My eyes narrowed. I'd heard that one before.
"It's too bad you didn't figure that out earlier in the parking lot," I hissed through my teeth, which were clenched. "You could have saved yourself all this regret." It was a low blow, suggesting that he should have let me die that day in the Forks High School parking lot... but I was serious.
"Regret?" The word and my tone had caught him off guard. "Regret for what?" Did I really have to spell it out for him?
I spelled it out for him. "For not letting that stupid van squish me."
He was astonished. He stared at me in disbelief.
When he finally spoke, he almost sounded mad. "You think I regret saving your life?"
"I know you do," I snapped.
"You don't know anything." He was definitely mad.
I turned my head sharply away from him, clenching my jaw against the wild accusations I wanted to hurl at him. I gathered my book-documents together, then stood and walked into the door. I meant to sweep dramatically out of the room, but of course caught my toe on the door-jamb and dropped my books. I stood there for a moment, thinking about leaving them there to rot in the un-nurturing wasteland that was the biology lab of the Forks High School. Then I sighed and bent to pick them up. He was there; he'd already stacked them into a pile. He handed them to me, his face hard. Thinking back, I should have thought there was something strange about the way he was able to pick up my books, stack them, and hand them to me in the time it took me just to make the decision to bend over as a first step in picking them up myself.
"Thank you," I said icily, blowing a cold wind across the frozen lake over my heart.
His eyes narrowed.
"You're welcome," he retorted.
I straightened up stiffly, turned away from him again, and stalked off to Gym without looking back, and almost without wanting to look back...
Gym was brutal. We'd moved on to basketball. My team never passed me the basketball, so that was good, but I fell down a lot. Sometimes I took people with me. Today I was worse than usual because my head was so filled with

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Chapter 4

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