Writings

The Trans-Canada highway runs through Calgary. The speed limit is a hundred kilometers per hour. That’s a completely fine speed limit on a dry, sunny day.

It’s a terrible speed limit on ice.

Forward

From Montana, we moved to Portsmouth, New Hampshire which is very cold in the winter. The house was tiny, and all seven of us lived there in four cramped bedrooms with hardly enough room to get around.

Carlisle suggested that maybe we get an upright instead of a baby grand this time.

Edward looked stricken.

Cramming a giant piano into the middle of a tiny living room is a lot easier than making Edward upset.

Forward

For the first day Maria was at the house, things actually went okay. I almost liked her; the way she talked in this odd mix of English and rapid-fire Spanish that kept me on my toes. I liked that she teased Jasper almost as much as I do. He took it like a gentleman.

The first day Maria was at the house, we actually relaxed.

Which was probably where we misstepped.

Forward

It rains a great deal in New Hampshire. It was pouring down evening when Carlisle was at work. Esme and Rosalie were working on some sewing project I wasn’t interested in, and Jasper and Emmett were battling it out at some new Parker Brothers game.

Muffled music from the second floor told me Edward was in his room.

As soon as I decided I should go find him, a framed photo went flying at my head and the glass shattered.

“Get out!” he screamed.

And then the world swung. Edward ran after me, laughing. He was in a field somewhere, with the mist of what might have been a pretty girl. We were sitting so close our knees touched.

He whispered.

I whispered back.

We both laughed.

So, I got up from my chair, and I went to find him.

He was sitting in the middle of his bedroom, reading from a little black book. I didn’t know what it was.

“What are you reading?” I asked.

He leapt to his feet—had I surprised him somehow?—slammed the little book closed, and wrapped his hand around the nearest item he could find, which happened to be a framed photograph of a couple and their baby. I wanted to catch it, but I couldn’t—it had to smash.

The smashing lead to the whispering. And the laughing.

“Get out!” he screamed.

I nodded. I picked up the photo and handed it back to him.

The woman in the photo had Edward’s eyes.

Forward

The way this story ends is that Edward is my best friend.

I know that’s not how you’re supposed to tell a story; it’s the kind of thing that annoys the snot out of Jasper, or would, if he had any to be annoyed out. But it’s the way I tell a story. Because I always know the end.

The Cullens—my family—are big readers. I think it’s because of Carlisle, who did nothing but read for two centuries. And the rest of them all follow suit, even Jasper and Emmett, who you think wouldn’t read much. But there’re a lot more books than there are TV shows and even vampires get bored with bad TV.

Reading doesn’t work very well for me, though. I see the final page turn, and I see the end of the book, and I see my reactions to the parts in the middle, and by the time I’ve picked something up I’ve decided to read, I already know the end. So if I read, I read differently—I read to appreciate the way the writer used her words, or the way he kept tension moving from scene to scene. I read to laugh at a funny line of dialogue.

I don’t read to know the end. I always know that from the beginning.

So the end of this story is that Edward is my best friend.

But that’s not how it begins.

Forward