Glitch by Quothme COMPLETE.pdf

Fanfiction Based On Charaters From Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Series

Rated MA for Mature Adult

Glitch

By Quothme

Summary: Maybe there really is a glitch in Bella's brain. After all, she knows he's out there. She knows he's been

watching her ever since she can remember. She's *not* crazy. Why won't anyone believe her? Dark humor.

Once you’ve read and enjoyed this story, why not show the author some love, and review

http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5907317/1/Glitch

Prologue

I stand in the middle of a forest far from home, lost and alone, screaming at the top of my lungs.

With my face lifted to an overcast sky only partially visible through grasping tree limbs, I scream and scream

variations on a theme. It goes something like this:

"I know you're out there! I know you are. I know. Please show yourself."

Please.

I scream for a while about the fact that I know he can hear me. I scream about the fact that I'm utterly lost and

that, if he doesn't help me, I'm not going to be able to find my way home. I scream until my vocal chords are a

raspy, bloody mess and I'm coughing up globules of blood. I scream until I'm sure I'm driving myself crazy—if

I'm not already.

Despite what my parents think, despite the long stream of psychiatrists and their theories that I suffer from

this, that, and the other—you name it—they are all wrong.

I know it.

I know him .

I know he's out there. I know he's been watching me my whole life, ever since I can remember. I know he's the

reason why the woods around me have gone completely still and silent. Why the birds have stopped chirping

and the squirrels have stopped scolding and the bunnies have stopped burrowing.

I'm not crazy.

And I will prove it.

But for now, I just raise my head and scream.

~o}I{o~

Chapter One ~ Shifting Sand

I'm about to have one of those moments.

You know, one of those moments when you realize that something you think you know, something you've

believed in your entire life, is not exactly true. You've never thought to question this belief, as every sign

points to you being right, so you've just gone with it.

Sometimes, it's a minor thing. Maybe you've regularly mispronounced the word façade . Or you've thought this

wholetimethatthePledgeofAllegianceactuallysays,andtotherepublicwherewitchesdanceOrthat

China is part of the Middle East. When someone notices your moment, you get a weird look and a laugh. A

surreptitious Google search later, you're left with a lingering feeling of stupidity.

Sometimes,themomentismoremomentousLikefindingoutyoureadopted. Or that your parents, who

you've never even seen raise their voices to each other, are getting a divorce. Or that no, Virginia, there is no

Santa Claus.

These moments are harder to recover from. In these moments, you feel betrayed, angry, disillusioned with

life. Google's customary quick fix cannot fix this. You haven't merely misunderstood the words of a garbled

song; someone has purposefully misled you. Perhaps even lied to your face.

But you do recover. You recover because millions of little kids across the globe recover from learning the

truth behind the Tooth Fairy. You recover because you can talk to your friends about how they got through

their parents' divorce. You recover because other people before you have recovered, so why can't you?

This is my moment. The moment when I realize that something I've believed in my entire life is completely,

horribly wrong.

And I'm not sure if I will ever recover.

~o}I{o~

The genesis of my moment is an ordinary summer's day in Forks—75 degrees and cloudy with a 99.9%

chance of rain. Indoors forecast similarly includes the usual: sitting in the upstairs bedroom of my father's

house, doing the same thing I do every day.

Try to take over the world.

I kid; I'm reading.

I lack the imagination to do anything as interesting with my free time as plan nefarious plots for world

domination. Instead, I immerse myself in others' imaginations.

I'm your ordinary girl—ordinary brown hair, ordinary slender-yet-soft build, ordinary size seven feet. And

the ordinary cascades from there through all facets of my life. I live in an ordinary small town with my

ordinary father in our ordinary white house. I like reading books about romance, hate math and science, and

am ambivalent toward sports.

And my favorite ice cream flavor is vanilla.

I even have your ordinary sense of morality. I've always considered myself an honest person. I don't cheat on

tests. I don't let other people cheat off me on tests. I report Lauren whenever I notice her cheating on tests.

I've never pocketed so much as a piece of gum without paying for it.

And, most importantly, I don't lie.

Ever.

That's why, after Charlie calls me downstairs for pizza, I answer him honestly when he asks me to whom I've

been speaking up in my room.

"Oh, just Edward," I say.

Charlie looks at me.

I continue eating my pizza.

"Edward who?"

"It's just Edward, actually."

"From school?"

"No." I look at Charlie oddly. "He doesn't go to my school."

It occurs to me right then that Charlie and I have never talked about Edward before. It hasn't really come up. I

mean, I always assumed it was a given that he knew about Edward, but we've never expressly discussed him.

Charlie goes back to eating his pizza, and I think the conversation is over.

I couldn't be more wrong.

Later that evening, I go downstairs for my nightly drink of water before bed. I stand at the sink for a long

moment before my brain's slow-moving filter at last informs me that something's different. The murmur of

voices that I'm hearing is not, in fact, from the TV.

Because the TV isn't on.

The living room is currently dark and murky, and the murmur that I'm hearing is Charlie talking to someone

on the phone.

I assume.

I have to make an assumption because Charlie usually talks on the phone sitting either in his leather recliner

or at the dining room table. He'd installed one of those extra-long spirally cords on the wall phone in the

kitchen so that it would stretch wherever he needs it to go.

Although the wall phone is off its hook, Charlie isn't sitting in any of his usual perches. I super-sleuth the cord

around the corner and see it disappear into the seam of the closed front door. Charlie is apparently talking on

the phone on the front porch, of all places.

I shuffle up to the door, the better to hear Charlie's muffled voice. The conversation seems to be winding

down, and his side is going like this:

justwantedtomakesureShetellsyouthings

The person on the other end seems to talk for a long time. The person seems to be providing a lot of details.

Perhaps asking a lot of rhetorical questions.

"Okay, I will," is all Charlie says in response. "Talk to you soon."

Suddenly, the front door flies open, and Charlie and I stand staring at each other across the foyer.

"What did Mom want?" I say, sipping my glass of water. I have a fifty-fifty chance of correctly guessing the

identity of the caller. Charlie talks to two people—Renee and Billy. And I don't tell Billy things.

"I, uh, called her. Just a little matter we needed to discuss."

"Okay," I say and go back into the kitchen to tip my remaining water into the sink. I never can finish that full

glass.

~o}I{o~

Unbeknownst to me then, the matter is anything but little . In fact, after that one little phone call, my life will

never be the same.

~o}I{o~

The next day is a Sunday, and I fully expect to have the house to myself for the morning while Charlie goes to

the tackle store with Billy. It's fishing season. Fishing is one of the few stereotypically male activities that

Charlie and Billy can enjoy together on equal footing, as it were, after Billy's accident.

Because I'm expecting not to have an audience, I don't comb my hair, change out of my pajama shirt, or put on

a bra. Instead, I roll out of bed and go downstairs to grab a bowl of cereal.

I'm feeling a little coo-coo for Cocoa Puffs.

When I pull my head out of the refrigerator, someone is leaning against the doorway to the kitchen, watching

me.

I scream and drop the carton of milk.

"Bells!" Charlie says, putting a hand over his heart, as though I am the one who scared him . "It's just me."

I glare at him and run a hand uselessly through my hair, trying to tame it back from my eyes.

"The TV's not on," I accuse. "How was I supposed to know you were here?"

The spoken words sound a lot worse than I mean. Charlie's eyes go all soft, and I know I've hurt his feelings.

"I just thought that maybe we could spend the day together."

The milk container on the floor burbles.

I scoop it up before the unnecessary pressure of the milk against the cap causes a huge mess that I will have to

clean up carefully. Spilled milk tends to go everywhere, leaving little rancid pockets that you discover months

later.

"I thought you and Billy had plans," I say nonchalantly, turning away to put the finishing touches on my bowl

of cereal. The milk starts turning a satisfying chocolate brown before my very eyes.

"He, uh, wasn't feeling well."

Charlie is a terrible liar. Which is one of the reasons why I don't lie, as I'm sure that we'd be firmly "like father,

like daughter" in this instance.

"Okay. What do you want to do?"

Charlie blinks, like he hasn't really thought that far ahead.

"How about we go for some ice cream?"

Ice cream? We haven't gone out for ice cream since I was six.

"Yes, please."

I bid adieu to my unfortunate bowl of Cocoa Puffs. Who am I to turn down ice cream for breakfast?

So that's how Charlie and I end up sitting outside the ice cream parlor in Port Angeles over an hour later. The

parlor occupies a prime location in the downtown strip. It's decorated inside and out like an old-timey mom-

and-pop soda shop with red vinyl and chrome seating and an oversized fake cone sign outside.

Unfortunately, I am not yet availing myself of the cute red and chrome seating options. I am still sitting in the

passenger's cab of Charlie's truck. Who would have guessed ice cream parlors don't open until after 11:00

a.m.?

Our drive had been utterly silent. After Charlie ascertained that the only things on the radio this early on a

Sunday morning were a screaming Joel Osteen and a screaming gospel choir, he flipped it off.

I don't mind the silence. I've always found silence comfortable. Of course, I would not remain comfortable

once I realized that our trip had absolutely nothing to do with ice cream.

After we watch a teenager unlock the front door, we give it five minutes before we get out of the car. Then we

wait five more minutes in front of the counter until the teenager looks up from sweeping the floor in the back

room and notices that he has customers.

He's apparently attributed the little jingling door noise this early in the morning to his imagination.

"So," Charlie says as we sit down at a booth in the corner, our bowls overflowing with ice cream and toppings.

And that is all he says. Sometimes it takes him a while to spit things out.

We carefully sculpt off pieces of our ice cream for a while. I make a miniature snowman, replete with a candy

corn nose.

"How is this summer treating you?" he finally asks.

A dripping spoonful hovers millimeters from my mouth. I lower my spoon regretfully back down to my bowl.

An open-ended question.

My specialty.

"Fine," I say, putting my spoon in my mouth as the period of my sentence.

"You haven't been going out much."

That one isn't even a question.

"No," I answer anyway. Summers tend to involve me, my bed, and a mountain of books artfully positioned an

arm's-length away.

"Have you thought about getting a job?"

My spoon freezes again. I'm only a junior; I hadn't been planning on getting a job until my senior year at the

earliest. Is this the infamous father-daughter chat about my future?

"I've thought about it," I say cautiously.

That's probably an overstatement on my part; I may have spent less than five minutes in ninth grade

pondering the topic. The options for underage employment in Forks are not merely options for employment.

They are also options for torture in various forms.

Bagging groceries at the Forks Thriftway, I would have to make small talk with every old lady and man who

has known me—and Charlie, for that matter—since I was in diapers. Candy-striping at the hospital, I would

have to watch Lauren and Tyler groping in what they think is a surreptitious fashion. Finally, assisting hikers

and hunters at Newton's Outfitters, I would have to fight off Newton's blatantly non-surreptitious attempts to

grope me . Not to mention the added bonus of having to avoid Jealous Jessica trying to claw my eyes out about

the fact that Newton isn't groping her .

My options aren't really options at all.

"Do you guys need any help at the police station?" I ask hopefully. "I could make copies and do computer

stuff."

"Having families work together is frowned on at the station," Charlie says.

In an instant, my carefully laid plan to approach Charlie about this job is foiled. It was all in my premature

execution, I'm sure. I'd planned to soften him up by suggesting a steak dinner at the Lodge. Then pop the

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