It was miserable because I had to play volleyball, and the one time I didn't cringe out of the way of the ball, it hit me in the head, bounced off, and hit my teammate in the head.
And it was worst of all because Fredward Cullen wasn't in school at all.
All morning I was dreading lunch, fearing his bizarre glares and the sexual tension between us, which I felt even in his bizarre, hateful glances, and even that one time from all the way across the lunchroom. Part of me wanted to confront him and demand to know what his problem was. While I was lying sleepless in my bed, I even played it out in my head, what I would say. But I knew myself too well to think I would ever take this late-night roleplaying into the lunchroom. I made the Cowardly Lion look like Arnold Schwarzenegger as The Terminator.42
But when I walked into the cafeteria with Jessica—trying to keep my eyes from sweeping the place for him, and failing entirely—I saw that his four siblings were sitting together at the same table they had been at yesterday, and he was not with them.
Mike intercepted us and steered us towards his table, where, I presumed, he would take joy from eating while looking at me. Jessica seemed elated by the attention, not knowing it was directed at me, and her friends quickly joined us; possibly because they, too, thought Mike's attention was directed at Jessica, although it wasn't. But as I tried to listen to their easy, ignorant chatter, I was terribly uncomfortable, and waited nervously for the moment he would arrive. I hoped that he would simply ignore me when he came, not even glare at me, so that I could prove to myself that I did not smell bad or have any other problem that would make a buck of his stature so skittish.
He didn't come, and as time passed I grew more and more tense.
I walked to Biology IV with more confidence when, by the end of lunch, he still hadn't shown his beautiful face at the Forks High School cafeteria. Mike, who was taking on the qualities of a golden retriever, walked faithfully by my side to class. I held my breath at the door, but
42. Arnold Schwarzenegger's star turn in 1997's The Terminator was the role that made his career. In it he plays the titular character, The Terminator, a robot that has been sent back in time to shoot a pregnant woman before she can give birth to a baby that, in the future, will try to shoot The Terminator before it goes back in time to shoot his mother.