hindrance| jasper hale

first time.

   Do you recall when you bumped into me?

The summer had eased into fall. The crunch of leaves echoed through the sidewalk as the hoard of students made their way out of the school and towards the parking lot. Jasper kept his head down and pushed through the crowd to Emmett's jeep where the rest of the Cullens would be.

Alice had been giddy all morning, especially at lunch when Jasper had bumped into a girl and noticed her shirt inside out. Alice had smacked his arm when Jasper pointed the mistake out but was nonetheless excited when she introduced herself and Jasper to her.

Alice's good mood had ruined his, and after the awkward interaction, Jasper felt like dying in a hole and never seeing sunlight again. Not that Forks had much of it, to begin with.

Jasper didn't realize he had zoned out, and roughly bumped into someone, and sent them to the ground. Jasper wanted to scream. When he regained his footing and looked over, he saw the girl from lunch trying to get back up. She was scowling, grunted, and asked, "What the hell is your problem?"

Jasper muttered a quiet, "Sorry," before his eyes caught a binder laying in a big puddle a few inches away from a car. The girl's eyes followed Jaspers and widened.

"You've got to be kidding me," she whined, pushing forward to pick up the soaked binder, water pouring out of it like a faucet. "That was my History project, dude."

Jasper felt a mixture of annoyance and guilt-- he didn't mean to bump into her so hard, but she should have been walking faster, and--

"Oh no!" Alice's shrill voice came from nowhere, the bouncy pixie wrapping her arms around Jasper's shoulders, "That's the one you just finished last night, right Jazz?"

Jasper grunted, moving to swat at Alice to shut her up, but the girl slightly perked up, and with the lamest puppy dog eyes, looked at Jasper. Alice grinned, and Jasper knew where this was going. "Jazz, you could totally help her redo it since you kinda ruined hers."

Jasper looked between the two girls, before sighing in defeat. "Yeah, I guess." The girl picked herself up with Alice's help, and Alice eagerly gave the girl Jaspers information before setting up a student date at that crappy cafe in town. That was the first time Jasper had heard her name, Theresa.

"But seriously, call me Tera," she said, tucking a brown lock behind her ear. "I'll see you tomorrow, yeah?"

"Yeah," Jasper nodded. When "Tera" was out of earshot, Jasper spun over and glared at the pixie-haired girl. "You knew that was going to happen."

"I have no idea what you could possibly mean," Alice mused, bopping Jasper and making a sly comment about, "you need more friends anyways."

After an hour of going over World War II with "Tera", Jasper was sipping on a strawberry shake with the brunette ranting about the Holocaust. The shake had really no taste, just served as a filler (and appearance) so he wouldn't be stuck purely in his own mind as he watched the human fumble over the easiest of the dates.

"Did you not look at the lesson?" Jasper finally asked, Tera, looking up slowly with a visibly pink on her cheeks.

"Not really. History isn't my best class, honestly." She looked back down to scribble more about Sam Houston. Jasper nodded, more to himself, and went back to his own notes. Rereading the words he wrote from memory, he got lost in the memories for a moment before his phone went off. Sighing, Jasper looked at the request Alice had sent him.

"Alice wants to know if you wanted to go bowling this weekend." Jasper wanted to crawl inside a hole and never escape. The wide-eyed look he got from Tera made him sick to his stomach and he felt even worse when the human grinned and muttered a simple, "Sure."

So there he was on Saturday night, surrounded by Emmitt, Roslie, Alice, and Tera. Edward had opted out to go hang with his own human, and Alice wouldn't let Jasper say no even if he did have a valid excuse not to come.

Jasper watched Tera giggle and bump shoulders with Alice, who was eating up this time spent with the human like candy. Emmitt and Roslie were being friendly, well- as "friendly" as Roslie could get. And Jasper was simply staying in his corner, doing relatively well on the board and staying in his own lane.

"I don't think I've ever sucked this bad at bowling," Tera said, and Alice snickered.

"We do this all the time so we're kinda seasoned at this," Alice explained, though forgetting the part where they were actually superhuman, and her incompetence wasn't really her fault at all.

Tera looked over to Jasper and whispered something ("Jasper doesn't seem like he likes bowling very much, though.") to Alice that made the pixie bust into giggles. "No," Alice wheezed, "No we usually have to drag him along. This is him putting up with us, honestly."

Tera grinned and nodded. "Seems about right."

When the human's turn came up again, Jasper noticed her shoelace had come untied, and before Jasper could get up and warn her, Tera had already slipped and the bowling ball lamely fell down the lane. The slow-motion fall made Jasper wince, but the shriek the human let out, made something bubble inside of him. By the time Tera had hit the floor, Jasper realized he had laughed at her slip up.

Tera was giggling too, looking to Jasper as they both sat there snickering at the fall. Rosalie and Emmitt snickered a little too, but Alice simply stared at them with glee.

The next Monday, Tera waved at Jasper and Alice in the school hallway. And for some strange reason, Jasper found himself waving back.