I read Twilight so you don't have to // CHAPTER 3: PHENOMENON
We just finished watching Severance (!!!) and jumped right into the first season of The Penguin (!!!). Ahhhh some of the best T.V. I’ve seen in a while. Penguin gives some Beaking Bad vibes with characters that are both fun and literally phychopathic and pure evil.
But enough of good media:
A Summary: Bella is nearly crushed by a van when, lo, Edward magically appears and prevents what was almost a deadly accident. The whole school shows up at the hospital, for some reason. When Bella confronts Edward he gaslights, gatekeeps, and girlbosses his way out of there, leaving Bella convinced that something is very off.
Random Observations: At this point we know that Bella has a lot of “I glanced up” and “I looked” and “I peeked”. In this chapter, I noticed that Edward seems to have a very limited repertoire of facial expressions and sounds:
Chuckle (He finds everything amusing, apparently)
Smirk (His default expression, halfway between "I know something you don't" and "You amuse me, mortal". Very incel-coded)
Scowl/Glare (For when Bella is being “particularly human”)
Clench (Jaw, fists, steering wheel, his butt, probably. This boy is tense)
Maybe by the end we can form a picture of Edward's entire emotional range: amused, condescending, annoyed, and restraining himself.
Outfits: I’m starting to think that I shouldn’t have added this section of the blog, since really, we’ve only had one Bella outfit described for us so far. I overestimated.
To compensate, I’ll just show you what Bella has for breakfast:
My Thoughts:
So Bella wakes up and “groans in horror” (pg. 53) to see that there’s a layer of ice on the ground outside. Yeah, it genuinely sucks when you have to drive yourself to school in the snow and ice, and it sucks even more when you “have enough trouble falling down when the ground is dry” (pg. 53).
Bella can’t stop thinking about how Edward lied about his eye color. She knew she saw a butterscotch shade of eyes, dammit! Why would he lie about that? She’s also feeling anxious about how he sometimes emits this hositlity towards her (red flag, red flag, red flag) but she erases this by thinking about his “perfect face.”
Good call, good call. Just ignore those glaring red flags and focus on his pretty looks instead, yes, good.
Bella carefully drives on the icy road to school and we have a paragraph where she ponders instead about Mike and Eric. She wonders why the boys “obviously” have crushes on her, when she never had boys drooling over her in Phoenix.
“Perhaps it was because I was a novelty here, where novelties were few and far between. Possibly my crippling clumsiness was seen as endearing rather than pathetic, casting me as a damsel in distress.” (pg. 55)
I feel like I note this every time, but once again for funsies: Bella—the narrator and the eyes in which we, the readers, interpret the story—is self-aware that her clumsiness makes her endearing to boys, as much as she tells us differently, and insists that she doesn’t like the attention. She's equally aware of when girls are jealous of her too, like when she dismisses Jessica as having "a clear case of sour grapes" regarding the Cullens.
To be clear, there's nothing wrong with enjoying attention. I feel like that's a totally normal human thing. My issue is with this disconnect between what Bella claims (she hates attention) and what she shows us through her narration (a hyper-awareness of how others perceive her and why they're drawn to her). It's this lack of self-awareness—or unwillingness to be honest with herself?—that makes her narrative feel unreliable. She gives us the "I'm not like other girls" energy while simultaneously cataloging all the reasons boys find her special. Either embrace being the center of attention or don't fixate on it, you can't have it both ways, loca.
Bella gets to school and sees why she had no problems on the road: it looks like Charlie put chains on her tires. Awh, Dad!
And then, suddenly, there’s a loud, high-pitched sound, and Bella sees a couple of things happen at once: Edward Cullen (naturally) standing a few cars away, a crowd of kids and their sea of shocked faces, and—oh, yeah—a freaking van screeching right for her.
The next thing she knows, Bella’s on the ground, the van crumpled around her. Not only that, it seems like someone was there just in time to save her. All together, now:
IT’S EDWARD CULLEN⊹✧˖
Bella is shipped to the hospital with a police escort from Charlie, and we meet Edward’s daddy, Dr. Carlisle Cullen.
“He was young, he was blonde…and he was handsomer than any movie star I’d ever seen.” (pg. 61)
Bella’s unhurt, but that’s not her focus. She’s reeling about how Edward got to her from across the parking lot and saved her life. When she confronts him about it, Edward, in his gaslighty way, tells Bella that he was always standing next to her, she must have hit her head.
When she asks why he bothered to save her if he’s going to be such a prick about it, he stares at her unblinkingly and whispers, “I don’t know.” (pg. 65).
Confused and pissed, Bella goes home, internally spinning about Edward and coming to the conclusion that his weird behavior is just proof that something is different about this “livid, glorious-faced, destroying-angel” teenager.
And that’s it for Chapter 3! Thanks for reading along, and I’ll see you next week.*