"Subtlety's not your strong point, is it?" Emmett asked, appearing by Rose's side as she made her way toward her first class of the day.
"Strong point nothing, big boy." She knocked her hip into his teasingly. "If we'd left it to Alice, the question would already be asked and Bella would likely never speak to any of us again."
Emmett was silent for a moment, and it seemed to be a thinking silence. That was unusual for him. "Do you believe Alice's vision?" he asked, hesitantly, as they neared Rose's classroom.
"I believe she had one, certainly. Whether it pans out or not depends entirely on Bella and Edward, and I'm not going to meddle either way. The surest way to fuck up the future is to try and mess with it."
"But would you care so much? I mean, about finding out what's up with her? If nobody thought she might have anything to do with us, you know?"
Rose compressed her mouth into a thin line. She could almost hear herself asking Edward the same question last night, and she didn't much like her own words being thrown back in her face, even if Emmett didn't mean it that way. "If I suspected anything," she said, "I'd still have tried to help her. That isn't the question."
"Then what is?"
They'd reached her classroom. Rose paused just outside the doorway and smoothed a palm down his button-down shirt, pressing out slight wrinkles.
"The question is whether any of us would have noticed her enough to suspect." She didn't like to admit it, but there it was.
The Cullens existed in a kind of insular world, and not much from the social world of high school penetrated it.
That wasn't necessarily so bad in and of itself, but it made her stomach clench uneasily when she had to admit that it was very possible some terrible things happened behind the closed doors of their quiet little town without their notice.
And it wasn't that they didn't care whether people were being hurt. It was that sometimes nobody cared enough to notice.
When the lunch bell rang, Rose gathered her things and headed for the door. She could already see Alice waiting outside her classroom, bouncing a little on the balls of her feet. Alice was never very good at waiting.
"Rosalie Cullen!" Alice snapped, Velcro-ing herself to Rose's side as they started down the crowded hallway. "What in god's name are you planning?"
Rose couldn't help but smile at her sister's vehemence. "Can't that crystal ball in your head tell you better than I could?"
"You know it doesn't work that way!" Alice almost wailed. "I saw you bugging Bella at lunch, but I have no idea why. I highly doubt you've suddenly changed your mind about her and Edward."
"There's nothing to change," Rosalie said, entering the cafeteria and wrinkling her nose both at the smell and the awful noise of several hundred teenagers all trying to talk at once. "I have absolutely no opinion one way or another about her and Edward."
"Then why - "
Rose left Alice behind as she caught sight of Bella entering from a different hallway. She heard her little sister's muttered grumblings as she followed her toward their target.
"Relay to Edward that the boys are not sitting with us today," Rose said before they got close enough for Bella to hear.
She sent her own thoughts his way, ordering the three Cullen boys to keep away, but it was always helpful to have Alice as reinforcement.
"Hey," Bella greeted them, and Rosalie was surprised to see what looked like a genuine smile touching her mouth.
"Hey yourself," Alice threw back, and the two shorter girls fell into step together just a little behind Rosalie. "How'd your Scarlet Letter paper go? Is it ready to turn in after lunch? What did you end up writing about?"
Rose led them to the Cullens' usual table and dropped into her usual chair. Alice left a space between them, and Bella took the chair on Alice's other side. That was fine with Rose; she could see them better this way, and with her heightened vampire senses hearing them over the constant cafeteria babble was no problem.
"I don't know if I got my point across as well as I wanted to," Bella said, toying with a little yellow apple she'd dug out of her backpack. She seemed almost comfortable around Alice, at this table on the sidelines, her back to the rest of the student body.
"My thesis was that Pearl was the real victim of the story. She carries the stain of her parents' bad name, no matter what she does. Even if she grows up to be a model member of that community - pious and whatever - she'll never be able to escape what her parents did to her."
"Ooh, that's good," Alice said, a touch of jealousy in her voice, though Rose knew Alice could never sustain jealousy for more than a few seconds; she just didn't have it in her. "I never thought about it like that before."
Bella shrugged, looking uncomfortable with the praise, twisting the stem of her apple in her fingers. "It's just what I always thought, I guess."
"Do you like the book, then?"
"No." Bella shook her head, and Rose was pleasantly surprised to hear the decisiveness in her voice. She wasn't afraid to give an opinion when asked - that was definitely a good sign. If she was being abused, then at least her sense of personhood and autonomy hadn't been entirely beaten out of her.
"What don't you like about it?"
"Mm." Bella picked at the sticker on her apple until it came off, and she stuck it idly on the thigh of her jeans. "I don't like Hawthorne's writing style, and...I don't know. It's just..." She paused, and both Cullens let her think her words through before she continued. "Just...maybe it's more real-life than Romeo and Juliet or whatever, but there's just nothing fun about it. I can't believe those two people actually loved each other. If they did, they'd have found a way to be together, despite the odds."
"Bella Swan!" Alice squealed. "We've got you figured out, now - you're a romantic!"
Bella's cheeks instantly turned pink, and she ducked her head a little, letting her hair fall in her face. "Well, that's just what I thought about the book." She tried to explain, but Alice wasn't having any of it.
"No, no, you can't take it back now," Alice cackled. "Hey, did you break your apple stem already?"
"No." Bella showed her the intact apple, lying in the palm of a small hand.
"Well, then we have to play the game, since we found out you're a romantic at heart." Alice motioned for her to twist the apple stem. "Say the alphabet, one letter for each twist. When it breaks, that letter is the initial of your true love."
Rosalie didn't bother hiding her grin; they weren't looking at her anyway.
"Do I have to?" Bella's voice was meek, but there was humor in it.
"Yes!" Alice made the twisting motion with her fingers again. "Go, go."
"But I already twisted it some. Does that matter?"
"Nope. Fate takes things like that into account," Alice said confidently.
"Fate. Right." Rose wondered at the sudden absence of humor from Bella's voice, but didn't say anything. "A," Bella recited, giving the apple stem a little twist. "B."
The stem broke away in her hand at "E." Rose wondered if Alice had seen that coming, and whether that was why she suggested the game.
"Who do you know with an E' name?" Alice asked in a falsely-innocent tone.
"No one," Bella replied, and there was something hard in her voice that Rose couldn't place. It wasn't anger, or sadness...could it be frustration? Suspicion? "Besides, even if I did have a true love out there waiting, he wouldn't be here."
"Why not?" Alice asked as Bella finally bit into her apple instead of playing with it. "I think lasting young love is maybe the most beautiful thing in the world."
"Yeah," Bella said, though it was not an agreement with Alice's statement, "well, it's not going to happen with me. As soon as I turn eighteen, I'm leaving Forks."
"Why?" Rosalie asked, trying to make her voice sound bored, but she wasn't sure she had succeeded.
Bella glanced at her, and the uncertainty was back. Clearly she did not altogether trust Rose yet, though she trusted Alice. "I think it might make more sense if you asked me why I'd want to stay," she said, and her voice lost the playful confidence it had had earlier. Now it was soft, hesitant...almost meek.
"Well, sure," Rose said, trying to coax the bright, cheerful Bella back to them. "I just wondered if you had any specific reasons."
Bella shrugged, refusing to look up from the table. She had a piece of apple in her mouth that she wasn't chewing; Rose could see the contour of it tucked against her cheek as if she were a little squirrel or chipmunk. "I have to go," she said suddenly, rising from the table. She gave Alice a faint smile that did not reach her eyes before she fled the cafeteria. Rosalie stopped Alice from going after her.
"Let her calm down," she said. "We've got something to do."
"I wish you hadn't provoked her," Alice said, staring wistfully at the hall Bella had disappeared down.
"Would you still be cranky if I said we were going to lure her home with us?"
Alice peered suspiciously into Rosalie's eyes, but after a moment her face cleared and she smiled.
"Let's go." Rose had no idea exactly what Alice had seen, but she was more than happy to let her pry into their future if it meant she would be helpful and not judgmental in the short term. In the long term, there was no telling what might occur.
Rose led the way out to the parking lot, where a small group of students were smoking in the rain and a handful of others were rummaging in their cars, looking for misplaced assignments or books.
She thought she probably should feel a little guilty about what she planned, but she couldn't. Their interaction at lunch had been brief, but it told her nothing that did not add to her suspicions.
Bella seemed like a sweet, intelligent girl, but she was clearly hiding something. And if they couldn't use Alice or Edward to figure out her secret, they were going to have to resort to...alternate methods.
Rosalie didn't look to the right or the left as she strode purposefully up to Bella's behemoth of a truck and popped the hood.
She knew from long practice that the way to not look suspicious was to act like you had every right to be doing what you were doing.
She peered into the gaping maw of the old beast, nodding absently as she familiarized herself with the setup. Someone had done some reasonably-good repair work on the hunk of junk, and recently, too. She wondered who - it certainly hadn't been Bella herself.
Let alone the fact that she didn't seem the type, Rose doubted that she could even lift some of the heavy, vintage parts under that hood.
She rummaged around, trying not to get too much dirty grease on her hands, though the innards of the truck were actually reasonably clean.
With a quick motion she unhooked one side of Bella's battery, and she took a pair of wire cutters from her bag and snapped two plastic-coated wires.
"What'd you do that for?" Alice asked. "Even I know that disengaging the battery is enough to make it not start."
"Exactly," Rose said, tucking the cut ends of the wires out of sight. "If even you know that, it's possible Bella does, too. The rest was for insurance."
"You'll be able to fix it again, right?"
"In less than five minutes," Rose assured her. "But now we have the perfect excuse to give her a ride home, and that's a first step, anyway."
"You are an evil, evil genius," Alice told her sister, with appropriate respect.
"I know." Rose flashed a falsely-sweet smile, which made Alice laugh. "Now let's get out of here, before someone sees us messing around with her truck and remembers it."