She Will Be Loved

Chapter 6

"So you guys are dating, right?" I asked Isabella at breakfast the next morning. It had occurred to me that a guy and girl hanging out together didn't necessarily mean anything. Stupid Tyler.

"Who's 'you guys'?" Bella asked a bit too innocently, dumping the last bits of scrambled egg on my plate and glancing through the kitchen door toward the front of the house.

"Dad is gone. And you and Edward." I stabbed the table with an accusatory finger. "You two are dating now, right?"

"He doesn't feel that way about me." Bella shrugged and turned to stare gloomily out the window.

"Good." I said flatly. She turned to me with widening eyes. "He's no good." I explained.

"What do you mean?" My sister mumbled. She didn't look too surprised.

"Well, I don't know what his deal is now." I told her. "But I saw that look he gave you. The 'stabbed by a pencil' look? And if he liked you now, that makes him more crazy, not less."

"He's not crazy." She said. And she did seem certain. I pursed my lips and stared at her, puzzled, until she got up to cram the dishes into the sink. From the misery on her face, I was becoming more and more certain that telling her about Edward's visit to my car would be a bad thing. Bad as in encouraging her, I mean. The last thing my mopey sister needed was a bipolar boyfriend.

"I'll see you later." Isabella walked out the door, seeming to realize I wouldn't have anything nice to say after that.

I just grunted.

...

The rest of the day was pretty good. Edward 'the Dick' Cullens was gone, along with his brother(whom I nicknamed Emmett 'the Buttface' Cullen during a staring match with his girlfriend when she caught me looking at their table). Tyler was trying to be nice to me, though I still wasn't sure if we were going to the dance together. And I didn't have to talk to Isabella as Annalise was going to the beach and invited me to sleepover at her house. All in all, falling asleep to Airplane was a pretty good end to a pretty good day.

The sun splitting my head in half as a wakeup call was therefore all the more irritating.

By the time Annalise and I had made it to the parking lot of the Newton's family store, Annalise and I had had two arguments, one of which involved whether or not we had accents and the other one whether The Taming of the Shrew was a play within a play. When Austin and Ben walked over to greet us I answered with a grunt and Annalise went to nap in the back of Newton's van. I joined her and, with a welcome bit of caffeine from Conner Rodigg, the two of us were soon almost human again.

Bella was the one of last to show and we drove off soon after she arrived, her way up front with Newton and Jess and me squashed in back with Lauren and Annalise. There was also a couple other girls, all the boys having joined Tyler and Lee in their cars.

"You guys are going to make a driftwood fire again, right?" I asked one of the guys, I didn't know his name.

"Already working on it." Ben called cheerfully.

"Awesome, Ben! You rock!" I laughed and walked over to join him, asking him about the different colors that might pop up and ignoring everyone else. Ben, Angela, and Tyler were the only ones of Bella's friends I could talk to when I was this grumpy. Annalise was now sleeping in Lee's minivan, growling at him as he tried to wake her up.

When I came back, I sat on one of the empty logs and shivered once as a wind chilled through my mist soaked clothes. I opened my mouth to jokingly yell at Ben to hurry up but Mike had started lighting smaller branches on fire to entertain Isabella and I felt it unnecessary to bring Jessica's evil eye anywhere near me. I shivered again and pulled at the summer dress I'd optimistically thrown on over a swimming suit. Had I remembered to pack a sweatshirt in my overnight bag? I thought I had—