Twilight 2 | Page 4

Mr. Berty said we needed to see it performed to fully appreciate it—that's how
Shakespeare intended it to be presented."
Edward rolled his eyes.
"You've already seen the movie," Alice accused.

"But not the nineteen-sixties version. Mr. Berty said it was the best."
Finally, Alice lost the smug smile and glared at me. "This can be easy, or this can be
hard, Bella, but one way or the other—"
Edward interrupted her threat. "Relax, Alice. If Bella wants to watch a movie, then she
can. It's her birthday."
"So there," I added.
"I'll bring her over around seven," he continued. "That will give you more time to set up."
Alice's laughter chimed again. "Sounds good. See you tonight, Bella! It'll be fun, you'll
see." She grinned—the wide smile exposed all her perfect, glistening teeth—then pecked
me on the cheek and danced off toward her first class before I could respond.
"Edward, please—" I started to beg, but he pressed one cool finger to my lips.
"Let 's d iscuss it lat er. We're go ing to be lat e fo r c la ss."
No one bothered to stare at us as we took our usual seats in the back of the classroom (we
had almost every class together now—it was amazing the favors Edward could get the
female administrators to do for him). Edward and I had been together too long now to be
an object of gossip anymore. Even Mike Newton didn't bother to give me the glum stare
that used to make me feel a little guilty. He smiled now instead, and I was glad he seemed
to have accepted that we could only be friends. Mike had changed over the summer—his
face had lost some of the roundness, making his cheekbones more prominent, and he was
wearing his pale blond hair a new way; instead of bristly, it was longer and gelled into a
carefully casual disarray. It was easy to see where his inspiration came from—but
Edward's look wasn't something that could be achieved through imitation.
As the day progressed, I considered ways to get out of whatever was going down at the
Cullen house tonight. It would be bad enough to have to celebrate when I was in the
mood to mourn. But, worse than that, this was sure to involve attention and gifts.
Attention is never a good thing, as any other accident-prone klutz would agree. No one
wants a spotlight when they're likely to fall on their face.
And I'd very pointedly asked—well, ordered really—that no one give me any presents
this year. It looked like Charlie and Renee weren't the only ones who had decided to
overlook that.
I'd never had much mo ney, and that had never bothered me. Renee had raised me on a
kindergarten teacher's salary. Charlie wasn't getting rich at his job, either—he was the
police chief here in the tiny town of Forks. My only personal inco me came fro m the three
days a week I worked at the local sporting goods store. In a town this small, I was lucky
to have a job. Every penny I made went into my microscopic co llege fund. (College was
Plan B. I was still hoping for Plan A, but Edward was just so stubborn about leaving me
human…)
Edward had a lot of money—I didn't even want to think about how much. Money meant
next to nothing to Edward or the rest of the Cullens. It was just something that
accumulated when you had unlimited time on your hands and a sister who had an
uncanny ability to predict trends in the stock market. Edward didn't seem to understand

why I objected to him spending money on me—why it made me uncomfortable if he took
me to an expensive restaurant in Seattle, why he wasn't allowed to buy me a car that
could reach speeds over fifty-five miles an hour, or why I wouldn't let him pay my
college tuition (he was ridiculously enthusiastic about Plan B). Edward thought I was
being unnecessarily difficult.
But how could I let him give me things when I had nothing to reciprocate with? He, for
some unfathomable reason, wanted to be with me. Anything he gave me on top of that
just threw us more out of balance.
As the day went on, neither Edward nor Alice brought my birthday up again, and I began
to rela x a lit t le.
We sat at our usual table for lunch.
A strange kind of truce existed at that table. The three of us—Edward, Alice, and I—sat
on the extreme southern end of the table. Now that the "older" and somewhat scarier (in
Emmett's case, certainly) Cullen siblings had graduated, Alice and Edward did not seem
quite so int imidat ing,