In Which I Read Twilight: Chapter 9 -- Theory · 4:30pm Jan 11th, 2018

As Bella and Edward drive home from Port Angeles, they begin discussing Edward’s mind-reading. Bella brings up why he can’t hear her thoughts, and Edward admits he doesn’t know.

”The only guess I have is that maybe your mind doesn’t work the same way the rest of theirs do. Like your thoughts are on the AM frequency and I’m only getting FM.”

For some reason, the idea that her mind might not work the same as everyone else’s and she might be a freak is of more concern to Bella than the fact that her boyfriend can read minds.

Edward asks Bella what put her on the path of “vampires”, and she talks about her discussion with Jacob. She says she “forced” Jacob to tell her and she “got Jacob alone and I tricked it out of him”, as if she did anything more than flutter her eyelashes at him before he folded like damp cardboard. She says she did some research on the Internet, then eventually decided it didn’t matter whether or not Edward was a vampire. This makes Edward angry, and he says he’s a monster.

You know, every now and then, the book has some halfway-decent dialogue, like:

“How old are you?”
“Seventeen,” he answered promptly.
“And how long have you been seventeen?”
His lips twitched as he stared at the road. “A while,” he admitted at last.

And that makes it even more annoying when everything else is so lackluster.

Bella and Edward discuss myths of vampirism. Edward can come out during the daytime (obviously), isn’t burned by the sun, and doesn’t sleep in coffins. This is something that always bugs me, not just about Twilight, but about urban fantasy in general: when the mythical creatures’ characteristics don’t match up with the myths, why don’t they match up with the myths? Where did the whole thing about an aversion to garlic come from if they’re totally okay with garlic? I know information can get corrupted down the line, but there isn’t even a token effort to say where the corruption came from. Not even a “Look, I don’t know why they say we can’t eat garlic. We can, okay? Stop asking about it.”

The subject turns to blood. Human blood tastes the best, but Edward and the rest of his coven drink animal blood, calling themselves “vegetarians” as a joke; they don’t want to be monsters. Bella guesses that Edward’s eye color has been changing based on how recently he’s fed; the darker the color is, the longer it’s been. Edward admits that yeah, that’s the case.

When they get back to Forks, Bella comments that it’d taken less than twenty minutes. Earlier in the chapter, she was freaking out about Edward driving too fast, and in the previous chapter, the trip from Port Angeles took about an hour. The numbers didn’t really add up to me — in order for Edward to make that kind of time, he’d need to be driving nearly three times the speed Bella’s friends did — so I did some research, and guess what? Forks and Port Angeles are about twenty miles apart and connected by a highway. Given that the speed limit on highways is usually seventy miles an hour, “less than twenty minutes” is how fast the trip should normally take. And I shudder to think of how slow Bella’s friends were going.

Bella arrives home, exchanges platitudes with Charlie, and tries to distract herself from thoughts of Edward with her evening routine, but can’t. And then (emphasis mine)…

About three things I was absolutely positive. First, Edward was a vampire. Second, there was a part of him — and I didn’t know how potent that part might be — that thirsted for my blood. And third, I was unconditionally and irrevocably in love with him.

…