I moved back to my usual lunch group with my taco and soda. My friends wanted to know what the deal had been with Alice, but I honestly had only fragments of likely-misleading clues, and the topic soon fizzled out as they lost interest in exotic speculations. The topic turned to the upcoming beach trip. I sat through this part of the exchange silently except for the necessary noises of assent and enthusiasm, and thought about the Cullen family.

I was trying to avoid excessive notebook use in school, around Jessica in particular - her tendency towards indiscriminate gossip wasn't showing any signs of being a fluke - and so I couldn't organize my wisps of thought visually, as helpful as it would have been. I closed my eyes, adding a feigned tired sigh, and tried to make an imaginary sketch of the mystery.

The Cullens were rich. Dr. Cullen was, well, a doctor, and by Charlie's account a very good one. If he had worked at a better-paying hospital for some years, and saved very much more carefully than most people were capable of, then that might explain it alone. But they were a young couple. Medical school took a long time. It seemed... not impossible, but unlikely, that there would have been not speck of a murmur about it if Dr. Cullen had been a child prodigy who'd graduated medical school when he was fourteen, or something. As far as I knew, Mrs. Cullen didn't work. They had five children to feed (they had to eat, in spite of how Alice had acted and the fact that I'd never seen one of them do it - were they concealing outrageously restrictive food allergies or a religious dietary requirement that embarrassed them for some reason?) and clothe and keep in trendy school supplies, plus a house.

Were there any really big hospitals in Alaska that could have paid Dr. Cullen a great salary? It wasn't the least populous state, but it was way down there, spread out over the largest area. If there was an expensive research clinic or something in Anchorage, I supposed I wouldn't have known about it, so it was possible that Dr. Cullen had spent several years living cheap and only two years ago suddenly cut his income, moved to a small town, and started providing his children with a shiny car and sizeable clothing budgets.

It was not impossible that the Hales' parents had left the Cullens some money in their wills. Or that when the Cullen children were adopted, they came with monetary bonuses to help with their care (and I didn't know how long those three had been in the family, except that it was longer than two years). Or that they were wealthy independent of the doctor's income for some other reason. But that, too, seemed like something I'd have heard a rumor about. There was little to no way that a resident of Forks was a lottery winner or the heir to a diamond cartel or a trust fund baby or something similarly dramatic and pecuniary without it being branded on their forehead forever by public chat.

They all bore weird visual similarities. The pale skin, the incredible beauty. But they were not, supposedly, genetically related, except Jasper and Rosalie, who had only hair color in common (none of them looked like family - they looked like they took the same dance classes and wore the same full-coverage white makeup and had been handpicked from the same modeling agency). I knew it was hard to adopt children - if the Hales were Mrs. Cullen's niece and nephew, that did some explanatory work, but Edward, Emmett, and Alice were from some other source. Didn't it take years of paperwork and waiting to get a child? I supposed it was faster if one was willing to take an older adoptee - but then, it was slower if you wanted a white kid, one without developmental problems. (This was evidence in favor of the hypothesis that Alice, and possibly Edward, were insane, which would have made them easier to adopt. I didn't know about Emmett. But they all did well in school and largely kept to themselves and Charlie thought they were model citizens...)

And it was known that Mrs. Cullen couldn't have children of her own. Since her husband was a doctor, that might have turned up earlier than it would in most couples, but my impression was that fertility testing didn't customarily enter a conception attempt until considerable trial and failure.

The timeline just didn't shake out naturally. I was placing a lot of faith in Forks's rumor mill, but it was a very good one. I guessed that Dr. Cullen was thirty-five at the very oldest. He was supposed to look a decade younger than that. If he'd finshed high school when he was sixteen, say - he probably could have skipped a grade or two back in elementary school without that making its way to my ears - and gotten through med school in an accelerated seven-year program so he had his doctorate at age 23, and raced through whatever licensing hoops were in his way at age 24, and was such a miraculous boon to medicine that he'd immediately gotten his super high paying job in Alaska -

And by then the Hales would have been living with Mrs. Cullen. I didn't know when Dr. and Mrs Cullen had gotten married, so they might not have been living out of the doctor's pocketbook until later. (But what was Mrs. Cullen doing before they married? If she had job skills, they'd never made it into the town consciousness.) But that left Dr. Cullen eight years racking up the big bucks. Not enough time for really high-yield investments to pay out. Was he living like a graduate student that entire time, surviving on ramen and store samples, only to start living like a king a little later on when he'd have to mostly eat savings to do it? When did the other three kids come in? If he'd been saving like a Scrooge during this period, why did they act so used to their nice things? Alice's story about her boots hadn't held any of the earmarks of being a gleeful once-a-year splurge, and I was sure they'd cost at least two hundred dollars, though she hadn't named a figure.

What about school loans? I guessed if I was factoring into the story that he was a brilliant doctor commanding an immense salary, he could also have been a brilliant student commanding a full-ride scholarship...

The bell rang.

Edward seemed to be following me to Biology. This was a slightly silly impression to have even given everything that had happened: we were both starting from the cafeteria, and were both headed for the same classroom. But he was walking right behind me, and seemed to be matching pace awfully precisely with me, Angela, and Mike. I couldn't speed up with all the ice on the paths - so I slowed down, claiming to my friends that I felt liable to fall. This was entirely credible, as I did fall down a lot even on surfaces not encrusted with slippery substances. They slowed down with me.

Instead of going around, Edward slowed down too. It did not seem likely that this was a coincidence or that he felt a deep and abiding need to keep off the grass.

What had Alice said to him, anyway?

We arrived at Biology after what seemed like a very long trip to have squeezed into only three minutes. Angela and I sat at our table, Mike slid in beside his partner, and Edward walked through the door a half a step behind us. He hesitated, like he wanted to go on following us - me - but instead plopped into his chair. He held himself very stiffly but didn't turn around to look at me.

Biology progressed in perfect ordinariness. Mike and I walked to gym, which ensued with no unusual happenings. It wasn't until I walked out of the gym building that Edward Cullen appeared at my side and said, "Hello, Bella."

I jumped, startled. My feet came down on the ice and immediately sheered off in opposite directions. I went down, scrunching my eyes closed and emitting a squeak. But where I expected my head to crack on the ice, there was silence. I opened one eye.

Edward had caught me neatly, and it must have looked to bystanders like we were in the middle of a very oddly timed ballroom dance. "Are you all right?" he asked.

"Yes," I said. "Please let go of me."

Edward stood me back up. He didn't seem to have any trouble with moving me around any which way he pleased, nor with avoiding balance challenges himself. "Thank you," I said, but I narrowed my eyes a little bit. I waited for him to talk next. He was the one who had greeted me; presumably he had a reason. I started counting to five in my head; if he hadn't gotten my attention by the time I reached it, I was going to continue towards my car.

"Alice told me you were upset by my... staring... earlier," he said in that smooth voice (if they made voices out of caramel, this would be one of them), looking into my eyes steadily. His were still gold. "I wanted to apologize."

"Oh," I said. It wasn't very helpful of me, but I didn't feel charitable; I wanted to see what he'd say without prompting.

"I'm sorry," he said, after an awkward pause, apparently having realized that saying he wanted to apologize wasn't quite actually apologizing.

"I accept your apology," I said. I'd gotten into the habit of saying that instead of "it's okay" when I was fourteen, having noticed that I often wanted to accept apologies for things that were not really okay.

"Thank you," said Edward.

"You're welcome," I replied.

There was another pause. I began counting to five again.

"Would you like me to walk you to your car?" he offered when I'd reached three. "I noticed you seem to have some trouble with the ice."

"No, thank you," I said.

This seemed to surprise him. "May I ask why?" he inquired after a moment.

I considered the pros and cons of various answers. Eventually I hedged my bets: "Are you sure you want to know?"

"Yes," he said immediately.

"Because I'm liable to ask very intrusive personal questions of you if I spend time with you socially, and I prefer to avoid situations in which I'm especially likely to be rude." And then, because it would have put the lie to my statement if I'd done otherwise, I turned and picked my way across the ice towards the parking lot.

Of course Edward couldn't let me walk away; he loped beside me, one long easy step to six of my careful ones. "Why would you ask intrusive personal questions?" he asked lightly.

"Because there are a number of things about you - your family in general, actually - that don't add up," I said, deciding that if he kept following me after what I'd told him, he wasn't entitled to special rudeness-avoiding care. "You are distractingly mysterious."

"You like solving mysteries?"

"I like the nonexistence of mysteries. Mysteries mean I've missed something," I said shortly.

"Interesting," Edward murmured softly. "What's missing about me?"

He seemed to want to keep me talking. That was potentially useful. I stopped - carefully, on a salted patch of sidewalk - and turned to face him. "If I tell you what's missing, will you fill in the gaps?"

"Probably not," he said, smiling in a manner that he probably thought was roguish.

"Then I have no incentive to answer your question," I said, and I continued to walk to my car.

Edward's face fell, and he kept following me. "What?"

"The only reason I'd mention to you what's confusing about you would be if I thought you'd demystify things for me," I said briskly. "I don't enjoy having my curiosity abused to no end. If I thought it was fun to muse aloud about things that confuse me, I could talk to one of my friends or parents instead. In the reasonably likely event that you're hiding something on purpose, then telling you what's off about you will only help you cover things up better - and I've got no motive to help cover up a secret I'm not in on, since I don't know if there are adequate reasons for it or not."

He kept following me until I got to my truck, although he didn't come up with anything else to say during the brief journey. "I suppose I'll see you tomorrow," I said as I pulled open my cab door.

"Of course," he said. "Tomorrow."

I hopped into the driver's seat and went home.

I pulled into the driveway, let myself in, and started a pot of lentils boiling, because they were impossible to overcook as long as I added water periodically and would be hot and ready to eat whenever Charlie got home.

I pulled out my notebook and wrote for a solid forty-five minutes. My hand was cramping up by the time I was done. All the confusing tidbits, all the erratic pieces of behavior, everything I'd heard from Jessica and other sources. I tapped the eraser end of my pencil several times around the bit where I'd written about Alice's lunch behavior. Her timing was strange. She'd interrupted me just before I'd asked any awkward questions, and I was sure I hadn't looked like I was going to say anything. I'd recorded video of myself thinking and writing before, just for kicks - my emotions were readable, but if I closed my eyes and skipped to a random point in the video before re-opening them, I couldn't tell whether I was about to write something or not until my arm actually moved. And I'd been the one in the video.

And then there was the bit with the van, in the morning...

I thought of a crazy idea.

I thought of a very cheap test.

That was the only kind of test worth doing on a crazy idea. If one was wise, one didn't bet one's life savings and firstborn child on something this silly. But it would cost me less to perform this test than it would cost to expend the willpower on avoiding it, now that I'd thought it up.

I shut my notebook. I shut my eyes.

I made up my mind that, when Charlie got home, I was going to tell him all about my suspicions of the Cullens.

Fifteen minutes later, the doorbell rang.