Chapter Eight: Bella. A motorcycle. You know where this is going.

Bella is ready to ride. Sure, she's never been on a motorcycle before. Sure, she can't even remember where the break is, or anything else. And sure, she's Bella, the world's clumsiest person. But this should be a piece of cake!

Forget even doing a real chapter summary for the moment. Let's just count the number of times Bella hurts herself, or comes close:

1. Jacob kick-starts the bike for her because she's afraid to. She starts to fall sideways before he catches the bike.
2. Bella takes her hand off the clutch because she hears Headward, causing the bike to somehow fall on top of her.
3. Once Bella is actually moving, she hits the foot brake. She loses control, causing the bike to end up on top of her again as it drags her across the sand. She cuts her head, forcing her first hospital trip in this chapter. The result: seven stitches.
4. Next Wednesday, Bella ends up in the ER again with a possible concussion. This is so unsurprising that the incident isn't even explained; Bella just casually mentions that she ended up in the ER a second time in a week or so.

Okay, so the whole chapter isn't about Bella getting herself hurt. She also likes to hear Edward's voice a lot. She's finally realizing that her subconscious memories of him -- I'm calling the hallucination 'Headward' -- pops up whenever she's doing something reckless and dangerous. Basically, he gives her good advice, and she can feel smug as she ignores it while simultaneously wishing she could hear it more and more often.

But after the second visit to the ER, people are starting to suspect that maybe these injuries aren't happening in the relative safety of Jacob's garage. At least for a while, Bella needs a new way to hear Headward, and she thinks finding that perfect little meadow in the woods might do the trick.

She gets Jacob to help her try to find it, as he's more experienced in things like "being useful" and "having skills." He takes a systematic approach, and our heroes hope they might not only find their meadow, but also SUPERBEAR, scourge of the Pacific Northwest. Alas, they find neither, and leave determined to try to get eaten by a giant bear again tomorrow.

And that's all for chapter eight. If you're noticing that these updates are short and not much is happening, then I'm doing a good job of accurately portraying what's going on in New Moon. I'm 200 pages in, and there's still another 363 pages to go. Ugh.