Chapter 6

The rest of the morning passed in about the same fashion. My Trigonometry

teacher, Mr. Varner, who I would have hated anyway just because of the subject

he taught, was the only one who made me stand in front of the class and introduce myself. I stammered, blushed, and tripped over my own boots on the

way to my seat.

After two classes, I started to recognize several of the faces in each class. There

was always someone braver than the others who would introduce themselves and

ask me questions about how I was liking Forks. I tried to be diplomatic, but

mostly I just lied a lot. At least I never needed the map.

One girl sat next to me in both Trig and Spanish, and she walked with me to the

cafeteria for lunch. She was tiny, several inches shorter than my five feet four

inches, but her wildly curly dark hair made up a lot of the difference between our

heights. I couldn't remember her name, so I smiled and nodded as she prattled

about teachers and classes. I didn't try to keep up.

We sat at the end of a full table with several of her friends, who she introduced

to me. I forgot all their names as soon as she spoke them. They seemed

impressed by her bravery in speaking to me. The boy from English, Eric, waved

at me from across the room.

It was there, sitting in the lunchroom, trying to make conversation with seven

curious strangers, that I first saw them.

They were sitting in the corner of the cafeteria, as far away from where I sat as

possible in the long room. There were five of them. They weren't talking, and

they weren't eating, though they each had a tray of untouched food in front of

them. They weren't gawking at me, unlike most of the other students, so it was

safe to stare at them without fear of meeting an excessively interested pair of

eyes. But it was none of these things that caught, and held, my attention.

They didn't look anything alike. Of the three boys, one was big — muscled like a

serious weight lifter, with dark, curly hair. Another was taller, leaner, but still

muscular, and honey blond. The last was lanky, less bulky, with untidy, bronze colored hair. He was more boyish than the others, who looked like they could be

in college, or even teachers here rather than students.

The girls were opposites. The tall one was statuesque. She had a beautiful figure,

the kind you saw on the cover of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, the kind

that made every girl around her take a hit on her self-esteem just by being in the

same room. Her hair was golden, gently waving to the middle of her back. The

short girl was pixielike, thin in the extreme, with small features. Her hair was a

deep black, cropped short and pointing in every direction.

And yet, they were all exactly alike. Every one of them was chalky pale, the

palest of all the students living in this sunless town. Paler than me, the albino.

They all had very dark eyes despite the range in hair tones. They also had dark

shadows under those eyes — purplish, bruiselike shadows. As if they were all

suffering from a sleepless night, or almost done recovering from a broken nose.

Though their noses, all their features, were straight, perfect, angular.

But all this is not why I couldn't look away.

I stared because their faces, so different, so similar, were all devastatingly,

inhumanly beautiful. They were faces you never expected to see except perhaps

on the airbrushed pages of a fashion magazine. Or painted by an old master as

the face of an angel. It was hard to decide who was the most beautiful — maybe

the perfect blond girl, or the bronze-haired boy.

They were all looking away — away from each other, away from the other

students, away from anything in particular as far as I could tell. As I watched,

the small girl rose with her tray — unopened soda, unbitten apple — and walked

away with a quick, graceful lope that belonged on a runway. I watched, amazed

at her lithe dancer's step, till she dumped her tray and glided through the back

door, faster than I would have thought possible. My eyes darted back to the

others, who sat unchanging.

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