Four days. Four days and I am still alive. Still breathing. Battered, though.

My verbal apologies for what I am doing to myself have gotten even better-rehearsed. When we have visitors they don’t even make it through the door before I have told them that I’m doing this for science, for fame, for knowledge. For the love of little apples. How I will get millions of hits on my blog (still waiting, btw.). How the fans finally won’t have any arguments anymore. How I will sleep more soundly, having finally solved the last big puzzle of humanity.

Needless to say, it is a lonely life.

Okay. The morning of Day Four dawns. We haven’t got much in the way of plans, which is a perfect excuse for me to slouch off to the bathtub and read.

Someone very wise once said that spaceships travel at the speed of plot. I guess you have to add that he also was the creator of a sci-fi television show in order for that to make sense, so yeah: he also created a sci-fi television-show. My point is that Bella’s thoughts travel at the speed of what is convenient.

Here’s the thing. In the first book Bella’s pretty fast on the uptake when it comes to the whole vampire thing. Edward’s fast, strong, attractive and he skips school when the sun’s out. What’s missing from the picture is that he doesn’t happen to be the quarterback for the Forks High football team. Enough to make Bella’s devious little mind tick. So she gets suspicious, asks the local mysterious native gullible teen for some inside info on native legends. Bam! The Cullens don’t like to go on the reservation. And they’re cold. A lot. Bam again! They have to be vampires. Easy as pie.

Book two: Jacob Black has these friends. They hang out a lot. Slavishly follow their leader, almost like dogs. The wolf is the sacred animal of the local tribe, as a matter of fact they even have legends about being descended from them. (Sons of bitches, all of them. Let me tell you: cleverly disguised racial slurs lie underneath it all!) Suddenly there’s huge wolves in the woods and Jacob doesn’t want to talk to her anymore (finally an intelligent reaction). And then Jacob comes along and tells her that something pretty strange has happened to him, but he can’t tell her, because there’s some weird shit going down in his head. And Bella is like: “Oh… I guess he doesn’t like me anymore, just like all the other sane people. I mean, he couldn’t possibly be a werewolf, they’re, like, mythical.”

I see.

The only logical explanation is that Bella has the power of Selective Disbelief +3. No, wait, there’s another one: possibly this woman, Stephenie, appeared to her in a dream and said that werewolves don’t exist. Edward’s sparkly shoelaces were with her and since Bella was very ecstatic to see them she believed Stephenie. Yeah, that has to be it. It’s the shoelaces’ fault.

Anyway. Aside from Bella’s highly selective… uhm… mind, the story takes its utterly predictable course. She falls in love with Jacob. Slowly, dragging it out for as long as possible, because otherwise this book would have been 57 pages long instead of the joy-filled 497 that it ended up having. And even then she doesn’t even say it, or think it with that sorry little excuse of a brain that she has, because that wouldn’t make the third book be any fun. Hah! Excuse my brittle and mirthless laugh. So she kinda falls into liking with him. Or something. Loke, I think might be a good term. Because although she is all about how much like a brother he is to her, she also goes on about his russet skin and delectable smell and beautiful eyes. And his biceps, mustn’t forget the biceps. I know that Stephenie Myers has at least one brother and if this is how she thinks of him then yuck. But before Bella can commit mental incest, Alice shows up because Bells finally managed to near-kill herself convincingly enough for it to look really real.

I guess Alice was hoping too.

Alice is disappointed, however. Bella is still very much alive and kicking (unlike the logic centers of my brain) and so they have hot lesbian sex. Okay… not so much. Ninjas come in and kill them both. No. Zombies come… I give up. (Just trying to include more potential target audiences.)

What actually happens it that Alice arrives and points out quite rightly that Bella must be some sort of ultra-dense supernatural magnet. I’ll let you decide what she means by “dense”. Then Rosalie, Edward’s adopted sister (the intelligent one in the family, since she can’t stand Bella) snitches about Bella-baby’s apparent demise to Edward and he decides to off himself. But first he calls, just to make sure that he’s got an actual reason for the vampire-assisted-death that he is about to experience. Jacob picks up the phone, because he happens to be standing in the right place at the right time, and off goes Eddie to Italy to ask the Volturi, some sort of vampire aristocracy, to kill him. To make it more convenient for the reader this contingency plan of his has been mentioned earlier in the book, so no one is confused, not even Bella.

Of course Bella saves him, meets the Volturi and goes back with Edward and Alice to Forks, where she has a lot of explaining to do. Not least of all why she believed Edward’s asinine story about not loving her in the first place and why she continues to believe it for quite a while after they are back. Yes, you heard me right. Doing what only Bella can do, she wilfully misconstrues every. single. thing. Edward says to her after their reunion. If it weren’t so exasperating it would be quite funny, I believe. Funny in a sad, Stephenie-needs-a-higher-word-count way, granted – but funny.

I can see now why the scriptwriter of Twilight: New Moon did what she did. Only way to save the story, really. Because when Bella realizes that she has been seeing visions of Edward in situations of extreme danger because she subconsciously believed that he still loved her, all realism finally goes out of the window. Preposterous, really. The idea of Bella having a conscience, let alone a subconscious… yeah… almost funny, isn’t it?

So the story ends. Bella has finally worked out that Edward still is her very own cuddly vampire and all is sunshine and happiness. There are still questions, true, like for example why no one is cross with Rosalie for almost getting her brother killed. Or why Bella’s father doesn’t put a bullet through Edward’s attractive head. Or why Bella keeps on living without writing “remember to breathe” on her palm. Questions upon questions. Maybe Eclipse will hold the answers to them, although I doubt it. It’s probably all about shoelaces.

For now my brain is safe. I’m too lazy to go out and shop and I haven’t bought Eclipse yet. Maybe a day off will give me some time to recuperate. At least that’s what I think. Best laid plans… never happen.