Charles Jensen | Writer

I looked at Edward. He was physically perfect, the human equivalent of a giant cream-filled eclair with his perfect pale skin, his golden, pastry-colored eyes, and his alternative-rock hair that was always mussed in just the perfectly disheveled way. Whenever I was next to him, I found myself wondering how it was possible for him to love me—-even though every boy in our high school was falling over himself to love me, I just saw myself as a frumpy, clumsy fool. I was, after all, just a typical girl.

“Have you ever noticed how stupid you are sometimes?” Edward asked me with a smirk, a smirk that mocked me with its perfection. And then he laughed softly, a sound so heavenly it entered my ear with the charm of churchbells ringing on a far-off hill.

I rolled my eyes. “Oh, sure. I’m the stupid one,” I replied sarcastically. But I knew it was true. Just being around Edward seemed to drain me of all my intelligence. I could barely focus in Biology when we sat next to each other. Even his smell–floral, musky–was intoxicating. I felt dizzy.

Edward touched me with his cold, vampiric hand, reminding me of how dead he really was. He must have been eighty years older than me, but he was so perfect and youthful, his face like a marquee idol’s, that I couldn’t believe it. And he wanted to suck my blood from my body until there wasn’t a hitch of breath left in my lungs. Deep down, I was afraid I wanted it too.

I could sense Edward trying to read my thoughts. “Stop that,” I said with irritation. I hated his surreptitious attempts to read me.

He slammed a hand down on the table. “God! You can be so foolish sometimes!” he seethed. His eyes glared at me with an intensity only someone that beautiful could possess. I tried to understand his frustration–after all, an ageless vampire must have a whole host of troubling memories I could deconstruct–but after a few moments, when his eyes softened at me and the corners of his mouth curled up like little elven feet, I forgot entirely what I was thinking about. What?

He leaned in to kiss me–or to bite me, I wasn’t sure–and I stopped breathing. We could both hear my big, stupid heart pounding under my ample teenage boobs, the ones Edward could hear all the boys thinking about when he read their thoughts, and the silence between us spanned eons. We sat there, almost kissing, for the entire rest of the book, during which time nothing else happened except for me avoiding conversation with my father, trying to let every boy in the school down easy, and wait–what was I thinking about again? Edward’s looking at me. He’s so pretty.