Midnight Sun (The Twilight Saga #5) - Stephenie Meyer Page 0,298

disrupt the routine, to her mind in a pleasant way. Knowing Bella would object, at first I resisted. But then the more I considered, the more I saw things from a different perspective.

Not Alice’s perspective. Alice’s motivations were probably at least seventy percent selfish; she loved a makeover. My own I judged to be around ten percent. Yes, this was a memory that I wanted to have. I’d admitted that to myself. However, my main motive was to modify one specific chapter in Bella’s future. It was for her sake that I went along with Alice’s bizarre plan.

I had a vision—not like Alice, not a true prophecy. It was just a probable scenario. This vision created an intense kind of ache throughout my entire body; it was half agony and half pleasure.

I envisioned Bella twenty years from now, maturing gracefully into middle age. Like her mother, she would hold on to the image of youth longer than most, but when the lines came, they would not mar her beauty. I imagined her somewhere sunny in a pretty but simple house that was, unless she changed her ways significantly, filled with clutter. Adding to the clutter would be children, two or three. Maybe one boy with Charlie’s curly hair and smile, and a girl who, like Bella, took after her mother.

I did not try to picture their father, or think about how his face might be reflected in her children; that was all agony.

One day when they were young adolescents, younger than Bella was now, perhaps prompted by a teenage rom-com on TV (though Alice had told me that the consumption of media would change quite a bit in the next decade; she was waiting for certain companies to form so she could invest in them), one of the children would ask Bella what her high school prom was like.

Bella would smile and say, “I wasn’t really into dances. I didn’t go to prom.” And the children would be dissatisfied. Their mother never had any good stories about her teenage years. Hadn’t she ever done anything interesting?

Bella would have no funny, lighthearted stories, just a dearth of normal experience, just secrecy and danger and tales so fantastical she might one day wonder whether they had ever been more than her imagination.

Or… Bella could laugh when her child asked, and her eyes would suddenly seem far away.

“It was crazy,” she would say. “I didn’t really want to go, you know I’m no dancer. But my lunatic best friend kidnapped me for a makeover and my boyfriend took me over my protests. It wasn’t so bad in the end. I’m glad I went. At the very least to see the decorations—they were like a budget version of the movie Carrie. No, you can’t watch Carrie. Not yet.”

So it was for that moment in Bella’s future that I’d allowed Alice to go through with her pushy and somewhat intrusive plan. More than allowed it, I’d aided and abetted.

And this was how I found myself in a tuxedo—chosen by Alice, naturally; at least I hadn’t had to do any of the shopping—a spray of freesia in my hands, waiting at the base of the stairs for Alice’s big reveal.

I’d seen it all in her head, but she didn’t care. She wanted every trite scene from the dramatic pageant that was a human prom.

Alice had given Charlie a heads-up that Bella would be out late, making it clear that she, Alice, would be an integral part of the evening from start to finish. Charlie never objected to anything involving Alice. He often objected to things that involved me, though usually only in his own mind.

I listened as Alice helped Bella hobble toward the stairs, Alice’s arm around Bella’s waist, Bella’s arm over Alice’s shoulder, leaning on her heavily. Bella had become fairly adept with her crutch but Alice had taken it away from her for tonight. I wasn’t sure how much of that was for the aesthetic, and how much was to keep Bella from trying to escape. Then, a few steps from the edge of the stairs, Alice squirmed out of Bella’s hold and urged her to continue alone.

“What?” Bella protested. “I can’t walk in this.”

“It’s just a few steps. You’ll manage. I don’t look right, I’ll mess up the picture.”

“What picture?” Bella’s voice rose half an octave. “There better not be anyone taking pictures of me!”

“No one’s taking any pictures. I just meant the mental picture. Calm down.”

“Mental picture? Who’s going to see?”

“Just Edward.”

Well,