This post was originally published on October 8, 2015. It has been lightly edited for content and style.
Previously: Edward decided Bella was dumb enough to be his friend now that he was committed to following her around always.
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Annie: We open the chapter with Bellwaaaaah doing homework but really listening for her Wow. Free. Truck. Even though she’s concentrating really hard on it, she doesn’t hear it when it’s returned. Apparently the Cullens are magic. Or the truck is. Or something.
Marines: My theory is that one of the Cullens or Hales is a The Truck Whisperer. I’m so good at this.
Kirsti: My theory is that they carry it in rather than driving it, simply because it will fuck with Bella’s head.
Annie: I’m too busy wondering where Bella’s keys to her truck are and how she’s going to get them back. These details, Stephenie leaves out, yet she tells us what food item Bella is balancing her steaks on to marinate. Oookay, girl.
Bella is her usual sunny horrible self and is dreading having to suffer through an Edward-less Friday filled with having to interact with people who are not Edward, so what’s the point?
Bella’s irritated that Jessica has ‘a lot’ of questions about Edward. In actuality, Jessica had one question for Bella. And it was a fairly legitimate one. Bella just wants to remind us all how she is the worst.
Mari: Part of the experience of going through this book as a Snow for me is realizing how freakin’ much of it E.L. James plagiarized for Fifty Shades of Grey, hence adding it to the drinking game. It’s actually really, really impressive the stupid details James managed to completely lift, including that Ana (Bella) always accused Kate (Jessica) of asking a million questions when it was usually just, “are you okay?” and after Christian (Edward) beat her or something. James was thorough.
Annie: Bella spends the rest of the day flopping around like a waterless fish and gets her nose all out of joint because she overhears some girl named Lauren say that Bella should just sit with the Cullens now all the time. Not quite sure why this is so offensive to Bella, because she is obsessed with Edward and the Cullens, but oookay, let’s just go with it.
Mari: Bella hilariously says that Lauren doesn’t know her well enough to dislike her. What a blissfully unaware thing for her to say. Bella hasn’t STOPPED disliking people she doesn’t know well enough since she got to Forks.
Annie: At dinner that night, Bella and her dad are talking about the trip to the beach planned for the next day. Bella gets judgey and awful about how happy Charlie seems to be that his daughter is making friends and joining in on stuff the local kids do.
Catherine: She can’t even be happy that someone else is happy for her. Worst.
Annie: Bella takes the opportunity at dinner to steer the conversation to her obsession with Edward. She asks her dad about Edward’s choice of camp grounds and Charlie tells Bella that’s no place for anyone to camp, because of all the bears. It’s more a place for hunting. Uh, okay? Are we dropping hints here, Stephenie? Is Edward a hunter?
The next morning, Bella’s confused by the appearance of the sun.
K: Apparently it’s “in the wrong place in the sky“. How. What. HOW?? HOW IS THERE A WRONG PLACE IN THE SKY FOR THE SUN TO BE?? Unless it’s, like, rising in the north-west and setting never.
Mari: I’ve been trying not to Tweet while I read because I’m saving all my snark for recaps, but I broke that rule at this point because Bella seems to be legitimately confused by weather. Not by the sudden changes (fair) or unaccustomed to it (also fair) but CONFUSED. She runs to her window to check out the weird pale yellow light and then after a beat figures out what it is: sun. Sun she thinks should be somewhere else in the sky.
GIRL. Stephenie. Your attempt at descriptive language is making your character seem like an idiot. STOP IT.
Annie: Bella meets up with the the poor, unfortunate souls that will be spending the day with her and some of the girls aren’t thrilled to see her.
I don’t blame these girls one bit; I would not be thrilled to see Bella show up either, because she is the living worst. (Can we start our own drinking game where we drink every time I say she’s the worst?) (C: I think it’s inevitable. ALL THE WINE!) (M: You can’t start a drinking game about things you say; that’s just talking and drinking.) (A: Just WATCH me.)
Poor Mike is happy to see Bella and she rewards him by being awful. Through some cheatery narration, she tells us that Mike is ‘blissful’ that she accepted his offer to ride in the car with him, and then says this, which sets off all of my rage buttons:
It was so easy to make Mike happy.
I HATE HER!
They all pile into cars and head to the beach. While Stephenie gives us way too many details about it (boo), Bella does admit that she finds the beach breathtaking (yay)!
K: These kids are a car accident waiting to happen because two extra people show up and they need all the seats, and basically all I can think of is this, which will mean precisely nothing to anyone but me and New Zealand:
Annie: They engage in activities that Stephenie Meyer seems to think teenagers would do at a beach; they build a fire and then some of the kids decide to go to the tidal pools.
Catherine: LOL! I can’t believe I never noticed this before. Where are all the drug pipes and the illicit premarital sex? Come on, Steph, this isn’t a field trip.
Annie: Bella decides to go with the tidal pools group, because the girls she’s decided to hate don’t feel like exploring.
The group heads off to the pools, and we’re detailed to death about them.
Mari: The descriptions could be decent pieces of writing if Stephenie didn’t insist on packing all of them in one sentence and making the whole thing bloated and bulky. Example:
“The bouquets of brilliant anemones undulated ceaselessly in the invisible current, twisted shells scurried about the edges, obscuring the crabs within them, starfish stuck motionless to the rocks and each other, while one small black eel with white racing stripes wove through the bright green weeds, waiting for the sea to return.“
If you made it through that 52-word sentence, that’s practically exercise! Congratulations.
Annie: Other than that, the only real thing worth mentioning is that Bella manages to stay upright and doesn’t fall face first into a pool.
K: Yeah, but she trips over a bunch as they head back to the beach. The post-it note I stuck to the page at this point reads “I’mma buy this fucking bitch a Zimmer frame.”
Annie: As they arrive back to the beach, Bella notices more people have arrived. The newcomers to the party are described as having shiny, straight black hair, copper skin, and are from the reservation. Not gonna lie, this stereotypical description hits some of my rage buttons.
Mari: Just wait. The racism is just getting started!
Annie: As introductions happen, one of the younger, quieter, boys reacts to Bella’s name, because of fucking course.
We learn that this boy’s name is Jacob.
K: HAHAHAHAHAHA, OH SWEET BABY JESUS I’D FORGOTTEN ABOUT THAT HAIR.
Mari: Save some of that laughter for the #snarkathon.
Annie: I tried to resist posting that gif, but with that hair? Sorry, not sorry.
After they eat, the crowd disperses a bit, and Bella finds herself alone with a smaller group of people. Jacob is, of course, one of those people.
Bella spends some time appreciating Jacob’s appearance, but then turns into a raving lunatic when Jacob asks if she’s Isabella Swan. Bella bitchily corrects him (it’s ‘Bella’!), Jacob explains that Charlie bought her Wow. Free. Truck. from Jacob’s father, and reminds her that they actually do kinda know each other. Stop being so awful, Bella. JUST. PLEASE. STOP.
Bella internal-monologues about remembering the fishing trips she was forced to go on when she was younger with Jacob’s sisters and father, until she got old enough to make a big enough scene. That put a stop to that family fun time. So she’s been the actual worst forever, then. Can’t say I’m too surprised.
Catherine: How can a human being hate fun this much?
Mari: God, if she were a well-adjusted, fun, independent, and well-developed woman, why would she need to fall in LOVE? Duh.
Annie: Bella and Jacob actually manage to carry on a conversation that isn’t weird, creepy, or stalkery. Bella even admits to being impressed by Jacob’s hobby of rebuilding cars. Lauren, the object of Bella’s hatred, inserts herself into the conversation, and Bella quickly goes back to her normal self– commenting on how she imagines the tone Lauren used is insolent. She’s now imagining that people are being rude and disrespectful. Girl, really?
Lauren says that it’s too bad the Cullens couldn’t make it to the beach, apparently, taunting Bella or something.
Catherine: Suddenly I’m imagining that Lauren is actually trying to be friends with Bella and just commenting normally and Bella is imagining it all as insulting. It’s making this book much more fun. That and the drinking games, obviously. (M: And pretending Edward is singing everything with his musical voice!)
Annie: One of the kids that arrived with Jacob says that the Cullens don’t come to the beach. Bella decides to latch onto that information and hold on tight.
Jacob tries to continue the conversation he and Bella were having before they were so rudely interrupted by Bella’s new archenemy Lauren and the mention of the Cullens, but Bella will have none of it.
In fact, she decides to try out Edward’s manipu-flirting and decides she’ll try to lure the 15-year-old away to pump him for information on Edward and his family, just because of this thing that was said in passing and I don’t even know what’s going on here.
K: A trainwreck.
Mari: And some more expert plagiarizing because Bella looks up from underneath her lashes, which of course, Ana did CONSTANTLY.
Annie: Bella pulls Jacob away from the group, and she feels that maybe she’s doing this creepy, manipulation flirting thing right. Like, that’s her thought process. She’s all ‘I’m going to try being a creeper to see if I can get this boy to do what I want’.
Jacob tells Bella that the Cullens are not supposed to come onto the reservation and then gets all ‘Ooooh, I’m not supposed to tell you that’ and acting…coy, maybe? And I’m left feeling super confused and super awkward just reading this exchange. Jacob’s voice gets ‘husky’…or huskier and he asks Bella if she likes scary stories and Bella, still in her manipu-fliriting is all ‘I looooove them’ and I want to vomit forever.
Jacob tells Bella about this legend that says their people are descended from wolves, and that there was one natural enemy of the wolf, or wolf-men (or, you know, Werewolves)… the cold ones.
I think I’m going to need a cold one or two to get through the rest of this chapter.
Catherine: A+
K: Shit. Now I’m going to have this stuck in my head for the rest of the millennium. #Australianproblems
Annie: I so wanted to use that as a point of reference, but I figured only a few people would get it. And now I have that stuck in my head again.
Jacob tells Bella about how the cold ones with the pale faces came into his great grandfather’s territory, onto their land. Being enemies, this was usually not a thing that worked out well for the wolf-men and cold ones, but these cold ones were different.
They were draft cold ones. They were civilized cold ones. They didn’t hunt humans. They hunted animals instead. And so Jacob’s great grandfather made a truce with these cold ones. That they would keep their secret about being cold and pale, and they were to stay the hell off the reservation.
Bella asks Jacob why this has anything to do with the Cullens, and does this mean the cold ones his grandfather knew are like the Cullens. Jacob tells Bella it’s because the cold ones are the Cullens.
Or something. This whole story-telling bit is so anticlimactic to me.
K: I think it’s because it goes for 75,000 pages when he could just be all “Local legend says they’re vampires”.
Mari: And to make this a more realistic teen outing, follow that one sentence up with, “would you like a cold one?”
Annie: Anyway, Bella’s all ‘What does this mean? What are they?’
For being such a smart person, Bella can be pretty fucking stupid.
But, let’s move past that, because here we are, ladies and gentlemen! We’re at the big reveal! Maybe?
Jacob tells Bella that the Cullens are vampires.
Bella has goosebumps or something and they talk about how Jacob gives good scary story or something and then Mike and Jessica arrive to save us from this awkward bullshit. Apparently Mike is jealous to find Bella alone with a male that isn’t a relative, because he jealously says ‘There you are!’
How… how does one do that? Is it a tone thing? You’d have to ask Bella because it’s all in her head.
Catherine: This book is quickly turning into Girl, Interrupted.
Annie: The whole vampire story, momentarily forgotten, Jacob asks Bella if Mike is her boyfriend, because, of fucking course, and Bella winks and assures Jacob that Mike is not her boyfriend. Because, ew. Mike. Bella takes a fraction of a second to feel bad for ‘using’ Jacob, and they all head back to the main group, because it’s time to go.
K: But also, we’re treated to this: “But I really did like Jacob. He was someone I could easily be friends with.” THE ONLY PERSON OF EVER, APPARENTLY.
Mari: Let’s back up, though, and think about what Jacob did to earn this title: he basically talked about Edward the whole time and let Bella believe her awkward flirting, “smoldering,” “underneath her lashes” BS was actually working. Sorry, Jacob. This has very little to do with you.
Annie: Yup. She gives absolutely zero fucks about Jacob as a person, he just provides information about her obsession and strokes her ego. Because Bella is the wooooorst. (Shots?) (M: NO.)
They pack up and climb into cars, and Bella makes a big deal of making sure she can sit in the back this time, so she doesn’t have to be next to Mike and can sulk and not think about anything. She’s especially not going to think about Edward.
The chapter comes to a close, with Bella closing her eyes, because how else would you end a chapter?
Mari: I’m going to end this recap with a reminder that Native Americans are devastatingly underrepresented in media and whenever we do find them, they are usually being portrayed as a stereotype. I recently took a Gender + Race in Media class and that professor had “mascot” listed as the most frequent portrayal of Native Americans in media.
My point is that while it’s fun to make fun of Twilight, it’s also cool to remind ourselves that there is some truly racist and sexist bullshit that lives within these pages. I think that’s why it can be frustrating when fans are like, “JUST LET ME LOVE IT.”
So, it’s easy to forget that when Stephenie Googled “rainiest city in the US” and found Forks, she also found the Quileute Nation, real people with real history and legends that Stephenie bastardized for her supremely successful fiction.
What’s left (for me) to see is how she treats the the Native American characters. Totally fairly, I’m sure.
Next time on Twilight: Bella Googles vampires in Chapter 7!
Fuchsia-haired, caffeine enthusiast, dog person, Raptors fan, sometimes blogger, music & social media geek, freelancer, human being. She/her.
I'm a 30-something south Floridan who loves the beach but cannot swim. Such is my life, full of small contradictions and little trivialities. My main life goals are never to take life too seriously, but to do everything I attempt seriously well. After that, my life goals devolve into things like not wearing pants and eating all of the Zebra Cakes in the world. THE WORLD.
I'm a 30-something librarian and I still live with my parents because I'm super broke. Leader of Team Heartless Cow. I have an inexplicable love for 90s television, eat too much chocolate, and read more than is good for me.
I am a 30-something year-old human woman who lives in Maine. I'm a freelance writer who mostly spends time that I should be doing that, watching T.V. I also love reading and comic books way too much.
