twiligth | Page 6

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 so me 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 subject he 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 conversat ion 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 blo nd. The last was lanky, less bulky, with unt idy, 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 fro m a broken nose. Though their noses, 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 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 bo y.
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,