1. First Sight, pt 5

They were huddled in the corner of the cafeteria, as far away from me and anyone else as possible.  There were five of them, none of them talking or eating or staring at me, which seemed to be the three things that were done in the Forks High lunch room.

They had little in common.  Of the three boys, one was big and muscular, with dark and curly hair.  Another, tall and lean and honey blond, with sharper edges.  The third was lanky, with untidy, bronze-colored hair - more boyish than the others, who looked like they could have been teachers as much as students.

The girls were polar opposites.  The tall one was statuesque, with a figure that made very girl around her suddenly a bit more self-conscious, and golden hair that fell in gentle waves down the middle of her back.  The other was short and pixielike, thin in the extreme, with smaller, unassuming features and short-cropped, deep black hair that stuck out in every direction.

But for all their differences, there was no doubt that they were somehow cropped together, with a resemblance that was almost familial.  Every one was chalky pale even for this sunless town - paler than me, part albino.  All of their eyes were dark and sallow, bruiselike shadows causing them to sink into their faces - like none of them had slept in weeks.  And all of their features were straight, strong, angular. Their faces, for all their differences, were all inhumanly beautiful, the kind you'd never expect to see without taking an airbrush to a fashion model or painting angels on marble walls.

I couldn't look away.

None of them looked at each other, or at anyone else in the room.  I saw no movement at all from them until the pixie rose with her tray and loped away with a sudden catlike grace, dumping her tray and vanishing out the back door without a sound.  The only sign she had ever been there was an unbitten apple and an unopened soda, left at the far end of one of the tables waiting for another student to come along and collect it.
My eyes darted back to the others, who sat, unchanging.

"Who are they?" I asked the girl from Spanish, whose curly hair bobbled as she looked up from her lunch to see.  As if he'd heard me, the younger one looked up, eyes flickering towards me.  I dropped my eyes at once, but not before his gaze flickered over me like I held nothing of interest to him at all.

"That's Edward and Emmett Cullen, and Rosalie and Jasper Hale," she said under her breath, as though brewing a dark conspiracy.  "I think Alice Cullen just left.  They all live together with Dr. Cullen and his wife."

I glanced sideways at the thinner, boyish one, who was looking at his tray now, picking a bagel to pieces with long, pale fingers.  His lips were moving quietly, as though he were speaking to the other three, who continued to ignore him and everyone else in the room.

The part of my brain that memorized names started working again, suddenly having a reason to care.  The girl sitting next to me - Jessica, that was it - looked at me expectantly.

"They're... very nice-looking", I said, suddenly feeling like an idiot.
"Oh, I know!  Don't they just sparkle!?" Jessica giggled.  I was trying to figure out how a human being could sparkle when she leaned in again, the conspiracy deepening. "They're all together, though: Emmett and Rosalie, Jasper and Alice.  And they live together."  Shock and condemnation. A product of small town values, certainly, though not anything that wouldn't be gossiped about in Pheonix as well.

"Which ones are the Cullens?" I asked.  "They don't look related..."
"Oh, they're not.  Dr. Cullen is really young, like in his twenties or thirties.  They're all adopted. The Hales are brother and sister, the twin blondes, but they're foster children."
"They look a little old for foster children."
"Well, they are now. Jasper and Rosalie are both eighteen, but they've been with Mrs. Cullen since they were eight.  She's, like, their aunt or something like that."