Téméraire: A Rosalie Hale Fanfiction

CHAPTER IX: TEENAGE DIRTBAG

 She had a rough few days of things getting worse before the medication finally seemed to break through. Jules felt like a shipwreck, battered and bruised by a raging ocean. She hardly emerged from her bed unless she absolutely had to, gravitating back endlessly as if she were magnetized to the perfect spot she had burrowed into beneath her duvet and amongst her pillows. She slept most of the time, and Charlie stopped over from work regularly to check on her and make sure she took her medication on time. Leah had stopped by once a day with soup from her mother, much to Jules' eternal joy because this was the closest comfort she could receive- even if Sue Clearwater's amazing chicken soup was nowhere near her Mamie's consommé.

There was a certain air of misery that always seemed to linger when she was not feeling well. Jules did not feel homesick for France, nor the little townhouse she had called a home for most of her life. It was not her grandmother's cooking she missed, it was her. It was one thing to feel homesick for a place, but when your home was a person it felt so very fragile and mortal...and Éloise Bertrand had been her whole world. Ever since she had left, Jules felt like her anchor to the earth had been severed, as if she had floated weightlessly without purpose along with the current, content to drift on and ride each wave and the next, making the most of it before her inevitable crash upon the shore.

When she was sick she missed her the most. She missed her loud, unapologetic laugh. She missed the way she used to scoff under her breath every time her granddaughter did something amusing or annoying- Jules swore the two circumstances sounded different, even if it was the same huff of air. When she felt vulnerable she missed her the most. She missed their conversations over afternoon tea, she missed complaining that her grandmother cooked far too much and for far too many people. She missed arguing over religion and politics. She missed her.

It was around noon of Friday when Jules woke up to a text from Rosalie Hale. It was not a very remarkable text message, just a heads up that the blonde who caused her heart palpitations would be arriving some time after school to drop off her school work. Jules had felt relieved by the warning and the time she would have to prepare herself, but now that she was in a clearer headspace, she began to wonder more and more exactly why the Cullens seemed to have such an effect on her.

Jules knew she was not the only one to feel there was a strangeness about the Cullens. The whole school had noticed it on the first day- whether they were self-aware enough to recognize their own reactions however, was another issue. Jules had noticed the way everyone seemed content to commentate from a distance- but they did remain at that distance, as if something in their bodies were telling them they were in the presence of danger. The same something that made her hair stand at the back of her neck, and goosebumps erupt all along her skin. Jules felt like she had a built-in radar system that went off every time a Cullen was in her immediate vicinity. She could not comprehend why.

There was nothing immediately odd about them. They seemed perfectly polite, well-dressed and well-spoken. Jules had only seen them for one day, but she had noticed that much from them at least. Perhaps this was what was so odd about them, what made her skin crawl. They were too perfect. Like the airbrushed pages of magazines or the irritatingly two-dimensional character tropes on television- something about them felt fictional. Jules was not certain if she wanted to find out the new family's secrets. It was not her business, and she would be content to steer clear and never think about their unusualness again.

And then there was Rosalie Hale.

The words Mister Berty and so many others had so tragically used as a line when they first met her echoed through her ears. What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. Juliette had always begged to differ. If there was one smell in her entire universe that she detested above all others, it was the sickly rotten sweet smell of a rose. And yet, she could not bear to part Rosalie's name from her surname, because it would never sound as sweet again if it would not conjure up the image of Rosalie Hale and her brief, bright smile.