New Moon

  I pulled my checkbook out, fanned myself with it, and rolled my eyes at his worries. "We're covered."

  It was a very strange kind of day. I enjoyed myself. Even at the dump, in the slopping rain and ankle-deep mud. I wondered at first if it was just the aftershock of losing the numbness, but I didn't think that was enough of an explanation.

  I was beginning to think it was mostly Jacob. It wasn't just that he was always so happy to see me, or that he didn't watch me out of the corner of his eye, waiting for me to do something that would mark me as crazy or depressed. It was nothing that related to me at all.

  It was Jacob himself. Jacob was simply a perpetually happy person, and he carried that happiness with him like an aura, sharing it with whoever was near him. Like an earthbound sun, whenever someone was within his gravitational pull, Jacob warmed them. It was natural, a part of who he was. No wonder I was so eager to see him.

  Even when he commented on the gaping hole in my dashboard, it didn't send me into a panic like it should have.

  "Did the stereo break?" he wondered.

  "Yeah," I lied.

  He poked around in the cavity. "Who took it out? There's a lot of damage..."

  "I did," I admitted.

  He laughed. "Maybe you shouldn't touch the motorcycles too much."

  "No problem."

  According to Jacob, we did get lucky at the dump. He was very excited about several grease-blackened pieces of twisted metal that he found; I was just impressed that he could tell what they were supposed to be.

  From there we went to the Checker Auto Parts down in Hoquiam. In my truck, it was more than a two hour drive south on the winding freeway, but the time passed easily with Jacob. He chattered about his friends and his school, and I found myself asking questions, not even pretending, truly curious to hear what he had to say.

  "I'm doing all the talking," he complained after a long story about Quil and the trouble he'd stirred up by asking out a senior's steady girlfriend. "Why don't you take a turn? What's going on in Forks? It has to be more exciting than La Push."

  "Wrong," I sighed. "There's really nothing. Your friends are a lot more interesting than mine. I like your friends. Quil's funny."

  He frowned. "I think Quil likes you, too."

  I laughed. "He's a little young for me."

  Jacob's frown deepened. "He's not that much younger than you. It's just a year and a few months."

  I had a feeling we weren't talking about Quil anymore. I kept my voice light, teasing. "Sure, but, considering the difference in maturity between guys and girls, don't you have to count that in dog years? What does that make me, about twelve years older?"

  He laughed, rolling his eyes. "Okay, but if you're going to get picky like that, you have to average in size, too. You're so small, I'll have to knock ten years off your total."

  "Five foot four is perfectly average." I sniffed. "It's not my fault you're a freak."

  We bantered like that till Hoquiam, still arguing over the correct formula to determine age--I lost two more years because I didn't know how to change a tire, but gained one back for being in charge of the bookkeeping at my house--until we were in Checker, and Jacob had to concentrate again. We found everything left on his list, and Jacob felt confident that he could make a lot of progress with our haul.

  By the time we got back to La Push, I was twenty-three and he was thirty--he was definitely weighting skills in his favor.

  I hadn't forgotten the reason for what I was doing. And, even though I was enjoying myself more than I'd thought possible, there was no lessening of my original desire. I still wanted to cheat. It was senseless, and I really didn't care. I was going to be as reckless as I could possibly manage in Forks. I would not be the only keeper of an empty contract. Getting to spend time with Jacob was just a much bigger perk than I'd expected.

  Billy wasn't back yet, so we didn't have to be sneaky about unloading our day's spoils. As soon as we had everything laid out on the plastic floor next to Jacob's toolbox, he went right to work, still talking and laughing while his fingers combed expertly through the metal pieces in front of him.

  Jacob's skill with his hands was fascinating. They looked too big for the delicate tasks they performed with ease and precision. While he worked, he seemed almost graceful. Unlike when he was on his feet; there, his height and big feet made him nearly as dangerous as I was.

  Quil and Embry did not show up, so maybe his threat yesterday had been taken seriously.

  The day passed too quickly. It got dark outside the mouth of the garage before I was expecting it, and then we heard Billy calling for us.

  I jumped up to help Jacob put things away, hesitating because I wasn't sure what I should touch.

  "Just leave it," he said. "I'll work on it later tonight."

  "Don't forget your schoolwork or anything," I said, feeling a little guilty. I didn't want him to get in trouble. That plan was just for me.

  "Bella?"

  Both our heads snapped up as Charlie's familiar voice wafted through the trees, sounding closer than the house.

  "Shoot," I muttered. "Coming!" I yelled toward the house.

  "Let's go." Jacob smiled, enjoying the cloak-and-dagger. He snapped the light off, and for a moment I was blind. Jacob grabbed my hand and towed me out of the garage and through the trees, his feet finding the familiar path easily. His hand was rough, and very warm.

  Despite the path, we were both tripping over our feet in the darkness. So we were also both laughing when the house came into view. The laughter did not go deep; it was light and superficial, but still nice. I was sure he wouldn't notice the faint hint of hysteria. I wasn't used to laughing, and it felt right and also very wrong at the same time.

  Charlie was standing under the little back porch, and Billy was sitting in the doorway behind them.

  "Hey, Dad," we both said at the same time, and that started us laughing again.

  Charlie stared at me with wide eyes that flashed down to note Jacob's hand around mine.

  "Billy invited us for dinner," Charlie said to us in an absentminded tone.

  "My super secret recipe for spaghetti. Handed down for generations," Billy said gravely.

  Jacob snorted. "I don't think Ragu's actually been around that long."

  The house was crowded. Harry Clearwater was there, too, with his family--his wife, Sue, whom I knew vaguely from my childhood summers in Forks, and his two children. Leah was a senior like me, but a year older. She was beautiful in an exotic way--perfect copper skin, glistening black hair, eyelashes like feather dusters--and preoccupied. She was on Billy's phone when we got in, and she never let it go. Seth was fourteen; he hung on Jacob's every word with idolizing eyes.

  There were too many of us for the kitchen table, so Charlie and Harry brought chairs out to the yard, and we ate spaghetti off plates on our laps in the dim light from Billy's open door. The men talked about the game, and Harry and Charlie made fishing plans. Sue teased her husband about his cholesterol and tried, unsuccessfully, to shame him into eating something green and leafy. Jacob talked mostly to me and Seth, who interrupted eagerly whenever Jacob seemed in danger of forgetting him. Charlie watched me, trying to be inconspicuous about it, with pleased but cautious eyes.

  It was loud and sometimes confusing as everyone talked over everyone else, and the laughter from one joke interrupted the telling of another. I didn't have to speak often, but I smiled a lot, and only because I felt like it.

  I didn't want to leave.

  This was Washington, though, and the inevitable rain eventually broke up the party; Billy's living room was much too small to provide an option for continuing the get-together. Harry had driven Charlie down, so we rode together in my truck on the way back home. He asked about my day, and I told mostly the truth--that I'd gone with Jacob to look at parts and then watched him work in his garage.

  "You think you'll visit again anytime soon?" he wondered, trying to be casual about it.

  "Tomorrow afte
r school," I admitted. "I'll take homework, don't worry."

  "You be sure to do that," he ordered, trying to disguise his satisfaction.

  I was nervous when we got to the house. I didn't want to go upstairs. The warmth of Jacob's presence was fading and, in its absence, the anxiety grew stronger. I was sure I wouldn't get away with two peaceful nights of sleep in a row.

  To put bedtime off, I checked my e-mail; there was a new message from Renee.

  She wrote about her day, a new book club that rilled the time slot of the meditation classes she'd just quit, her week subbing in the second grade, missing her kindergarteners. She wrote that Phil was enjoying his new coaching job, and that they were planning a second honeymoon trip to Disney World.

  And I noticed that the whole thing read like a journal entry, rather than a letter to someone else. Remorse flooded through me, leaving an uncomfortable sting behind. Some daughter I was.

  I wrote back to her quickly, commenting on each part of her letter, volunteering information of my own--describing the spaghetti party at Billy's and how I felt watching Jacob build useful things out of small pieces of metal--awed and slightly envious. I made no reference to the change this letter would be from the ones she'd received in the last several months. I could barely remember what I'd written to her even as recently as last week, but I was sure it wasn't very responsive. The more I thought about it, the guiltier I felt; I really must have worried her.

  I stayed up extra late after that, finishing more homework than strictly necessary. But neither sleep deprivation nor the time spent with Jacob--being almost happy in a shallow kind of way--could keep the dream away for two nights in a row.

  I woke shuddering, my scream muffled by the pillow.

  As the dim morning light filtered through the fog outside my window, I lay still in bed and tried to shake off the dream. There had been a small difference last night, and I concentrated on that.

  Last night I had not been alone in the woods. Sam Uley--the man who had pulled me from the forest floor that night I couldn't bear to think of consciously--was there. It was an odd, unexpected alteration. The man's dark eyes had been surprisingly unfriendly, filled with some secret he didn't seem inclined to share. I'd stared at him as often as my frantic searching had allowed; it made me uncomfortable, under all the usual panic, to have him there. Maybe that was because, when I didn't look directly at him, his shape seemed to shiver and change in my peripheral vision. Yet he did nothing but stand and watch. Unlike the time when we had met in reality, he did not offer me his help.

  Charlie stared at me during breakfast, and I tried to ignore him. I supposed I deserved it. I couldn't expect him not to worry. It would probably be weeks before he stopped watching for the return of the zombie, and I would just have to try to not let it bother me. After all, I would be watching for the return of the zombie, too. Two days was hardly long enough to call me cured.

  School was the opposite. Now that I was paying attention, it was clear that no one was watching here.

  I remembered the first day I'd come to Forks High School--how desperately I'd wished that I could turn gray, fade into the wet concrete of the sidewalk like an oversized chameleon. It seemed I was getting that wish answered, a year late.

  It was like I wasn't there. Even my teachers' eyes slid past my seat as if it were empty.

  I listened all through the morning, hearing once again the voices of the people around me. I tried to catch up on what was going on, but the conversations were so disjointed that I gave up.

  Jessica didn't look up when I sat down next to her in Calculus.

  "Hey, Jess," I said with put-on nonchalance. "How was the rest of your weekend?"

  She looked at me with suspicious eyes. Could she still be angry? Or was she just too impatient to deal with a crazy person?

  "Super," she said, turning back to her book.

  "That's good," I mumbled.

  The figure of speech cold shoulder seemed to have some literal truth to it. I could feel the warm air blowing from the floor vents, but I was still too cold. I took the jacket off the back of my chair and put it on again.

  My fourth hour class got out late, and the lunch table I always sat at was full by the time I arrived. Mike was there, Jessica and Angela, Conner, Tyler, Eric and Lauren. Katie Marshall, the redheaded junior who lived around the corner from me, was sitting with Eric, and Austin Marks--older brother to the boy with the motorcycles--was next to her. I wondered how long they'd been sitting here, unable to remember if this was the first day or something that was a regular habit.

  I was beginning to get annoyed with myself. I might as well have been packed in Styrofoam peanuts through the last semester.

  No one looked up when I sat down next to Mike, even though the chair squealed stridently against the linoleum as I dragged it back.

  I tried to catch up with the conversation.

  Mike and Conner were talking sports, so I gave up on that one at once.

  "Where's Ben today?" Lauren was asking Angela. I perked up, interested. I wondered if that meant Angela and Ben were still together.

  I barely recognized Lauren. She'd cut off all her blond, corn-silk hair--now she had a pixie cut so short that the back was shaved like a boy. What an odd thing for her to do. I wished I knew the reason behind it. Did she get gum stuck in it? Did she sell it? Had all the people she was habitually nasty to caught her behind the gym and scalped her? I decided it wasn't fair for me to judge her now by my former opinion. For all I knew, she'd turned into a nice person.

  "Ben's got the stomach flu," Angela said in her quiet, calm voice. "Hopefully it's just some twenty-four hour thing. He was really sick last night."

  Angela had changed her hair, too. She'd grown out her layers.

  "What did you two do this weekend?" Jessica asked, not sounding as if she cared about the answer. I'd bet that this was just an opener so she could tell her own stories. I wondered if she would talk about Port Angeles with me sitting two seats away? Was I that invisible, that no one would feel uncomfortable discussing me while I was here?

  "We were going to have a picnic Saturday, actually, but... we changed our minds," Angela said. There was an edge to her voice that caught my interest.

  Jess, not so much. "That's too bad," she said, about to launch into her story. But I wasn't the only one who was paying attention.

  "What happened?" Lauren asked curiously.

  "Well," Angela said, seeming more hesitant than usual, though she was always reserved, "we drove up north, almost to the hot springs--there's a good spot just about a mile up the trail. But, when we were halfway there... we saw something."

  "Saw something? What?" Lauren's pale eyebrows pulled together. Even Jess seemed to be listening now.

  "I don't know," Angela said. "We think it was a bear. It was black, anyway, but it seemed... too big."

  Lauren snorted. "Oh, not you, too!" Her eyes turned mocking, and I decided I didn't need to give her the benefit of the doubt. Obviously her personality had not changed as much as her hair. "Tyler tried to sell me that one last week."

  "You're not going to see any bears that close to the resort," Jessica said, siding with Lauren.

  "Really," Angela protested in a low voice, looking down at the table. "We did see it."

  Lauren snickered. Mike was still talking to Conner, not paying attention to the girls.

  "No, she's right," I threw in impatiently. "We had a hiker in just Saturday who saw the bear, too, Angela. He said it was huge and black and just outside of town, didn't he, Mike?"

  There was a moment of silence. Every pair of eyes at the table turned to stare at me in shock. The new girl, Katie, had her mouth hanging open like she'd just witnessed an explosion. Nobody moved.

  "Mike?" I muttered, mortified. "Remember the guy with the bear story?"

  "S-sure," Mike stuttered after a second. I didn't know why he was looking at me so strangely. I talked to him at work, didn't I? Did I? I thought so...

  Mi
ke recovered. "Yeah, there was a guy who said he saw a huge black bear right at the trailhead--bigger than a grizzly," he confirmed.

  "Hmph." Lauren turned to Jessica, her shoulders stiff, and changed the subject.

  "Did you hear back from USC?" she asked.

  Everyone else looked away, too, except for Mike and Angela. Angela smiled at me tentatively, and I hurried to return the smile.

  "So, what did you do this weekend, Bella?" Mike asked, curious, but oddly wary.

  Everyone but Lauren looked back, waiting for my response.

  "Friday night, Jessica and I went to a movie in Port Angeles. And then I spent Saturday afternoon and most of Sunday down at La Push."

  The eyes flickered to Jessica and back to me. Jess looked irritated. I wondered if she didn't want anyone to know she'd gone out with me, or whether she just wanted to be the one to tell the story.

  "What movie did you see?" Mike asked, starting to smile.

  "Dead End--the one with the zombies." I grinned in encouragement. Maybe some of the damage I'd done in these past zombie months was reparable.

  "I heard that was scary. Did you think so?" Mike was eager to continue the conversation.

  "Bella had to leave at the end, she was so freaked," Jessica inserted with a sly smile.

  I nodded, trying to look embarrassed. "It was pretty scary."

  Mike didn't stop asking me questions till lunch was over. Gradually, the others were able to start up their own conversations again, though they still looked at me a lot. Angela talked mostly to Mike and me, and, when I got up to dump my tray, she followed.

  "Thanks," she said in a low voice when we were away from the table.

  "For what?"

  "Speaking up, sticking up for me."

  "No problem."

  She looked at me with concern, but not the offensive, maybe-she's-lost-it kind. "Are you okay?"

  This is why I'd picked Jessica over Angela--though I'd always liked Angela more--for the girls' night movie. Angela was too perceptive.

  "Not completely," I admitted. "But I'm a little bit better."

  "I'm glad," she said. "I've missed you."

  Lauren and Jessica strolled by us then, and I heard Lauren whisper loudly, "Oh, joy Bella's back."

  Angela rolled her eyes at them, and smiled at me in encouragement.

  I sighed It was like I was starting all over again.