weren't being loud, but they were definitely the kind of group that just had a presence.
Claire was laughing at something Paul had said, and Embry was half-smiling as he poked around on his tray.
I grabbed a tray of food without even looking at what I picked, and made my way over to them before I could second guess myself.
Paul looked up first, and his brow lifted slightly in recognition.
"Well, if it isn't Little Miss First Year," he said, leaning back with a smirk.
I raised an eyebrow, sliding my tray onto the table. "Gonna make me beg for a seat?"
Claire grinned, patting the empty chair beside her. "Don't mind him. He thinks he's a gatekeeper or something."
"That's because I am," Paul muttered, but he was already nudging his tray over to make room for me.
I sat down, trying to look nonchalant, but I could already feel my shoulders relaxing.
Embry looked over at me, nodded once. "Rough week?"
"You could say that," I said, stabbing a fork into my scrambled eggs. "Turns out, I'm a bad fit for people who have functioning social filters."
Claire laughed again. "Same."
Paul raised his eyebrows. "So you decided to join the misfits instead?"
I shrugged. "I figure if I'm gonna be a reject, I'd rather be one in a group than alone."
He nodded slowly, like that was a respectable answer, and the tension I hadn't even realized I was carrying started to ease out of me a little more.
"You're welcome here," Claire said plainly. "You don't have to fake anything. That's kind of the unspoken rule."
"Good," I said. "I suck at faking."
Paul grinned. "We noticed."
But he said it like it was a compliment, and for once, I didn't feel like I needed to snap back or defend myself.
As the conversation rolled on—easy, effortless banter that didn't make me feel like I was walking a tightrope—I realized that maybe this place wouldn't be entirely unbearable.
Because now?
I had a table.
Maybe even a circle.
And for the first time all week, that felt like enough.
Rosalie POV
If Eleazar noticed how collectively fried we'd been last class, he didn't say anything.
Not that he seemed like the type to comment on things unless it actually interfered with the curriculum. He had a kind of quiet control over the room—firm, but not in a way that made you feel like you were constantly being monitored.
Just… observed.
I liked that.
I didn't get the feeling he was going to pull some dramatic "you're failing at life" speech like Caius or let things slide with a half-assed smirk like Aro. Eleazar was different. Present. Composed. He had this stillness about him that made everyone else feel a little more centered—whether they realized it or not.
I took my seat and flipped open my notebook without being asked. I'd picked France for the assignment he gave us, mostly because it was the only place I could picture myself living that wasn't a complete disaster.
Maybe it was the fashion. Or the food. Or the fact that if you acted stuck-up and aloof in Paris, people just called it "charm."
At least I'd fit in.
Lauren, of course, had picked Spain, but when Eleazar moved around the room checking on our progress, she had about three lines of bullet points and half a doodle of the Spanish flag with glitter pen.
He paused beside her desk for a second too long, then moved on without comment.
Edward was actually working. Bella too, though she kept side-eyeing Edward every few minutes like she thought no one noticed.
Please.
I noticed.
Everyone noticed.
Except maybe Jake, who looked like he was busy contemplating the meaning of life, or how to fight the urge to punch someone.
"Ms. Hale," Eleazar said, stopping by my desk. "How's France treating you?"
I looked up at him. "It's fine. I mean, I've barely scratched the surface, but it's not hard to make it sound good. Their government's a mess, but the country itself is still romanticized enough to cover the cracks."
He raised a brow at that. "Interesting observation."
"I mean, that's how marketing works," I said. "You slap pretty lighting and an aesthetic playlist on a train wreck and call it culture."
There was a pause, and then Eleazar smiled. It was small but genuine.
"Are you always this intense?"
"Do you want the honest answer?"
He laughed softly. "Only if you think I can handle it."
I didn't respond to that, just returned to my notes. He moved on.
That was another thing I liked about him—he didn't try too hard. He just let people be, which ironically made it easier to try.
"Do you think I could live in Spain one day?" Lauren whispered from beside me.
I didn't look at her. "Sure. You'll just have to learn how to ask for iced coffee without sounding like a tourist."
"Iced coffee?"
"They don't do it like we do. Better start preparing now."
She made a face. "Well, I'll just start my own coffee shop. Problem solved."
I smirked. "Tell yourself whatever you need to get through this assignment."
By the end of the class, Eleazar stepped back to the front of the room and looked us over with that thoughtful, unreadable expression he always had.
"Next week," he said, "you'll start presenting. No notes. Just you and the knowledge you've gathered."
Tyler let out a quiet groan.
"Consider this your first real challenge," Eleazar continued. "Not because I care about memorization, but because I want to see what you can retain when the paper isn't doing the thinking for you."
I appreciated that.
It wasn't about grades or sounding smart. He actually wanted to know if we were learning.
That was rare.
The bell rang a moment later, and we all started packing up.
As I walked out, I realized something strange—I wasn't dreading next week's presentation.
Because for the first time in a while, it felt like someone actually wanted to hear what I had to say.
Alice POV
Marcus was talking again.
He always spoke like he was counting the seconds until the sun burned out.
Today, it was something about narrative voice in Gothic literature, and his tone made it sound like he was physically in pain having to teach us.
I sat in my usual seat, near the edge of the room, far enough from the others to avoid drawing attention, but close enough to hear everything I needed to.
Not that it mattered.
Because I wasn't really listening.
Not to Marcus, not to the rustling of papers, not even to Tyler's exaggerated sighs every five minutes like he was being slowly tortured.
I was thinking about Jasper.
The kitchen had been empty when I wandered in, barefoot, my sweater sleeves pulled over my hands, the silence of pre-dawn with the shutters still down clinging to everything like frost.
I wasn't even hungry, not really.
But I'd needed something.
Movement.
Distraction.
There was comfort in the dull fluorescent buzz and the distant hum of the fridge, and I'd just started pulling open cabinets when I noticed him.
Jasper.
Sitting at one of the tables in the corner, hunched slightly over a spiral-bound notebook, scribbling like the words would vanish if he didn't catch them fast enough.
I'd frozen.
I don't know why.
Maybe because I hadn't expected anyone else to be there.
Maybe because he didn't move or look up even when I opened the door.
I stood there, indecisive, caught between leaving and pretending I hadn't seen him.
The silence was heavy.
And then, without looking up, he asked, "How are you feeling about everything now that we've been here a bit?"
Just like that.
No preamble.
No question of whether I wanted to talk.
And yet… not hostile.
Just quiet.
Neutral.
I'd wanted to ignore him.
I had every right to.
I didn't owe anyone answers.
But being the only two people in that room, in that silence, made it feel wrong not to say anything.
Rude, somehow.
So I answered.
"Still adjusting," I said, my voice barely above a whisper.
It felt foreign coming out of my mouth, like using a muscle I hadn't stretched in years.
He finally looked up then.
Not surprised, just… present.
"Yeah," he said, after a long pause. "Same."
I didn't ask what he'd been writing, and he didn't offer to explain.
But I asked the one question I could manage.
"Do you think it gets better?"
He gave a tired kind of shrug. "I think we get better at pretending it does."
I don't know how long we sat in silence after that.
Maybe ten minutes.
Maybe an hour.
He didn't say anything else.
Neither did I.
Eventually, I turned and left with a packet of crackers in hand and too many thoughts in my head.
Now, I stared at the page in front of me, not seeing any of the words.
Jasper was across the room now, seated between Jacob and Emmett, head down like always.
But now I noticed things I hadn't before.
The way he tapped his pen once before he wrote something down.
How he sometimes squinted at the page like he was fighting his own thoughts.
I didn't know what to make of him.
But he'd asked me a question.
And I'd answered it.
That didn't happen often.
And I hadn't been able to stop thinking about it since.
Marcus's voice droned on at the front of the room, something about unreliable narrators in Wuthering Heights.
I was vaguely aware of him assigning reading, of Rosalie making some comment under her breath that got a laugh out of Emmett, of the soft scratch of pens on paper and the shuffling of pages.
But I couldn't stop watching Jasper.
Not openly—never that. I wasn't stupid.
But out of the corner of my eye, when I was sure no one was paying attention.
He hadn't looked at me once during the entire class, which somehow made me feel more conscious of him than if he had.
Most people didn't know how to be quiet properly.
They used silence as a way to manipulate space—expecting a reaction, demanding presence even in stillness.
But Jasper… his quiet didn't feel demanding.
It was like he just was. A part of the silence.
Like he'd been carved out of it.
And maybe that's why I'd answered him.
Because he hadn't asked like someone trying to extract something from me.
He'd asked like someone who might actually get it.
I let my eyes drop to the paper in front of me.
A prompt was written in Marcus's barely legible scrawl on the whiteboard:
"How does emotional distance affect narrative perception in first-person accounts?"
I didn't write anything.
Not because I didn't have an answer.
But because it felt too obvious.
Emotional distance was survival.
You step back from the narrative so it doesn't swallow you whole.
You make yourself the observer, not the subject.
You tell the story in past tense, like it's already over.
Even when it isn't.
That's how I lived.
And how I kept surviving.
I didn't know if Jasper was like that too.
But I suspected.
And that made me wonder if he was still thinking about the kitchen that morning the way I was.
If he noticed that I'd spoken.
Or if, like everything else here, it had already faded into the blur of routines and therapy and the endless sound of Marcus sounding like death warmed over.
The bell rang.
People moved quickly.
Chairs scraped. Pages were shoved into binders. Someone made a joke near the back of the room and a small cluster of laughter broke out.
I stood, slowly, collecting my things.
And just as I turned toward the door, I felt a flicker of pressure in my chest.
A shift.
I glanced up—briefly—and across the room, Jasper was looking at me.
Not long. Not obviously.
Just a flicker. A glance.
But enough.
He remembered.
And suddenly the silence between us didn't feel so empty anymore.
It felt like something was beginning.
Even if I didn't know what.
Bella POV
Music wasn't something I'd ever really thought about.
Not deeply, anyway.
It was always just… there.
In the background.
In stores, on commercials, in my mom's kitchen when she was cooking and pretending things were okay.
I'd never taken the time to listen closely, to feel it, because what was the point?
It wasn't like a song was going to change anything.
It wasn't going to make the things in my head any quieter.
But now, sitting in this room surrounded by keyboards and string instruments that most of us didn't know how to use, I was starting to understand why maybe it mattered.
Athena stood at the front of the class, smiling that calm, encouraging smile she always wore, pointing out some chord progression on the board and asking if we could recognize it from the pop song she'd just played.
Half the class was paying attention.
The other half was doing what they always did—doodling, zoning out, whispering to each other about lunch, therapy, anything but this.
And then there was Edward. Stationed at the piano.
Not part of the lesson.
Not part of us.
Just him.
Athena had clearly figured out pretty early on that there was no point trying to teach him anything.
Not because he didn't need it, but because he already knew it all.
So now she just let him sit there and play.
It was probably her way of keeping him from getting bored—and keeping the rest of us from getting upstaged every five minutes.
I'd found it irritating at first.
The way he sat there, so casually detached, like the rules didn't apply to him.
And maybe they didn't.
Maybe they never had.
But now, after days of watching him glide into that seat like it belonged to him, and hearing his fingers touch the keys with such effortless precision…
I couldn't stay annoyed.
Because there was something different about how he played.
Not performative.
Not for praise.
It was like watching someone breathe.
There was a lull in Athena's voice as she turned to wipe the board.
A ripple of shifting chairs, the scrape of paper, Tyler sighing obnoxiously behind me.
Then—
Sound.
Soft and tentative.
The beginning of a melody so gentle it almost didn't register at first.
Like something private.
Like something I wasn't supposed to hear.
I glanced up from my worksheet.
Edward's hands were moving across the keys with absent grace, each note trailing into the next like a thought he hadn't fully spoken aloud.
The music didn't demand attention, didn't try to impress.
It just existed, quietly and confidently, like it had always been there and we were only just now lucky enough to notice.
It was… beautiful.
And I hated that word.
Hated how feminine and floaty it sounded in my head.
Hated that it applied so perfectly here.
But there was no denying it.
The music he played was beautiful.
And then...his eyes lifted.
And met mine.
It wasn't a long look.
Just a few seconds.
But something in me stilled.
Time didn't stop.
It didn't need to.
Because I did.
Something low in my stomach tightened, a fluttering that didn't make any sense.
His expression wasn't smug or teasing, not like I might've expected.
It was soft.
Barely even a smile. Just… a flicker of warmth.
Like we were sharing something, even if it was only for a moment.
And that was terrifying.
Because I didn't do that.
I didn't connect.
Not like that.
Not with looks that seemed to reach inside me and touch things I'd kept locked up tight.
I looked away, too quickly, my face heating as I dropped my gaze back to my paper.
Which may as well have been blank for all the words I could see on it.
What the hell was that?
Some trick of the lighting?
An awkward coincidence?
A brain glitch from skipping too many meals?
But I knew it wasn't any of those things.
Because whatever that moment had been—however brief, however quiet—something had stirred.
A crack in the carefully built walls.
A pulse beneath the numbness.
I didn't know what to do with it.
Didn't know what it meant.
But even after I looked away, even as the music flowed back into the space between us and Athena resumed talking like nothing had happened.
I could still feel it.
Like the echo of a heartbeat that wasn't mine.
Lauren POV
I was halfway through my salad when Kate showed up at the cafeteria door.
She was hard to miss, dressed in her usual soft colors like she'd just stepped off the set of some PBS therapist special—calm smile, unassuming eyes, voice like chamomile tea.
"Lauren?" she said gently, like I was a stray cat she was trying not to startle.
I swallowed, slowly set my fork down, and stood.
No use pretending I didn't know what this was.
Everyone had their turn.
Tonight, it was mine.
We walked in silence. Kate didn't make small talk, which I appreciated.
I wasn't really in the mood to pretend I wanted to chat about the weather or the mashed potatoes or whatever therapist icebreakers were popular this week.
The hallway was quieter than the rest of the building, the low hum of voices and music from the rec room getting swallowed up by thick walls and heavy doors.
She led me into an office that looked like every therapy space I'd ever been forced into: too tidy, too warm, like someone had gone out of their way to stage the idea of comfort but had never actually felt it.
I sat in the armchair because the other options were too on the nose.
She took her seat across from me, folded one leg over the other, and opened a folder—my folder, I assumed.
"So, Lauren," she said softly. "I know you've already figured this out, but I'm your primary therapist while you're at Denali."
"Yay," I said, voice flat.
She smiled like I'd just recited a heartfelt poem.
"I thought tonight we'd just talk a little. Nothing too deep—unless you want to. I just want to get to know you a bit better."
"Sure. Let's trauma bond."
Still smiling. Still unbothered. "Would it be okay if I asked you a few questions?"
"Would it matter if I said no?"
"Nope," she said cheerfully, making a note in the file.
I leaned back and crossed my arms. "Go on then. Let's peel back the layers of the broken Barbie doll."
She started with the basics.
How I was feeling about the program so far.
Whether I was sleeping.
What my eating habits were like.
What my relationships were like back home.
The usual.
I gave her half-truths.
Not because I was trying to hide anything.
But because I wasn't sure what she wanted to hear.
And because, honestly, some of the answers were too messy to say out loud.
She flipped a page.
"I've read the notes from your intake and initial behavioral assessments. Would you mind telling me a bit more about what was going on at home before you came here?"
I didn't respond right away.
Instead, I picked at the edge of the chair's armrest, dragging my nail along the upholstery.
"My dad's a control freak," I finally said. "The kind of guy who thinks love is yelling at you not to ruin your life while holding a Bible in one hand and a belt in the other."
Kate nodded, her face unreadable but not dismissive.
"He's terrified I'll end up a statistic. Pregnant, incarcerated, addicted—whatever fits the worst-case-scenario bingo card. So he figured shipping me off to Alaska with a bunch of psychos and junkies was a great way to turn things around."
I could feel the sarcasm sharpening my words like glass.
"He said he was at his wit's end. Which is hilarious, because I'm pretty sure he's never had a witty thought in his life."
Kate gave the smallest of smiles, but not in a mocking way.
"And your mother?"
"Still trying to pretend the '50s never ended. She cried while the maid packed my suitcase."
"Did she say goodbye?"
"Yeah," I said. "Right after Dad invited the muscle-bound henchmen inside to drag me out like I was resisting arrest."
That part still burned.
Not just the way they carried me out of my own house like I didn't belong there—but the way my father had let them.
Had called them.
Had stood there watching it happen.
Kate's voice was soft again. "How did that feel?"
"How do you think?" I snapped. Then caught myself.
She waited.
So I took a breath.
"It felt like betrayal," I said, quieter now. "Like I stopped being a daughter and became a liability."
She nodded slowly. "That must have hurt."
I blinked, looked away.
Yeah. No shit.
"Do you remember when the first time was that you felt like you weren't what your parents wanted you to be?"
That question knocked something loose in my chest.
I stared at a framed print on the wall behind her. Some vague mountain landscape. Probably Alaska.
"I don't know," I said. "Maybe when I was nine and my mom said I was getting chubby and took away dessert for a month. Or when my dad told me I was 'difficult like my mother's side of the family.' Or when I came home with a D in math and they made me go to a tutor for the entire summer instead of letting me hang out with my friends."
I paused, then added, "Or maybe it was when I started sneaking out because it was easier than trying to be perfect. At least at the parties, I didn't have to apologize for existing."
Kate didn't write anything down during that part. She just looked at me. Really looked.
And for some reason, that was worse.
After what felt like an hour of microdissections and uncomfortable self-awareness, Kate finally said,
"Thank you for telling me what you did. You didn't have to. But I appreciate that you did."
I nodded stiffly.
I didn't know how to respond to that kind of honesty.
It felt foreign.
Almost threatening.
"Same time next week?" she asked, her tone gentle again.
I shrugged. "It's not like I have a social calendar."
Kate smiled. "You're free to head to the rec room. Or just take some quiet time. Whatever you need."
I stood, straightened my shirt, and grabbed what was left of my dinner tray.
"Thanks," I mumbled, just loud enough for her to hear.
Her eyes flicked up with the same calmness as always. "Anytime."
As I walked out of her office and back toward the now-dimming corridors, I didn't feel lighter.
I didn't feel healed.
But I didn't feel quite as full of static, either.
And maybe… maybe that was a start.