twi saga | Page 7

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 m ake conversation with
seven curious strangers, that I first saw them.
They were sitting in the corner of the cafeteria, a s 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 th ey each had a tray of
untouched food in front of them. They weren't gawki ng 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, cu rly hair. Another was
taller, leaner, but still muscular, and honey blond . The last was lanky,
less bulky, with untidy, bronze-colored hair. He wa s more boyish than
the others, who looked like they could be in colleg e, or even teachers
here rather than students.
The girls were opposites. The tall one was statuesq ue. She had a
beautiful figure, the kind you saw on the cover of the Sports Illustrated
swimsuit issue, the kind that made every girl aroun d 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 sunle ss 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 — purpli sh, bruiselike
shadows. As if they were all suffering from a sleep less night, or almost
done recovering from a broken nose. Though their no ses, all their
features, were straight, perfect, angular.
But all this is not why I couldn't look away.
I stared because their faces, so different, so simi lar, 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 perfec t blond girl, or
the bronze-haired boy.
They were all looking away — away from each other, a way 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 — unope ned soda, unbitten
apple — and walked away with a quick, graceful lope that belonged on a
runway. I watched, amazed at her lithe dancer's ste p, till she dumped
her tray and glided through the back door, faster t han 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 na me I'd
forgotten.
As she looked up to see who I meant — though alread y 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 br ief flash of a
glance, his face held nothing of interest — it was a s if she had called his
name, and he'd looked up in involuntary response, a lready having
decided not to answer.
My neighbor giggled in embarrassment, looking at th e table like I did.
"That's Edward and Emmett Cullen, and Rosalie and J asper Hale. The
one who left was Alice Cullen; they all live togeth er with Dr. Cullen and
his wife." She said this under her breath.
I glanced sideways at the beautiful boy, who was lo oking at his tray
now, picking a bagel to pieces with long, pale fing ers. His mouth was
moving very quickly, his perfect lips barely openin g. The other three still
looked away, and yet