Twilight

Hating what she’s about to do to her father, Bella quickly kisses Edward, storms into her house, yells, “Go away, Edward!” (392), and slams the door. She races upstairs; her father follows, asking what’s the matter. She locks herself in her room and begins frantically to pack—Edward’s already there, helping—while yelling angrily that she broke up with Edward. He helps her sling her duffle bag onto her shoulder and disappears out a window.

Bella bursts from her room and storms downstairs, where she tells Charlie she likes Edward too much and is scared she’ll become trapped in “stupid, boring” Forks like her mother. Before he can stop her, she rushes outside, climbs into her truck, yells to Charlie that she’ll call him the following day, and pulls away from the house.

Edward, already in the truck, takes over the driving. Emmet jumps on and stands guard; Alice brings up the rear in the Jeep. They head for the Cullen residence. Edward reports that James is close, heard Bella’s performance, and is already following them. She asks why this tracker is so interested in her; Edward says he hates being thwarted and loves a challenge.

They hurry inside the Cullen house, where Laurent stands with the other family members. He apologizes for James’s behavior and says, “I’ve never seen anything like him in my three hundred years. He’s absolutely lethal. That’s why I joined his coven” (400). Laurent won’t go against James; instead, impressed by the Cullens, he’ll travel north to Alaska in search of their sister family of peaceful vampires. He leaves at once.

Esme takes Bella upstairs and changes clothes with her; this will confuse their scents and perhaps misdirect James and Victoria. Back downstairs, Carlisle and Edward will drive the Jeep in one direction, Esme and Rosalie will take Bella’s truck in another, and Alice and Jasper will drive Bella south in the house Mercedes. Alice frowns a moment, reading the future, then says Victoria and James will take the bait.

As the first cars pull out, Jasper says quietly to Bella that she’s wrong to doubt herself: “You are worth it” (404). Alice whisks her protectively to the Jeep, and the three set out for Phoenix.

The black Mercedes hurtles through the night along the highways at twice the speed limit. Unable to sleep, Bella leans against Alice in the back seat, tears flowing, comforted by the cool hardness of Alice’s skin. By late afternoon, they’re checked into a hotel suite near the Phoenix airport. Bella finally sleeps; she wakes at three in the morning. Alice has ordered food for her; she eats distractedly, worried that there’s been no call yet from Carlisle.

Alice and Jasper assure her that she’s safe, that they’ve watched Edward change tremendously since meeting her, and that protecting his new girlfriend is their only duty. Bella tries to sleep; Alice sits with her. Bella asks why they haven’t called; Alice figures the predators are near them, and they don’t want to break the silence. She adds that they’re in no danger.

Bella asks Alice how someone becomes a vampire. Reluctantly—Edward will be angry that she’s spilling the beans—Alice says a vampire’s bite contains a venom that spreads painfully, over a few days, through a human and transforms them.

Alice suddenly has a vision of the future: James is waiting in a room filled with mirrors; he’s watching a video on TV. Just then, Edward calls and tells Bella they lost track of James near Vancouver: He took a plane, perhaps to Forks, where Victoria has been searching for clues. Esme keeps watch over Charlie. Bella tells Edward she misses and loves him; he says the same to her.

Alice draws a picture of the room she foresaw. It has a wooden floor, mirrors on the wall, and a gold line running horizontally around the middle. Bella says it’s a ballet studio; the gold line is the barre that students hold onto. It’s similar to one not far from her house where she took dance lessons as a child.

Concerned that her mom might return home before the danger has passed, Bella uses Alice’s cellphone to call her mom’s answering machine. She leaves a message asking Renée to call her as soon as she gets the message.

Bella sleeps; when she wakes at two in the morning, she finds Alice drawing a picture of James sitting in a living room. Bella says it’s in her mother’s house. Bella begins to panic, but Jasper simply touches her shoulder, and she gets calmer.

Alice makes a call and learns that Edward will fly down and that he and Carlisle will take her to a safe location while Alice and Jasper guard Renée. Bella says it’s clear James wants to hurt someone close to her, including the Cullens, and that they can’t guard everyone in her life forever. Jasper ramps up the calm in Bella, causing her eyes to close in sleepiness, but Bella resists, hurries into her bedroom, and slams the door. She spends hours curled up, staring at the wall.

The phone rings; Alice answers, then hands the phone to Bella. It’s her mom, her voice alarmed. Bella begins to explain, but a man’s voice interrupts: It’s James. On pain of killing Renée, he forces Bella to pretend she’s still talking to her mom. He tells her to get away from her guardians, go to her old house, and dial the number on a note he leaves there.

Bella decides to do what James demands. It means her own death, but it’s the only hope of saving her mom. She writes a note to Edward, begging him not to go after James after this is over and instead letting her settle the problem with her life instead of his. She puts the note in a hotel envelope and seals it, unmarked.

Alice sits, eyes glazed, hands gripping the coffee table. Bella knows she’s just foreseen Bella’s death at the ballet studio, but Alice composes herself and says it’s nothing. They drive to the airport to pick up Edward. While waiting for the plane, Bella hands the sealed note to Alice, who understands it’s for Renée. She says she wants some breakfast; Jasper walks with her toward the restaurant. Bella asks Jasper to wait while she uses the bathroom.

Inside, she dashes through it, knowing it has a back door. From there, she takes an elevator to street level. She finds no cabs outside, so she hops on a shuttle for a nearby hotel, then grabs a cab for the ride to her mom’s house. On the way, to calm herself, she imagines ways she and Edward might have hidden out together.

At the house, she hurries inside, finds the note, dials the number, and James answers. He tells her to go to the ballet studio. She runs there beneath a hot sun, falling twice, sweating profusely. She misses Forks.

The studio is closed, but the door is unlocked; she steps into the cool, air-conditioned lobby. She hears her mother calling to her in a panic and runs toward the sound. In the dance room, a VCR plays a family video of her mom, years earlier, alarmed, catching Bella as she nearly falls off a pier during a trip to California.

James shuts off the VCR. Bella knows her mom is still out of town. Strangely, she feels relief: “Charlie and Mom would never be harmed, would never have to fear” (444).

James is puzzled that she’s not angry. He comments that humans are quite strange and sometimes make no sense. He says capturing her was easy, as she’s only human. The real purpose of the hunt is to get Edward riled up. To encourage that, he starts recording a video message for Edward: “I would just like to rub it in, just a little bit” (447).

A long time ago, he says, an old vampire befriended a young human woman in an insane asylum; James wanted her blood, but the old man turned her into a vampire, so he couldn’t. In revenge, he killed the old one. The young one is Alice; now, James can kill Bella and symbolically balance the accounts.

He touches her, puts a wild lock of her hair back in place, then begins to circle. He crouches and bares his teeth. Bella runs for the exit, but he’s there instantly and strikes her, sending her flying across the room to crash into a wall mirror. She tries to crawl away; he steps on her leg, snapping it; she screams.

The video camera records everything. Hoping she’ll beg Edward to hunt James, he asks her to say something. She cries, “No, Edward, don’t—” (450), and he strikes her face, slamming her again against the mirrors. A shard slices her scalp, and blood flows down her hair and onto her shirt. James seems maddened with thirst, and Bella hopes her agony is nearly over. As he comes toward her, reflexively, she raises a hand to protect herself, then loses consciousness.

Bella dreams. She hears the voice of an angel who calls her name and asks her desperately to listen to him. Beyond the voice are the sounds of a terrible battle: “A vicious bass growling, a shocking snapping sound, and a high keening, suddenly breaking off” (453). The voice calls out, “Carlisle!” Another voice sounds, describing middling blood loss, a broken leg, and broken ribs.

Bella fights her way to the surface and screams that her hand is burning. Edward, Carlisle, and Alice surround her; they realize that James bit her. Carlisle tells Edward to suck the poison from Bella’s hand. He’s afraid to try, but finally, he grips her hand, and his mouth closes on her hand wound. Bella screams again with pain. They hold her tight; finally, Edward says it’s all out and that Bella’s blood “tastes clean.”

Bella tells Carlisle that the hand pain is gone. She thanks Edward; he says, “I love you,” and, exhausted, Bella replies, “I know” (456-57). Edward laughs. She says James tricked her with her mom’s recorded voice, and Renée is still out of town and safe. She tells Alice that she knows about her life before becoming a vampire.

Bella smells gasoline. The others prepare to leave, but Bella wants to stay and sleep. Edward picks her up; cradled against his chest, she drifts off.

Days later, Bella wakes in a hospital bed. Edward is with her. He says her mom is there, too, grabbing a bite to eat. She thinks the Cullens came to Phoenix so Edward could reconcile with Bella, but on the way to meet them at their hotel, she fell down some stairs and through a window. Bella asks how Edward managed to suck out the poison without getting carried away; he says it felt impossible to halt, “But I did” (460). She asks about James; he says that Jasper and Emmet killed him, then left quickly because they’re not as good at resisting a bleeding human.

Renée arrives; she announces that Phil got hired by a team in Jacksonville, that they’ve already picked out a nice house there, and that Bella will have her own bedroom. Bella interrupts to say she needs to stay in Forks; Renée quickly works out that it has mostly to do with Edward. Reluctantly, she gives her assent. She adds that she’s been sleeping at the hospital for days, partly waiting for Bella to waken and partly because a huge crime happened in her neighborhood: The ballet studio was deliberately burned to the ground.

After Renée leaves on an errand, Bella tries to make Edward promise he’ll never leave her, but he still frets about being a danger to her. She asks why he didn’t simply let James’s bite transform her into a vampire; that way, she reasons, they’d be on an equal footing. “I can’t always be Lois Lane […]. I want to be Superman, too” (474). He says he won’t take away her chance at a human life. She retorts that he’s all she wants from life, and that she will eventually grow old and die—and that she knows other vampires if he won’t do it. She guesses that Alice already has foreseen that she’ll become a vampire. He says she’s not always right in her predictions.

The nurse adds sleep medicine to her IV drip. As she drifts off, Bella says to Edward, “I’m betting on Alice” (480).

Weeks later, Alice spends an afternoon at the Cullen home with Bella, dressing her up for an evening event. Bella’s still in a leg cast; otherwise, she looks fabulous. Edward, in a tuxedo, drives her down the long driveway toward town and a surprise. He gets a call from Charlie, who’s still miffed at him for the entire Phoenix incident. Charlie puts Jacob on the phone, who’s hoping to see Bella during the evening. Edward informs him that Bella is “unavailable” this night and every night from now on.

Bella realizes they’re going to the prom. She’s angry, partly because she completely missed the clues about the date and time on posters at school and partly because she hates dances. Edward pleads, “Humor me,” and his eyes melt her resistance. She quips, “I’ll probably break my other leg” (485). Edward announces that Alice, Jasper, Emmet, and Rosalie will attend; this mollifies her.

At school, he promises to hold onto her all night so that no accidents will happen. They enter the gym, which is festooned with decorations. Students are dancing, but they make wide room for the Cullens, who whirl elegantly, Alice gorgeous in black satin, Rosalie in tight, backless scarlet, and Emmet and Jasper looking sophisticated and “intimidating” in their tuxedos.

Edward brings Bella to the dance floor. She starts to panic, but he puts her feet atop his own, and they spin and dance effortlessly. Bella is beginning to enjoy it when Jacob appears, his hair in a ponytail, wearing a shirt and tie. He’s much taller than when they last spoke. He asks to cut in; Edward gives way. Jacob and Bella sway back and forth awkwardly.

Bella asks how Jacob ended up at her school’s prom. He says his father arranged it with a promise to get him a master cylinder if he’d give Bella a message. Billy wants her to break up with Edward; he also wants her to know that “we’ll be watching” (492). Bella tells Jacob to assure his father that Edward saved her life and that she knows Billy means well.

Edward takes Bella outside, where they sit on a bench under a tree beneath the moon. He says he wants her to have a full human life, and the prom is part of that. She says she’d never have gone without him; he replies that she ended up enjoying it; she says that’s because she’s with him. She confesses that she didn’t think they’d be going to the prom because she thought he’d decided to turn her into a vampire and that everyone dressed up for the occasion.

He grins, amused at her notion. He says that it stuns him that she wants “for this to be the twilight of your life, though your life has barely started” (497). She replies that becoming a vampire would mark a beginning, not an end. He asks if she’s sure about this; she says yes. He teases her, leaning toward her neck, then backing away. He wonders at her eagerness to become a “monster.” She replies that she simply wants to be with him forever.

Edward asks, “I will stay with you—isn’t that enough?” She answers, “Enough for now” (500).