Luminosity (Book One)

Chapter 6: Edward

I hurried through Friday trying as hard as I could to avoid more vampire stuff to process. I stuck to my human friends, finding someone to walk with between each class and sitting with them at lunch. During lunch I made homework buddy plans with Angela that involved me driving her to my house immediately after school. (Angela lived near enough to walk between school and home, and wouldn't leave a car behind that she'd have to fetch later.) When I met up with her right after gym, it successfully deterred Edward from catching up with me (I caught a glimpse of him in the parking lot, and his expression said that he certainly would have).

Angela hopped into my truck and we rumbled down the highway and to my house. I fixed us celery sticks and plopped some dip into a bowl, and then it was several hours solid of homework. At least ostensibly. Angela subscribed to the "work next to each other" theory of group studying, and didn't look over my shoulder. I finished everything that was due on Monday so it wouldn't hang over my head on the weekend. But after that, I pulled out my personal, non-school notebook, and thought in plain sight.

I had reasonably strong evidence that vampires "mated for life", so to speak. I didn't know if they ever engaged in casual friends-with-benefits arrangements, but from what Edward had said, if they actually went so far as to fall in love, there they stayed. Alice had said only that Edward "liked" me. But she had a strong motive to avoid spooking me and sending me out of Forks on the next plane. She'd asked me to promise not to stop speaking to her brother, and she'd approached me before I'd made any mental threats to go to Charlie about the family - she'd approached me at the first available opportunity after I'd decided to treat Edward's staring as a harrassment issue. (Well, she had also saved me from Tyler's van, but that was the sort of thing that would have likely turned up in any future-peeking she did about me.)

I wasn't sure if this particular aspect of vampirism "worked" with humans like me. But... If I would be easy for Edward to forget about, if I were just an arbitrary human who caught his fancy, there was no reason for the vampires to have any collective interest in me at all. There would be no reason for Edward to follow Alice's guidelines about what would set me off. There would be no reason for him to put himself through the ordeal of being around my super-yummy self. There would be no reason for his family to trouble themselves to welcome me. There would be no reason for Alice to see me eventually becoming a vampire. He would have every motivation in the world to go chew on elephants in Kenya or otherwise be not-here until I graduated and went off to college.

If Alice saw me as her future sister-in-law, though... eternally and vampirically bound to Edward...

Yes, then I could see Edward's family rallying around him, glad that the odd one out of their number had at last found his eternal bride - just add venom. I could see them graciously agreeing to satisfy my curiosities - which would have been dismissible at best and a death sentence at worst for anyone else. I could see Alice focusing on me, thinking of what I would do if Edward pursued me any of a hundred ways, coaching him...

I uttered a quiet curse. Angela looked up and I thwacked my trig book in plausible annoyance. She politely told me that her father was a minister and she'd be much obliged if I didn't swear at triangles around her, then looked back at her English essay.

I was suddenly reminded of something I'd written - at least a year and a half ago, I thought. That meant it would be in my computer, with my compiled and archived older thoughts, not in my notebook. I got up and fetched it; Angela wasn't curious, and I supposed she expected I'd be typing up my essay.

I tried a few too-generic keywords, searching through my logs and turning up a lot of redundancy. Finally I typed the phrase "romance novel", and my word processor took me directly to the correct section. A little under two years previously, I'd been the beneficiary of my great-aunt's sudden conversion to Catholicism and her disposal of her "sinful" book collection. She'd actually given the volumes to Renée, but Renée left them lying about, and I'd been bored one afternoon.