Page 43 of Life and Death

“When I have free time, and parts. You wouldn’t happen to know where I could get my hands on a master cylinder for a 1986 Volkswagen Rabbit?” she added jokingly. She had an interesting voice, warm and kind of throaty.

“Sorry,” I laughed, “I haven’t seen any lately, but I’ll keep my eyes open for you.” As if I knew what that was. She was very easy to talk with.

She flashed a brilliant smile, looking at me in a way I was learning to recognize. I wasn’t the only one who noticed.

“You know Beaufort, Julie?” Logan asked. I should have known someone like Logan would notice how much I disliked my full name.

“Beau and I have sort of known each other since I was born,” Jules said, smiling at me again.

“How nice for you,” Logan said. I hadn’t noticed before how fishy his pale green eyes were.

Jules raised her eyebrows at his tone. “Yes, isn’t it wonderful?”

Her sarcasm seemed to throw Logan off, but he wasn’t done with me yet. “Beau, Taylor and I were just saying that it was too bad none of the Cullens could come out today. Didn’t anyone think to ask them?”

He looked at me like heknewI’d asked Edythe to come, and thought it was hilarious that she’d turned me down. Only, it hadn’t felt like a rejection in the moment—it’d felt like she’d wanted to come with me, but couldn’t. Had I read her wrong?

My worries were interrupted by a strong, clear voice.

“You mean Dr. Carine Cullen’s family?”

It was the older girl who had first introduced the local kids. She was even older than I’d thought, now that I looked at her closer. Not really a girl at all, but a woman. Unlike Julie’s, her hair was cut short as a boy’s. She was standing now, and I saw that she was almost as tall as I was.

Logan glared at her, glaredupbecause he was shorter than she was, irritated because she’d spoken before I could respond. “Yes, do you know them?” he asked in a patronizing tone, only half-turned toward her.

“The Cullens don’t come here,” she said, and in her clear, forceful voice, it sounded less like an observation and more like . . . a command. She had ignored his question, but clearly the conversation was over.

Taylor, trying to win back Logan’s attention, asked his opinion of the CD she held. He was distracted.

I stared at the woman—she stood with a confident, straight posture, looking away toward the dark forest. She’d said that the Cullens didn’t come here, but her tone had implied something more—that they weren’t allowed to come, that they were prohibited from coming here. Her manner left a strange impression with me that I couldn’t shake.

Jules interrupted my meditation. “So, is Forks driving you insane yet?”

I frowned. Possibly, I was literally insane at this point. “I’d say that’s an understatement.”

She grinned sympathetically.

I was still turning over the woman’s brief comment on the Cullens, and piecing it together with what I’d read from Edythe’s reactions the other day. I looked at Jules, speculating.

“What?” she asked.

“You want to take a walk down the beach with me?”

She looked at Logan, then back to me with a quick grin. “Yeah, let’s get out of here.”

As we walked north toward the driftwood seawall, the clouds finally won. The sun disappeared, the sea turned black, and the temperature started to drop. I shoved my hands deep in the pockets of my jacket.

While we walked, I thought about the way Edythe could always get me to talk, how she would look at me from under her thick eyelashes and the gold of her eyes would burn and I would forget everything—my own name, how to breathe, everything but her. I eyed the girl walking alongside me now. Jules just had on a long-sleeved t-shirt, but she swung her arms as she walked, not bothered by the cold. The wind whipped her silky black hair into twists and knots on her back. There was something very natural and open about her face. Even if I knew how to do that burning thing that Edythe did, this girl would probably just laugh at me. But not meanly, I didn’t think. With Jules, you would always be in on the joke.

“Nice friends,” she commented when we were far enough from the fire that the clattering of the stones beneath our feet was more than enough to drown out our voices.

“Not mine.”

She laughed. “I could tell.”

“Were those other kids your friends? That one seemed kind of . . . older.”

“That’s Samantha—Sam. She’s nineteen, I think. I don’t hang out with her. One of my friends was there before—Quil. I think she went up to the store.”