I tucked the notebook away carefully, as if it were a treasure, and stepped out into the hallway. I had to find Bella. If I had just seen a being that looked like something out of a dream, I couldn't imagine what she must be going through with Mike Newton.
When I reached the cafeteria, the roar of hundreds of teenagers hit me like a brick wall. I moved with the efficiency of a shadow. I picked up a brown plastic tray and, while the others pushed and shouted for an extra helping of greasy pizza, I selected a red apple—its color standing out violently against the gray of the day—a plastic-wrapped sandwich, and a carton of milk. Everything was done with precise movements, without looking at the server, who handed me my change without even focusing her eyes on my face. To her, I was just a hand handing over money.
Balancing the tray, I located Bella. She was sitting at a long table, surrounded by the din of Mike Newton and his entourage. There was a free seat next to her, almost as if the universe had reserved that small space for its "anchor" to land.
I walked toward them. Mike was in the middle of an animated anecdote, gesturing with a slice of pizza in his hand. I passed by a couple of boys who stepped back just in time to let me through, though they kept laughing without noticing what had moved them.
I slipped into the empty chair next to Bella without making the slightest sound.
"You survived Mike," I said in a low voice, my words cutting through my sister's bubble of anxiety. "Though you seem to have aged five years in one morning."
Bella gave a small start, relieved, and her shoulders finally dropped from the height of her ears. Mike cut himself off mid-sentence, blinking at me as if I had appeared by magic through some video editing trick.
"Oh, hey... Mael, right?" Mike said, trying to regain his rhythm. "I didn't see you come in."
"That happens a lot," I replied with absolute neutrality, opening my milk carton. "Don't let me interrupt your story. It seemed... fascinating."
Mike hesitated, sensing the subtle sarcasm in my tone, but soon returned to his chatter with Eric and a girl named Jessica who wouldn't stop prattling. Bella, ignoring the noise around us, leaned toward me.
"You have no idea, Mael," she whispered, exhausted. "I feel like I've been through an FBI interrogation. And you? You look... different. What did you draw in class?"
I kept the tray between us like a barrier against the rest of the table. With one hand, I opened my notebook and turned the page just enough for her to see the sketch of the porcelain pixie.
Bella's eyes widened. She looked at the drawing and then, with an almost imperceptible flick of her head, pointed toward the farthest corner of the cafeteria, where the light from the windows died before touching the occupants of an isolated table.
"It's her," Bella murmured in a barely audible whisper. "She's there. With her siblings."
I turned my head slowly. There they were. There were five of them, and they all shared that same quality I had tried to capture on my paper: a beauty that didn't belong to this zip code, or even this century. They were like pieces of ancient marble forgotten in a warehouse of cheap plastic.
"They're the Cullens," Jessica cut in, having leaned over when she saw us looking that way, eager to spill the gossip. "They don't talk to anyone... and no one talks to them. They're, you know, weird."
"They aren't weird," I corrected quietly, without taking my eyes off the girl from the drawing, who was now sitting next to a blonde boy who looked like he was suffering from some kind of chronic pain. "They are compositionally perfect. That's what scares people."
At that moment, the copper-haired boy was different from the rest. While his siblings looked like statues lost in an elegant lethargy, he projected a vibrant tension, like a violin string about to snap.
I watched as his gaze, intense and strangely golden, fixed first on Bella. She, unaware of the scrutiny for a second, was dealing with her sandwich, but I could tell how her body tensed instinctively. The boy looked at her with a mixture of curiosity, confusion, and something bordering on hostility, as if she were a riddle he couldn't solve and it irritated him deeply.
I kept my gaze fixed on him, dissecting the line of his jaw and the perfect mess of his hair, until it happened.
As if he had felt a prickle of electricity in the air, the boy snapped his eyes away from Bella and locked them directly onto mine. His expression changed in a fraction of a second: frustration transformed into absolute bewilderment.
It was the first real shock of my life. Normally, people look at me and their eyes pass right through, as if they only see the space I occupy and not the person. But he saw me. His brows knit together slightly and his pupils dilated. He held my gaze with an intensity that would have made anyone look away, but I didn't move. I studied him with the same coldness a portraitist uses to study a difficult shadow.
"Mael?" Bella's voice brought me back. She was pale, looking back and forth between the boy and me. "What's going on? Why is he looking at you like that?"
"I don't know," I replied without looking away, my voice barely a whisper. "It looks like he's seen a ghost. Or like someone finally turned on the light."
The copper-haired boy tilted his head, his expression becoming almost analytical, as if he were trying to hear something coming from my direction and only finding static. Beside him, the "pixie" girl touched his arm lightly, whispering something in his ear while flashing me a quick, knowing glance, confirming that our encounter in art class hadn't been a hallucination of mine.
He finally broke eye contact, turning back to his table with a rigidity that screamed discomfort.
"They're dangerous, aren't they?" Bella asked in a thin voice, while Mike Newton continued to ramble on the other side about the basketball team.
"I don't know if dangerous is the word, Bells," I said, closing my notebook and feeling a tingling in my fingers. "But they're the first ones in this town who don't need a map to find me in a room. And that, by itself, is already a problem."
I took my red apple and bit into it, feeling the copper-haired boy's gaze still burning at the periphery of my vision. The "Swan Show" had just become much more interesting than my social battery was prepared to allow.
Bella sighed, exhausted by the torrent of gossip from Jessica, but I simply leaned back in my chair, observing the scene with the distance of someone analyzing an art exhibit they didn't ask to visit.
"Jessica says they're too stuck-up to mix with anyone else," Bella added, lowering her voice.
"People always mistake harmony for arrogance, Bells," I replied, slowly moving the milk carton across the table. "What bothers them isn't that they don't talk to anyone; it bothers them that they break the visual symmetry of this place. They are like a stroke of pure oil paint on a canvas of cheap, dirty watercolor."
I took a slow bite of my apple, watching Mike and his group continue to laugh at something stupid.
"That's a delicate way of saying they're jealous," Bella murmured with a half-smile.
"Envy is such a crude word, very unartistic," I said, shrugging with total indifference. "Let's just say the rest of the students feel like half-finished sketches next to a completed masterpiece. It hurts them that the Cullens don't need the crowd's approval to exist. The anonymity I seek for comfort, they impose by design. It's... refreshing."
Bella looked at me as if I were speaking a foreign language, but I was already back in my own world.
"That Edward guy," I continued, fixing my sight on the copper-haired boy, whose jaw was still tense, "has a bone structure that looks like it was designed by a Renaissance sculptor with a bad temper. If he looks at me like that again, I'm going to start charging him for the psychological portrait I'm doing for free."
"Mael, please, don't provoke them," she whispered, though she knew my "indifference" was chronic. If the world exploded in colors, I would probably just complain that the chromatic combination was in poor taste.
I stood up with the tray, that same fluid movement that didn't displace even a blade of air.
"Relax, Bells. I'm not going to say anything to them. I prefer statues when they stay still on their pedestals. Come on, Biology class isn't going to cancel itself, no matter how much you wish for a universal flood."
We walked toward the cafeteria exit. Just as we passed near their table, I felt that vibration in the air again, that static electricity. Edward didn't look up, but his knuckles were white from gripping the edge of the table so hard. I passed him without quickening my pace, with the indifference of someone walking through a museum on a Monday morning: admiring the aesthetic, but with no interest in buying the piece.
The hallway toward the science and humanities classrooms was a funnel of humidity and hormones. I stopped in front of the Biology lab door, where Bella stood frozen as if she were about to enter a mass grave.
"Good luck with the dissections," I told her, giving her a light tap on the shoulder. "Try not to faint over the toad."
"I wish it were the toad I was worried about," she muttered, glancing sideways into the classroom.
I left her there and continued toward the History building. As I crossed the threshold, the atmosphere changed. History was a classroom that smelled of old books and a lack of budget, with yellowing maps that still showed countries that no longer existed. I moved toward the back, looking for my corner of invisibility, but I stopped dead.
There, sitting in the last desk of the center row, was Jasper.
The blonde boy, the one Bella had described as being in constant suffering, was alone. His desk was an island of tension. I sat in the adjoining seat, at a regulation social distance, and pulled out my notebook.
Unlike the cafeteria, the silence here was heavy. Jasper didn't move. He didn't even seem to blink. He sat with a rigidity that I found fascinating from an anatomical point of view: every muscle in his neck was defined, like a piano string tightened to its limit.
I began to draw abstract lines, trying to capture not his physical appearance, but the "vibration" he emitted. It was a chaotic energy, a contained storm. Suddenly, the ceiling fan creaked and changed the direction of the air, sending a gust from my direction toward his.
Jasper reacted in an absurd way. His nostrils flared and he slammed against the back of his chair with a silent violence. His eyes locked onto me, charged with an intensity that would have intimidated anyone, but to me, it just seemed like an excess of drama.
"If you're going to collapse, try to give a warning," I murmured without even looking up from my paper. "I wouldn't want you to stain my drawing with your existential crisis."
Jasper didn't respond. He stayed petrified, looking at me as if I were an anomaly in his system, a blind spot he couldn't process.
But my patience for other people's drama is zero. I brushed off his stare and immersed myself in my work. The teacher began to talk about westward expansion, and the sound of his monotonous voice became the perfect background noise.
As I focused on the texture of the paper and the structure of the maps the teacher was projecting, I felt my own presence dissolve. It was a technique I had mastered since I was a child: if I stopped being aware of others, they stopped being aware of me. I became an extension of the desk's shadow, a ghost taking notes in impeccable handwriting and filling the margins with sketches of desolate landscapes.
I completely ignored Jasper's rigidity beside me. His eyes might have been burning into my temple, but to me, he was no more than an inanimate object of great aesthetic value, like an ancient vase placed in the wrong spot. I focused on the class, absorbing dates and names while my fingers brought to life a series of geometric figures intertwining at the edge of the page.
When the bell rang, Jasper shot out of the classroom with a speed that defied physics, disappearing before most students had even put away their first pen.
I took my time. I put each pencil back in its case and closed my notebook deliberately. As I stood up, I noticed that even the teacher's gaze passed over my desk as if it were empty, looking for someone else to ask to erase the chalkboard.
I walked out into the hallway with the calm of someone who has not been disturbed. I didn't know what had happened in the rest of the school, nor did I care much. My morning had been productive: a fashion design inspired by a pixie and a diagram of the War of 1812 decorated with Victorian shadows. For a Monday in Forks, it wasn't bad at all.
The Forks High School gym was a monument to echoes and the smell of burnt rubber. The dying afternoon light filtered through the high windows, giving everything a grayish, depressing tone. As expected, the P.E. teacher decided the best way to welcome us was to separate us by gender: girls to the volleyball nets and boys to the basketball hoops.
I leaned against the wall for a moment, watching Bella being dragged toward a group of girls who seemed far too enthusiastic. Her look of panic was almost poetic. I knew that for her, a ball flying toward her face was the closest thing to a death sentence.
"Good luck, Bells," I murmured, though she could no longer hear me over the racket of sneakers screeching on the wood.
I joined the group of boys. Mike Newton was there, of course, leading the team with that "high school captain" energy he loved to project. He passed the ball to me as soon as he saw me, perhaps expecting me to trip or not know what to do with it.
I caught it with one hand, effortlessly, taking advantage of that swimmer's reflex I still retained. I wasn't interested in scoring, or winning, and certainly not in breaking a sweat. My goal was the same as always: to be a functional but invisible element on the court.
While the game turned into a chaos of pushing and shouting, I limited myself to moving through the empty spaces. I dribbled the ball with a hypnotic rhythm and passed it the exact second someone blocked me, disappearing from their line of sight before they could even register my presence.
"Nice one, Swan!" Mike shouted after I gave him a perfect pass that he didn't even see coming until the ball was in his hands.
I didn't answer. My mind was elsewhere. As I ran across the court, my gaze escaped toward the other side of the gym, looking for the Cullens. But they weren't there. Not Jasper, not Edward, not the big guy, Emmett. It was as if P.E. were optional for them, or maybe they just didn't fit into the aesthetic of a school gym.
In a break in the game, I looked toward the volleyball area. Bella was a walking disaster. She had just hit the ball with her wrist, sending it directly into the back of the neck of a girl whose back was turned. She was apologizing with exaggerated gestures, red with pure embarrassment.
I felt a pang of pity, but also of artistic curiosity. The contrast between my sister—so clumsy, so human, so loud in her fragility—and the mental image I had of Alice or Edward was fascinating. We were opposite twins: she occupied space with her vulnerability, I avoided it with my indifference.
When the final bell rang, I approached her while she wiped the sweat from her forehead with the sleeve of the yellow raincoat she had refused to take off until the last moment.
"Tell me you didn't kill anyone," I said, appearing at her side.
"Almost," she sighed, exhausted. "I hate this place, Mael. I hate the rain, I hate volleyball, and I hate that that boy, Edward, looked at me in Biology like I was something disgusting that just crawled out of the sewer."
We walked toward the exit, the sound of the red Chevy waiting for us in the parking lot like a metallic refuge.
"I don't think he saw you as something disgusting, Bells," I replied, thinking of Jasper's reaction in my History class. "They simply don't know what to do with us. We're a glitch in their algorithm of perfection."
I started the engine, and the truck's roar buried any further conversation. Monday was finally over, and as we pulled out of the school, I saw a silver shadow in the corner of the parking lot through the rearview mirror. The Cullens were still there, motionless, like statues watching the world go by.
The drive back was the closest thing to a sanctuary we had all day. The roar of the Chevy was a wall of sound that isolated us from the outside world. Bella sank into the passenger seat, resting her forehead against the cold glass, watching the raindrops slide down in erratic paths. She was silent, processing her own chaos, which gave me the space my mind needed to do the same.
I drove automatically. My hands knew the weight of the steering wheel, but my consciousness was back in the classrooms, visually dissecting the Cullens. To me, they weren't "weird kids" or "new students"; they were archetypes, figures that demanded to be brought to paper under a different light.
As soon as we got home and Bella locked herself in her room to try to digest her traumatic encounter with Edward, I settled at the small desk in my room. The lamp created a circle of warmth on the blank paper.
My hand moved with an urgency that bordered on feverish. I didn't want to portray them as they were, but as my instinct had perceived them:
I started with Alice first. Not as a high school student, but as an ethereal pixie fairy. Her feet didn't touch the ground; she was surrounded by silk threads that seemed to connect the past with the future. Her porcelain skin glowed with a stardust that seemed to hide a mischievous and ancient wisdom.
Emmett was pure brute force but with a spark of humor. I transformed him into a massive bear-man, with shoulders that took up half the page. I drew him holding a honeycomb with a lopsided grin, suggesting that, despite his destructive power, there was something of a simple, playful appetite in his nature.
For Rosalie, I didn't need much mental effort. She became an ice queen sitting on a throne of frost. Her features were so perfect they were painful to look at. She was surrounded by frozen roses that shattered at the slightest touch, capturing that aura of unattainable beauty that kept everyone at a safe distance.
With Jasper, the charcoal grew darker. I drew him as a weary warrior, with dented armor and deep shadows under his eyes. He was surrounded by a thick smoke representing the violence and pain of a thousand battles. He wasn't a soldier who enjoyed war, but one condemned to feel every blow, trapped in an eternal agony he couldn't escape.
I left Edward for last. I portrayed him as a melancholy aristocrat from another era, sitting on the edge of an abyss. His eyes were pits of unnecessary information, reflecting the boredom of someone who has already heard all the stories and knows all the endings. He seemed to be carrying the weight of everyone's thoughts, trapped in a symphony of mental noise that made him crave absolute silence.
I closed the notebook and stared at the wall. My fingers were stained with graphite and my social battery was in the red, but I felt strangely satisfied.
Forks was no longer just a gray, boring town. Now it was a stage inhabited by myths wearing hoodies and driving expensive cars. Tomorrow I would have to see them again—Jasper and his rigidity, Alice and her lightness. And although everyone else's world seemed to be collapsing, I could only think of one thing: I needed to buy more B-series pencils. The Cullens' shadows were going to wear them all out.