TWILIGHT (The Twilight Saga, Book 1)

"You're Isabella Swan, aren't you?" He looked like the overly helpful, chess club type.
"Bella," I corrected. Everyone within a three-seat radius turned to look at me.
"Where's your next class?" he asked.
I had to check in my bag. "Um, Government, with Jefferson, in building six."
There was nowhere to look without meeting curious eyes.
"I'm headed toward building four, I could show you the way…" Definitely over-helpful. "I'm Eric," he
added.
I smiled tentatively. "Thanks."
We got our jackets and headed out into the rain, which had picked up. I could have sworn several
people behind us were walking close enough to eavesdrop. I hoped I wasn't getting paranoid.
"So, this is a lot different than Phoenix, huh?" he asked.
"Very."
"It doesn't rain much there, does it?"
"Three or four times a year."
"Wow, what must that be like?" he wondered.
"Sunny," I told him.
"You don't look very tan."
"My mother is part albino."
He studied my face apprehensively, and I sighed. It looked like clouds and a sense of humor didn't mix.
A few months of this and I'd forget how to use sarcasm.
We walked back around the cafeteria, to the south buildings by the gym. Eric walked me right to the
door, though it was clearly marked.
"Well, good luck," he said as I touched the handle. "Maybe we'll have some other classes together." He
sounded hopeful.
I smiled at him vaguely and went inside.
The rest of the morning passed in about the same fashion. My Trigonometry teacher, Mr. Varner, who I
would have hated anyway just because of the subject he taught, was the only one who made me stand in
front of the class and introduce myself. I stammered, blushed, and tripped over my own boots on the
way to my seat.
After two classes, I started to recognize several of the faces in each class. There was always someone
braver than the others who would introduce themselves and ask me questions about how I was liking
Forks. I tried to be diplomatic, but mostly I just lied a lot. At least I never needed the map.
One girl sat next to me in both Trig and Spanish, and she walked with me to the cafeteria for lunch. She
was tiny, several inches shorter than my five feet four inches, but her wildly curly dark hair made up a lot
of the difference between our heights. I couldn't remember her name, so I smiled and nodded as she
prattled about teachers and classes. I didn't try to keep up.
We sat at the end of a full table with several of her friends, who she introduced to me. I forgot all their
names as soon as she spoke them. They seemed impressed by her bravery in speaking to me. The boy
from English, Eric, waved at me from across the room.
It was there, sitting in the lunchroom, trying to make conversation with seven curious strangers, that I first
saw them.
They were sitting in the corner of the cafeteria, as far away from where I sat as possible in the long room.
There were five of them. They weren't talking, and they weren't eating, though they each had a tray of
untouched food in front of them. They weren't gawking at me, unlike most of the other students, so it was
safe to stare at them without fear of meeting an excessively interested pair of eyes. But it was none of
these things that caught, and held, my attention.
They didn't look anything alike. Of the three boys, one was big — muscled like a serious weight lifter,
with dark, curly hair. Another was taller, leaner, but still muscular, and honey blond. The last was lanky,
less bulky, with untidy, bronze-colored hair. He was more boyish than the others, who looked like they
could be in college, or even teachers here rather than students.
The girls were opposites. The tall one was statuesque. She had a beautiful figure, the kind you saw on the
cover of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, the kind that made every girl around her take a hit on her
self-esteem just by being in the same room. Her hair was golden, gently waving to the middle of her
back. The short girl was pixielike, thin in the extreme, with small features. Her hair was a deep black,
cropped short and pointing in every direction.
And yet, they were all exactly alike. Every one of them was chalky pale, the palest of all the students
living in this sunless town. Paler than me, the albino. They all had very dark eyes despite the range in hair
tones. They also had dark shadows under those eyes — purplish, bruiselike shadows. As if they were all
suffering from a sleepless night, or almost done recovering from a broken nose. Though their noses, all
their features, were straight, perfect, angular.
But all this is not why I couldn't look away.
I stared because their faces, so different, so similar, were all devastatingly, inhumanly beautiful. They
were faces you never expected to see except perhaps on the airbrushed pages of a fashion magazine. Or
painted by an old master as the face of an angel. It was hard to decide who was the most beautiful —
maybe the perfect blond girl, or the bronze-haired boy.
They were all looking away — away from each other, away from the other students, away from anything
in particular as far as I could tell. As I watched, the small girl rose with her tray — unopened soda,
unbitten apple — and walked away with a quick, graceful lope that belonged on a runway. I watched,
amazed at her lithe dancer's step, till she dumped her tray and glided through the back door, faster than I
would have thought possible. My eyes darted back to the others, who sat unchanging.
"Who are they?" I asked the girl from my Spanish class, whose name I'd forgotten.
As she looked up to see who I meant — though already knowing, probably, from my tone — suddenly
he looked at her, the thinner one, the boyish one, the youngest, perhaps. He looked at my neighbor for
just a fraction of a second, and then his dark eyes flickered to mine.
He looked away quickly, more quickly than I could, though in a flush of embarrassment I dropped my
eyes at once. In that brief flash of a glance, his face held nothing of interest — it was as if she had called
his name, and he'd looked up in involuntary response, already having decided not to answer.
My neighbor giggled in embarrassment, looking at the table like I did.
"That's Edward and Emmett Cullen, and Rosalie and Jasper Hale. The one who left was Alice Cullen;
they all live together with Dr. Cullen and his wife." She said this under her breath.
I glanced sideways at the beautiful boy, who was looking at his tray now, picking a bagel to pieces with
long, pale fingers. His mouth was moving very quickly, his perfect lips barely opening. The other three still
looked away, and yet I felt he was speaking quietly to them.
Strange, unpopular names, I thought. The kinds of names grandparents had. But maybe that was in vogue
here — small town names? I finally remembered that my neighbor was called Jessica, a perfectly
common name. There were two girls named Jessica in my History class back home.
"They are… very nice-looking." I struggled with the conspicuous understatement.
"Yes!" Jessica agreed with another giggle. "They're all together though — Emmett and Rosalie, and
Jasper and Alice, I mean. And they live together." Her voice held all the shock and condemnation of the
small town, I thought critically. But, if I was being honest, I had to admit that even in Phoenix, it would
cause gossip.
"Which ones are the Cullens?" I asked. "They don't look related…"
"Oh, they're not. Dr. Cullen is really young, in his twenties or early thirties. They're all adopted. The
Hales are brother and sister, twins — the blondes — and they're foster children."
"They look a little old for foster children."
"They are now, Jasper and Rosalie are both eighteen, but they've been with Mrs. Cullen since they were
eight. She's their aunt or something like that."
"That's really kind of nice — for them to take care of all those kids like that, when they're so young and
everything."
"I guess so," Jessica admitted reluctantly, and I got the impression that she didn't like the doctor and his
wife for some reason. With the glances she was throwing at their adopted children, I would presume the
reason was jealousy. "I think that Mrs. Cullen can't have any kids, though," she added, as if that lessened
their kindness.
Throughout all this conversation, my eyes flickered again and again to the table where the strange family
sat. They continued to look at the walls and not eat.
"Have they always lived in Forks?" I asked. Surely I would have noticed them on one of my summers
here.
"No," she said in a voice that implied it should be obvious, even to a new arrival like me. "They just
moved down two years ago from somewhere in Alaska."
I felt a surge of pity, and relief. Pity because, as beautiful as they were, they were outsiders, clearly not
accepted. Relief that I wasn't the only newcomer here, and certainly not the most interesting by any
standard.