Life and Death Read online

  Contents

  COVER

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  FOREWORD

  EPIGRAPH

  PREFACE

  1. FIRST SIGHT

  2. OPEN BOOK

  3. PHENOMENON

  4. INVITATIONS

  5. BLOOD TYPE

  6. SCARY STORIES

  7. NIGHTMARE

  8. PORT ANGELES

  9. THEORY

  10. INTERROGATIONS

  11. COMPLICATIONS

  12. BALANCING

  13. CONFESSIONS

  14. MIND OVER MATTER

  15. THE CULLENS

  16. CARINE

  17. THE GAME

  18. THE HUNT

  19. GOODBYES

  20. IMPATIENCE

  21. PHONE CALL

  22. HIDE-AND-SEEK

  23. THE CHOICE

  24. CHANGE

  EPILOGUE: AN OCCASION

  AFTERWORD

  COPYRIGHT

  To my boys, Gabe, Seth, and Eli, for letting me be a part of the teenage boy experience. I couldn’t have written this without you.

  FOREWORD

  Hello, lovely reader!

  As you may know, 2015 marked the tenth anniversary of Twilight. To celebrate this milestone, I decided to create a reimagining of the original story.

  As I was musing on Twilight after being away from it for so long, I started thinking about something I’d said many times before at signings and in interviews. You know, Bella has always gotten a lot of censure for getting rescued on multiple occasions, and people have complained about her being a typical damsel in distress. My answer to that has always been that Bella is a human in distress, a normal human being surrounded on all sides by people who are basically superheroes and supervillains. She’s also been criticized for being too consumed with her love interest, as if that’s somehow just a girl thing. But I’ve always maintained that it would have made no difference if the human were male and the vampire female—it’s still the same story. Gender and species aside, Twilight has always been a story about the magic and obsession and frenzy of first love. There isn’t much difference at all between a female human in love with a male vampire and a male human in love with a female vampire. And that’s how Beau and Edythe were born.

  A couple of notes on the conversion:

  1. I’ve done a pretty straight-across-the-board gender swap with all the Twilight characters, but there are two exceptions.

  • The biggest exception is Charlie and Renée, who have stayed Charlie and Renée. Here’s the reason for that: Beau was born in 1987. It was a rare thing for a father to get primary custody of a child in those days—even more so when the child was just a baby. Most likely, the mother would have had to be proven unfit in some way. I have a really hard time believing that any judge at that time (or even now) would give a child to a transient, unemployed father over a mother with a steady job and strong ties to her community. Of course, these days if Charlie had fought for Bella, he probably could have taken her from Renée. Thus, the more unlikely scenario is the one that plays out in Twilight. Only the fact that a few decades ago a mother’s rights were considered more important than a father’s rights, as well as the fact that Charlie’s not the vindictive type, made it possible for Renée to raise Bella—and, in this case, now Beau.

  • The second exception is very small—just a few background characters mentioned only twice. The reason for this exception is my misplaced sense of justice for fictional people. There were two characters in the wider Twilight universe who really got the shaft in an ongoing sense. So instead of doing a swap with these characters, I gave them a coup. It adds nothing to the story. It was just me being weird and indulging my neurosis.

  2. There are many more changes in the writing than were necessitated by Beau’s status as a male person, so I thought I would break them down for you. These are, of course, rough estimates. I did not count all the words I changed, or do any actual math.

  • 5% of the changes I made were because Beau is a boy.

  • 5% of the changes were because Beau’s personality developed just slightly differently than Bella’s. The biggest variations are that he’s more OCD, he’s not nearly so flowery with his words and thoughts, and he’s not as angry—he’s totally missing the chip Bella carries around on her shoulder all the time.

  • 70% of the changes I made were because I was allowed to do a new editing run ten years later. I got to fix almost every word that has bothered me since the book was printed, and it was glorious.

  • 10% were things that I wished I had done the first time around but that hadn’t occurred to me at the time. That might sound like the same thing as the preceding category, but it’s slightly different. This isn’t a case of a word that sounds clunky or awkward. This is an idea that I wish had been explored earlier, or conversations that should have happened but didn’t.

  • 5% were mythology issues—mistakes, actually—mostly related to visions. As I continued into the sequels to Twilight—and even Midnight Sun, where I got to look inside Alice’s head with Edward—the way Alice’s visions worked was refined. It’s more mystical in Twilight, and looking at it now, there are ways she should have been involved and wasn’t. Whoops!

  • Which leaves a 5% catchall, for the many miscellaneous changes that I made, each for a different, and no doubt selfish, reason.

  I hope you have fun with Beau and Edythe’s story. I truly had the best time ever creating this new version. I love Beau and Edythe with a passion I did not see coming, and their story has made the fictional world of Forks fresh and happy for me again. I hope it does the same for you. If you get one tenth of the pleasure out of this that I did, it will be worth it.

  Thank you for reading. Thank you for being a part of this world, and thank you for being such an amazing and unexpected source of joy in my life for the last decade.

  Much love,

  Stephenie

  If his destiny be strange, it is also sublime.

  Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea

  PREFACE

  I’D NEVER GIVEN MUCH THOUGHT TO DYING—THOUGH I’D HAD REASON enough in the last few months—but even if I had, I wouldn’t have imagined it like this.

  I stared across the long room, into the dark eyes of the hunter, and she looked pleasantly back at me.

  At least it was a good way to die, in the place of someone else, someone I loved. Noble, even. That ought to count for something.

  I knew that if I’d never gone to Forks, I wouldn’t be about to die now. But, terrified as I was, I couldn’t bring myself to regret the decision. When life offers you a dream so far beyond any of your expectations, it’s not reasonable to grieve when it comes to an end.

  The hunter smiled in a friendly way as she sauntered forward to kill me.

  1. FIRST SIGHT

  January 17, 2005

  MY MOM DROVE ME TO THE AIRPORT WITH THE WINDOWS ROLLED DOWN. Though it was January everywhere else, it was seventy-five degrees in Phoenix, and the sky was bright blue. I had on my favorite t-shirt—the Monty Python one with the swallows and the coconut that Mom got me two Christmases ago. It didn’t quite fit anymore, but that didn’t matter. I wouldn’t be needing tshirts again soon.

  In the Olympic Peninsula of northwest Washington State, a small town named Forks exists under a near-constant cover of clouds. It rains on this insignificant town more than any other place in the United States of America. It was from this town and its depressing gloom that my mom escaped with me when I was only a few months old. It was in this town that I’d been forced to spend a month every summer until I was fourteen. That was the year I finally started making ultimatums; these past three summers, my dad, Charlie, vacationed with m
e in California for two weeks instead.

  Yet somehow, I now found myself exiled to Forks for the rest of my high school education. A year and a half. Eighteen months. It felt like a prison sentence. Eighteen months, hard time. When I slammed the car door behind me, it made a sound like the clang of iron bars locking into place.

  Okay, just a tad melodramatic there. I have an overactive imagination, as my mom was fond of telling me. And, of course, this was my choice. Self-imposed exile.

  Didn’t make it any easier.

  I loved Phoenix. I loved the sun and the dry heat and the big, sprawling city. And I loved living with my mom, where I was needed.

  “You don’t have to do this,” my mom said to me—the last of a hundred times—just before I got to the TSA post.

  My mom says we look so much alike that I could use her for a shaving mirror. It’s not entirely true, though I don’t look much like my dad at all. Her chin is pointy and her lips full, which is not like me, but we do have exactly the same eyes. On her they’re childlike—so wide and pale blue—which makes her look like my sister rather than my mom. We get that all the time and though she pretends not to, she loves it. On me the pale blue is less youthful and more … unresolved.

  Staring at those wide, worried eyes so much like my own, I felt panicked. I’d been taking care of my mom for my whole life. I mean, I’m sure there must have been a time, probably when I was still in diapers, that I wasn’t in charge of the bills and paperwork and cooking and general level-headedness, but I couldn’t remember it.

  Was leaving my mom to fend for herself really the right thing to do? It had seemed like it was, during the months I’d struggled toward this decision. But it felt all kinds of wrong now.

  Of course she had Phil these days, so the bills would probably get paid on time, there would be food in the fridge, gas in the car, and someone to call when she got lost… . She didn’t need me as much anymore.

  “I want to go,” I lied. I’d never been a good liar, but I’d been saying this lie so much lately that it almost sounded convincing now.

  “Tell Charlie I said hi.”

  “I will.”

  “I’ll see you soon,” she promised. “You can come home whenever you want—I’ll come right back as soon as you need me.”

  But I knew what it would cost her to do that.

  “Don’t worry about me,” I insisted. “It’ll be great. I love you, Mom.”

  She hugged me tightly for a minute, and then I walked through the metal detectors, and she was gone.

  It’s a three-hour flight from Phoenix to Seattle, another hour in a small plane up to Port Angeles, and then an hour drive back down to Forks. Flying’s never bothered me; the hour in the car with Charlie, though, I was a little worried about.

  Charlie had really been pretty decent about the whole thing. He seemed genuinely pleased that I was coming to live with him sort of permanently for the first time. He’d already gotten me registered for high school, and was going to help me get a car.

  But it would be awkward. Neither of us was what you’d call extroverted—probably a necessary thing for living with my mother. But aside from that, what was there to say? It wasn’t like I’d kept the way I felt about Forks a secret.

  When I landed in Port Angeles, it was raining. It wasn’t an omen, just inevitable. I’d said my goodbyes to the sun.

  Charlie was waiting for me with the cruiser. This I was expecting, too. Charlie is Police Chief Swan to the good people of Forks. My primary motivation behind buying a car, despite my serious lack of funds, was that I hated driving around town in a car with red and blue lights on top. Nothing slows down traffic like a cop.

  I stumbled off the plane into Charlie’s awkward, one-armed hug.

  “It’s good to see you, Beau,” he said, smiling as he automatically steadied me. We patted each other’s shoulders, embarrassed, and then stepped back. “You haven’t changed much. How’s Renée?”

  “Mom’s great. It’s good to see you, too, Dad.” I wasn’t supposed to call him Charlie to his face.

  “You really feel okay about leaving her?”

  We both understood that this question wasn’t about my own personal happiness. It was about whether I was shirking my responsibility to look after her. This was the reason Charlie’d never fought Mom about custody; he knew she needed me.

  “Yeah. I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t sure.”

  “Fair enough.”

  I only had two big duffel bags. Most of my Arizona clothes were too permeable for the Washington climate. My mom and I had pooled our resources to supplement my winter wardrobe, but it still wasn’t much. I could handle both of them, but Charlie insisted on taking one.

  It threw my balance off a little—not that I was ever really balanced, especially since the growth spurt. My foot caught on the lip of the exit door and the bag swung out and hit the guy trying to get in.

  “Oh, sorry.”

  The guy wasn’t much older than me, and he was a lot shorter, but he stepped up to my chest with his chin raised high. I could see tattoos on both sides of his neck. A small woman with hair dyed solid black stared menacingly at me from his other side.

  “Sorry?” she repeated, like my apology had been offensive somehow.

  “Er, yeah?”

  And then the woman noticed Charlie, who was in uniform. Charlie didn’t even have to say anything. He just looked at the guy, who backed up a half-step and suddenly seemed a lot younger, and then the girl, whose sticky red lips settled into a pout. Without another word, they ducked around me and headed into the tiny terminal.

  Charlie and I both shrugged at the same time. It was funny how we had some of the same mannerisms when we didn’t spend much time together. Maybe it was genetic.

  “I found a good car for you, really cheap,” Charlie announced when we were strapped into the cruiser and on our way.

  “What kind of car?” I asked, suspicious of the way he said “good car for you” as opposed to just “good car.”

  “Well, it’s a truck actually, a Chevy.”

  “Where did you find it?”

  “Do you remember Bonnie Black down at La Push?” La Push is the small Indian reservation on the nearby coastline.

  “No.”

  “She and her husband used to go fishing with us during the summer,” Charlie prompted.

  That would explain why I didn’t remember her. I do a good job of blocking painful things from my memory.

  “She’s in a wheelchair now,” Charlie continued when I didn’t respond, “so she can’t drive anymore, and she offered to sell me her truck cheap.”

  “What year is it?” I could see from the change in his expression that this was the question he was hoping I wouldn’t ask.

  “Well, Bonnie’s had a lot of work done on the engine—it’s only a few years old, really.”

  Did he think I would give up that easily?

  “When did she buy it?”

  “She bought it in 1984, I think.”

  “Did she buy it new?”

  “Well, no. I think it was new in the early sixties—or late fifties at the earliest,” he admitted sheepishly.

  “Ch—Dad, I don’t really know anything about cars. I wouldn’t be able to fix anything that broke, and I couldn’t afford a mechanic… .”

  “Really, Beau, the thing runs great. They don’t build them like that anymore.”

  The thing, I thought to myself … it had possibilities—as a nickname, at the very least.

  “How cheap is cheap?” After all, that part was the deal killer.

  “Well, son, I kind of already bought it for you. As a homecoming gift.” Charlie glanced sideways at me with a hopeful expression.

  Wow. Free.

  “You didn’t need to do that, Dad. I was going to buy myself a car.”

  “I don’t mind. I want you to be happy here.” He was looking ahead at the road when he said this. Charlie had never been comfortable with expressing his emotions out loud. An
other thing we had in common. So I was looking straight ahead as I responded.

  “That’s amazing, Dad. Thanks. I really appreciate it.” No need to add that he was talking about impossibilities. Wouldn’t help anything for him to suffer along with me. And I never looked a free truck in the mouth—or rather engine.

  “Well, now, you’re welcome,” he mumbled, embarrassed by my thanks.

  We exchanged a few more comments on the weather, which was wet, and that was pretty much it for conversation. We stared out the windows.

  It was probably beautiful or something. Everything was green: the trees were covered in moss, both the trunks and the branches, the ground blanketed with ferns. Even the air had turned green by the time it filtered down through the leaves.

  It was too green—an alien planet.

  Eventually we made it to Charlie’s. He still lived in the small, two-bedroom house that he’d bought with my mother in the early days of their marriage. Those were the only kind of days their marriage had—the early ones. There, parked on the street in front of the house that never changed, was my new—well, new to me—truck. It was a faded red color, with big, curvy fenders and a rounded cab.

  And I loved it. I wasn’t really a car guy, so I was kind of surprised by my own reaction. I mean, I didn’t even know if it would run, but I could see myself in it. Plus, it was one of those solid iron monsters that never gets damaged—the kind you see at the scene of an accident, paint unscratched, surrounded by the pieces of the foreign car it had just destroyed.

  “Wow, Dad, it’s awesome! Thanks!” Serious enthusiasm this time. Not only was the truck strangely cool, but now I wouldn’t have to walk two miles in the rain to school in the morning. Or accept a ride in the cruiser, which was obviously worst-case scenario.

  “I’m glad you like it,” Charlie said gruffly, embarrassed again.

  It took only one trip to get all my stuff upstairs. I got the west bedroom that faced out over the front yard. The room was familiar; it had belonged to me since I was born. The wooden floor, the light blue walls, the peaked ceiling, the faded blue-and-white checked curtains around the window—these were all a part of my childhood. The only changes Charlie had ever made were switching the crib for a bed and adding a desk as I grew. The desk now held a secondhand computer, with the phone line for the modem stapled along the floor to the nearest phone jack. This was one of my mother’s requirements, so that we could stay in touch. The rocking chair from my baby days was still in the corner.