Previously: Bella paid attention her “friends” for the first time in months.
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Catherine: For some reason Bella thinks that it’d be a super great idea to go visit the Cullens’ old house at the beginning of this chapter. Obviously she wants to hear her hallucination of Edward’s voice again. Why doesn’t she just start doing drugs? I don’t know, but we’re subjected to this instead.
Marines: I never really thought I’d be on #teamdrugs.
Kirsti: She also asks herself if she’s become a masochist that she’s going there, and I’m all “GIRL. YOU WANTED YOUR BOYFRIEND TO LITERALLY MURDER YOU. YOU’RE ALREADY A MASOCHIST.”
Catherine: During a looooong passage of her driving up there she tells us what’s changed in the months since the Cullens have been gone. Namely, plants have overtaken it.
Who else remembers that terrifying fascinating show Life After People that was on the History channel a few years ago? It showed us what would happen if everyone on earth were to suddenly disappear and everything left over went full on Little Shop of Horrors with plants overtaking everything again.
The Cullen house is that now.
“It was creepy. For the first time since I’d seen the beautiful house, it looked like a fitting haunt for vampires.”
Mari: Okay, but… it’s only been four months? Like what kind of rabid trees have now overtaken the house, guys? Are they vampire plants? Is Edward running back over here daily to water and MiracleGro everything?
K: Clearly, in addition to not owning a face, SMeyer doesn’t own a garden. Wait, isn’t she’s from Arizona? Everything suddenly makes perfect sense…
Catherine: It’s been taken over by fairies guys, obviously. They were attracted to the leftover body glitter.
Bella does seem to realize that her hallucination was not terribly healthy, she even refers to it as an episode with italics and everything. But she also insinuates that she wants to go looking for Edward even though he clearly doesn’t care about her and doesn’t want her to. So two steps forward one step back, I guess.
She pulls up to the house and gets out, but no voice. She notes that the house was still there but, ‘It’s concrete reality would not counteract the nothingness of the nightmares‘. (A: Nice try at alliteration, though. Points!)
So everyone put your choice of bingo chip on ‘TOO MANY WORDS’. I’ll wait.
Done? Good.
…I know you didn’t come back right away. It’s fine. (M: Side-tracked by a snack and some YouTube videos. Soorry.) (K: Fell down a Tumblr black hole. Not sorry.) (A: Burned book. Had to go find another copy. Only sorry cuz I found one.) (C:It’s not fine. I lied.)
She gets too upset by the fact that nothing and everything has changed and jumps back in Wow. Free. Truck and takes off over to Jacob’s house.
Mari: Because she feels hideously empty without him. This series is in no way about girls who cannot live without boys, though. Definitely not.
K: She wonders if she’s developing a new addiction to Jacob, and those of us who’ve read Breaking Dawn can sit back and laugh while drinking away the pain, because we know what’s really addicted to Jacob. And it ain’t Bella.
Annie: Ew, I’m not ready for that.
Catherine: When she gets to Jacob’s one of the motorcycles is already like, halfway done or whatever and Bella’s shocked. I guess that’s impressive. She’s shocked a lot so it’s hard to tell.
Annie: For someone who’s supposed to be super smart, the simplest shit shocks her. I think it’s time Stephenie picked up a thesaurus and chose a better word. Also. How about THAT for alliteration? I’m giving Smeyer a run for her money.
Catherine: Four for you, Alliterative Annie.
Bella tells Jake that he’s amazing and he tells her that if he was smart he’d be dragging out the process of fixing the bikes more. Bella asks why and he answers her question with another question.
He asks her what she would say if he said that he couldn’t fix the bikes and she says that that would suck but they’d just find something else to do together. Jake is pleased by this because he very obviously just wants to spend time with her and doesn’t want that to end when he’s done with the bikes. (A: He clearly doesn’t know her like we do.) (C: He would be running away.)
They make plans to hang out and do homework at her place twice a week so their dad’s won’t get suspicious of what they’re doing in the garage. I’ve never seen teenagers hang out to do homework unless they had a specific project for school that they had to do together. That alone is suspicious, you guys. You’re just making it worse.
K: For inexplicable reasons, it pissed me off that Bella was all “Jeez, how much stuff are you leaving undone to hang out with me, Jacob?”. Girl. You’re the senior. You’re the one spending like an hour a day (yes, I just Google Maps-ed it) driving to La Push and back. How about you judge your own life and choices first?
Catherine: Meyer definitely did not Google Maps that. You’ve now done more research than she ever did.
Later, Bella goes home and makes dinner for Charlie. ‘Making dinner for Charlie’ becomes such a thing in this book that you’d think it was something he was forcing her to do instead of something she takes on herself and then gets a weird martyr complex about.
This is evidenced by the fact that she apologizes to Charlie for dinner being late and then when he’s like, ‘it’s nbd. Don’t worry about it’. She’s all like:
“I knew he was just relieved that I was still acting like a normal person, and he was not about to rock the boat.”
Meanwhile, this man managed to feed himself for 17 years while you lived in Arizona. He never asked you to make him shit. #TeamCharlie
Annie: #TeamCharlie forever, because she is the fucking worst to her father. And like, he doesn’t even deserve it like some fictional parents do. The least she could do is help out by cooking dinner and not being a complete psycho about it.
Mari: I’m pretty sure her chicken tastes like tears and sorrow anyway.
K: Which would explain why whenever she comes home a little late, he’s all “I ORDERED PIZZA OH SWEET BEAUTIFUL PIZZA HOW I MISSED YOU”.
Catherine: Now that Bella has put in the minimum effort for one parent, we have to hear about her doing it for the other one as well.
She checks her email and sees that Renee has sent her a long email replying to her last one. Bella sends her another email but doesn’t tell her about the motorcycles because she ‘s not telling anyone about her shitty motorcycles. (M: Did we ever complain about Bella calling her parents Charlie and Renee? The weirdness of it struck me in this paragraph, for some reason.) (A: No, we haven’t. I think I skim over it because it’s just one more of Bella’s terrible quirks that drives me batshit crazy.) (C:It’s super weird and it’s never explained.)
At school the next day, we get a brief run down of what’s going on with Bella’s friends and them ‘welcoming her back with open arms’ after her ‘months of aberrant behavior’. This girl is calling her being monosyllabic and bitchy ‘aberrant behavior’. Hilarious.
K: I have to interrupt here, because the sentence structure here is SO FUCKING WEIRD: “School Tuesday had its ups and downs.” I literally had to read that sentence six times before I understood that what SMeyer was actually trying to say was “When I went to school on Tuesday, it had its ups and downs.” I’m too angry to even work out what parts of speech she’s lacking, but SMeyer needs to buy a truckload of them.
Catherine: Anyway, Angela and Mike are happy Bella’s done with her gross depression and mental illness (because it lasted for, like, whole MONTHS you guys. Ew.). Jessica is still hesitant. Bella wonders if Jess needs a ‘formal written apology for the Port Angeles incident’. Oh, you mean that thing where you might’ve gotten her killed or assaulted? That ‘incident’? Yeah, she at least needs a verbal apology, which you have not really provided. Assface.
Annie: How dare Jessica still be upset about that, she doesn’t need an apology for that. Get your shots ready people, because I’m going to say it: BELLA IS THE WORSTTTTT.
Catherine: SHOTS! (M: This is still not how a drinking game works.)
At work, Mike is ‘animated and chatty’ and Bella hates it. She’d much rather be in Jacob’s garage smelling his farts, I guess.
Mike stupidly asks her out yet again. (K: WHY? WHYYYYYYYYY?) (C: He clearly has no self respect.) Bella tells him she doesn’t date and he suggests that they go out as friends. Because sure, he can definitely go out to a movie with Bella alone and not attach any romantic feelings to it. He’s shown that he’s so good at that in the past. She tells him that she’ll have to do it next week because she already has plans to do homework with a friend like a trademark normal teen. He’s disappointed. Blah. Who cares?
The next night Bella and Jacob are doing homework at her house when Charlie comes in. Bella is making lasagna to ‘atone for all the pizza’. See what I mean? Where is this coming from? (M: The devil?) (K: Just STFU and eat the damned pizza, Bella. It’s not like you’re going to put vegetables in the lasagna, therefore it’s probably LESS healthy than the pizza)
Meyer, who is successfully transitioning all over the fucking place all of the sudden, takes us through the next two days in two paragraphs because nothing eventful happens. Holy shit. She did it!
Sunday morning Bella is cleaning the house and waiting for Jacob to call her to tell her to come over. She’s apparently shaken because of her latest nightmare. In it, she’s lost in the wilderness again but this time she’s in the ‘sea of ferns’ that the Cullens’ front yard has become. How can one get lost in waist high ferns? No idea. But if anyone can it’s Bella.
Mari: A break-up coma was involved. I’m sure of it.
K: Or she forgot how to use her legs and is just crawling around on her hands and knees. I also have to laugh about the fact that this is the girl who can’t identify a fucking BMW when she sees one, but she can identify a hemlock tree from her dream? LOL OKAY.
Catherine: Jacob calls Bella and tells her that they have a date. She’s confused. She’s easily confused. The bikes are done.
Mari: In a week? Is this part of his spoiler spoiler bear spoiler powers?
Catherine: Nope! Just good, old fashioned bad writing.
Bella rushes out of her house past Charlie and he loses dad points for not realizing that she’s clearly not this excited about doing homework or anything. Although I guess he thinks that Bella and Jacob are dating now. So maybe that’s it?
Bella gets to Jacob’s house and they load up the bikes so they can take them somewhere to practice driving. She’s all freaked out now, having lost steam on the idea when she realized she would actually be driving the bike and not just staring at it anymore.
They decide to head out to a spot that Jacob knows to ride the bikes but on the way there they have to go over the cliffs by the sea. Bella happens to see four men standing on one of the cliffs that juts out over the ocean. As she’s driving by, one of the men jumps into the ocean and Bella screams and hits the brakes.
“I threw open my door and started to get out, which made no sense at all. The fastest way to a phone was to drive back to Billy’s. But I couldn’t believe what I’d just seen. Maybe, subconsciously, I hoped I would see something different without the glass of the windshield in the way.”
Sure, Bella. Sure.
Mari: Stephenie writes like she isn’t even convinced of her own story. I mean, honestly, slamming your brakes and getting out to get a closer look is not an abnormal reaction. Stephenie treats it like it is, so we get this absolutely absurd extra explanation that MAYBE, SUBCONSCIOUSLY Bella’s brain needed a better look without all that glass blocking her view. HOKAY.
Catherine: Bella tells Jacob that she just saw a guy jump off a cliff and he laughs at her reaction and tells her that those guys are just cliff-diving.
As they watch another one of the men on the cliff jumps off into the ocean. Jacob says that those guys are jumping from super high just to show off and he seems annoyed by it but that he and his friends and all of the not-werewolves in La Push usually jump from lower down. Bella is surprised and initially scared to learn that Jake cliff dives but then her natural stupidity takes over:
“I’d never witnessed anything so reckless in all my life. My eyes widened, and I smiled, “Jake, you have to take me cliff diving.”
Jacob tells her that it’s too dangerous and since that’s the point, Bella persists. He tells her that he’ll do it but on a warmer day and that they’re not jumping from the top. She agrees not to jump from that high on the first time, anyway.
K: JUMP FROM THE TOP, BELLA. LAND ON A ROCK. TAKE JACOB WITH YOU.
Catherine: They start driving again and Bella asks Jake who those guys were since he seemed to know them. He tells her it’s the ‘La Push gang’ and Bella gets impressed for some reason. Probably because she wants to join now. Picture Bella in a gang. Oh, wait, we don’t have to because of the magic of movies.
Mari: I want to unsee it.
K: BRB, fetching Brain Bleach.
Annie: No, but look at that wig! She must’ve found it at the same wig shop that sold Jacob his wig:
Hashtag never forget.
Catherine: Lol. They both killed the same raccoon. I’m so glad we get to use that gif again.
Jake tells her that they aren’t really a ‘gang’ gang and that they are more like a neighborhood watch or something. But with less concerned PTA moms and more werewolves.
He tells her that the leader is Sam Uley, the guy that found Bella after she went out to die in the woods and brought her to the humane society. Bella doesn’t want to think about that so she points out that Jake doesn’t seem to like the gang very much even though they sound ‘annoyingly goody two shoes for a gang.’
Mari: Sam ran some meth dealers out of town and Jacob takes it really personally. He thinks it’s so annoying that Sam is so about his land and his national pride that he doesn’t want meth dealers around children.
K: Seriously, that’s Jacob’s argument for why Sam’s the actual worst. I…am so baffled by everything about this.
Catherine: Jake says that they are annoying and they show off a lot and once Quil said something that pissed one of the guys in the gang off and the guy got so mad that he started shaking and Sam had to calm him down by putting a hand on his chest. Jake says that it was dumb because the guy, Paul is shorter and smaller than all of them and that Quil definitely could’ve taken him. Probably not the point though, Jake.
The story reminds Bella of the night that she was found in the woods.
“–it reminded me of something…a trio of tall, dark men standing very still and close together in my father’s living room. The picture was sideways, because my head was lying against the couch while Dr. Gerandy and Charlie leaned over me.”
So, basically Meyer got better at transitioning between scenes in this book but also developed this weird thing where she must point out where Bella’s head is at all times and tell us how it impacts her vision.
Bella points out that Sam, being 20, is a little too old for gangs. Since 20 is OLD you guys SO OLD. (M: Not as old as some 100-17 year olds we know, though. Just sayin’.)
Jake says that Sam was gonna go to college but he stayed and Jake was surprised when no one gave him any crap about not taking a scholarship or whatever. He is clearly pissed about this whole thing and Bella asks why he’s taking it so personally. He doesn’t answer because they are at the turn off for the place where they are gonna ride.
But once they get out and set up the bikes Bella asks him again what’s really bothering him about Sam.
Jake breaks down and tells her that Sam and his crew have been looking at him like they’re ‘waiting for something’ and ‘treating him special’.
Pedophiles, werewolves, could be either at this point.
Bella get’s all preachy and mom about it and says that he doesn’t have to do anything he doesn’t want to, like join a gang, even if it’s a nice gang. (M: You don’t even have to stay safe and not die if you don’t want to! #lessonsfromBella)
Jake also tells her that Embry has been avoiding him lately and hanging out with the gang. He was also out on the cliffs just now. For anyone wondering, Jacob could tell because he can see that far with his werewolf vision but he doesn’t know it yet. (M: I guess we stopped treating this as a fake spoiler. WEREWOLVES, Y’ALL.) (C: Fake spoiler from 10 years ago! Sssh, we have to keep it quiet.)
He says that the same thing happened with Paul: he wasn’t friends with Sam at all and then one day he missed a few weeks of school and when he came back he was in Sam’s gang. Jake is basically worried about Embry and worried that he is also gonna end up getting recruited into what he sees as a kind of cult.
Bella asks him if he’s talked to Billy about his fears and Jake is like, “yeah but he told me not to worry about it because werewolves.”
K: I have a lot of thoughts about the werewolves and why they’re around, but it’s probably best to wait and deal with that when we actually get to SMeyer telling us that. Just know that LITERALLY NONE OF THIS MAKES ANY SENSE.
Catherine: You guys should all know that anyway. PSA: None of this makes any sense. Jake get’s so upset talking about this that Bella hugs him so he’ll feel better and she can go back to using him as an emotional crutch without any of his gross feelings getting in the way.
They hug for a minute and Bella thinks that it’s nice but it’s weird that she feels so comforted and connected to Jake because she doesn’t usually relate to people this well. Or:
“Not human beings.”
Ugh. First off all, you’ve only met, like 6 people that weren’t human in your life and you were only really ‘connected’ to one of them, so settle down. And two, she really must not like her parents that much.
Mari: This story makes me really dislike Stephenie Meyer. She takes that whole, “I’m not like other girls” BS and expands it to, “I’m not like other human beings.” I’M NOT LIKE OTHER HUMAN BEINGS. I know it’s the character of Bella saying this, but this entire notion of humans being beneath her oozes out of Meyer’s story, in which all humans are terrible.
K: I think it’s especially grating because the “I’m not like other girls” BS tends to come with an implication that the character saying it is, in fact, BETTER than other girls. Extrapolating that, Bella doesn’t relate to human beings because she’s better than them and therefore can only relate to supernatural beings that look like angels. Go fuck yourself with a rusty star picket, Bella.
Catherine: Jake starts weirdly stroking her hair and Bella pulls away like, ‘okay haha, enough hugs’. She then immediately reminds him that she’s 2 whole years older than him because she thinks that will deter him from wanting to date her for some reason.
He reminds her about their age game and that they agreed he was middle-aged because he can fix bikes or whatever. Then he tells her she’s like a little porcelain doll and points out how pale she is. He starts to say that he’s only ever seen one person who was paler and then stops short when he remembers who that person was.
But it’s not quick enough and Bella get’s antsy to move on and ride the bikes so she can almost die again.
I’m not sure who her toying with death is hurting more in this case, her or us.
Mari: Always us.
K: Definitely us.
Annie: Forever us.
Next time on New Moon: Bella crashes her bike some in Chapter 08.
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.
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'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.
Fuchsia-haired, caffeine enthusiast, dog person, Raptors fan, sometimes blogger, music & social media geek, freelancer, human being. She/her.
