The Early Days

“Eventually we made it to Charlie’s. He still lived in the small, two-bedroom house that he bought with my mother in the early days of their marriage. Those were the only kind of days their marriage had - the early ones.”

-Isabella Swan, Twilight

---

It all started all because I decided to come to school early one day. I swear. That was when my life took its toll and became something that I couldn’t calculate like I always could in mathematics.

She was the new student. Of course. So everyone was oogly eyed over her like over sized dinner plates. Really…they would think they would know another human being when you saw one. Apparently being in Forks so long that it took time to get used to foreigners…which wasn’t all that great for the foreigners.

But she was…something else.

Renee Higginbotham. She was…well, as I said, something else. She wasn’t exactly the belle of the ball but she had that sort of mischievous upturn to her eyes that just dragged you in, as if she knew your greatest desire. But of course she had no idea what I was talking about when I told her that.

That was the first thing I ever said to her. Maybe if I said something different, things would not be as they are. But then again, I’m getting ahead of myself.

She was sitting alone at the cafeteria table, nibbling on her morning toast that the lunch ladies were so keen on handing out to everyone like a golden ticket to Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. And they were as short as Oompa Loompas anyways, so you never know…

So anyways, she wasn’t even paying attention to her burnt bread really, as she was just entranced with the book she had in hand.

I had enough courage to go up to her and plant my behind beside her as if I was supposed to be there. When she looked over at me from her hardcovered book, she raised a perfect eyebrow.

“Do I interest you or something? This is like the fifteenth that you’ve sat beside me this week and then you suddenly leave after five seconds or so.”

Of course, as you can see, I had done it quite a bit.

“Your eyes smile,” I said dumbly.

She laughed. Then she saw my serious expression and laughed again, putting down her book.

“Yeah, okay, whatever,” she said between giggles. I smiled. ‘Cause her eyes were doing that again.

Twelfth grade was the last year at Forks High School, so I remember all that happened clearly. And seeing as I am telling of how I met my wife for the first time, or well talked to her for the first time, I can even remember the distinct smell of her shampoo in her golden brown locks.

Strawberry.

And then it happened again and again. I would sit beside her in the mornings and tell her something odd, or not say anything at all and watch her read.

One day she came to school and tried to hide- unsuccessfully- in the school library. So when I plopped down beside her one warm, muggy April morning, she gave out a long exasperated sigh.

“Is there anywhere I can go without you following me? I swear…are you obsessive or something? Are you stalking me?” she asked, half-serious. I wonder what she would have done if I said yes. But I didn’t. I was more logical that that of course.

“No, I don’t stalk you. Does it bother you that I have taken an interest in you?” I asked.

She rolled her eyes and put down her copy of Dracula.

“Uh, yes, if you haven’t noticed. First it was saying my eyes are smiling, which by the way is virtually impossible, and now you’re juts following me, seeking me out on purpose. What the hell is your problem?”

I thought about it. I can see why she was all nit picky though. I guess I would be creeped out as well. But honestly, I couldn’t help it.

So instead, I changed the subject.

“How’s is that?” I inquired, pointing to the book in her lap. Renee squinted at me, as if trying to perceive the mysteries of the world and then sighed in defeat.

“Deliciously scandalous,” she answered, holding the book carefully in her hands.

“So you believe in vampires?” I asked, smirking a little as she seemed to be engrossed in it.

She pursed her red lips in thought.

“Well, I guess we’ll never know until we see one, now won’t we?” she said, winking at me.

“You can’t be serious.”

She only laughed.

“What? I am a man of fact. And vampires are indeed not fact.”

She looked over at me with her smiling brown eyes and smirked.

“I beg to differ.”

---

Graduation came and went. By then Renee and I were dating for three months. And we didn’t even know why either. Mostly cause we chose not to question why. We just did.

Renee was valedictorian and I was the captain of the basketball team. Everyone thought we made such an adorable couple, and for a time, so did we.

I asked her to marry me on her birthday. I got down on one knee and popped the question. And what did she say?

"Yes." Of course, as you all may well know, you know where this is going.

And I was the happiest man in the entire world. Or maybe I just joined the league of men who had that giddy feeling that started in their stomach and enveloped them entirely like a wave of complete and unadulterated joy whenever they look at their newly wed partner.

We bought a two-story house in Forks, not far from where I lived before with my parents. Renee of course wasn’t absolutely thrilled with the idea of staying in the cloudy green town. I swear I heard her talking in her sleep once saying how she felt like she fell in green gelatin. It was amusing but I wasn’t all too sure if I should have taken as lightly as I did, even if she was talking about drowning in green wobbly dessert.

The place was a fixer upper though. Or well, Renee thought so and took the renovation into her hands. She went a little overboard with the whole thing.

The kitchen, once a patterned wallpaper crazy blue had transformed into a bright golden haven where she made her deadly concoctions called 'meals'. I knew that if it smelt like Mexican food emanating from there…I had better make up an excuse that I was needed as the volunteer policeman. That was way before I started to grow a belly and a receding hairline.

Renee of course couldn’t look more vibrant than ever.

But one day, she was extremely excited. She nearly bulldozed me over, casing my stable challenged self to start kicking in, and made me fall down with her on top of me on the outside porch.

“Renee, what’s with the-”

“I’m pregnant!” she squealed, her face breaking out into a large smile, her eyes lighting up as well.

How was I supposed to react?

So I started smiling like an idiot. And then I hugged her tightly. And then I kissed her. And hugged her, until I was doing both.

And of course I was screaming out.

“We’re having a baby!”

I was already thinking of what I could pass on to our child, what tricks I could show them, how to throw a five pointer.

And as the months passed, the excitement on her face came and went. I found her depressed one time, sniffling as she laid on the bed, a protruding bump from her stomach. It was one of the scarier moments that I walked home from one day from work to hear your young wife crying.

I climbed up the stairs, two at a time, and saw her puffed up red face.

“Honey, what’s the matter?”

She looked at me and started crying even worse.

I walked up to the bed and crawled beside her, rubbing the giant bulge tenderly. Just three more months were left till I was going to be a dad; man of the house.

But she never told me.

And then come September, our little girl, Isabella Marie Swan was born, coming into our lives. And when I saw my little girl, or well, my daughter (I don’t know if she would appreciate me calling her my little girl anymore) I had a feeling that I could describe.

“I love you,” I whispered in her small ear every night. Renee smiled at me from her side of the bed and started holding her closely when I gave her back.

“Do you think we could move away? Like, a fresh start, you know? Somewhere new…somewhere…” she pursed her lips in thought, as she had done only a year ago in the library, “less green.”

I laughed, thinking she was talking in jest. “Why? This is a great place for her to be raised.”

She looked over at me, clutching Bella closer to her. “Here? Where it’s always raining and the sun never shines? I don’t think so.”

We started fighting regularly after that. At first it was little bouts over where we should move or where we should stay. We eventually even started to yell at each other. Bella always started to cry when we did.

I guess it was just because we were still so young. She was still nineteen and I was twenty already at the time. We didn’t know better. We didn’t know what we really wanted.

And then came the time when Bells was almost one when Renee walked out the door, saying she was fed up with my practical self and this town which she was forced to move in long ago.

I begged her not to leave. She was taking our kid…she was leaving me. For how long? Forever? Years? Months? Weeks?

“Please, don’t do this,” I said, as she was halfway through the threshold.

She had a duffel bag hanging from her arm and Bella falling asleep over her shoulder.

“If Forks is so great, why don’t you suffer here by yourself? I’m not letting Bella being raised here just because you refuse to see the world like I do...like I should. I can’t stay in one place forever. It’s just not who I am…Just let me go, Charlie,” she pleaded. And her eyes weren’t smiling anymore when she said this. Her eyes didn’t smile anymore at all.

And then she left me alone in that lonely house.

Watching my family leave me.

---

Damn Edward Cullen…stupid boyfriends…Bella is not getting caught up in this. Never, ever, ever, ever, ev-

“Dad, I’m getting married.”

I stopped my thoughts as if a train had just run into me. I shook me head and closed my eyes, opening them again.

“…What?”

“I’m getting married to Edward. Whether you like it or not.”

“YOU ARE NOT GETTING MARRIED!” I shouted loudly at her, making her

“YES I AM! You’re not going to stop me!”

“I’m going to do whatever I bloody can to make you stay!” I shouted back, trying to hold back from shaking her senseless.

I’m not going to make her get caught up and make the same mistakes that her mother and I did. It was just too much pain. It’s been eighteen years and I still haven’t really got over it. Just like Bella was never going to get over Edward.

But was there anything I could do to stop it?

“Dad,” she started again, lowering her voice and taking her hand in mine. We were standing in the living room. I noticed the ring on her finger. So she was really…serious?

“I love Edward. I know he loves me. I know you only care what happens to me…but it’s not like that, okay? And I know what you mean. Like, what can I know? But I do know this is what I want. Let me be free to make my own mistakes, Charlie. That’s the whole point of living, isn’t it? So…just let me live, okay?”

I stared at her. I pulled my hand away and sunk in my chair. I was forgiving before. But she jumped off cliffs, disappeared for days, got mixed up with Jake, met some very nice friends here. But…she was growing up, wasn’t she? She graduated, she found love (however much I didn’t like it), she’s been to different places, seen more than what I’ve seen probably.

“Okay…” I whispered, reluctantly.

“What? I didn’t hear you,” she said, standing in front of me.

“I said…” my voice dropped, “okay.”

“Speak up dad!”

“Okay! Okay!” I shouted, still furious. She smiled when I said that.

No, her eyes smiled. Just like her mother did, back in the early days.

“Thank you.”

She leant down and kissed my wide forehead.

And then she stood back up and she was still beaming brightly, looking at the ring on her finger.

“Thank you,” she whispered again.

And then she turned and walked out through the door, turning around to look at me before she went fully outside. I looked up glumly from the floor.

“Goodbye, daddy,” she said, just like she used to whenever she came over for those summers, which seemed like an eternity ago.

And then she left me alone. In the lonely house that I am in always. That I will always stay in.

The only good days seemed to be the early days, these days.

But maybe it was just that way.

Maybe my time was in the early days.

And Bella’s were just beginning.

The End.

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(EDIT NOTE: Okay, so as Twilight-day-every-day pointed out (once again, thank you!), Renee's last name was not Dwyer before her marriage to Phil. It was in fact, Higginbotham. I am not kidding you. It's on the Twilight Lexicon of you really want to see for yourself. Poor child.)

Yeah…corny. But meh. I really wanted to write this. Cause, being bored is something that should be shot down and murdered. Sorry if any confusion was present while reading this. But really, last time all I checked, people are writing about vampires and werewolves… and all sorts of other stuff.

After all, aren’t these two people are the very reason for Isabella Swan today, aren't they? ;P But I don't think I did them justice...-angst-

And I need a breather sort of too. Like, I’ve been trying to fix up story lines and write decent chapters (it's hard T.T). So I can’t help putting these one shots up. It’s a habit to get away from trying to figure out what and what and blah blah.

Yours truly,

Freak a Geek