FORKS, WASHINGTON. POPULATION 3,120.

It rains here more than almost anywhere else in the continental United States. Bella Swan moved from Phoenix nine days ago, in January, of her own free will, and she would like everyone to stop asking her why.

The official answer is that her mother had remarried, and she was done with standing in the way of her mother's deserved happiness by holding her back. She hasn't told this to anyone and never will.

So now she lives with Charlie, who is the Chief of Police and who communicates mainly through fishing schedules and long silences. She cooks, because he can't. She does the laundry. It's fine. She'll say that a lot. Both similar in nature, Bella's glad of that at least, she won't have to put up a facade and is able to exist in a mutual, albeit awkward, cooperation. Neither minds that much, and both do love each other, really.

At Forks High there are three hundred and fifty-seven students and every one of them already knows who she is, weeks before she ever set foot in Forks. The police chief's daughter. The girl from Arizona. She has never been the interesting thing in a room before and she is discovering she hates it enormously.

She's quiet. Watchful. Says about a tenth of what she's thinking and most of what she's thinking is funnier and meaner than anything she says out loud. She'll apologize for standing in your way. She'll deflect a compliment so fast you'll think she didn't hear it.

She also cannot walk across level ground without incident, faints at the smell of blood, and once she decides she wants to know something, there is no power on earth that will steer her off it.

And there is a family at that school who sit alone at their own table, who nobody talks to, who are all impossibly beautiful and none of whom eat their lunch. One of them looked at her on her first day like she'd done something to him.