Twilight / Life and Death

I never gave much thought to how I would die, but I never imagined it would be like this. It was to Forks that I exiled myself - an action I took with great horror. In the Olympic Peninsula of northwest Washington, a small town named Forks exists under a near-constant cover of clouds, a gloomy, omnipresent shade my mother escaped with me when I was a few months old. But she had remarried, and her new husband's life on the road left her perpetually unhappy. So I left the sun and the blistering heat of Phoenix for the dripping, green, alien planet of Forks to live with my police chief father, Charlie. He was a man of few words, and his quiet house was a time capsule of the marriage he'd never gotten over. The one bright spot was the faded red truck he bought for me, a noisy, solid iron affair that became my haven in a town where I was sure I would never belong.

It was there, sitting in the lunchroom of my new high school, trying to make conversation with seven curious strangers, that I first saw them. There were five of them, sitting in a corner, not talking, not eating. They were all chalky pale, with dark, bruise-like shadows under their eyes. And yet, they were all devastatingly, inhumanly beautiful, faces you never expected to see except perhaps painted by an old master as the face of an angel. They were the Cullens and the Hales, adopted children of the town's young doctor. They kept to themselves, outsiders just as I was, though it seemed their isolation was by choice. As I watched, the youngest one, the boy with the untidy, bronze-colored hair, looked up and met my gaze. His name, I learned, was Edward.

My first class with him was a nightmare. When I walked into Biology, he went rigid in his seat, staring at me with an expression of hostile, furious revulsion. He sat on the extreme edge of his chair, leaning as far from me as possible, his hand clenched into a white-knuckled fist. The look in his black eyes was so full of hate that I was terrified, though I couldn't imagine its cause. He was gone from school for a week after that, and I couldn't shake the nagging suspicion that I was the reason. When he returned, he was a different person. “My name is Edward Cullen,” he said, his voice quiet and musical. He was friendly, overwhelmingly charming, and his eyes were no longer black, but a strange, warm ocher, the color of butterscotch.

The day the ice slicked over the school parking lot, I saw the dark blue van skidding, spinning wildly toward me. I didn't even have time to close my eyes. But just before the shattering crunch, something hit me, hard, and I was on the ground behind another car, something solid and cold pinning me down. Two long, white hands shot out and stopped the van a foot from my face, leaving a deep dent in its metal body. It was Edward. He had been standing four cars down, and in less than a second, he had crossed the lot to save me. He begged me to forget what I'd seen, to accept a lie, but it was impossible. He was impossibly fast, impossibly strong, and his skin was impossibly cold.

My obsession grew, a consuming mystery I couldn't leave alone. He was cold and distant one day, intensely focused on me the next. On a rare sunny day, I went with friends to the beach at La Push, the nearby reservation, where I ran into an old family friend, Jacob Black. Trying to understand the Cullens' strangeness, I flirted with him, coaxing him to tell me his tribe's old stories. “Do you know any of our legends about the cold ones?” he asked, his voice dropping low. He told me of a treaty made with a family of “blood drinkers” who hunted animals instead of people, who were forbidden from Quileute land. “Your people call them vampires,” he whispered, and the word hung in the air between us.

It wasn't until he saved me a second time, from a group of men who cornered me in a dark Port Angeles alley, that I finally confronted him. Speeding away from town in his silver Volvo, I told him my theory. He didn't deny it. He confessed everything - that he could read minds, though mine was strangely silent to him; that he was a vampire, frozen at seventeen since 1918; that my blood smelled more appealing to him than any other human's he had ever encountered. “You are exactly my brand of heroin,” he explained, his voice laced with self-loathing and a terrifying hunger. He admitted that his initial hatred had been a desperate attempt to fight the overwhelming thirst I provoked in him.

He took me to a sun-drenched meadow deep in the forest, a place he loved when the weather was clear. There, he stepped into a circle of buttery sunshine, and I finally understood why his family avoided the light. His skin, which was pale and smooth in the shade, literally sparkled, like thousands of tiny diamonds were embedded in the surface. He was terrifying, and he was beautiful. We spent the day there, and I learned the story of his compassionate father, Carlisle, who had created their family and taught them to live without being monsters. As his cold lips touched mine for the first time, I knew that about three things I was absolutely positive. First, Edward was a vampire. Second, there was a part of him that thirsted for my blood. And third, I was unconditionally and irrevocably in love with him.

Our peace was not to last. While playing baseball with his family during a thunderstorm - the crash of the bat against the ball hidden by the rolling thunder - we were interrupted. Three nomadic vampires, their eyes a deep, predatory burgundy, emerged from the woods. Their leader, Laurent, was civilized enough, but the second male, a tracker named James, caught my scent on the wind. A feral snarl ripped from Edward's throat as he crouched to defend me, and in that instant, the game was set. James, thrilled by the challenge of a protected human, had found his new hunt.

What followed was a frantic escape. To protect Charlie, I staged a brutal fight with Edward, screaming cruel words I knew would wound my father, forcing him to let me leave. With Alice and Jasper as my guards, we fled to Phoenix, hoping to draw the tracker away from Forks. But James was cleverer than we knew. He found my mother's house, and using old home videos of my childhood, he tricked me into believing he held her hostage. “Be very careful not to say anything until I tell you to,” a pleasant voice on the phone instructed, while my mother's panicked cries from the video played in the background.

I slipped away from Alice and Jasper, my heart shattered, knowing I was walking to my death. I met him in the empty ballet studio I had attended as a child. The end came quickly. He broke my leg, threw me into the mirrors, and as the scent of my own blood filled the room, I felt his teeth sink into my hand. But as I drifted into darkness, I heard the sound of an angel. Edward had come. The last thing I knew was a searing fire spreading from my hand up my arm, and Edward's cold lips pressing against the wound, desperately trying to suck the venom out before it could change me forever. Waking in a hospital room, I found him by my side, his face etched with a pain that mirrored my own. We had survived, but I knew nothing would ever be the same.