Chapter 14: who are they

The rest of the morning passed in about the same fashion. Bella's 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. Her name was Jessica.

Emma joined me 5 minutes later. Emma look concerned. She was awfully quiet rest of the day. It was unusual for her. I thought she was nervous.

Jessica 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 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 acros s 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 eight 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 five boys, 1st was big — muscled like a serious weight lifter, with dark, curly hair.

2nd was taller, leaner, but sti ll muscular, and honey blond.

3rd has a tall,muscular,fair-skinned body , silver haired. 4th is tall, very attractive, and fairly well-built. He has pale skin, brown hair, and green/hazel eyes.

The another was lanky, less bulky, with untidy, bronzecolored 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 figure, the kind you saw on the cover of the was statuesque. She had a beautiful Sports Illustrated the kind that made every girl around her take a hit on her self being in the same room. Her hair was golden, gently waving t swimsuit issue, esteem just by o 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.

The last girl was smaller, with hair somewhere between red and brown, but different than either, kind of metallic somehow, a bronze-y color. She looked younger than the other two, who could have been in college, easy.

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 — suffering from a sleepless purplish, bruise like shadows.

As if they were all ess 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 the perfect blond gir l, or the bronze.

They were all looking away — haired boy. — maybe 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 — wal unopened soda, unbitten apple — and ked 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.