New Moon Chapter 12 – Shirtless tree-climbing.

Previously: Bella went to Jacob’s house and he totally shut her down and now she’s super sad. AGAIN.
—

Kirsti: After that delightful curb hanger, Bella freaks because clearly the weird noise outside is Victoria coming to murder her face off. But no. It’s Jacob, just casually hanging out in the tree outside her bedroom window. Shirtless. Because of course he is.

Marines: Shirtless? For climbing trees? Really? Shirtless? For breaking and entering? It gets really uncomfortable when you can tell Stephenie was just writing out her wet dreams.

Annie: The better to make you shudder in horniness, my dear.

K: I just threw up in my mouth a little.

She asks him what the fuck he’s doing there, and he tells her he’s trying to keep his promise. He swings himself into her room, and Bella freaks because she’s convinced he’s going to die. But Jake’s got werewolf mad skills and makes it look super easy. They both look towards the door to see if Charlie noticed the noise when Jacob landed, but LOL NOPE. Charlie’s had his dose of responsible parenting for this hundred pages, and he hears nothing.

Catherine: Because 200-something pounds of muscle and sweaty regret or whatever totally doesn’t make any noise when it hits the deck in an upstairs room. 

K: Shhhh, don’t poke the plot holes.

Jacob grins, and Bella reads too much into it: “It wasn’t the grin that I knew and loved – it was a new grin, one that was a bitter mockery of his old sincerity, on the new face that belonged to Sam.”

What.

Mari: His new face belongs to Sam and it makes his smile different…? What kind of sorcery…

K: Anyway, this is too much for her to handle. She thinks about how she cried herself to sleep over him and now he’s grinning like nothing happened. Also, there’s only one person allowed to climb in her window, and it’s not Jacob. She tells him to GTFO. He says he came to apologise; she tries to push him out the window. No, seriously: “I tried to shove him back out the window – after all, if this was a dream, it wouldn’t really hurt him.” Um. Girl. Your logic is fucked up. What if it’s NOT a dream?!

Mari: “Officer, I murdered him on account of it could’ve totally been a dream.” 

Annie: “LOL, probs a dream, so I’m just going to shove you out the window and then go have a tea party with the pink elephants.” Bella is the worst.

K: Very true.

But the dream thing’s a moot point. Jake’s now super buff and so hot that she burns her fingers on his pecs when she tries to push him. (C: Why can’t she find a boyfriend with a normal fucking temperature?) Realising how super buff and enormous he is proves too much for our little Bell End, and she gets so instantly exhausted that she starts swaying back and forth. (M: …WTF just happened?) (A: Another episode of Meyer doesn’t understand how humans work.) Jacob helps her back to bed, and asks if she’s okay. She’s all “What the fuck do YOU think??”

Jacob apologises some more, and tells her that he’d love to explain but he can’t. He tries and PHYSICALLY can’t tell her. He asks if she’s ever had a secret that she couldn’t tell anyone, and her mind immediately jumps to Edward and his vampiness. Because of course it does. Jacob’s all “Right, that. I have the same sort of deal, okay?”. He says that it’s not his secret to tell.

Catherine: I hate this dumb comparison. Meyer is obviously trying to draw the obvious illusion to Bella keeping the Cullens’ secret and show that it’s the same type of secret (something mythical) but it IS actually Jacob’s secret to tell. I mean, there are reasons that he can’t tell it, but it is his secret. He’s not keeping it for someone else. This is a cheap comparison. 

K: Agreed.

In typical Bella fashion, everything is about Edward: “I still didn’t see how it applied to him, or Sam, or Billy. What was it to them, now that the Cullens were gone?” Eventually, Jacob says that the worst part is that he’s already told her everything, but now he can’t. Not gonna lie, you guys. All I can think of is the Nac Mac Feegle and getting the terms “geas” and “geese” confused.

Mari: I’m really weirded out by this scene because apparently, “whatever he was trying to do, it was so hard he was panting.” He’s in your room in the middle of the night, panting…? Awkward. 

Catherine: Maybe if she throws a stick he will go away. 

K: It’s that whole not-being-able-to-control-his-thermostat thing, I guess?

Anyway, Jake gets super excited because he’s totally found a loophole (A: Called contrivance.): she can GUESS what the secret is, and then he can confirm it. Bella continues to be as intelligent as a lump of rock, and he’s forced to drop anvils – think about the day we met and what we talked about on the beach and no, I don’t mean when we talked about my car or the Wow. Free. Truck. Eventually, Bella’s all “Ohhhhhh, you told me spooky Quileute legends, yeah?”

He tells her to think more specifically about the stories he told her, and she’s all “But I’m tiiiiiiiired.” He gets a little pissy because obviously she’d only remember the vampire story from that day. Then he asks if she honestly didn’t know what Edward was before that day. She doesn’t answer. Jacob points out that her loyalty and his inability to tell his secret are basically the same thing. Bella internally disagrees: “For me, this was all essentially voluntary. I protected the Cullens’ secret out of love; unrequited, but true.” Excuse me while I hurl.

Mari: First over the sentiment and second because of that weird little semi-colon. What’s it doing there? 

Annie: Proving that SMeyer doesn’t understand proper punctuation? Or maybe she just wanted to give us a spot on the Bingo card.

K: HOORAY FOR THE BINGO CARD.

She asks if there’s a way to get Jacob out of whatever he’s involved in and LOL NOPE. He’s in it for life. She says they should just run away together, and Jacob says he’d love that but he can’t. Then he says he has to go, because a) she’s about to fall asleep, and b) he snuck out to see her and the others will be wondering where he is.

Bella gets pissed and hisses that she hates Sam and his gang. Jacob says it’s nothing to do with them – they’re actually super cool. He’s not supposed to see her because it’s not safe for him to be around her. Even though it’s risky, he’s going to do his best to keep his promise that he’d never hurt her. (A: I feel like we’ve heard this from someone else?) He tells her to put some serious effort into working out his secret, and to come and see him when she joins the dots. Assuming she wants to see him.

Bella’s confused about why she wouldn’t want to see him, and “His face turned hard and bitter, one hundred percent the face that belonged to Sam. “Oh, I can think of a reason,” he said in a harsh tone.” Can… can you own someone else’s face? I really don’t think you can. Unless it’s, like, in a jar like a serial killer from Criminal Minds…

Annie: What about Face/Off? Maybe it’s something like that.

Mari: It’s such a lovely thing about Bella’s personality that she essentially views all the world in ways that directly relate to her? And seems to project that outward? So, Jacob is her smiley best friend who she uses to keep away break-up comas, until he’s not. Then she attributes everything about him to another person. 

BELLA. GIRL. Sometimes people are their own people. I promise. 

K: Pffff, no. They’re clearly ALL ABOUT HER.

Anyway, he makes her promise to phone if she doesn’t want to see him.

He heads to the window, and she tells him to creep out the door so he doesn’t break a leg. Jacob’s all “LOL. Breaking things. As if.” Then he hugs her really tightly, and leaves.

Mari: That’s putting it nicely. He pulls her, chokes her with his hug and then pushes her back down on the bed. What the hell.

K: Bella flops back onto her bed and passes out. Probably because Jacob hugged her too hard.

We’re treated to approximately a thousand pages of her dreaming: it’s a different dream to usual. She’s still in the forest, but this time it’s near La Push. Then Jacob turns up. He’s terrified, and tells her to run. Because Bella has mad skills, she gets dream deja vu. No, seriously: “The abrupt wave of deja vu was so strong it nearly woke me up.”

Mari: WHY IS STEPHENIE MEYER SO BAD AT STORY TELLING RIGHT NOW? 

Catherine: SHE DOESN’T EVEN KNOW HOW DREAMS WORK. DREAMS! 

K: Mari, I think you mean “WHY IS STEPHENIE MEYER SO BAD AT STORY TELLING ALL THE TIME EVER?”.

She somehow realises that she’s having the exact same dream she had the day she found out Edward was a vampire.

She waits for the dream to play out – Edward walking out of the forest, his eyes black. But LOL NOPE. Instead, Jacob falls to the ground and turns into a wolf. But not the same wolf she dreamed of last time. This is the same red-brown wolf she saw in the meadow a week or so ago. And it has Jacob’s eyes.

She wakes up screaming, but Charlie doesn’t even bother to check on her. That whole “I can only responsible parent every hundred pages” thing, yeah? Bella remembers the story Jacob was talking about earlier, and we’re treated to A FULL PAGE taken directly from Twilight featuring the conversation she had with Jacob about Quileute wolf legends. (M: Why, God? Why?) (A: To teach E.L James that you can reuse your own work?) Back in the present, Bella chokes out the word werewolf. And then has a nervous breakdown about Forks and its obsession with the paranormal.

She realises that Jacob’s not human, and wants to scream some more. Then she decides there’s something seriously wrong with her: “Why else would my life by filled with characters from horror movies?“. So… THIS makes her realise that there’s something wrong with her, but HALLUCINATING HER EX-BOYFRIEND’S VOICE was totally normal???

Then she realises that Sam doesn’t have a gang. He has a pack. And with that, she decides to go to La Push immediately. She runs into Charlie on her way out, and he makes her promise not to stop anywhere on the way to or from Jacob’s because the wolves have taken someone else, and this time there’s a witness. The rangers are offering a reward for a wolf carcass.

Bella freaks: “My voice shot through three octaves.” THREE?? Girl. Clearly you’ve got a future as a Mariah Carey impersonator. Then she realises that Charlie’s wearing his gun and hiking boots, because he’s going on a wolf hunt. She shrieks that it’s too dangerous for him to go, but he insists he’ll be fine. He leaves, and she stays, declaring it too early to go to La Push. But really, it’s just a cover so that she can collapse on the floor once Charlie’s gone.

Then we’re treated to a page and a half (C: Goddddd) of Bella dithering about how Jacob’s her best friend and he deserves a warning about this, but he and his friends might be murderers and if they are, they deserve to be shot in their collective faces blah blah blah, I give zero fucks about any of this.

Mari: Especially because YOUR BOYFRIEND IS A BIG, FAT MURDERER BELLA. 

Annie: Please. Only her vampire boyfriend may commit murders! And only as long as that he’s murdering her. Murderous boyfriend>everything else.

K: She thinks about the Cullens some more, and decides that nothing could be harder than the effort they went to to not drink human blood. The werewolves, she tells us, have chosen the easy path. Now she has to decide which path she’ll take.

Mari: I vote for one that ends with AND THEN SHE DIES. 

Annie: I second that vote!

Catherine: As long as it’s quick. 

K: Motion carried.

 

Em-dash count: FIFTY SIX HOLY HELL SMEYER.
Ellipses count: 24.

 

Oof.

 

Next time on New Moon: Bella goes to talk to Jacob about his wolfiness in Chapter 13.