New Moon Chapter 17 – She’s a brick house.

Previously: Jacob saves Bella from drowning and when she gets home there is a surprise vampire waiting for her.
—

Marines: We’ve fallen off pace a bit here, and it’s my fault. Time is so hard, you guys.

Catherine: SO hard. It went forward like, an hour the other day and we can’t be blamed for that. So…

Kirsti: I would say that I stole it, but Australia is on daylight saving for another 2 weeks, so it definitely wasn’t me.

Mari: Bella finds Alice in her house, waiting “perfectly motionless in the center of the hall.” So, in addition to breaking and entering, Alice is just standing there. Still. Waiting.

Bella nearly wets herself over seeing Alice. She runs in for a hug, but it’s like running into a cement wall because VampMeyers are basically the most unlovable creatures ever.

K: Man, being with Edward must be a DREAM. I can see why Bella jumped off a fucking cliff to be closer to his memory or something.

Mari: Bella sniffs at Alice and tells us that she smells like nothing we know but it’s the best smell ever. So, I guess this is like when Christian smelled like Christian and Ana smelled like Ana. Bella “doesn’t realize” that her hugging and sniffing has turned into sobbing, because she’s the least observant narrator of all time. Imagine what your life would be like if you could just start SOBBING, but only realize it full minutes later.

Don’t imagine it. It’s scary.

Alice leads Bella to the living room and pulls baby Bella into her lap.

“It was like curling up into a cool stone, but a stone that was contoured comfortingly to the shape of my body.” 

No part of that sounds comforting.

Catherine: That’s not…how stone works. 

K: Seriously. I also can’t stop laughing about the idea of a comfortingly contoured stone.

Mari: Alice waits for Bella to finish and between sobs, Bell-bell lets us know that she finally feels like everything is going to be okay. Except JOKES! Just as Bella thinks, “it finally seems like things will be okay,” this happens:

“Alice sighed. “I’d forgotten how exuberant you are,” she said, and her tone was disapproving.
I looked up at her through my streaming eyes. Alice’s neck was tight, straining away from me, her lips pressed together firmly. Her eyes were black as pitch.
“Oh,” I puffed, as I realized the problem. She was thirsty. And I smelled appetizing. It had been a while since I’d had to think about that kind of thing. “Sorry.” 

No, Bella. Things will not be okay because that friend you are so happy to see? The brick house? SHE WANTS TO EAT YOU. Yeah, it’s been a while since you had to worry whether the people you were surrounding yourself with were thinking of you as friend or food.

K: But Meyerpires are soooooooo dreamy that you can overlook them wanting to eat you. Or something??

Mari:

Alice says this awkward smelly-blood moment is her fault, since it’s been too long since she hunted. She changes the subject to how exactly Bella is alive after her happy cliff diving into an impossible hurricane accident. Bella asks if Alice saw her fall and Alice corrects her: I saw you jump.

Bella doesn’t know how to reply to that without the whole, “but Angry Curtains Edward…” explanation. Alice says she knew this would happen (the Bella acting dangerously part), but Edward was counting on the fact that Bella pinky-promised not to get into trouble. Edward also warned Alice not to go looking for visions of what gifts Bella was getting for Christmas, or whatever the hell kind of visions Alice gets. Even though Alice wasn’t trying to keep tabs on Bella, she got a vision of her jumping off a cliff. So Alice hopped on a plane, even though she knew she wouldn’t be in time to stop nothing-bad-can-happen! cliff diving times.

Catherine: Well, you have to understand, everyone just loves Bella SO MUCH that they’re willing to put their entire lives on hold to cross the earth just to make sure she’s okay. That’s how lovable she is. Don’t you see? 

Annie: No, no, I absolutely do not. Because she is the absolute worst.

K: Seriously, none of this makes any sense at all. NONE OF IT.

Mari: Alice expected to get here and find Bella dead, but she thought maybe she could help Charlie in some way. (K: Alice Cullen, the only person on the planet who gives a shit about Charlie.) Bella tells her that she was cliff diving for purely recreational purposes, not suicide. Bella doesn’t clarify that almost committing suicide is how she enjoys herself. Recreationally.

Annie: I will rant about this more in-depth later, but I hate how Bella is flippant about suicide. It’s not a big joke, Bella. IT’S NOT A BIG JOKE YOU UNINFORMED PRAT.

Mari: Bella admits that she would’ve died had it not been for Jacob, because she didn’t really think about the part that she was jumping into water. During a storm. There is a bit of confusion over the fact that Alice didn’t see Jacob pulling Bella out of the water and it involves Alice sniffing Bella. There is a lot of sniffing going on with the non-wolfy characters right now. Bella explains that Jacob was kind of her best friend up until a second ago when he was like HOPE YOU DON’T DIE and it was my favorite thing ever. Anyway, Alice doesn’t know what to make of Jacob’s absence from her vision and we move back to talking about what a death-prone idiot Bella is.

K: “I’ve never seen anyone so prone to life-threatening idiocy,” Alice tells us. NEITHER HAS THE PLANET THROUGHOUT ALL OF HUMAN HISTORY.

Mari: Alice asks how Jacob managed against the currents. Bella decides that she can tell everyone’s secrets and tells Alice that he’s a werewolf. Alice says that explains the fact that Bella smells “awful.” I remember that Jacob smelled the vampire in the previous chapter so I did some cheating and searched the whole book for the word smell. Alice describes the werewolf smell as “awful” in this chapter and later, Jacob describes the vampire smell as “too sweet. Sickly sweet.” I don’t know. I feel comfortable taking a nice racism shot over that one, right?

Catherine: Sneaky racism, too. It’s like Meyer is smuggling racism into our minds. 

Annie: Sneaky, subtle racism is the worst, because after a while, you do not even notice it any more. It normalizes it. NOT COOL.

K: Plus, shots help dull the pain of this writing, subtle racism and all.

Mari: Anyway, Alice gets all huffy about the fact that Bella is hanging out with werewolves and it’s just like her to start hanging out with more monsters after the vampires left town. This is kind of a stupid argument because 1- it’s the vampires “fault” that werewolves were made 2- Bella didn’t know they were werewolves and 3- Bella knew Jacob first. I’m not down with this whole idea that Bella is a danger magnet, because that again puts the fault on her. She attracts danger and not she hangs out with a lot of vampires who cause all kinds of trouble by being, you know, murderers.

Anyway again, Bella tells Alice about Victoria and Laurent being in town and the way the werewolves protected her. She tells her everything except about the motorcycles and Angry Curtains. Bella’s narration glosses over the story (thank God) but does give us an awful lot of detail about how much Alice narrows her eyes and a crease in her forehead. Bella also spares a second to feel sad about Harry dying, which is an actually shocking turn of events.

K: She also tells us that Alice’s voice sounds like wind-chimes, which sounds like THE MOST ANNOYING THING OF ALL TIME.

Mari: “ARE YOU SPEAKING OR TINKLING RIGHT NOW?”

Alice says that the vamps leaving town didn’t do Bella any good at all, and she doesn’t even know about blank pages, break-up comas and Angry Curtains. Alice apologizes for intruding. Bella begs her to stay. Well, Bella starts hyperventilating as she begs Alice to stay. Alice has to command her to breathe, but Bella can’t because she “couldn’t quite locate [her] lungs.” Bell, girl. You don’t have to point to them for them to work. Pro tip.

Alice says Bella looks like crap because you know. No mens. This conversation is interrupted by Jacob calling to see if Bella is dead. For real. Bella is like, “no, not dead,” and Jacob hangs up on her. Every time I read another chapter where Bella has survived, I want to hang up on this book too.

K: Same.

Mari: Bella invites Alice to stay the night and she agrees to, even though she has her own house. I guess she doesn’t know it’s been overtaken by vampire trees, or whatever. (C: The Cullen’s house is now a post-apocalyptic, plant ruled microcosm. In case you missed that chapter, guys.) Alice decides to go hunting first and wants to know if Bella will be safe for an hour. She then ANSWERS HER OWN QUESTION by seeking out a vision on command. She sees that Bella will be safe for the night. I call bullpoo on this entire thing and the selective workings of her visions. This is not new information, but I just wanted to make it known all the same.

K: I just realised that Alice is basically the Legolas of this series – she can see stuff way before anyone else can, she dances around the place, and she’s essentially a pain in the arse while also being oddly likeable?? Or something? But obviously now, all I can think of is “They’re taking the hobbits to Isengard-gard-gard-gard.”

Mari: Bella showers, prepares the couch for Alice to “sleep” on, and heats up some dinner. When she goes back into the living room to watch TV, Alice is already back, eyes all butterscotch and magic after having killed Bambi. Bella cuddles up next to her slab-friend and asks if Edward knows she’s here. Alice says no. Edward isn’t with the rest of the Cullens because. Alice flew in from Denali, but no word on why she didn’t run the whole way with a car on her back.

Catherine: Okay, is it weirding anyone else out that Bella is so desperate for cold, stone, icy, needless list of adjectives vampire hugs that she’s now spooning with her ex-boyfriend’s sister? What is this? Are they gonna fuck? Is Alice just really creeped out right now and trying to figure out how to hug and roll like Chandler did in that episode of Friends? 

Annie: Absolutely, but to be fair, everything that Bella does weirds me out, so…

K: Agreed. Seriously, though, why hasn’t Alice been all “Girl. This is fucking weird. Get out of my bubble, yeah?”??

Mari: She’s probably just sniffing her blood and dreaming about Bella-pies.

Charlie gets home and he’s really sad. Bella is nice to him and gives him hugs. I actually feel bad for Charlie when he says he’s going to miss Harry and how sad it is for his children, teenagers themselves, to now be missing their father. Bella tells Charlie that they have a guest and he greets Alice as warmly as he can under the circumstances. He shuffles off to eat some food and Bella and Alice go back to the TV room. Bella wants to talk some more about the Cullens but she says that drowning has really taken it out of her. So, she falls asleep.

When she wakes up the next morning, she’s still on the couch and Alice and Charlie are in the kitchen. Alice asks how bad it was when they left and Charlie’s like, “I actually don’t know because of blank pages.” Just kidding. He says it was real bad. He recaps what we already know and proves that he’s not as clueless as Bella’s narration would have us believe. He was just kind of lost about what to do when doctors were throwing around the word “catatonic” after a break-up. He tried to send her to her mother to see if that helped but she threw a fit and then started acting like a robot with nightly nightmares.

K: CATATONIC BECAUSE HER BOYFRIEND LEFT TOWN. CATATONIC. WHAT THE SHIT, SMEYER.

Mari: Charlie goes on that Bella seemed to snap out of it after Jacob came into her life. He basically uses a page to tell us he’s #TeamJacob, even though he can tell Bella is still dead inside. Bella thinks, “I am. Because true love.” Whatever, Bella. Charlie basically says he hopes Edward doesn’t come back, and that’s pretty much the end of that conversation. Bella makes loud waking up noises (K: Because they stopped talking about Edward, so obviously she doesn’t care any more). Charlie leaves to go help Sue Clearwater with funeral arrangements.

The girls spend the day… talking about the Cullens! Carlisle (I first typed Maxwell, no lie) (C: I mean, this could be what Carlisle Maxwell does at his super!secret evil laboratory. We don’t know.) is teaching at Cornell, Esme is restoring an old house, Emmett and Rosalie were on a millionth honeymoon and Jasper is studying philosophy at Cornell.

K: Okay, but like why did Emmett and Rosalie have to be on ANOTHER HONEYMOON?? Why couldn’t they just “have gone to Europe for a few months” and left it at that?! 

Mari:

Alice, meanwhile, has been looking into her human life and the asylum she was admitted to. I don’t know if any of the information she provides will be important later, but I also don’t care.

Charlie gets home that night and is still sad. (A: Poor Charlie.)

The next day, Charlie leaves the house early for the funeral. As soon as he’s gone, the girls get up. Bella starts catching up on chores because she knows how to show a friend a good time. Alice tries to ask her questions about school and her life, but Bella has literally nothing to say about it.

K: Alice also trails around after Bella while she’s doing the cleaning, which I mention only because my post-it for this section is surprisingly witty and I need to share it: “Yeah, don’t help or anything, Alice. Just let CinderBella clean on her own.”

Mari: The doorbell rings and it surprises Alice, which means it can only be a wolf at the door. Alice wants to step out, but Bella tells her to stay, since she was here first. Alice laughs a “silvery” laugh (meaning gentle and clear) but it has “a dark edge” (meaning nothing that makes any damn sense).

Alice insists that it wouldn’t be good to have her in the house with a wolf, so she climbs out the window.

The wolf is still at the door.

 

Next time on New Moon: Is anyone going to answer the door? Maybe in chapter 18.