Oh, Twilight, I’ve missed you. Since our last time together I’ve thought about you a lot, watched the movie based on you, cringed at the movie based on you, made fun of the movie based on you. And all of this made my more excited to get back to you, and finally, this windy afternoon, I have.

Billy and Jacob, our resident narrative Natives, come over to watch the game with Charlie. We find Jacob playing coy with the whole werewolf/vampire mythology, calling Billy a “superstituous old man,” (239). I know that Jacob becomes a werewolf at some point, but it’s unclear to me whether he believes in that stuff at this point in the narrative. He either doesn’t know about it, or he’s playing dumb around Bella.

But not much happens in this scene, so let’s move on.

We get some suggestion that Edward is comfortable, both ethically and practically, with breaking in Bella’s house. Instead of Bella walking home, Edward tells her (not offers to, mind you) that he will go to her house and retrieve her truck, which will be in the parking lot when she gets out of school. Bella notes that the key “was in the pocket of a pair of jeans I wore Wednesday, under a pile of clothes in the laundry room” (243). This is followed with a rather nonchalant, “Even if he broke into my house, or whatever he was planning, he’d never find it” (243). Have we actually reached so quickly the point in the story at which Bella is okay with Edward breaking into her house without her permission? It seems so.

Edward claims that he’s interested in Bella because, “I have a better than average grasp of human nature. People are predictable. But you…you never do what I expect. You always take my by surprise” (245). This line seems disingenuous to me. We as readers have been riding shotgun along with Bella through this narrative so far, and she’s done very little that I found unexpected or surprising. Maybe Edward was surprised to meet a female character who was strong-willed, independent and self-sufficient, but I wasn’t. And Bella’s strength as a character deceases proportionally to Edward’s proximity. The closer the two of them become, the weaker Bella gets. Instead of her strengths, she now becomes defined by her faults–her clumsiness, her average good looks, etc.

Edward as a protector only works if Bella’s faults and weaknesses define her character. The tragedy of this book for me is not the forbidden, doomed lover nonsense, but rather that Bella is unconditionally in love with a man who requires her to relinquish her strengths.

Oh, and then there’s the drug use. I’ll say that again. The drug use. To help ease her nerves the night before their trip into the woods, Bella “deliberately took unnecessary cold medicine,” which is “something [she'd] never done before” (251). She does this for two reasons–first, to fall asleep (“my mind had too much free time” (251)), and to make sure she’s not “loopy from sleep deprivation” the next day (252).

I’ll let that sink in for a second. So strong is Edward’s influence over Bella that she willingly uses drugs to cope with the mental strain. She even knows that it’s not necessary. She uses language like “deliberately” and “unnecessary.” Bella knows that what she’s doing is not needed and possibly even bad for her, but even with that knowledge, she takes the cold pills anyway. Most of the things I’ve read in the book so far could potentially be explained away by the vagaries of teenage-dom, insecurity, etc. But here we have a first-person narrator who is willingly doing something that she knows is bad for her.

I had to stop for a moment when I read that.

The rest of the chapter is Bella and Edward covertly sneaking off on Saturday morning for a hike in the woods. The chapter ends with Edward stepping into the sunshine, which I can only assume will mean that very soon he’s going to sparkle, or dazzle, or whatever he does.

Ben’s End of Chapter Award

Potential Candidate for Best Sentence Ever Written in English: “I woke early, having slept soundly and dreamlessly thanks to my gratuituous drug use” (252).

A short in-between chapter tonight. We find Bella and Edward at the beginning of their four-book long pseudo-romance. Bella’s obsession has become in itself every bit as creepifying as Edward’s, to the point that Bella can no longer physically control the impulse to look at and touch Edward. Sitting in the darkened classroom, “A crazy impulse to reach over and touch him, to stroke his perfect face just once in the darkness, nearly overwhelmed me. I crossed my arms tightly across my chest, my hands balling into fists. I was losing my mind” (219, emphasis mine). Her eyes flick to him “of their own accord,” and the urge to touch him is “overpowering.” She has to physically restrain herself to keep from jumping his broody bones.

This “strange new intensity” is of course exciting for Bella because, for the first time, Edward seems to share her feelings. Touching seems really important in this chapter, and we are treated to not one but two very cheesy dramatic scenes in which Edward gently touches Bella’s face before they part ways, across the eternal and insuperable expanse of the high school hallway. Touch for each of them is an emblem of possession–by touching, and having that touch welcomed and cherished, their connection grows deeper.

But all is not well in the Twilight-verse. Mike, who is “so easy to like,” warns Bella that Edward “looks at you like…like you’re something to eat [sic]” (221). But Bella’s excitement to see Edward overrides this warning. And, yay, Edward and Bella have their first fight as mutual dependents/co-dependents. The thing is, Edward can’t read Bella’s mind, but he can read other people’s minds, and that information can clue him into whether Bella is lying to him or not. Which is distressing to Bella because she apparently feels the need to lie to Edward.  She tries to lie to him on p.222 and does lie to him on p.224. This seems to strengthen a point of annoyance I had in another chapter–this is not love we’re dealing with. This is mutual infatuation. And it now seems that Bella is willing to lie to keep up an appearance with Edward that will ensure his continued interest in her. Interesting thing is, thanks to Edward’s hyper-perceptiveness and his built in lie detector, he knows when Bella is lying, but Bella has no way of knowing when Edward is lying to her. And if Bella finds it so easy to lie to him, I have to wonder how much of what he tells her is the truth. Edward is reluctant to talk about himself, and whenever Bella gets too close to asking a touch or interesting questions, Edward cuts her off. And in this chapter we find him going on the offensive, filibustering by asking her a barrage of trivial and inane questions about Bella, preventing her from asking anymore about him.

This entire relationship is based on communal deception and mutual hedging.

And holy crap can Bella swing a mood. She goes from absurdly happy and horny on one page, to angry and vindicitive the next, then back to happy and horny. The hormone nozzle is turned up to full blast, readers. We’re talking deluge. When I read Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, another novel effectively drenched in the gamey funk of hormones, I was at the age at which my own were raging. While reading this, however, mine have more or less slowed to a dribble, evened out. As a result, I’m teetering much closer to the OH GOD, SHUT YOUR MOUTH side of the spectrum rather than the I SO TOTALLY KNOW HOW YOU FEEL side.

I’m also interested in Bella’s relationship with Charlie, yet another relationship with a male that is based on deception and hedging. Not only is she an adolescent girl, but she’s an adolescent girl who’s in love with a vampire–the ultimate bad boy. He even drives a muscle car and wears a leather jacket. Edward “The Fonz” Cullen–spoiler of virgins and nightmare of fathers. But at least he’s “perfect and beautiful to an excruciating degree” (227).

The most significant paragraph in the Bella/Charlie scene is this:

I sympathized with him. It must be a hard thing, to be a father; living in fear that your daughter would meet a boy she liked, but also having to worry if she didn’t. How ghastly it would be, I thought, shuddering, if Charlie had even the slightest inkling of exactly what I did like.” (227, first emphasis mine)

Look at that first italicized sentence–”but also having to worry if she didn’t.” So, in Meyerland, the father is apprehensive when a girl brings a boy home, but is also equally worried when she doesn’t. Now, there is a ton of baggage that that simple phrase comes freighted with. A girl not bringing home a boy could have any number of meanings–the girl simply doesn’t interact well with boys, the boys are not intersted in the girl, the girl actually likes other girls. Regardless of whatever Charlie’s subterranean worries about Bella’s social life are, the obvious implication is that fathers worry about daughters who do not perform socialized gender roles. Charlie worries as much about Bella dating the wrong boy as he does about her dating no boys at all.

Because, gasp,bisexual people, lesbians, and asexual people exist, oh noes, ZOMG. Charlie doesn’t want to hear it. Fingers in ears, la la la la la la.

But of course that’s not actually it. These thoughts aren’t Charlie’s at all. They are filtered through Bella’s narration. This is Bella’s internal and unspoken speculation about what her father’s expectations are. From there it’s not a stretch to speculate that this conception of the female gender role could be what Bella actually believes in, or at least feels pressured to conform to.

Oh, and at the end of this chapter there is a special appearence by every wise old Indian man in every piece of insensitive pop culture ever, complete with “creases running through the russet skin like an old leather jacket” and “ancient” eyes.

Ben’s End of Chapter Awards

The Zoe Washburn “Had a Kind of Poetry to it, Sir” Award for Lyrical Aptitude: “‘It’s twilight…It’s the safest time of day for us…The easiest time. But also the saddest, in a way…the end of another day, the return of the night” (233).

Best Use of Present and Past Tenses of the Same Verb in Quick Succession to Indicate Confusion: “Did they know that I knew? Was I supposed to know that they knew that I knew, or not” (221)?