Chapter Text
My biggest worry in life is that I’ll end up in jail for arson.
I’ve spent the last few months of my life as a ticking time bomb, just waiting for the moment where I end up breaking completely and make my fantasies of burning down Sam Uley’s house a reality.
There are three reasons why I haven’t done it already.
The first is that his house is basically in the middle of the woods. If I wasn’t careful, I’d start a whole damn forest fire, and I would really hate to kill some good nature.
The second is that it would disappoint my parents. My mom and dad have been nothing but kind and supportive through my complete emotional breakdown, and I would hate for their patience to be rewarded by seeing me hauled off to jail, with my dad’s cop best friend probably being the one to put the cuffs on me.
And the third reason is Emily. Fucking Emily. My cousin, my best friend, my favorite person in the world.
Why’d you do it? Why’d you shack up with my ex-fiance right after he dumped me? After he’d been missing for three weeks? After spending every single day by my side as I worried myself senseless?
I don’t hate you, Em. I don’t think I ever could. But it will be a long time before I forgive you for this.
This is how I’ve spent the last few months, in a cycle of “get angry, calm down, get angry again, and somehow go to sleep after that.” I effectively gave up on my college ambitions. My social life became nonexistent. I became the mythical bitch of the reservation, sure to be used as a cautionary tale of what happens when you stew on a breakup for too long.
Living like this was exhausting. But I didn’t know what else to do.
So here I am, wearing a Shaun Alexander jersey I forgot I owned, headed to Chief Swan’s house on a mid-December Sunday to gorge myself on pizza while the Seahawks probably lose again. The last time I’d seen Charlie, his daughter had gone missing after one of the Cullen kids broke up with her and left her alone in the woods. I was there when fucking Sam, the former man of my dreams, showed up shirtless with Bella in tow. He had broken up with me the previous day, and I had to see him get declared a hero.
I found out about him and Emily two days after that. It was a bad week to be Leah Clearwater, to put it mildly.
It took until halftime for me to get concerned about Bella. Her truck was in the driveway, but she wasn’t downstairs when we got there. When I brought it up to Charlie, he just looked away and gave me a non-answer. I assumed she was just not into sports, but would come down for pizza at some point. But by the time we were five minutes deep into the analysts talking about why the Seahawks were sucking ass this week, my patience had boiled over.
“Hey, Charlie, is Bella alright?”
Charlie took a look at his beer and let out a heavy sigh. “She hasn’t been alright since that Edward boy abandoned her. Ever since then, she’s just been… I dunno, like a zombie. She still goes to school, cooks dinner, does her homework, but there’s just nothin’ there when I try to talk to her. And she wakes up every night screamin’, I can’t even imagine what her nightmares must be like. I’m startin’ to wonder if I should send her to live with her mom again. Maybe a change of scenery would be good for her…”
My anger comes roaring back, but it’s found a new target. Charlie is always at his happiest whenever Bella is around. He was beside himself when Bella told him she wanted to move in with him. She’s been here for less than a year and now she’s managed to take all that joy away, over what? Some fucking rich boy who tossed her aside after a few months? Fuuuuck that.
I hurried up from the couch and stormed to the staircase. I was going to give Bella a piece of my fucking mind.
“Leah!” my dad shouted, which stopped me just enough to turn back and see looks of concern on their faces.
“Look, Leah… don’t judge her too much. You two have more in common than you think,” said Charlie, who I guessed was doing his best to make sure that I didn’t accidentally make his daughter worse. “Please just… I don’t think I could stand watching her get hurt again.”
At that, I calmed down. Not by much, but enough to realize that maybe going in guns blazing would be a bad idea for someone who might as well have been dead. So I went up the stairs like a normal person, and when I got to Bella’s closed door, I knocked.
“Hello? Bella? It’s, uhh… it’s Leah Clearwater. Harry’s girl? We hung out a bit when we were kids?” I waited for a moment, and got no response.
“Do you mind if I come in?” Once again, I was met with silence. I reached down to the doorknob and turned it to see if it was locked, and upon seeing that it wasn’t, I slowly opened the door, preparing myself to be yelled at at any moment.
I was instead greeted by the saddest sight I have ever seen: a gaunt, greasy-haired girl, wrapped halfheartedly in a blanket and staring out the window like a sad puppy.
Any residual anger from earlier quickly vanished, and my strategy got thrown in the garbage. Bella didn’t need to be yelled at, not now. She needed a friend.
So I closed the door behind me, sat down in her desk chair, and turned to face her. It was time for me to try and be the Leah of old, the one who had, like, actual emotions and shit. Here goes nothing.
“So, Bella… I’m sorry I didn’t try to talk earlier. I… had my own version of what happened to you.”
I studied her face, waiting for a reaction. There was none so far, but I kept going anyway.
“Not to compare traumas or anything, but Sam was the only guy I was with throughout high school. He proposed right after we graduated. We were already planning our life, our future, our forever… and then he went missing, and when he came back he left me for my cousin. Fucked up, right?”
Once again, there was nothing. If anyone else was so clearly ignoring me like this, I’d probably be telling them to go fuck themselves, but this was not the time and place for that. I don’t even know what was coming over me, other than that I just wanted Bella to know she wasn’t alone, that she didn’t need to throw her life away over some jerk. That probably sounds like rich advice coming from the Queen Bitch of the Quileute Tribe, but I just didn’t want her to be sad anymore.
“I’ve… probably overstayed what little welcome I had, but if you ever wanted to talk more, or hang out or something… you know where to find me.” I then realized that she probably didn’t know where to find me, so I found a piece of scratch paper on Bella’s desk and wrote my address and my phone number down. And as I got up to leave, I heard a soft, scratchy voice say something.
“Thank you.”
I left Bella’s room with a small, but genuine smile on my face. Was this what doing good things for people felt like? I hadn’t done it for someone outside of my immediate family for a bit, and for the first time in a while, I was hopeful.
By the time my dad and I left the Swans’ place, we were both in a good mood. The Seahawks came back from behind to win the game, and through my rambling confession to Bella, I managed to make myself feel like a real person again.
Maybe things will really start to change now.