Bella gets through the rest of the morning in a daze, until lunch, when she sees Edward sitting alone. He motions for her to join him and tells her that he has decided he will just do what he wants. He will see her as much as she wants. She still does not understand why he had so much hesitation, but she can tell that his warning about trouble is real.
Bella is still very irritated with all the mystery and Edward’s vague clues, so she explodes at him. If he decides to stay away from her again, he had better warn her. In response he asks her to tell him one of her theories about what he is, but he warns her that he might not be one of the superheroes (as she thinks) but one of the bad guys instead.
Edward tells her he is skipping Biology today. The lab involves pricking Mike’s finger for a drop of blood. The sight of the blood makes Bella woozy, and Mike offers to take her to the nurse’s office. She has to lie down on the way there to try to prevent herself from fainting, and Edward spots her in her condition. He offers to take her instead of Mike, and he picks her up easily, carrying her there.
Bella starts to feel better at the nurse’s office until Mike comes in with another student who felt woozy from his own blood, and she goes outside before the sight makes her sick again. Edward tells the receptionist that she is probably still too weak for gym class, so she excuses both of them. Edward insists on driving Bella home. When he drops her off, he tells her that he will not be in school on Friday because he is going camping for the weekend. Bella tries to hide her disappointment.
The weather forecast for Saturday is—finally—for sun, so Mike’s trip to the beach at La Push is on. Everybody meets at Mike’s father’s store and drives over together. At the beach, they gather driftwood to make a fire. After a little while, some of the kids decide to hike to see the tidal pools, and Bella goes with them. When they get back after their hike, they find that a bunch of teenagers from the reservation have come to the beach to join them.
Bella ends up sitting next to Jacob, who is fourteen or fifteen years old. He turns out to be Jacob Black, Billy Black’s son. When another of the teenagers from the reservation, Sam, responds to a question about the Cullens with surprising hostility, Bella asks Billy to take a walk with her. She uses her charm to get him to explain why Sam reacted so negatively. Sam explains that according to Quileute legend, the people are descended from werewolves, and werewolves have only one natural enemy—vampires, the “cold ones.” His great-grandfather, who was a tribal leader, made a pact with a group of cold ones who lived near them and lived peacefully. The pact was that they would not expose the vampires to society if they stayed off of the reservation.
When Bella gets home, she goes to her room and listens to music as loud as she can so that she won’t be able to think until she falls asleep. She dreams that she is in the forest, trying to get to the beach where she knows she will find the sun, but Jacob Black is there, pulling her back to the darkest part of the forest. He turns into a wolf, and she sees Edward come out of the forest, glowing faintly and with fangs bared. She steps towards him, and Jacob the wolf launches at him. Bella shouts herself awake.
Bella can’t fall back asleep, so she goes to the Internet to research vampires. She finds a site named “Vampires A–Z” with an alphabetized listing of all the world’s vampire legends. She finds very few that correspond with even one of Edward’s weird characteristics—and none that explains all of them or matches Jacob’s story. Bella realizes how strangely she is now acting, and she decides she needs to get out of the house.
She walks into the forest behind her house. While she is deep in the woods, the idea that Edward is a vampire starts to seem more plausible, and Bella thinks carefully over all of the strange things she has noticed about Edward. She does not come to a secure conclusion, but she decides that even if he is a vampire, she is not going to stay away from him. She resolves to go to Seattle with him the next weekend.
On Monday, Bella wakes up to a beautiful day, and she gets to school early in her excitement to be outside. Mike finds her there and asks her if she wants to go out, but Bella says she doesn’t think it would be a great idea because of Jessica. Bella’s great mood is ruined at lunch when she notices that none of the Cullens or the Hales is anywhere.
Bella feels sad for the rest of the day, and she cannot distract herself from her mood after school. The next day is sunny again, and the Hales and Cullens are again absent. In order to distract herself, she agrees to go with Jessica and Angela to Port Angeles to help them choose dresses for the upcoming dance.
Analysis
In this section, Edward keeps warning Bella about him. Although she still does not understand why, she believes him when he says it is for her own good. Thus Bella starts to believe that Edward may not, in fact, be one of the “good guys.” Once she finds out from Jacob Black about the legend of the cold ones, she starts to have an understanding of just what Edward might be, and she pursues the idea that he might be a vampire.
What is most surprising in all of this is not that Edward is a vampire (this is a fictional story after all) but that Bella decides that, even if he is, she does not mind. He has made clear that she might not be safe around him and that he is not necessarily “good.” Yet Bella, though she is shaken and amazed by the idea, still plans to spend Saturday alone with him. This is not just because she finds him attractive, an interesting mystery with a dark side (often the kind of thing that perversely attracts people to each other), but most likely because Edward appears to be sincere in trying to look out for her best interests.
This brings up the theme of good and evil and the theme of faith. In her research, Bella finds one legend of “good” vampires to which she clings for some hope. In addition, from what Jacob said about the cold ones, she believes that the Cullens, if they are vampires, do not kill humans and prefer to live under the radar. Yet, though these beliefs are helpful to her, Bellas still does not know the truth. (Later, when Edward admits what he is, Bella does not think to ask him what he eats.) Bella does not need further evidence of Edward’s goodness; she has seen enough. Is it really enough? She seems to act partly because she is attracted to him and has faith in him despite his warnings. This, then, is an example of faith—faith that does not need much evidence. Recall that she was drawn to him even when all he had ever done was glare at her.
Bella’s overwhelming faith in Edward thus returns us to the themes of fate and free agency. When she goes into the forest to think about the chance that Edward is a vampire, she emerges having decided that no matter what, she will stay with him. While this feels like a moment of decision, and thus an exercise of free agency, she later says that she never really felt like she had a choice. It does seem that her mind was made up from the first moment she saw Edward.
Anyone who knows any vampire legends will immediately understand why the Cullens do not show up on sunny days. By tradition, vampires avoid sunlight because it harms them. Later, we will find out that the tradition is not correct--the sunlight actually makes their skin glisten in such an inhuman way that people will figure out that they are not human. Edward also avoids the sight of blood. He seems to make a point of keeping himself away from the temptation of human blood, although he did fine when Tyler was cut up in the hospital. Here again we see his self-control at work.
This section also suggests that Bella is more like a vampire than the average person. Not only is she pale, but at times she does not seem to have much of an appetite for human food (with a notable exception being the meals she prepares for herself and her father). She also claims to be able to smell human blood, which vampires normally can do but humans normally cannot do.
