We walked back around the cafeteria, to the south buildings by the gym. Eric walked

me right to the door, though it was clearly marked.

"Well, good luck," he said as I touched the handle. "Maybe we'll have some other

classes together." He sounded hopeful.

I smiled at him vaguely and went inside.

The rest of the morning passed in about the same fashion. My Trigonometry teacher,

Mr. Varner, who I would have hated anyway just because of the subjecthe taught, was the

only one who made me stand in front of the class and introduce myself. I stammered,

blushed, and tripped over my own boots on the way to my seat.

After two classes, I started to recognize several of the faces in each class. There was

always someone braver than the others who would introduce themselves and ask me

questions about how I was liking Forks. I tried to be diplomatic, but mostly I just lied a

lot. At least I never needed the map.

One girl sat next to me in both Trig and Spanish, and she walked with me to the

cafeteria for lunch. She was tiny, several inches shorter than my five feet four inches, but

her wildly curly dark hair made up a lot of the difference between our heights. I couldn't

remember her name, so I smiled and nodded as she prattled about teachers and classes. I

didn't try to keep up.

We sat at the end of a full table with several of her friends, who she introduced to me. I

forgot all their names as soon as she spoke them. They seemed impressed by her bravery

in speaking to me. The boy from English, Eric, waved at me from across the room.

It was there, sitting in the lunchroom, trying to make conversation with seven curious

strangers, that I first saw them.

They were sitting in the corner of the cafeteria, as far away from where I sat as possible

in the long room. There were five of them. They weren't talking, and they weren't eating,

though they each had a tray of untouched food in front of them. They weren't gawking at

me, unlike most of the other students, so it was safe to stare at them without fear of

meeting an excessively interested pair of eyes. But it was none of these things that

caught, and held, my attention.

They didn't look anything alike. Of the three boys, one was big — muscled like a

serious weight lifter, with dark, curly hair. Another was taller, leaner, but still muscular,

and honey blond. The last was lanky, less bulky, with untidy, bronze-colored hair. He was

more boyish than the others, who looked like they could be in college, or even teachers

here rather than students.

The girls were opposites. The tall one was statuesque. She had a beautiful figure, the

kind you saw on the cover of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, the kind that made

every girl around her take a hit on her self-esteem just by being in the same room. Her

hair was golden, gently waving to the middle of her back. The short girl was pixielike,

thin in the extreme, with small features. Her hair was a deep black, cropped short and

pointing in every direction.

And yet, they were all exactly alike. Every one of them was chalky pale, the palest of

all the students living in this sunless town. Paler than me, the albino. They all had very

dark eyes despite the range in hair tones. They also had dark shadows under those eyes —

purplish, bruiselike shadows. As if they were all suffering from a sleepless night, or

almost done recovering from a broken nose. Though their noses, all their features, were

straight, perfect, angular.

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But all this is not why I couldn't look away.

I stared because their faces, so different, so similar, were all devastatingly, inhumanly

beautiful. They were faces you never expected to see except perhaps on the airbrushed

pages of a fashion magazine. Or painted by an old master as the face of an angel. It was

hard to decide who was the most beautiful — maybe the perfect blond girl, or the bronze-

haired boy.

They were all looking away — away from each other, away from the other students,

away from anything in particular as far as I could tell. As I watched, the small girl rose

with her tray — unopened soda, unbitten apple — and walked away with a quick,

graceful lope that belonged on a runway. I watched, amazed at her lithe dancer's step, till

she dumped her tray and glided through the back door, faster than I would have thought

possible. My eyes darted back to the others, who sat unchanging.

"Who are they ?" I asked the girl from my Spanish class, whose name I'd forgotten.

As she looked up to see who I meant — though already knowing, probably, from my

tone — suddenly he looked at her, the thinner one, the boyish one, the youngest, perhaps.

He looked at my neighbor for just a fraction of a second, and then his dark eyes flickered

to mine.

He looked away quickly, more quickly than I could, though in a flush of embarrassment

I dropped my eyes at once. In that brief flash of a glance, his face held nothing of interest

— it was as if she had called his name, and he'd looked up in involuntary response,

already having decided not to answer.

My neighbor giggled in embarrassment, looking at the table like I did.

"That's Edward and Emmett Cullen, and Rosalie and Jasper Hale. The one who left was

Alice Cullen; they all live together with Dr. Cullen and his wife." She said this under her

breath.

I glanced sideways at the beautiful boy, who was looking at his tray now, picking a

bagel to pieces with long, pale fingers. His mouth was moving very quickly, his perfect

lips barely opening. The other three still looked away, and yet I felt he was speaking

quietly to them.

Strange, unpopular names, I thought. The kinds of names grandparents had. But maybe

that was in vogue here — small town names? I finally remembered that my neighbor was

called Jessica, a perfectly common name. There were two girls named Jessica in my

History class back home.

"They are… very nice-looking." I struggled with the conspicuous understatement.

"Yes!" Jessica agreed with another giggle. "They're all together though — Emmett and

Rosalie, and Jasper and Alice, I mean. And they live together." Her voice held all the

shock and condemnation of the small town, I thought critically. But, if I was being

honest, I had to admit that even in Phoenix, it would cause gossip.

"Which ones are the Cullens?" I asked. "They don't look related…"

"Oh, they're not. Dr. Cullen is really young, in his twenties or early thirties. They're all

adopted. The Hales are brother and sister, twins — the blondes — and they're foster

children."

"They look a little old for foster children."

"They are now, Jasper and Rosalie are both eighteen, but they've been with Mrs. Cullen

since they were eight. She's their aunt or something like that."

"That's really kind of nice — for them to take care of all those kids like that, when they're so young and everything."