Chapter Ten: Damn it, not that stupid meadow again.

Jacob never gets in touch with Bella about his mysterious illness, and every time Bella presses Billy for info, she gets nothing. A week goes by like this, frustrating Bella. There, I just told you everything that happens in the first seven pages of this chapter. That was one exciting read!

Jacob does get better, but he still doesn't call Bella. Instead, he's hanging out with other friends -- maybe he's finally come to the conclusion that spending all of his time with a girl who is using his feelings for her so that she can have a pseudo-boyfriend (without any of that icky sexual stuff) isn't the healthiest thing for either of them.

Bella decides that she needs to do something without Jacob for a change. She thinks about getting her motorcycle, but -- and this is really her reasoning -- she's afraid to get on the thing without anyone around to drive her to the emergency room. That's how clumsy Bella is, if you haven't paid attention to the first book and a half; it's a bit shocking that she was able to think about motorcycles without getting into an accident, to be honest.

Instead, Bella decides she'll go looking for her perfect beautiful meadow that only pales in comparison to her perfecter more beautiful vampire ex-boyfriend. She searches using the same grid system Jacob was using, and sure enough, after a few pages of walking, she finds it...only to be disappointed, because without a sparklepire, it's just an ordinary meadow. The hole in Bella's chest (we'll talk more about that a little later...oh, we definitely will) is, like Lisa, tearing her apaaaaart!

But this is a magical meadow of happiness and joy and unicorns and shit. If it needs a sparklepire to be special, then damn it, it'll summon a sparklepire on demand. It just might not be the sparklepire you want.

Enter Laurent. Remember him? He was the other, other non-Cullen vampire from the first book. The polite one who ate people, but wasn't so evil about it. Bella sees him, and of course, should be scared shitless. But this is Bella we're talking about, and she can't help but come up with an absolutely awful way of dealing with the situation at hand.

I mean, you probably shouldn't tell this human-eating vampire that the Cullens aren't around anymore.

So Bella does that.

And then, if you did that, you'd try to lie convincingly.

Bella instead does a really shitty job of it, which Laurent sees right through. Bang up job as always, Bella. Even Headward shows up to tell her how bad she is at everything. She does slow Laurent down a bit by bringing up Victoria, who it turns out wanted to kill Bella as revenge for the death of James. She's going to be disappointed, though, because Laurent is going to have a Bella snack first. Bella tries to threaten him, she tries to beg, but it's to no avail. Laurent's a pretty cool guy though; he says he'll make it so fast that she'll never feel a thing. Big points to Laurent for that -- it's the gentlemanly thing to do.

Now, you'd be forgiven for expecting a Cullen to show up now and save the day. Clearly, we need to have someone help Bella, since she's hopeless at ever helping herself. But this time, it's not a vampire to the rescue. No, we've got a wolf ex machina instead. Just as Laurent is about to kill her -- what fortunate timing! -- he runs away from something approaching from the woods. It's the giant bear! Only it's not a bear at all...it's an impossibly huge wolf. A whole pack of impossibly huge wolves. Impossibly huge wolves that not only seem intelligent, but clearly scare the crap out of vampires. Bella is entirely sure this is unrelated to Jacob's mysterious absence, especially after he told her the legend about his tribe having descended from wolves in the last book. If she's about as quick with figuring out "werewolf" as she was "vampire," it'll only be another eight chapters or so before she puts the pieces together.

Here's another theme that you'll be seeing a lot of in the next few chapters: Bella is shocked, SHOCKED I say, that Laurent runs from the giant wolves. It doesn't occur to her that anything could possibly threaten her precious sparkly gods, even another equally impossible creature that she knows nothing about yet. Does this mean vampires -- and by extension, Edward -- aren't perfect in every way? Impossible.

Anyway, Bella runs out of the forest, always expecting the totally invincible Laurent to kill the wolves even though he was clearly pissing his pants while they chased after him. To my chagrin, she makes it back to her truck and drives home. She tells Charlie about the giant wolves, then heads up to bed without eating. She once again assumes that Laurent, who was running as fast as possible in the opposite direction of the wolves, is going to kill them all. Even worse, she's sure that the definitely-alive-and-not-torn-to-shreds Laurent will either follow her scent back home, or tell Victoria she's defenseless now with the Cullens out of the picture. This means that not only is she in danger, but Charlie is as well. Of course, Victoria really is dangerous, since she's not currently being eaten by giant wolves, so that's a reasonable thing to be worried about.

Laurent though? Call it a hunch, but I don't think we'll be hearing from him again. Sorry that your sparklepires aren't quite as perfect as you want them to be, Bella.