New Moon Chapter 16 – Death-ception

Previously: Bella went cliff diving in a storm and got our hopes up by getting caught in a rip.
—

Kirsti: Just as Bella thinks she’s about to drown, her head breaks the surface. BOOOOOOOOOOO. The waves slam her up against some rocks, which doesn’t, like, hurt her or cut her in any way. No, no, friends. The rocks basically perform CPR on her, ensuring that all the water in her lungs gets spewed back out. What the shit, Meyer.

An anxious voice orders her to breathe, and Bella gets super sad when she realises that it’s Jacob and not Edward.

Marines: Jacob is telling her to breathe but because it’s Jacob and not Edward, “I could not obey.” 

K: Lungs don’t work like that, SMeyer.

Then she realises that the rock that’s forcing the water out of her lungs is hot, and obviously it’s not a rock at all – it’s Jacob’s hand. And then we’re treated to this piece of WTFery: “Was I dying again, then? I didn’t like it – this wasn’t as good as the last time.”

WASN’T. AS GOOD. AS THE LAST TIME.

Let’s just stop and process that for a moment, shall we? (A: Please, no. I don’t wanna.)

Jacob asks if she can hear him, and then Sam turns up and asks how long Bella’s been unconscious. Is… is this the biggest piece of cheatery narration ever? Is Bella actually unconscious while she’s having all these thoughts about her head swishing around and hot rocks and black spots in her vision?? Or does SMeyer flat out not know what being unconscious means?!

Catherine: In the same way that E.L. James thought ‘subconscious’ meant split personality. 

Annie: Well, let’s not forget that SMeyer is anti-human. She just doesn’t know how human people work.

Mari: So, she gives us blank pages because of a break-up but paragraphs of text when Bella is unconscious? Seems legit.

K: Totes. 

Anyway, Jacob tells Sam that it’s been a few minutes. Sam points out that she’s breathing so she’ll come around but that they should probably move her because she’s a human icicle. (C: Just what she always wanted! Live your dreams!) Bella manages to open her eyes and say Jacob’s name. He’s super relieved and asks what hurts. She stammers out that only her throat hurts. Sam announces that he’s heading back to the hospital.

Jacob picks her up and we’re informed that he’s once again shirtless. AB SHOTS! She stares out at the black water and notices “a small flash of fire” dancing on the surface. He carries her up the beach, and Bella asks how he managed to find her. He tells her that he followed her tyre tracks, then heard her scream. “Why would you jump, Bella? Didn’t you notice that it’s turning into a hurricane out here? Couldn’t you have waited for me?” I…don’t really understand why that last question is relevant to the first two. And yet, here we are. (M: Friends wait for friends to dive into hurricanes, Kirsti.)

He makes her promise to only do super stupid things when he’s around. Bella manages to ask if they found Victoria, and Jacob says that Victoria jumped in the water and started swimming. Apparently vampires are much better swimmers than werewolves, so he headed home because he knows how much Bella loves spending time at the beach and he thought Victoria might try and get to her by sea. This whole thing is beyond ridiculous. “Can’t get past the barricade of werewolves? FINE, I’LL FUCKING SWIM.” Meanwhile, the werewolves are like this:

Catherine: But dogs… are better swimmers… than people…?

Annie: The only benefit I could see here is that vampires don’t need to breathe underwater, but I call bullshit here. Big, giant, strong, powerful werewolves could most definitely handle swimming. Your lore is flawed, SMeyers. 

Mari: I’m almost certain there is something here about swimming being a “white sport.”

K: Probably.

Anyway, Bella asks if someone’s hurt that Sam’s going to the hospital. Jacob tells her that Harry Clearwater had a heart attack and that it doesn’t look good. Bella immediately feels guilty because “Nobody needed to be worrying about me right now. What a stupid time to be reckless.” Indeed, Bella. Indeed.

They reach Jacob’s house, and he dumps her on the sofa and gets her some dry clothes. He goes to leave so she can change, but she tells him to stay because she’s too tired to move yet. He sits down and promptly falls asleep. Bella confuses sleep and unconsciousness again, but then the sound of Jacob’s snoring “soothed like a lullaby” and she falls asleep.

Obviously, she has a bizarrely detailed dream, but instead of being all about one or other of her love interests and their supernatural abilities, it’s just a string of old memories but with a scene from Romeo and Juliet tacked on the end. Yes, because we needed half a page of that.

When Bella wakes up, Jacob’s still asleep. So she just lies on the sofa and thinks about Juliet and how she would have reacted if Romeo had dumped her ass and left town. AND THEN SHE COMPARES HERSELF TO JULIET. Not kidding.

“I thought I knew how Juliet would feel. She wouldn’t go back to her old life, not really. She wouldn’t ever have moved on, I was sure of that. Even if she’d lived until she was old and grey, every time she closed her eyes, it would have been Romeo’s face she saw behind her lids.”

Then in a spectacularly heavy handed piece of comparison, she wonders if Juliet would ever have married Paris if Romeo had left. She decides that she wouldn’t have, then wonders if it would have been different if she loved him and Paris was, like, Juliet’s bestest friend of ever and also a werewolf. She listens to Jacob’s breathing some more, and declares it to be “the sound of comfort.”

Catherine: How pretentious do you have to be as a writer to compare your work to Shakespeare in the actual book? 

Annie: How delusional do you have to be as Stephenie Meyer to compare your bullshit ‘writing’ to Shakespeare’s writing in your terrible book?

Mari: How clueless do you have to be to compare your story to Shakespeare across almost 2 pages made up of literally nothing but narrative questions? 

K: All excellent questions.

Bella decides that she’s reading too much into the story, and NO FUCKING SHIT. She decides to think about reality instead. Which, frankly, is a relief after two full pages of “what would Juliet do?” Apparently Harry having a heart attack while she was off being a reckless idiot has put everything into perspective for her. And she’s pissed about this because it means she has to change her ways. She wonders if she can actually do that.

“Maybe. It wouldn’t be easy; in fact, it would be down right miserable to give up my hallucinations and try to be a grown-up.“

………………… what the fuck.

She decides she can only do it if she has Jacob.

Annie: Of fucking course. She needs a male crutch, otherwise she’ll waste her miserable life away curled up in a Bella-ball. Can’t just live your life as a whole person. You need a man to either prop yourself up or command and control you. Excellent fucking message, you twat (CAN I SAY TWAT?).

Mari: It’s not even that she needs a man full stop. She needs one to be SANE and an ADULT. Wonderful.

K: Then she thinks about her ill-advised drowning attempt instead, and how there was “strange fire on the waves“. She realises that it couldn’t ACTUALLY have been fire, but her train of thought is interrupted by Billy coming home. He apologises for waking them, and Bella realises that Harry’s died. She asks where Charlie is, and is told he’s still at the hospital, helping Harry’s wife make arrangements.

Billy heads to his room so as not to interrupt the half-arsed plot, leaving Jacob and Bella to sit on the floor together. She tries to comfort him, and “After a long moment, Jacob caught my hand and held it to his face.” Is… is face-palming with someone else’s hand a thing that people actually do? Because I can’t imagine another way to interpret that. Then he asks how she is, and says he’s going to take her home so she’s there when Charlie gets back.

He hugs her to him as they drive, and I really hope the Wow. Free. Truck has a bench seat, otherwise that would be super uncomfortable. Bella realises that she doesn’t want Jacob to be her brother after all: “all I really wanted was a claim on him.” Uuuuuuugh. NO. STOP. It occurs to her that she could stake a claim, but that in order to do so, she’d have to tell him everything. Including her theatre curtain hallucinations. She knows he’ll take her anyway, blah blah blah it’s like a FULL FUCKING PAGE of her being all “IDK, maybe dating Jacob wouldn’t be so bad?”. Except that obviously, it would be a sad pathetic cousin of her relationship with Edward, because of course it would.

They get to Bella’s house, and Jacob turns off the ignition and hugs Bella properly. He says that he knows she doesn’t feel the same way he does, but he’s so happy she’s alive that it doesn’t matter. Bella tells us that if she kisses Jacob’s bare shoulder – because of fucking COURSE he’s still shirtless – she knows exactly what will happen, and it would be super easy. She wonders if she could do it. Then Invisi-Edward Theatre Curtain whispers velvetly in her ear, telling her to be happy. (A: Pleasenostop.)

She freezes, and Jacob lets her go. He opens the truck door, and suddenly smells vampire. After a moment trying to decide whether to wolf out or get Bella to safety, he guns the engine and they speed off. But as they do, she spots a car opposite her house. Carlisle’s car. And despite telling us through the whole of the first book that she sucks at identifying car types, she instantly knows that “It was a Mercedes S55 AMG.” Okay, girl. Whatever.

Catherine: Oh no, totally, because as someone who sucks at identifying car types myself I always know when somethings a Ford 5592 Banana Delta Fudgesicle car. We know these things because it’s true love, Kirsti. Duh. 

Mari: Stalker-lationships 101! Memorize the car, even if you don’t know what the Jeff it means.

K: How foolish of me not to remember.

She yells at Jacob to stop because she knows it’s the Cullens. He stops, but he’s disgusted about her wanting to go back to her house when there’s a vampire in it. She’s shocked that he’s disgusted, and he’s even more disgusted when he realises that she’s shocked. It’s a vicious circle of weird facial expressions. Eventually, Jacob snaps that this changes everything and he has to get off their territory and go tell Sam. He jumps out of the Wow. Free. Truck and vanishes into the night with a “I really hope you don’t die.”

Catherine: That makes one of us. 

Annie: Yep.

Mari: I’m choosing to believe that was all sarcasm.

K: That IS a much more satisfying version of the story. I accept this theory.

Bella heads back to her house, and heads inside where it’s, like, super duper dark. As she goes to turn on the light, she realises that the flame she saw on the water when she was drowning wasn’t a flame at all. It was Victoria’s hair. She suddenly can’t move or breathe because she came super close to death while coming super close to death. (M: While being dead inside. Death-ception.) Then the light switches on anyway, and “[I] saw that someone was there, waiting for me.”

Classic SMeyer curbhanger.

Em dash count: FORTY ONE. Holy hell.

Ellipses count: FORTY. Someone stage an intervention for this woman.

 

Next time on New Moon: Guess who’s back? THE PLOT. Check it out in Chapter 17.