"Oh, look," said Alice, seizing my arm in a friendly but inescapable grip and pulling me towards the front left wheel of my truck, and then past it. She pointed at the tire. "Snow chains. That was smart! I thought you were from Phoenix and it never ices there."
I hadn't put the chains there, and I was surprised I hadn't noticed them before I got into the truck that morning. I supposed that explained why I hadn't had a terrible time driving to school in all the glittering frozenness. "My dad -" I started to guess, but Alice was still hauling on me and it made it hard to form sentences. It was outrageous, how strong she was in spite of being so tiny. "Hey, um -"
"Look," she said again, dragging me farther and farther away from my truck, "all these people have lived in Forks all their lives and half of them don't chain their tires." Finally she seemed to think that, four parking spaces away from the Chevy, we had moved far enough, but she maintained her hold on her arm. I expected to find my skin painted with bruises later.
"Alice," I said, but before I could ask her to please release my arm, a dark blue van skidded across the parking lot and collided with the back corner of my truck.
The truck was sturdy. It made an awful noise, and I lost some paint, but I didn't doubt it would work later.
I would have been standing in the path of the van if Alice hadn't pulled me away.
Alice no seemed to find it necessary to hold my arm in her vice of a hand, but I decided that if she'd found it appropriate in the first place she wouldn't mind my clinging back just a little bit. She was little and bony but didn't sag under my attempt to seek support. I made a small burbling sound.
"Chains on tires in icy weather are such a good idea," said Alice sagely.
I wobbled in place, wrapped around Alice's unprotesting arm and trying not to fall over. Between the ice and the fact that I'd just nearly been trapped between a truck and a van, it was a challenge, but eventually I found enough footing and mental stability to let go of her. "Aaaaaaaugh," I said. My voice was strangely devoid of emotion, considering. It should have been exhibiting relief, or stress, or confusion, or gratitude, or some combination of those things.
I supposed Alice deserved to hear the last one spoken aloud. "Thank you," I added to my ineloquent exhalation.
"For what?" she said. "The compliment about the snow chains and how smart that was? You're welcome!"
It seemed obvious that she was playing dumb, somehow, but I couldn't fathom why. The van hadn't been anywhere in sight when she'd started pulling me away from the truck; there was nothing for her to play dumb about. "For pulling me out of the way," I said. "If you hadn't, the van would have squished me."
"That was lucky!" she said cheerfully. "Hey, I'd better get to my class. I'll see you at lunch, Bella!"
Alice danced away, her grace untroubled by the ice. I blinked at her a couple of times, and then tottered towards the blue van for the ritual exchange of insurance information.
Tyler Crowley was the van's driver; I recognized him from my Government class. He'd gotten a few small cuts, but looked mostly okay; without any humans in the path of his out-of-control car, he'd mostly focused on slowing down and hadn't careened too crazily. By the time I'd written down all the details, Charlie had arrived - apparently the school secretary had called emergency services. He was worried about me at first, but I reassured him that I'd been standing "all the way over there" and that my truck was "just fine, thanks for the chains by the way" and that my witness's remarks were "all written down right here" (I tore a page out of my notebook) and that I was "going to go to class now, I don't want to get any later, love you, Dad".
I was late to English, but after explaining the car accident - with Alice edited out, the implication being that I'd wandered autonomously out of harm's way - I wasn't in trouble. Mike and Eric overheard the story. Mike seemed to decide the best reaction was one of exaggerated compassion, making sure I was okay, did I need help touching up the paint on my truck, etcetera. Eric went with something more along the lines of "wow, Bella had a cool adventure", which would have been the pleasanter of the two if it hadn't made everyone in the class lean in and want me to tell all about my cool adventure.
Tyler was back in school by the time Government started, and he apologized profusely about the minor scratches to my car. His face was covered in bandaids that stood out brightly beige against his brown skin and it was fairly silly-looking. I waved off the apologies; he hadn't caused the ice, and if he'd had any choice about where to aim his van at all, my truck was a good target, sturdy thing it was.
The minor accident - or "cool adventure" - was the talk of the school all morning. Jessica seemed morbidly fascinated by the fact that I could have been killed if I hadn't been some twenty feet away before Tyler had even lost control of his car. She kept talking about it all the way from Spanish to lunch. I was just about to ask her if she could please stop describing my gruesome counterfactual death when, right outside the cafeteria doors, Alice appeared at my elbow.
"Hello, Bella," she said.
"Hi," I said. I blinked. Alice was not quite as aggressively mysterious as Edward, but she was puzzling. At least she didn't scare me. Jessica looked put out by her arrival.
"I'm going to go in and sit down, Bella," said Jessica after enough of a pause to be awkward.
"Okay," I said over my shoulder, still facing Alice. "Later, Jess."
Jessica went inside, and I looked back at the tiny girl who had saved my skin that morning. She was smiling at me like she was dying to tell me what I would get for my birthday but had promised not to. We stared at each other for a bit.
"Uh," I said. "Thanks again for getting me out of the way earlier..."
"You're welcome!" exclaimed Alice. "Do you want to sit with me at lunch today?"
"You - and your, uh, siblings?"
"Hmm," said Alice, furrowing her brow. "No, I don't think that would be a good idea. Just me."
I spent two seconds debating whether to ask her why or not. I decided it would be rude and that I might get clues if I sat with her anyway. "Sure," I said.
My usual tablemates looked puzzled when I walked in with Alice, and I gave them a look intended to convey "I don't know what's going on either, I'm just going with it". They continued to look puzzled. I suspected that most, if not all, of the content of my meaningful looks was lost in translation. I'd catch up with them later and use words instead.
Alice bought a sandwich and a bottle of apple juice. I took a soda, a banana, and, as it was Taco Day, a tortilla full of fixings, and then we found an empty table. I opened my drink and partially peeled my fruit. Alice didn't touch her purchases.
When I'd finished my banana, I said, "Aren't you going to eat?"
"I forgot that this kind of sandwich has mayonnaise on it," she said at once. "I don't like mayonnaise."
It was a tuna sandwich. I wondered if there were any commercially available tuna sandwiches without mayonnaise. "Why don't you get a different one? You never opened it, I bet they'd let you trade it right back," I said.
That one stumped her for a moment. Then she said, "I'm not that hungry anyway. I can just have a snack when I get home in a couple hours."
Uh-huh. "What about your juice?"
"I only like juice with food," she said.
"I'll trade you my soda if you want, I don't care," I offered.
"No, thank you," Alice said firmly.
I turned my head a bit to look at her from another angle, as though that would help. "Don't like soda?"
"I don't. Sorry," she said with an apologetic smile.
"What do you like to eat?"
That threw her a bit. She stared at me blankly for a second before she said, as though at random, "Grapes. Love grapes."
"Is that all?"
She pouted a little, as though disappointed that naming a fruit wasn't enough to turn off my curiosity, and started reciting a paragraph's worth of food items. They were all consistent with her manifest preferences (no mayonnaise, no soda, nothing she could have easily gotten from the school cafeteria), but she sounded like she was reading her grocery list. My past experience with talking extensively about food preferences tended to involve people going on about the little details. If they liked cheese, they'd mention in an aside that Camembert was only worth eating from a particular creamery. Chocolate lovers would have a story about which shop gave out a free sample of which truffle. Fans of quiche would take a moment to dispel the myth that it was difficult to make. Anyone who brought up potato salad would also have a longstanding recipe rivalry with a neighbor. At a minimum they'd specify that the pot roast was to be "the way Grandma makes it". Alice didn't include anything like that; she just listed generic things. "Cauliflower. Pomegranates. Salami. Biscuits. Pistachios. Chickpeas. Licorice. Polenta."
I let her rattle on for a bit, and then held up a hand. "Okay. Very well-rounded diet."
Alice grinned at me.
Lunch with Alice was very awkward. Whenever I made up my mind to say something she spoke first, with some innocuous non-sequitur. Occasionally it was interesting - she had perspectives on the personalities of some of the teachers that I could imagine being useful - but just as often it was entirely apropos of nothing. I was treated to a six-minute description of the mishap-filled shopping expedition that had yielded the boots she was wearing; she told me about the weather in Alaska; she listed the colors and locations of the stains she'd gotten on herself when she learned to tie-dye.
I wondered if she was actually insane.
I decided to ask her if she might know what Edward's deal was, and before I opened my mouth, she said, "Did you know that in Korean -"
"Alice," I said, talking over her, "can I ask you something?"
Her eyes got very wide. She stared at me. She appeared to be desperately wondering if there was a polite way to say "no, you may not" and coming up blank. Finally she nodded once.
"On my first day here, your brother Edward looked at me very angrily, in Biology and again after school, and then he was out of school for a week, and yesterday he wouldn't stop looking at me in class like he was frustrated about something I'd done even though we've never spoken; do you know why either of those things might be?"
Alice gazed, gold-irised, into my eyes. A confusing mix of expressions I couldn't follow crossed her face, and finally she said, "I don't think I should discuss Edward's personal business."
"Because," I said, frowning, "it was kind of concerning to me. I had actually decided that if he didn't stop staring at me, I was going to treat it like a harrassment issue. It doesn't feel very safe. And it's distracting."
Her hands were under the table, but her shoulders moved like she was wringing them. I heard a rocky scraping noise and guessed that she had a pebble stuck in the sole of her boot that was scratching up the linoleum. "I... don't think... that he will hurt you," she said.
There were so many more reassuring ways she could have uttered those exact words.
"I would consider it a personal favor," I said, slowly and carefully, "if you'd tell your brother that I don't appreciate being glared at like I killed his dog, or scrutinized like an unsolved Rubik's cube, while I am trying to do my schoolwork or while I am trying to eat my lunch. I think it would be better for me and him and everybody involved if he cut it out before I involve a teacher, or the principal, or my father, who you probably know is the police chief. I have never done anything to antagonize Edward whatsoever."
"I know you haven't," Alice said quickly.
"Good. I hope he knows it too," I said, trying to sound earnest.
"He does," she assured me. "I'll, um, talk to him about it." And with that she got up and fled, leaving her untouched mayonnaise-tainted sandwich and sealed bottle of juice on the table behind her.