Pinned but Fluttering

Chapter 1

So here's Chapter 1 at last. I hope that you all like it. I've been pleasantly surprised by the interest in Pinned but Fluttering and I hope it lives up to your expectations. Let me know what you think, okay?

As always, I don't own Twilight; I only wish I did. But I do love messing with SM's characters; some of them are extremely OOC (out of character) in this fic. 



Chapter 1

I lay curled in a ball atop the stained mattress I've slept on every night since I was ten—when I first came here—listening to them argue. About me. Again.

Change had indeed come in the form of Mrs. Jane, a sharp-faced woman who had pounded on the front door a week ago. Mrs. Jane and Billy had argued on the front porch, starting with low, hissing voices that grew louder and louder until Billy was shouting.

Even through my locked door, I could hear every word.

At last someone on the Quileute Reservation had reported Billy after not seeing me outside his house for two years. I don't know who did it—and Mrs. Jane bravely refused to tell Billy the name of the informant despite his shouts and thinly-veiled threats.

I admired her bravery. I didn't possess that kind of bravery. Above all else, I avoided making Billy angry; I had learned my lesson all-too-well in the past. And I was glad that I wouldn't be on the receiving end of his diatribe at the next council meeting. Billy was the unofficial leader of the Quileute Tribe, and someone had gone behind his back to protect me. My heart warmed with unspoken gratitude toward this unknown person, but undiluted fear caused the rest of my body to continue trembling.

I knew too well whom he would blame for this situation in the end.

Billy had assumed, apparently wrongly, that he was safe on the Reservation, that no one from my former life would or could report him. But someone had called Child Protective Services, and since I was still legally under the care of the state of Washington rather than the sovereign Quileute Nation despite living in La Push, they came. Or at least Mrs. Jane came.

While I appreciated her wish to help me, I knew it was useless. Hopeless.

Her interference would only make things worse. Much worse.

Billy would be on the warpath now...no pun intended. He was an imposing man, his dark face lined with years of drink.

He blamed his drinking on me, too.

He blamed the accident on me—the accident that took his wife's life and put him in the wheelchair.

And he was teaching Jacob to blame me, too. For everything.

It was hard to remember Billy and his wife and their three kids before the accident, back when they were the normal, happy family to whom my parents had left me after they died.

When I was eight, my mom got cancer. She got thinner and thinner, wasting away. She didn't attempt chemotherapy when the doctors told her that the medicines would only extend her life by a month or so, and she didn't want to spend her last months throwing up. So she just faded away.

I remember laying on my parents' bed, next to her, sleeping beside her as my mom didn't want me to leave her sight. Dad took care of her, with my help. We tried to keep her eating, tried to keep her comfortable. Several times each day I would place my warm palm against her thin, cold face, and tell her how much I loved her.