Midnight Sun (The Twilight Saga #5) - Stephenie Meyer Page 0,156

was your favorite birthday?” I asked her. I badly needed some distraction.

Her mouth screwed up into something that was halfway between a wry smile and a scowl.

“What?” I asked. “Is it not my day to ask questions?”

She laughed and her hand fluttered as though she was waving away that concern. “It’s fine. I just don’t know the answer. I’m not a big fan of birthdays.”

“That’s… unusual.” I couldn’t think of another teenager I’d met who thought the same way.

“It’s a lot of pressure,” she said, shrugging. “Presents and stuff. What if you don’t like them? You’ve got to get your game face on right away so you don’t hurt anyone’s feelings. And people look at you a lot.”

“Your mother isn’t an intuitive gift giver?” I guessed.

Her answering smile was cryptic. I could tell she would say nothing negative about her mother, though she’d obviously been scarred.

We walked for a half mile in silence. I was hoping she would volunteer more, or ask a question that would tell me where her thoughts were, but she kept her eyes on the forest floor, concentrating. I tried again.

“Who was your favorite teacher in elementary school?”

“Mrs. Hepmanik,” she responded without a pause. “Second grade. She let me read in class pretty much whenever I wanted.”

I grinned at her. “A paragon.”

“Who was your favorite grade school teacher?”

“I don’t remember,” I reminded her.

She frowned. “Right. Sorry, I didn’t think—”

“No need to apologize.”

It took me another quarter mile to think of a question she couldn’t turn around on me too easily.

“Dogs or cats?”

Her head tilted to one side. “I’m not really sure.… I think maybe cats? Cuddly, but independent, right?”

“Have you never had a dog?”

“I’ve never had either. Mom says she’s allergic.”

Her response was oddly skeptical.

“You don’t believe her?”

She paused again, not wanting to be disloyal. “Well,” she said slowly, “I caught her petting a lot of other people’s dogs.”

“I wonder why…?” I mused.

Bella laughed. It was a carefree sound, totally lacking any kind of bitterness.

“It took me forever to talk her into letting me have a fish. I finally figured out that she was worried about being stuck at home. I’ve told you how she loved to take off every weekend we could—go visit some little town or minor historical monument she’d never seen before. I showed her those time-release food tablets that can feed the fish for over a week, and she relented. Renée just can’t stand an anchor. I mean, she already had me, right? One huge life-altering anchor was enough. She wasn’t going to volunteer for more.”

I kept my face very smooth. This insight of hers—which I didn’t doubt, she’d always seen through me so easily—put a darker spin on my interpretation of her past. Was Bella’s need to be a caretaker based not on her mother’s helplessness, but on a feeling of needing to earn her place? It made me angry to think that Bella might ever have felt unwanted, or that she needed to prove her worth. I had the oddest desire to wait on her hand and foot in some socially acceptable way, to show Bella that her merely existing was more than enough.

She didn’t notice me trying to control my reaction. With another laugh, she continued. “It was probably for the best that we never tried anything bigger than a goldfish. I wasn’t very good at pet ownership. I thought maybe I’d been overfeeding the first one, so I really cut back on the second, but that was a mistake. And the third one”—she looked up at me, baffled—“I honestly don’t know what his problem was. He kept jumping out of the bowl. Eventually, I didn’t find him soon enough.” She frowned. “Three in a row—I guess that makes me a serial killer.”

It was impossible not to laugh, but she didn’t seem offended. She laughed with me.

As our amusement subsided, the light changed. Alice’s promised sunshine had arrived above the thick canopy, and immediately I felt jittery and anxious again.

I knew that this emotion—stage fright was the closest term I could come up with—was truly ridiculous. So what if Bella found me repulsive? If she rejected me in disgust? That was fine, better than fine. That was literally the smallest, tiniest sort of misery that could hurt me today. Was vanity, the fragility of ego, truly that strong a force? I’d never believed it had that kind of power over me, and I didn’t think so now. Obsessing over this reveal kept me from obsessing over other things. Like