I'M IN HERE
Chapter One - Routine

Rosalie sat down next to me in the lunch room, switching half her egg salad sandwich for half my ham and cheese without asking. I raised my eyebrows and nodded to my orange, then looked to her apple. She thought about it for a second and then placed the apple on my tray, taking my orange in return. Score.

Pulling out my iPod, I scrolled down the extensive menu of playlists, choosing one that seemed to suit the mood, and started it. I put one ear bud in and handed the other to Rose. She positioned the ear piece and listened in silence for a few minutes, taking the time to enjoy the ham portion of her sandwich, before looking at me and rolling her eyes.

She raised her 'what the fuck, Cullen?' eyebrow, waiting for an explanation. I stuck out my bottom lip in a faux pout, and she just shook her head, taking my iPod out of my pocket and scrolling through until she settled on her favourite playlist. The same one she chose every time I let her have dibs on music. She didn't like my taste right now. She said it was pretentious hipster bullshit. I might have agreed with her, but that didn't mean I wanted to listen to something different.

Lunch passed uneventfully, as usual, and we remained in our own world – listening to music and flipping through the miscellaneous items in our bags. Today, she was studying notes for the history test next period and I was browsing through some comics my aunt Elizabeth had mailed me for my birthday, not seeming to notice that she was either seven months late or six months early.

Students began streaming out the cafeteria doors, signalling the end of lunch period. I wrapped the cords back around my iPod, tucking it into my blazer pocket. Rosalie frowned, cocking her head to one side as she took in my appearance. She straightened my tie, the way she'd done every lunch time for as long as I could remember. I could see her fingers twitch, almost touching my hair, but she resisted. There's not much she could have done, anyway. My hair was the one rebellious part of me. Okay, maybe I could think of another, but my hair was beyond stubborn. It was unruly and no amount of Rosalie's primping would force it into conformity.

"What were you listening to today, Edward?" Jessica Stanley asked. She was blinking a lot. It was kind of distracting.

"A little of everything," I shrugged, ignoring the smug smile on Rosalie's lips as she pretended she didn't notice Jessica in the slightest. "Nothing, really. Is there something in your eye?"

"Uh, no," Jessica answered. Her cheeks flushed a blotchy pink, but she stopped her rapid-fire blinking thing. "Are you going to Lauren's party on Saturday night?"

Lauren Mallory was one of the few people who lived off campus in her family's mansion in some gated community just past school grounds. This gave her the social prestige of being one of the only students with the ability to throw a massive house party. Her father was ancient and had one foot in the grave, her mother was a former Playboy bunny, and neither one cared what she got up to as long as she was 'happy'.

"Maybe," I said. I wouldn't go.

"And you, Rosalie?" Jessica asked, looking to Rosalie hopefully.

"Maybe," she echoed. Her face was as cool and calm as ice.

"Cool. Well, uh, talk to you guys later," Jessica said, looking between us awkwardly. She radiated nervousness that was past any reason I could comprehend, her attention flitting around with the frenetic energy of a hummingbird. It almost made me feel anxious in sympathy. I wanted to shake her and tell her to make up her own mind of whether or not to attend Lauren's party. Why should our approval mean anything? We were kids, just like her. Not gods.

"She's exhausting," Rosalie said to me when we got to the locker we shared. She leaned in so no one could eavesdrop. "If she'd just stop caring what everyone thought of her, she could actually be cool."

I shrugged in response and I fingered the spines of my books, looking for my biology text. "Or she could cut her caffeine intake."

"Either way."

I glanced at Ben Cheney's locker to my left while I waited for Rosalie to finish getting her books. He'd recently started dating Angela Weber and his smitten nature could be easily identified in the new look of his locker. There was no trace of the football and hockey player photos that had been plastered on the door. Instead, there were pictures of Angela or Ben with Angela. There were even a few pictures that I assumed he'd simply associated with her, like a pink converse sneaker, a stick of cotton candy, and a golden retriever. I looked back at our locker. There wasn't a single photo or decoration, not even a book out of place. The top shelf held my school books, the bottom shelf contained Rosalie's, and nothing else. It was decidedly utilitarian, not offering a glimpse into our minds for curious onlookers to see.

I said onlookers, because I knew people were curious. They memorized the trivial details we showed because we gave them so little. Even our dorms were as plain as our locker, keeping our secrets hidden from prying eyes, keeping us safe. There was speculation, gossip, rumours, fiction – whatever you wanted to call it, in spades. It's the nature of the beast. Youth revels in mystery, in the art of the tease and the enormity of possibility that imagination allows to exist in place of truth. We gave them the freedom to invent and they worshipped us for it.

In addition to the secrecy we held as individuals, it was the mystery of us that distanced us, that held us above them. In a closed school for the wealthy children who had everything, they couldn't have us. We were undefined, unattainable, and uninterested and it drove them insane with the need to possess that which was denied to them.

It was freshman year when the gossip started to focus on our sexual relationship. General consensus was that we had lost our virginity to each other sometime around Thanksgiving and had fucked our way through Christmas vacation in the Swiss Alps. In truth, Rosalie's family had spent the holidays in Vienna while I had endured another painful Christmas at the Platt Estate in New York listening to my grandmother complain about the vulgarities of my depraved, sexually perverted generation and the degenerate noise that passed for music these days.

I had nothing to gain by owning up to my unsoiled virtue, but I was always shocked that Rosalie had gone along with it. She'd eventually admitted to allowing the rumours to persist as a means of keeping the lowly potential suitors at bay. Despite Olympia Academy being the most prestigious private school in the Pacific North West, there was a notable amount of classless boys residing within its walls. Using me as a shield to protect her from their hormones seemed to be worth the price of being identified as my girlfriend. I also suspected, though Rosalie would never admit to it, that she believed in waiting until marriage and doing things traditionally – an idea that didn't really fly in Olympia's halls of debauchery, popular or not.

Rosalie also kept Lauren Mallory's skanky claws out of my hair, literally, and for that I was willing to be 'exclusive' in our charade. There wasn't really anyone else I was interested in anyway.

All the factors of our existence resulted in a co-dependence between us. A symbiotic relationship, if you will. It was how I came to have exactly one friend in this whole world, despite a reputation for popularity.

It became the flaw that exposed my true self in what was nearly my ultimate demise.

I'm intending to update every Thursday.

Thanks to Jes and Lauren for their pre-reading / beta-ing / idea bouncing work. Hearts.