Our Infinite Sadness

Letters

Edythe steeled herself on the approach toward her new purgatory, Forks High School, on Wednesday morning. All night she had girded herself for the horrible task ahead, and she had no idea how she would survive it. She had to weather the cold assessing judgment of her siblings every moment. Her entire family was betting with Alice, that she would fail and that Ben would have to die.

The trial had commenced before she had even stepped into the car. Alice, goddamn her, had seen fit to do something she seldom ever did: she had dressed Edythe in a reprise of a previously used outfit. Edythe knew why. There was a symmetry to it, a theatrical, maudlin symbolism. She'd done it to thrust the knife and twist it deep. At the time, Edythe hadn't even realized what Alice had been up to. She had just stood there with arms out, taking instruction passively, as Alice had dressed her. Not until she'd been out at the car and climbing into the back seat with Jasper had she seen her reflection in the glass.

"No! No, Alice, NO!"

Jasper administered his strongest soporific at triple dosage.

No effect. Edythe would not be contained. She fought with all her strength, but Emilia was in on it. She gripped Edythe's arms and head in a full nelson. A human would have been beheaded by the force she put on the back of Edythe's neck to hold her down.

"You want a third path for him, don't you, Edy?" Alice harshly lectured, "This is the best way. Cold turkey. This is the dress you hate him in."

It took three people to force her into the car. The body panels had deep gashes and score marks from her fingernails. This should have infuriated Rex, because he was their resident mechanic, but he chortled through the whole messy affair, in grand humor. He would likely simply trade it in.

"Get in that car, Edythe. You're not ditching this. You forced all this upon us and you're doing it as Alice instructs, to the letter!"

They had shoved her into the car with Jasper, and he had taken her hands in an iron grip, looked her in the eye, and harshly nodded in agreement with Rex.

She couldn't fight them all.

Carlisle had already left for the hospital, but Esme stood on the porch. She had witnessed the entire assault. Her expression was hard, too. This was what they called tough love. She saw red all the way to school.

Here is what Alice did. She dressed Alice in the very same pale blue and white gingham and satin dress that she had worn on the first day that he had set eyes on her. The day on which she had thought of a hundred ways to murder him in that tiny classroom. The day when she had turned on him and glared with such intense dripping hate that he had cowered and shrunk back like a beaten dog. Alice dressed her identically, down to the last detail: her favorite platinum, sapphire and diamond hair comb, the waist sash tightly form-fitting with a pretty bow tied just so at the base of her spine, lacy white ankle socks, and the same glossy blue shoes, now ever so slightly scuffed after their first use.

Edythe hadn't even known that Alice had saved this outfit. She typically dumped worn clothes straight into the thrift pile. It was almost like she knew, even then, that she would need it again. Truly, the Prophet Isaiah had nothing on Alice.

So, yes. Edythe perambulated the hallways that morning in utter dread.

Another dimension of her hell was that she had to continue to do her only job as a Cullen. She had to listen for changes in how the students thought of them, and that meant having to pay attention to the maddening din of vacuous human minds that she typically tried to ignore. All morning long she had to endure them while at the same time also having to weather the constant queries from her siblings. "No," she told them, "no change. We were freaks before yesterday, and we're freaks today. Opinions have not changed a bit." And also, "Yes, the curiosity and intrigue over yesterday are already dying down. It is already history."