In Which I Read Twilight: Chapter 8 -- Port Angeles · 3:47pm Jan 8th, 2018
As soon as Bella and her friends get to Port Angeles, dress-shopping ensues. Given the subject matter and book, it’s not as insufferable as you might think it is, and largely skipped over. During the shopping, Bella hears from Angela that the Cullens are often out of school when the weather’s nice, as they frequently go backpacking.
Once the shopping’s completed, Bella splits from the rest of the group to look for a bookstore, figuring if she’s out on the town, she might as well. Her friends offer to go with her, but she waves them off; “they didn’t know how preoccupied I could get when surrounded by books”. A shame; we could’ve gotten some character-building scenes from that. Heaven knows everyone needs them. In her hunt and after a false start, Bella wanders from the tourist district to the abandoned warehouse district, where-
What? No, really. Don’t look at me like that. She just happens to wind up on the wrong side of town. She doesn’t even turn around and immediately nope her way out there. Trust me, it’s even stupider when you have to actually read it.
Anyway, while meandering through the abandoned warehouse district, Bella runs into a gang of twenty-something males who start following her. Bella, who knows they can’t be up to anything good, considers her options and notes that she’d never unpacked her pepper spray from her bags, so it’s back at her house. Why would you have pepper spray and not unpack it when going to an unfamiliar city? Luckily for her, once she’s cornered, Edward comes out of nowhere in his car and whisks her away from the men. Bella notices that it’s well past the time when she was supposed to meet her friends for dinner; Edward drives her to the restaurant even though Bella never told him which one she was going to (this is actually noted in the book and halfway-decent foreshadowing, not a continuity error like all the other things I’ve mentioned).
Side note: after failing to find a good bookstore in the tourist district, Bella kept walking around because it wasn’t time for her to meet her friends yet. By the time she and Edward get to the restaurant, her friends have already ordered their dinner, gotten it, and finished. Just how long did she spend in the abandoned warehouse district?
Bella meets her friends as they’re leaving the restaurant. Since they’ve already eaten, Edward offers to get Bella dinner now and take her home so the other girls don’t need to wait for her. Inside the restaurant, the hostess welcomes Edward “a little more warmly than necessary”. Somehow, Bella’s surprised that that bothers her, even though she’s head-over-heels for him. Edward gets the two of them a booth with almost nobody around. When their server arrives, she only pays attention to Edward, as if ignoring half the people she’s serving won’t mean she doesn’t get a tip.
In the middle of eating her dinner, Bella brings up a question: if, hypothetically, Edward could read minds, what would be the limitations on that? He talks about said limitations — it’s got a range of a few miles, it’s easier to find someone if he’s read their mind before, etc. — and mentions he found her by skimming the minds of various people around Port Angeles. Bella’s response to her boyfriend being able to read minds?
I sat quietly, dazed, my thoughts incoherent. My hands were folded in my lap, and I was leaning weakly against the back of the seat. He still had his face in his hand, and he was as still as if he’d been carved from the stone his skin resembled.
And that’s it. Really. That’s barely anything. Come on, I want more than that. And didn’t have much of a response to Edward saving her from the would-be rapists, either. It’d be nice if Bella had a reaction to something that wasn’t surly dislike.
Bella finishes her dinner, and they get in Edward’s car to head home. Kind of a lackluster ending to a chapter like this, where Edward saves Bella again and finally starts admitting what he is to her.
I thought everyone knew that bookstores next to the bad part of town had the best deals.
And Bella's emotional range does seem to go from first-world-problematic to dl surprise. How very compelling.
But... but the bookstores in the abandoned warehouse district have the best used books...
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Heh. Maybe someone could work that justification into the hypothetical rewrite.