New Moon Chapter 11 – A hole full of hurt.

Previously: Bella almost got vampire mauled, but really big wolves with deep intelligent eyes showed up.
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Catherine: Bella opens up this chapter by telling us that she’s surprised she’s still alive. It’s been 3 chapters since my last chapter so I can’t remember why she’s almost dying this time. Is it still because her boyfriend broke up with her or because her emotional crutch did? Let’s read on and see.

Oh! It’s because she keeps expecting Victoria to kill her in her sleep. Good for her. That’s a legit reason to be surprised by your life.

Marines: It’s amazing that this was nearly word for word my exact same thought process. How sad that I honestly thought she was surprised to be alive because of her one-twoo-luff pains. When she mentioned Victoria, I was like practically cheering for her to be afraid for her life for an actual reason. 

Annie: Same. Well, after I got over my shock that we were developing some sort of plot much earlier in this book. Bella is no longer afraid for her life because she’s alone. It’s not because she’s manless. It’s for a legit reason! There is a scary ass vampire who’s coming to kill her. Progress.

Kirsti: I know that Charlie’s only capable of responsible parenting like once a book, but WHAT THE SHIT YOUR KID IS HAVING PANIC ATTACKS EVERY DAMNED DAY AND YOU’RE NOT SENDING HER TO THE DOCTOR??

Catherine: Of course not. In this book therapy is gross and for crazy people, remember? 

Bella tells us a bit about how scared and jumpy she is and then segues that into talking about how Jacob still hasn’t called her. I’d be more worried about the homicidal vampire she thinks could pop up at any minute, but okay. (A: Manless>murdery vampire.)

Apparently it’s been another week and Jacob still hasn’t called her. Look, I’m not a complete cold hearted bitch. I think we’ve all had a friend suddenly cut off contact with us in the past and remember how much it sucked. But Bella thinks that Jacob is very ill with mono and she still makes a huge nuisance of herself in this chapter.

“I called him Tuesday, but no one answered. Were the phone lines still having problems? Or had Billy invested in caller I.D.? On Wednesday I called every half hour until after eleven at night, desperate to hear the warmth of Jacob’s voice.”

Girl. Take the hint.

Mari: Every. Half. Hour. This is straight up harassment, whether or not the guy has mono or just never wants to see your face again.

K: GIRL. No wonder he’s not answering the phone. You’re a fucking stalker and he’s probably out getting a restraining order.

Catherine: At the very least Billy should be telling her to cut the shit. Calling a friend every half hour ’till they pick up is something a middle-school kid does not SUPER SMART Bella.

Bella denials herself into thinking that it’s a good thing that Jacob is avoiding her. Because actually, if Victoria does come to kill her it’d be good if Jacob weren’t around for that. I guess she figures that Victoria is just gonna kill everyone in a mile wide blast radius from her house.

So, Bell-Bell has a lot on her mind, which is why it takes her till that Friday to figure out that Jacob mostly likely got inducted into Sam’s nice, fun times, happy people gang and that’s why he’s not calling her back. (M: He’s busy with the meth dealers!)

I know this happened on a Friday because even though Meyer gets better in this book about not taking us through every single inane moment of Bella’s day, she still has to tell us every day that passes and give us a brief rundown of everything that Bella’s feeling that day.

That’s why this book is, like, 600 pages. It’s all sad feelings.

When she comes to this conclusion, she says ‘Holy crow’ again, like a normal teenager, so you know it’s serious.

She decides that she HAS to go see Jacob now, because, see she’s the only one that can get him out of his happy sunshine community service gang. It has to be her. And it doesn’t matter that Victoria might murder him because it’s been a whole week and no one has come for her yet, so it’s probably fine. Because a week is such a huge space of time for an immortal vampire. Victoria’s probably just doing her nails and forgot.

“This was a rescue mission. I was going to talk to Jacob—kidnap him if I had to. I’d once seen a PBS show on deprogramming the brainwashed. There had to be some kind of cure.”

Mari: Did she just reason that she could kidnap Jacob because she once saw a documentary…? And I can use this line of reasoning in real life…?

Annie: And like, can we take a sec to picture this? Clumsy Bella? Kidnapping strong, muscly Jacob? I think maybe Bella hit her head one time too many falling from those death bikes. Just. No, Bella. No.

K: I actually want that scene to be part of the plot. It would be FAR more interesting than anything we’ve read so far. 

Catherine: Bella figures she should call Charlie, for once, and inform him of the danger she’s barreling toward, arms and legs flailing.

So she calls him and he doesn’t give a shit. Well, he does at first but when Sam Uley is mentioned he completely shuts down and tells Bella that Sam is a good man and he’s the one who found Bella out in the woods and blah, blah, dismissive parent stuff. Charlie tells Bella that he’s busy because two tourists have gone missing in the woods and it was probably the wolves what did it.

Bella is distracted by this because she still doesn’t think there’s any way 5 MASSIVE wolves could win a fight against a single vampire. Even when the only way to kill these vampires is to tear them into pieces and that’s a wolf’s whole thing probably.

Think it through, Bella.

She just assumes that Laurent outran the wolves but she wonders why when he so obviously could’ve just killed them.

Speaking of brainwashing, did Edward manage to convince Bella that sparkly vampires were the most fearsome, unbeatable creatures on the earth? ‘Cause it seems like he did. And I get that Bella is so dumb that you could pretty much just throw her brain in the machine, set it to spin cycle and walk away but she has herself heard stories of Carlisle being a former vampire hunter. So like…where is she getting this from. There’s always a bigger fish, Bella.

Mari: Her whole brain goes, “vampire sparkly. vampire perfect. vampire so good can’t lose. vampire will eat me. me love vampire.” This book is so good, you guys.

K: Award winning writing compared to the tripe SMeyer spewed out.

Catherine: Charlie tells her not to worry about it and Bella gets frustrated and hangs up on him. What’s this? An emotion on Bella that isn’t sadness and mumbling? Why, I never!

Bella calls up Jacob’s house AGAIN and asks Billy of the ‘careful voice’ where Jake is. He tells her that he’s hanging out with friends and mentions Embry and since she knows Embry is already in the fun times horse around but everything is legit and we talk about our feelings a lot gang, that’s enough for her to start gearing up for her rescue mission.

She tells Billy to have Jake call her when he gets in and then goes to La Push to park outside their house and wait for Jacob to come home. I never tried this myself but I can’t imagine any rational parent of a friend accepting this shit.

Mari: “Jacob’s got weird friends! I’ll save him!” *parks outside his house and watches* — Bella Swan

Annie: Edward taught her well. I mean, she is a fucking expert when it comes to stalking now. Next she’ll be climbing into Jacob’s bedroom window to watch him sleep at night. And don’t even get me started on how good she is at ignoring the ‘no, stop’ requests. 

Catherine: While Bella is driving she sees a boy walking along the side of the road and it’s Quil. No comment on why she calls him a ‘boy’ even though he’s only 2 years younger than her. But I think it’s just more of her #lewronggeneration shit and not casual racism. Though I am starting to wish that we’d put ‘Bella thinks she’s 80 years old’ on the Bingo cards. (M: And on that note, a casual racism spot too…) (K: Clearly I need to think for more than 30 seconds when making up the board for Eclipse…) (C: There’s so much repetition in these books if you think for that long you will end up with, like 6 different cards. And 2 of them will be just about Edward’s eyes.)

She mentions that Quil looks a lot bigger than the last time she saw him and she stops to give him a ride.

Bella starts quizzing Quil about Jacob as soon as he gets into her car. He says that he saw Jacob and Embry today but only from a distance. When they noticed him they just disappeared into the trees. He says that he thinks Sam and his crew were with them. Bella takes this an another confirmation that Jake is in West Side Story now.

Poor Quil is shaken and scared that he’s gonna be next and no one is listening to him. Bella drives him home and then goes to wait for Jacob. Of course, once she gets there she realizes that she has nothing to do while she waits. You think Bella, who READS ALL THE TIME would bring a book with her in this situation. Or even have one stashed in her car somewhere. Especially since she does say that she has her backpack with her. She doesn’t have a book or some homework in her fucking backpack? IDK why this is making me angry but it is.

Mari: She used to read before she found and lost a man, Catherine. Gosh.

Annie: Between being a ball of sads over Edward and stalking Jacob, Bella has zero time for her love of reading.

Catherine: True. I can’t remember the last time she picked up a book in this book.

She starts doodling on a piece of paper and gets so wrapped up in that that she doesn’t notice Jacob approach until he’s hammering on her window.

“What are you doing here, Bella?” Jacob growled.
I stared at him in blank astonishment.”

Last time her voice was blank with disbelief now her face is blank with astonishment. Meyer clearly doesn’t know what the word ‘blank’ means. (M: Hint: it doesn’t mean “full of.”)

Anyway, Bella’s face is astonished but also totally blank because Jacob has changed a lot in the two weeks since she’s seen him. Like, a lot a lot. Like Today Show makeover a lot. He’s more muscular and he cut his hair off. Also he looks sadder. She takes half a page to describe that but I nutshelled it for you.

Bella describes his sad face as being like, her ‘sun had imploded’.

GET IT BECAUSE EDWARD’S THE MOON AND JACOB’S THE SUN DO YOU GET IT DO YOU DO YOU GET IT YET!?!?!?

K: Man, this is going above and beyond the Anvil of Obvious Storytelling. It’s like a tornado of anvils.

Catherine: It’s not subtle if you bash us over the head with it, Meyer!

Jacob is with his wolf buddies and they’re all wondering who this weird, fish-mouthed girl is. Except Sam who knows for sure she’s crazy ’cause he saw her mid-breakup coma.

Bella wants to punch Sam. Actually, she thinks wants to be a vampire since then Sam wouldn’t mess with her. This thought ‘knocks the wind’ out of her. She spent the whole second half of the last book wanting to be a vampire so she could stay forever and ever with Edward but I guess she forgot about that.

She doesn’t like thinking about vampires because they make her hole hurt. (M: Almost a word for word quote.)

Jacob is super hostile with her and ‘demands’ to know what she wants. She tells him she wants to talk to him alone.

He looks to Sam for approval.

“Sam nodded once, his face unperturbed. He made a brief comment in an unfamiliar, liquid language—I could only be positive that it wasn’t French or Spanish, but I guessed that it was Quileute.”

Yeah, Felix Baumgartner, way to take a flying fucking leap. You’re like a detective.

Mari: It wasn’t French or Spanish… but was it English? She’s not positive.

K: Given the confusion over the meaning of the word “blank”, English is clearly not Bella’s strong suit.

Catherine: So the other wolves all go into Jacob’s house and Bella and Jacob are left outside to talk. They take a bit of a walk away from the house and Bella notices that Jake seems to not be making any noise when he walks. (A: What a fucking WEIRD thing to notice.) Ya know, like a wolf does?

Jake tells her he was way off about Sam’s fun cult and it’s not what she thinks but he can’t tell her what it actually is. There’s a lot of back and forth where Jake tells her that Sam is helping him and Bella demands to know how but Jake talks around the issue. Then she tries to heal him with her hugs but he won’t touch her.

Jacobs yells at her to stop blaming Sam for this and she asks who she should blame. He tells her she should blame those ‘filthy reeking bloodsuckers that she loves so much’.

Bella is shocked, because remember no one besides her is supposed to know about the vampires. Even though Jake was the one who actually told her about them in the first place. But he didn’t actually believe the story he was telling her so it’s a turnaround that now he apparently does.

Mari: Never mind that it was supposedly Quileute legend/history. That’s how appropriation works.

Catherine: Bella starts hurting in her hole again at the mention of the Cullens but she ignores it to pretend that she doesn’t know who he’s talking about. He doesn’t buy it and says that he doesn’t want to say the Cullens’ name out loud ’cause he knows it hurts her. But then he does it anyway. (M: He’s suddenly my fave again.)

Bella wonders what the Cullen’s have to do with Sam’s crew and wonders if they’re a group of vampire-haters. She wonders why Jake would start believing in the vampires all of the sudden when he didn’t before and now their isn’t even any evidence. She points out that the Cullens are gone and Jake tells her that ‘sometimes things are set in motion, and then it’s too late‘.

Bella is still confused and demands to know what’s set in motion and what he’s blaming the Cullen’s for.

Okay, it’s easy to call Bella an idiot and poke fun at her for not getting that Jacob and his buddies are werewolves. But let’s be fairwolves for a second here: the only thing she knows about the Quileute legends is the rundown that Jake gave her about the wolves a year before and she was barely listening to that part of the story. She was more interested in the cold ones part. Plus, Jacob himself didn’t even believe it. She doesn’t really know that any other mythical beings exist beyond vampires. This would all be more believable if she started out thinking that Jacob was some different strain of vampire. But she doesn’t, so… she looks like an idiot.

Mari: Hey, but at least you looked at it fairly before arriving at that conclusion. It’s especially stupid because Bella made the flying leap to vampire so soon after meeting Edward. 

K: Meanwhile, I’m wondering how the fuck any of this makes any sense at all because, like, the Cullens have been there for years. So how is it SUDDENLY their fault that werewolves are being created, like, months and months after they left town?! (Side note: it may be possible that I fell asleep and missed some plot at some point.)

Catherine: No, no, you’re awake, this isn’t a nightmare. They never accurately explain this shit at all.

Jacob starts to get all up in Bella’s face and wouldn’t you know it, ghost Edward appears in Bella’s demented mind to warn her to be chill and love one another and not push Jacob into eating her. Bella wonders why ghost Edward would be showing up now since she couldn’t possibly be in danger from Jacob. (M: Idiot.)

Jacob starts to head back to the house but Bella stops him by saying that she ran into Quil and he’s scared he’s gonna be next to join the fun guy gang. Jacob gets pissed but it’s obviously more at himself and the situation.

K: Actual quote: “his face turning a strange shade of green under the red-brown surface.” I guess he can audition for the role of Elphaba now?

Catherine: He says that Quil won’t be next and this has to stop now and then he assaults a tree. Well, he pounds on it and it snaps but it’s a little tree so obviously that’s totally normal.

Jacob is horrified by his tree assault and he heads back to the house for real this time. Bella chases after him and stumbles over her words, asking if he’s breaking up with her.

“The words were all wrong, but they were the best way I could think to phrase what I was asking. After all, what Jake and I had was more than any schoolyard romance. Stronger.”

She must just think that all of her relationships are better than everyone else’s. No matter the context. Everything she feels is just more. Stronger.

Annie: And HOLD THE FUCKING PHONE. She was all ‘I’m just using him, we’re just friends, I’ll never return his feelings’, and now she’s all ‘what we had was so much more than a schoolyard romance’? Girl.

Catherine: Jake tells her they can’t even be friends. Bella asks why and tells him that she needs him.

“The blank emptiness of my life before—before Jacob brought some semblance of reason back into it—reared up and confronted me. Loneliness choked in my throat”.

At least she’s using ‘blank’ right?

Mari: All she needed to do was think about her life without a man! 

Catherine: Jacob tells her he’s sorry but he seems angry. Bella thinks that this might have nothing to do with the Cullens or Sam and it might just be that Jake got tired of waiting for her to get tricked into dating him already. She actually goes so far as to tell him that maybe if she had some more time she might start to develop feelings for him.

I hate them both so much, you guys.

Annie: Legit feelings are legit. I hate them, too.

Catherine: At least we’re all here together.

She begs him not to quit on her and says that she can’t take it. He finally breaks and tells her that it’s not her fault and that it’s all about him. He tells her that he’s not good enough to be her friend and he knows what he is now (a werewolf, in case this was all too subtle for you.) (M: Damn, I thought we might still be talking about bears. BEARS BEARS BEARS BEARS.)

Teen Wolf runs back into the house and Bella shuts down again. She just stands outside starting at his house until it starts to rain on her and Billy opens the door to tell her that maybe she should go the hell home since the other option is her curling up and dying on his doorstep.

As natural defense mechanisms go, Bella’s isn’t the best. No wonder she gets almost killed so much.

Mari: BEAR.

Catherine: Where?! Where bear?!

“Not as bad! Not as bad! My mind tried to comfort me. It was true. This wasn’t as bad. This wasn’t the end of the world, not again. This was just the end of what little peace there was left behind. That was all.”

Well, you trooper. I guess this means we can avoid having to read about a second breakup coma?

K: Thank fuck. Although some more basically blank pages would have been nice. 

Catherine: Every blank page is like a tiny vacation. 

Bella realizes that the whole time she thought Jacob had been healing her hole, he’d actually been carving out a new hole. So now she has two holes and both of them are painful.

I only mention this so I can give you an update on Bella’s hole. It’s not even important. I just like saying ‘hole’ for the cheap laughs. (M: They can’t all be expensive.)

Charlie is waiting for Bella when she gets home and he gets anxious when he sees her face and she realizes that she must look all sad again. She talks to him a bit about what happened and then goes to take a shower. When she gets out she overhears him on the phone arguing with someone.

It’s Billy and they are clearly arguing about Bella and Jake. (A: And the dowry for their arranged marriage?) Charlie tells Billy that she’s only just getting over Edward leaving and if Jacob sends her back into that depression he’s gonna have Charlie to answer to. Billy apparently tells Charlie that Bella was leading Jacob on (or something to that effect, we don’t get his exact words but that is how Bella sums up what he must’ve said) and Jake doesn’t want to be friends with her anymore because of that.

Bella thinks that she doesn’t believe that anymore. She thinks there’s more to this than an unrequited crush and for once, she’s right. That’s using your noodle, Bella.

Bella thinks about ghost Edward and lets herself cry as she falls asleep. She has a another one of her totally inexplicably psychic dreams and in this one Jake is walking next to her in the woods and he suddenly changes into Edward. She reaches for him but he puts up hands and backs away. Ooooh metaphors. What could it mean?

She wakes up from the nightmare crying and starts to go back to sleep when she realizes what woke her up.

“Something sharp scraped along the length of my window with a high-pitched squeal, like fingernails against the glass.”

We can only hope it’s Victoria.

Annie: Please let it be Victoria.

Mari: We can probably safely say that if it sounds like fingernails against the glass… it’ll be fingernails against the glass. 

K: I dunno, Mari. Maybe if we’re lucky, it’ll be bear claws against the glass. 

Catherine: Mmm, bear claws…

Next time on New Moon: Bella dreams hold all the answers in Chapter 12.