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[0.2] C H A P T E R T W O
Forks was a boring, old town. According to Annie, anyhow. I wouldn't know. I'd never been there. I was born and raised in Portland Oregonㅡup until the night of the accidentㅡand I'd only been out of the state four times in sixteen years, let alone to the small town in the middle of Washington. I'd never even heard of Forks.
Apparently Joseph and Jaime have long time friends of approximately two-hundred-and-sixty years down here; A man by the name of Carlisle and his family. The Cullen clan, rather. Jaime says they make it a point to visit every few years or so. I was...integrated, into this family of our own three years ago. I had yet to make the trip to Forks, and yet to meet this coven that Joseph talks so highly of.
But this year we're being formally invited. With wedding invitations.
So, I'll need to add that on my growing list of firsts. Vampire wedding. That should be something.
"But you're going to love aunt Alice," Annie says, her voice a couple tones too shrill with excitement. "She can see the future, you know. She's probably already seen you. And she probably already loves you."
"That's so cool," I say, one half because the prospect of meeting another more prominently gifted vampire is genuinely intriguing, the other half because I have no other alternatives, and the last thing I want is to dull Annie's cheer. I figure the least I can do is pretend to be enthused. "She sounds awesome. I can't wait to meet her."
But something about this feels wrong. Traitorous, almost. I have a family. A real one. Grandparents. Aunts. Uncles. Cousins. People that I should be with right now. People that have spent the last three years crying over my missing corpse. People that have let regular visits to my tombstone carve out their tears on Sunday afternoons. A family that deserves to be whole at thanksgiving dinner and on Christmas morning. A family that I can never see again.
But yet here I am somehow, not dead but not alive, pledging allegiance to a family I didn't choose and a life I didn't want. Despite myself I try not to be bitter. At least not at the people. At the circumstances, perhaps. But not the people. Joseph and Jaime saved me the only way they knew how. I could never hold that against them.
The car is relatively quiet now, save for the raindrops shattering against the windows and the top-one-hundred hits of the nineties playing low on the stereo. Joseph is in the driver's seat, hands steady on the wheel and Jaime is in the passenger's side, golden eyes drinking in words from the pages of a book I'm sure she's read hundreds of times before.
Annie's to my right, looking besides herself with joy. I've come to discover it's kind of just an Annie thing, her fifteen-year-old face frozen with a sort of whimsical adolescent wonder for the world around her. She's one-hundred-and-forty-eight, but somehow she's held onto her shreds of childlike innocence. Preserved it.
