Breaking Dawn Chapter 35 – Old enough to fight.

Previously: Christmas gifts and promise bracelets.
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Catherine: This chapter opens with Bella sneaking out on Edward. Are we lucky enough for them to get a divorce? Probably not.

Marines: If a divorce would be anything like their “break-up,” perhaps it’s for the best.

Catherine: Good call. 

She’s only sneaking out to see J. Jonah Jameson again anyway.

Bella talks to Edward and notices that he might have figured out that she’s up to something. Because he has a “forced composure” in his expression and he hugs Renesmee a little tighter. I guess he really might think she’s cheating on him. (M: With who? Her ex-boy-space-friend is dating her daughter.) When Bella gets in the car she wonders if Edward is on to her because he read the odometer on her car after her last trip to the city. Which is just the most romantic and not at all an abuse tactic. (A: You can really see how ELJ got her abuse playbook for Grey from this.) (K: THIS SHOULD NOT EVEN BE A CONSIDERATION IN A ROMANTIC RELATIONSHIP WTF STEP.) Bella drives into the city and Meyer fills in her word count by having her wonder how much longer they have till the Volturi arrive and if she would have met J. Jenks under other circumstances for some reason. J wants to meet in a restaurant because a “hand off in a dark parking lot” would apparently “offend his sensibilities.” Why the fuck do we need to know this much about JJ Abrams again? THIS BOOK IS SO LOOOOONG.

Annie: Some might say it’s TOO long. And by some I mean me. And by too long I mean this book should have never, ever been written.

K: Agreed. For so very many reasons.

Catherine: Bella gets shown to a private room in the restaurant by a waiter who is dazzled by her beauty.

“I still wasn’t used to being beautiful to everyone rather than just Edward.”

Because we all know Bella’s never experienced having guys hit on her. Like, maybe an entire senior class of guys in her high school who all constantly hit on her and asked her to prom? But of course, Bella is too humble to remember that or she has brain damage or something. Plus, it’s much more flattering when it’s a creepy random waiter ogling you. (A: This. Is. Tedious.)

Bella waits for J and warms her hands by the fire so they won’t be freezing when he shakes her hand. Then she goes on this weird dark tangent about sticking her hand in the flame and burning it. I get that she’s probably worried about what will happen if they lose a fight against the Volturi and she and her family are burned in a big Cullen bonfire but it’s so out of place and abrupt and just… chilling. Bella needs to calm the hell down, guys.

K: It’s at about this point in time that it occurs to me that all of this could have been fixed if Edward had taken five minutes out of Edward And Bella’s Vampire Sexcapades to send a little note to Aro that said “Bella had a baby. She’s half human, not a baby vamp. Also, her birth nearly killed Bella so I had to vampire-ise her. We cool? xoxo, Eddie”. But noooooo, we have to suffer through a million pages of artificially created tension instead. W.H.Y.

Catherine: Once again, proof that this book was written in the 90’s. Now we just email each other about our mutant babies.

Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt (M: A+) comes in and distracts Bella from her hallucination. They do shake hands and then he immediately hits on her.

“You look stunning, if I may be so bold, Mrs. Cullen.”

No, you may the fuck not. This is a fucking business transaction not a date. If you have to ask if you can be bold, don’t. Between this and Edward being suspicious of her and holding their baby while watching her walk out like a sad housewife in the 50’s, this whole chapter has a very weird sex vibe. Am I the only one noticing this?

Annie: Fifty. Shades. Of. Grey.

Mari: Really and truly. The majority of Fifty Shades, if not portraying direct abuse, was about interactions with people in love with our main characters and giving off weird sex vibes. 

K: Seriously. Everything about this chapter is icky.

Catherine: Thank God it’s not just me.

 J. Jenks says that he prefers working with Bella to working with Jasper because he finds Jasper unsettling. Bella is surprised by this, since Jasper’s whole thing is that he calms people down with his mind power. She wonders what Jasper did to this guy. Which is such a weird fucking thing to wonder. Yeah, what the hell did he do? Why would this guy be scared of Jasper? He’s not exactly supposed to be running around threatening middle-aged lawyers. He reveals that he’s been working with Jasper for like 20 years so maybe it’s just that Jasper hasn’t aged. Which is fair.

J calls Bella by her first name, which IRKS me because again PROFESSIONAL business relationship and she never said you could refer to her by her first name. Why is this man bothering me so much? J gives Bella the documents and she chokes up a bit when she sees Renesmee’s passport. But she gives him his money and starts to leave.

And then something hella interesting happens.

J. Jenks seems really nervous. He’s dabbing his forehead and everything. He asks if he can ask Bella an awkward question. Then he asks her if they are planning to kidnap a child. He prefaces this by saying that he has a “healthy level of respect” for the Cullens and keep in mind he’s been working for them for 20 years, providing illegal documents and legal help for 20 years.  So what the FUCK have the Cullens been doing for 20 years that would leave him thinking they’d be capable of kidnapping a child? Like? That’s pretty suspicious, no? Show of hands how many of us have people in our lives that would immediately suspect that we’d kidnap a child. Anyone?

Annie: Not me. At least, I hope not.

Mari: I… I just never thought I would be asked this question.

K: Look, I might get EXTRA suspicious of people during November, but that’s only because Movember is a good-but-terrible thing that happens and the second someone has a moustache, they automatically become like 25% dodgier-looking…

Catherine: #Facts.

Also,  Jenks thinks Jacob is Renesmee’s father. So even Meyer’s own characters are rebelling against the pedo storyline.

Bella assures him that they aren’t kidnapping anyone and that she just wants an entirely new identity for her daughter in case something should happen to her. J is fine with that for some reason. The illegal documents business makes you okay with a lot of stuff, I guess. Bella notices that she can see the blood behind his skin and thinks about how glad she is that contrivance made her a super special newborn who can control herself because it would be a shame to kill such a nice man. Okay then.

It takes Bella less time to get home because it’s so dark out that she decides to turn off her headlights and “floor it.”  No, really. I understand that the Cullens can’t be hurt in a car accident, but do they not get that there are other people on the road? Those other cars you guys see aren’t being driven by robots. I just????

Mari: Clearly the answer is that they DON’T care. I use for my evidence their tacit acquiescence of the MURDER their billionty house guests are committing. And it isn’t a vampire thing. Bella has never given a fuck about anyone but herself.

K: TRUE STORY. See also: book 1 when she basically made Jessica walk down a dark rapey alley towards a bunch of sketchy dudes.

Catherine: When Bella gets home most of the vampires are out hunting. Some of them are hunting actual people which she tries not to think about. (M: SEE?) She goes to Alice and Jasper’s room and finds a small purse which she packs with the passports from J. Jenks and a bunch of cash. She feels bad that it’s not very much to help Jacob and Renesmee if they do have to escape. (M: maybe shouldn’t have paid Jay Jay double the price for no reason, girl.) Then she realizes that Alice and Jasper can meet up with them somewhere. Only Alice can’t search for Jacob or Renesmee because she has psychic blind spots for both of them. Bella gets a piece of paper and concentrates super hard while writing RIO DE JANERIO in the hopes that Alice will mentally see this and know where to look for Jacob and his child bride. She figures Rio will work for them because they still need to find the legends associated with the other vampire babies and that Jasper and Alice are already in South America.

Anyway she stuffs the note into the bag and tries not to cry.

Two days pass while they wait for the Volturi to arrive. (M: Two more days…) Apparently the field that Alice saw them walking into is the same field that Victoria’s army of newborns had their offscreen fight in. How convenient! Good thing Forks doesn’t have more than one field. (A: Seriously.)

Bella and Edward spend some time together because they may only have a few hours left to live.

“Edward and I had not had a last grand scene of farewell, nor did I plan one.”

Surprising considering these two used to have full on Casablanca-level goodbye scenes when they were just going to two different classrooms in high school. I genuinely find that hard to believe.

“To speak the word was to make it final. It would be the same as typing the words The End on the last page of a manuscript.”

Now Meyer is just fucking with us.

The vamps all go out to the field to camp the night before the battle. Jacob is also there and Bella thinks about how far they’ve come and how she never thought their relationship would be able to work but now that he’s planning to fuck her baby it’s totally congenial and everything is perfect.

It starts to snow overnight and in the morning the wolves gather in the woods around them. Bella dresses Renesmee and gives her the backpack with the papers and the money. Bella breaks it to R that she may have to run today and leave her parents behind. R does her annoying face touching thing to get across her devastation even though she just talked three sentences earlier.

Bella puts on Aro’s wedding present which is apparently a big honkin’ diamond necklace because she thinks it might start things off on a better foot. Then she and R join Edward who pretty much thinks that they’re gonna die. Keep in mind, Edward doesn’t know about Bella’s plan to get Jake and Renesmee to run off if everyone starts getting murdered. He’s just like… bringing his toddler into battle. (M: “Old enough for promise rings, old enough to FIGHT.” — Edward, apparently.) (K: This would not surprise me at all, tbh.) Why wouldn’t Bella tell him about her plan to make him feel better? I don’t know. But here we are.

The vampires have formed a line on one side of the field with the wolves in the woods behind them. Bella notices Siobhan concentrating and rubbing her temples and wonders if she is picturing a peaceful resolution using her power like Carlisle wanted her to.

Jacob comes out of the woods as a wolf and stands next to Bella. Renesmee touches his shoulder and relaxes because this book is weird and gross.

The chapter ends with Edward sensing the Volturi nearby and the vampires waiting for them to emerge from the forest.

 

Next time on Breaking Dawn: More than 600 pages later, the Volturi are here in Chapter 36.