Twiglet

er…that’s what I have been calling Stephenie Meyers’ magnum opus since it first became popular.
I hadn’t read it but knew I wouldn’t like it.
Eventually, however, I caved.
I didn’t find it addictive, romantic or anything like that, more of an irritant.
I won’t be bothering with the movie, or the rest of the books in the series, but I did take the time to write a semi-spoof of it. Anyone who isn’t bothered reading the book will find most of the salient plot-points here.
Don’t expect polish as I literally came in from work (finished reading the book on my coffee break) and sat down to write it. It’s a first draft, and there won’t be a second.

Be warned, there is much snark to follow!

Twiglet
My name is Bella, and I am seventeen. Let’s be honest up-front, shall we? I may be seventeen but I have the mental age of an eleven year old who has spent the last three years huffing Mills & Boon books (the kind before they got raunchy, I do not approve of raunch).
I am extremely clumsy and so unattractive that in all my seventeen years on this earth I have never been asked out by a boy, never been (blush, blush, swoon) kissed. Never so much as made a blip on the radar of any the boys at my school in Phoenix. You’d think there was something wrong with acting like a character from an 18th century novel. I wear skirts and hate jeans, I have no cell-phone and use e-mail only infrequently to stay in touch with my mother, who does not seen to be capable of using a phone. This may be important later. My mother cannot cook, but I can (I can also do laundry, I’m your average fifties housewife minus the valium. What is Valium? I take cough syrup to sleep and consider that to be gratuitous drug use, but I digress, or I would if I knew the word existed…) My mother left my useless Sherriff father and is now married to a not-very-good baseball player. I don’t understand baseball. That’s for boys.

Also, Phil (the ball guy) is younger than her, which I do not understand. However as I am wondrously self-sacrificing, I am going to live with my father (the aforementioned clueless lawman) in a small town called Forks, on the opposite side of the Olympic peninsula from Knives and just below Spoons. It’s on the Olympic peninsula so I can make references to gods, angels and godlike beauty and thus get across my Mormon agenda…oh wait. Sorry. You’re not supposed to know about that. The atheists might kick up.

Forget I said anything. Even though it might explain my affection for turtlenecks which is otherwise bizarre. Oh and the fact that I hate to wear jeans. They are for boys.

I’m all for strict gender roles in case you hadn’t noticed.

Anyway, I hate Forks. It’s small and it rains there like totally all the time. Pardon me, I seem to have allowed some modern teen vernacular to impinge upon my narrative. I will resume once I have washed my mouth out with soap (strawberry scented) and water.

So, in Forks I had to start in a new school and I was worrying about everyone laughing at me because I’m a clumsy idiot who falls over every five minutes. I needn’t have worried though, because for some reason, somewhere on the journey over from Phoenix, I seem to have become a boy-magnet, and I’m surrounded by helpful, friendly boys as soon as I walk through the door. I don’t like any of them though. They remind me of Labradors. This could be foreshadowing or just an effect of my weird word-choices. Who knows?

There was only one boy in Forks who got my attention, and that was because he didn’t follow me around, or offer to carry my books. He glared at me. I was afraid of him. It made me feel funny. He was stunningly beautiful, with flaming red hair which I will call “bronze” in case anyone gets a mental picture of a ginger-minger and thinks I’m weird. He had obsidian black eyes (I found that word in my pocket book of gemstones, it may come in useful again later) and a perfect nose and rosebud lips (that one is from my gardening book, look out for more interesting plant references too!). I can’t tell you what he was wearing because I was so captivated by his beautiful face. He was sitting with a bunch of other people at lunch and they all looked like supermodels. I felt uglier than usual. I found out his name was Edward.
In future, to save time, whenever I mention Edward, you should choose from a list of synonyms that I got from my handy thesaurus and put them in front of whatever feature I’m focused on at that point: stunning, smouldering, god-like, angelic, dazzling, sparkling, rippling – it’s a fun game, take out your own thesaurus and find words you can add to describe how beautiful he is. Did I mention the beauty? Also, he had really big hands. That may mean something, since I keep going on about it, but we’re probably all too young and/or repressed to get the hidden meaning, which is probably evil and could send us to hell.
Which is where it felt like I was when I was being ignored by Edward.

I couldn’t blame him though, his family were all gorgeous and graceful, like they were put there just to contrast with my clumsy drabness. However! My clumsiness turned out to be my saving grace because after lots of pointless mooning over him, he finally showed how he felt about me, by saving my life in a spectacular fashion.
After that we were inseparable, though he never touched me. I wondered why, rather a lot, but then I swooned so he had to touch me so he could be all heroic and bring me to the nurse’s office. I’m so glad he didn’t switch out of my biology class, even though he was skipping it that day because there was going to be blood, which is why I fainted.

Blood makes me faint. This is important.

After saving my life and caring for me during my swoonage, I became fascinated by him. I was only sort of interested before, honest. Now I was just plain obsessed.

Luckily, the token Indian (Native American, of course, there are no blacks or Asian people in Forks, they, along with the Latinos live in Knives as it’s more their sort of place. I’m not racist by the way…) filled me in on local lore about werewolves (which I totally missed, but may be important later) and vampires. My angelic, godlike, smouldering hunk with the big hands and the butterscotch/amber/topaz/obsidian eyes (the eyes are important, not only because they are so dreamy but because IT MEANS SOMETHING when they change colour, okay???)was a vampire. Wow.

That made him even more interesting, and explained a lot. I looked vampires up on the internet and that made me feel better about him, as he didn’t seem to be like any other vampire types on Wikipedia. Probably because he was a vegetarian vampire, or not, as he likes to eat mountain lions. It may explain the dress-sense though, since he wears a heck of a lot of taupe clothing and turtlenecks. Maybe only evil vampires have good dress sense? Or maybe that didn’t occur to me at all, since I have none either. I like turtlenecks, and I don’t care about the tan leather jacket because it smells great and he looks all hunky in it. I didn’t even take issue with his sleeveless white shirt, even though it’s like something Fabio would wear, as I have no idea who Fabio is. I really am not your usual seventeen year old.

Know how I know? Because Edward is really over a hundred years old, and he has never met anyone like me before. I’m special. Not in a special-needs way…..although you could be forgiven for thinking that…but special special. I always knew this because I am an egotistical person, who thinks that’s ok as long as I know I’m being egotistical. Or at least allude to the possibility occasionally.

Anyway, here I am with a bunch of boys all hopelessly in love with me, and all I want is to be with the guy who stalks me, er, I mean keeps me out of danger. He saved my life again when I went to buy dresses with my friends, as I have conveniently also got no sense of direction and got lost and was being followed by some loutish types who probably wanted to deflower me, even though I never state that. By this point he was accustomed to me being a throwback to an old romance novel, and even though nothing actually happened to me, he fully expected me to swoon (again and more) or go into shock. I didn’t though – see how plucky I am?

After this incident I learned a lot about my hunky, dreamy, dazzler. He really does dazzle you know, in sunlight. Also he has a six-pack. No happy trail though. I would have to gouge out my eyes if I noticed something like that. I’m a good girl, really. Even if I have the swoons (not the hots, never them) for a vampire. All my interest in him is strictly above the waist, he makes my heart skip, but my panties (100% white cotton, granny-style, with chastity belt) remain undampened. I never say this, but you should know how chaste I am.

Edward introduced me to his family, did I mention how gorgeous they all are? Only one of them had the cop-on to find me repellent. I’m sure I’ll win her over. Maybe not in this book, but sometime in the future. I only mention her not liking me in case I run out of plot, or my mooning over her “brother” gets too repetitive and annoying even for me to bear.

In fact, I have spent so much time mooning over him that I am running out of space in which to insert something exciting (in case some of my readers are not happy just to read the witterings of a throwback in sickly-sweet (and chaste!) first love. Also because I want to sell the movie rights, so there should be some action. I have read Harry Potter and thought that Quiddich was interesting, so was really really happy when my vampires had their own spectacular game to play. It was like baseball, which I don’t understand but I suddenly grasp enough of the basics to show how exciting it is – especially since they have to play it during thunderstorms as they are all made of stone (or crystals, I can’t really decide) and make a lot of noise playing it.

It was  really exciting, and made even more so by the arrival of some proper vampires (who were not very well-dressed either, and don’t even have shoes!) who fixated on me. Instead of explaining me away as a pet or something, Edward got all super-macho and growly at one of them which I found both scary and flattering, but not sexy. One of the evil vampires took offense at this and gave me the evil eye, or would have if I had any talent for exposition, which I don’t so instead I must explain the threat in mind-numbing detail.

Basically, my goose is cooked. And possibly that of my parents, who I have just realised I actually love quite dearly and could never stand to have hurt.
So I had to run away to Phoenix with Alice (the convenient fortune-teller) and Jasper (the empath) so nobody gets hurt. Except, this is me, so you just know there will be a spanner in the works, even if I have to clumsily drop it in there myself.
One of the evil vampires made me run away from the airport (where my luscious, oddly fangless dreamboat, was flying in to meet me – on a plane! Who knew they’d need a plane….) to go on a mission to save my mother, which meant never seeing Edward (Those eyes! Those eyes!) ever again because I’d probably be dead.

It all turned out to be a horrid ruse, my mother was not really there after all, the crafty vampire had used an old home-movie to make me think she was. I should have known my mother would never use a phone! She really doesn’t know how! Drat! I was about to die for nothing. Still, he kicked the living daylights out of me (in my old ballet studio which Alice saw the inside of in a vision, but not the outside, yet still….) only for me to be saved by Edward, and have the horrible nasty vampire venom sucked out of my hand. I wasn’t too pleased about that part. I want to stay an immature twerp, er, sorry, I want to stay seventeen forever like Edward, never get old, never get wrinkly and horrible. Luckily, I went unconscious for a while, but unfortunately for my readers I did wake up and went straight back to being myself (all irritating). My mother was at the hospital, and she liked Edward. My dad wasn’t (he probably had no time off left from all his fishing trips), and Edward and I made up a story about how I got beaten up so badly. I walked into a door….er fell down some stairs. My mom wanted me to move in with her and ball-guy but I wanted to stay in Forks with my hunk.

Eventually I left hospital, but because all this endless mooning is starting to grate on my nerves (even mine, my poor readers!) we’ll skip forward a bit to where I’m getting all dressed up for no apparent reason, only to be vilely tricked into going to my own prom with Edward. There I was thinking Alice was getting me all spruced up for me to change into a vampire (well, really I thought we were going to elope, hunky and me, but that might seem like a bit of a stretch even to my most romantically unhinged readers) but it was just prom. And my native American friend (who is suddenly tall now, so I may develop an interest in him if this whole vamp thing ever gets tired) crashed the ball to warn me about my hunky vamp, so he could get some parts for his car. I still didn’t notice that he’s a werewolf, which is probably just as well as there are only a couple of pages left, and I want to fill them with more drivel about my hunky, smouldering dreamboat of a bad boy, who is really quite sweet and loves me.
So there.