Title: The One Where Bella Finds Out Edward is a Vampire …and Edward Speaks in Turn of the Century English
Disclaimer: I don't own Twilight or any of the characters. No copyright infringement is intend.
Pairing: Bella and Edward
Rated: M for foul language, bad humor and terrible Twilight clichés
Summary: There's something about Edward Cullen that makes him different, and Bella Swan is determined to figure it out. A parody, of sorts.
Author's Note: I love Twilight to pieces. This is simply a parody, meant for silliness and gentle mocking.

Bella Swan was a bright girl. She got good grades in school, and she was fairly independent for a 17-year-old. With a scatter-brained mother, young Bella had to be the one who made sure the milk didn't spoil and that the phone bill was paid on time. But, there was one thing Bella Swan knew nothing about, and that thing was boys, especially a particular boy by the name of Edward Cullen.

The only really successful conversation she had ever had with a boy was when she tried to flirt with Jacob Black to trick information out of him, after his friend whose name she couldn't remember - Solomon something, maybe? - let something slip about the Cullens. Otherwise, the boys at Forks High all seemed really thick-headed and prime candidates for a "no means no" assembly at school.

Yes, boys were confusing, frustrating, and sometimes downright infuriating. Edward Cullen had all of these things in spades. But, Bella Swan was nothing if not determined (some would say down right stubborn) to figure out exactly what he was, because she knew, irrevocably, he wasn't human.

Edward Cullen was beautiful, godlike, like that Calvin Klein ad that made Bella blush every time she saw it or better yet like a statue all carved in ice-cold marble. Unfortunately, Bella didn't realize how close she was to figuring out Edward's secret with that last one. But, she was determined to not rest until she uncovered his secret. Not really, of course she would stop to sleep occasionally, because who would voluntarily forgo sleep?

Anyway, Bella reflected, their first encounter didn't go very well. Edward had crinkled his nose at her in the Biology classroom, making the expression that one makes when they smell something bad. This would have given Bella a clue, but Bella was unfamiliar with Ockham's Razor, wherein the simplest explanation is usually the most correct.

Of course, the simplest explanation would probably not involve Edward's being a vampire, but the simplest explanation was that the expression Edward was making was, in fact, because he smelled something bad, only in this case, bad means good, really fucking tua cantante good.

The thing is, Bella knew that she didn't smell bad. Her hair smelled exactly like the 10-year-old bottle of strawberry-scented White Rain she had washed her hair with that morning, because it was the only non-manly smelling shampoo in Charlie's possession. Bella didn't question its existence, and had she asked Charlie, he probably would have blushed and grunted. But, were he to get a couple more Vitamin R in him, he would have told her that it was the remainder of the brief tryst he had with Mrs. Cope, the high school secretary, about 10 years prior, before Mrs. Cope was a Mrs. and was still Shelley the check out girl at RiteAid.

Police Chief Charles Swan was a famous ladies man, after all, and don't you forget it.

Their next encounter in Biology class had gone a little better, Bella reminisced. They engaged in idle banter for approximately 20 minutes while everyone else in class struggled to match slides of onion root to the nearly identical pictures in their textbook that clearly showed the difference between prophase and interphase. Bella was a smart girl (and had done this lab before), and it was obvious to her that she could keep up with Edward Cullen intellectually, making her rather smug.

What Bella didn't know was that Edward Cullen was actually translating Homer's Odyssey into French, because the Leconte de Lisle translation was ripe with error, while simultaneously writing a four part trombone ensemble piece of which he was planning to record all four parts when he got home that evening, while carrying on a completely banal conversation with the girl he wanted to woo, whereby woo, he meant kill.

Their idle banter was a little awkward and left Bella blushing again, like a virgin on her wedding night, as she found herself revealing more about herself than she had to anyone, ever. Even her friends in Phoenix didn't know this much about her, then again, she hadn't had any friends in Phoenix, and really very little back story, for that matter, other than the minor league step-dad thing, and ballet lessons when she was eight or nine.

After the Biology lab, future encounters with Edward proved only that he ran hot and cold, which was ironic, because Edward actually couldn't run hot and hadn't since 1918 when a fever nearly killed him. Of course, Bella Swan did not know this yet and was only using "hot and cold" metaphorically.

The near-death van squishing experience was one of the most concerning pieces of evidence. Bella was convinced that Edward had reached her in world-record time, and not only moved her out of the path of the van, but actually lifted the van in the air so as not to squash her. This experience should have terrified Bella. She didn't know it, but Charlie had talked to Dr. Cullen about a psych consult when Bella didn't seem at all concerned that she ALMOST DIED. Bella was too preoccupied with the Cullen boy to care at all about her own mortality, chalking it up to her embarrassing clumsiness. Which was also ironic because some part of Edward Cullen, how big a part was still in question, actually wanted to kill Bella himself. Charlie, however, got distracted by a cute nurse and returned to his extreme "hands off" parenting style, biding his time to start being over-protective until the sequel when Bella ran off to Italy only to bring back the vampire boy who broke her heart.

The worst part about the van incident was that Edward stopped talking to Bella after it happened.

The days seemed to flip past like a story where one day of the week was written on each page. Bella slowly turned through those days.

But, then one day, one of the most annoying days of Bella's short life, the day when not one, not two, but three boys tried to get her to ask them to the dance, on that day of all days, Edward Cullen decided to once again grace her with his charming demeanor.

What Bella didn't know was that he had sneaked into her room the night before and had an epiphany while watching her twist and writhe and talk in her sleep. Of course, it took him awhile to get to this epiphany because he was hard, well, of course his body was hard, he was a vampire, but he was also aroused, and though he felt like a bit of a pervert, he could not determine if it was because of the tua cantante blood lust or the lust lust, both of which he had somehow been able to keep in check for a century. Except for his "lost weekend" back in the '30s, and what happened in one's rebellious period, remained in one's rebellious period as far as Edward was concerned.

Oh, yes, the epiphany. Edward was in love with her.

Upon this discovery, after he justified to himself that having three horny, teenage boys try to get her to ask them to a dance was enough of a "chance" for her to have a "normal life," only then, did he began to speak with her in earnest. He wanted to learn what he could about the silly little human, so he could sort out his feelings. He wanted to make sure, after his epiphany, that she was worth fighting the song of her blood.

Eventually, it was determined that the only thing they had in common was a love of Debussey and a fondness for imagining ways for Mike Newton to suffer. It wasn't much to build a relationship on, for sure, but this is fate and true love and all that crap we're talking about here.

Of course, Bella didn't know any of this, and she was just stunned that a man, so beautiful, so graceful, so, well, you get the point, that a man like Edward Cullen would give her the time of day.

On the first day he spoke to her, he asked if he could drive her to Seattle the weekend of the dance. Bella had questioned why, and he said something along the lines of: "It would give me the greatest pleasure to know you have not passed your excursion uncomfortably."

Bella wondered briefly if she were delusional or if Edward really was sounding an awful lot like a Victorian gentleman, but regardless, and much to her chagrin, she nodded in acquiescence.

She berated herself for giving in so easily, especially when Edward added, "I'd rather you no longer persist, then, in continuing this endeavor of friendship."

Regardless, this conflicting invitation on Edward's part was probably the highlight of Bella's life up to this point. But, it didn't last long, because the next day was truly the most earth-shattering day in Bella Swan's life. You see, Edward Cullen invited her to sit with him at lunch, and under the jealous gaze of Jessica Stanley, Bella complied. It was almost as if she were dazzled into submission by the Adonis.

The conversation almost immediately turned to the question of their relationship status, they were teenagers after all. Even though Edward was in love with Bella, he still wanted to kill her, so he tried to play it cool when Bella asked if they were "friends."

"I know not how to answer your query, Bella."

"You're impossible!" she huffed.

"Then, I suppose we could attempt a friendship."

Edward had responded slowly. He was busy browbeating himself internally for not keeping his language in check. The change in decades had not much altered Edward's language, and he had trouble keeping his century-old self in tact around the woman he may or may not love.

Bella, of course, did not notice. Though, she was more observant than Edward expressed credit for, she was too self-conscious to worry about Edward's proficiency of the English language. She was still preoccupied with the fact that she was having lunch with with THE Edward Cullen.

Of course, she wasn't actually eating anything. Even though this was just lunch in the school cafeteria, Bella Swan would not break the cardinal rule of going on a first date, which was never to eat more than your companion, especially not something messy like public school pizza, because there is no possible way that anyone could eat pizza in a sexy way. Even though Bella Swan was slim, she was a teenage girl and very self-conscious about her body and her appearance in general. It would have to take her being in shock to ungracefully eat something like pizza, or worse yet, a full plate of slippery, stuffed pasta in front of the man of her dreams. Literally, she dreamed about him almost every night.

In fact, Edward Cullen was very grateful that Bella Swan had decided not to eat, even though he knew she should, but just the thought of her chewing and swallowing the gooey, bland organic matter that passed as school lunch made him want to vomit.

If he could vomit.

Lunch passed by quickly. Bella was normally a shy girl, a wallflower, very unassuming, but she was uncharacteristically bold at the lunch table that day. She knew from reading Cosmo that the secret to get into a man's pants was to get him talking about himself, but Edward Cullen was no ordinary man and seemed very uncomfortable talking about himself.

Eventually, she became so flustered under the gaze of the dazzling specimen that she uncouthly blurted out, "I'm trying to figure out what you are."

"I must beg you to terminate this line of questioning, Bella."

"Mark my words, friend," Bella said smugly. "I'll find out, if it's the last thing I do."

Edward snickered to himself, because of the truth in her words to which she was not privy.

She did not get many more clues during that conversation, other than Edward laughing at her suggestions that he was bitten by a radioactive spider, which was ridiculous for multiple reasons, one of which being that Edward could not shoot spider webs from his wrists and attach them to thin air in order to swing from them.

To make matters worse for Bella, Edward skipped Biology that afternoon, and for some reason decided to stay on campus in his car listening to CDs, even though he could have easily left and been back in plenty of time to pick up Alice and Jasper. He had no time to think about how idiotic his actions were, because it was then that he saw Mike Newton trying to help a very pale, unblushing Bella out of the biology classroom. His hero complex kicked in, and once again he was at her side, carrying her to the school nurse. He was beginning to think she was pulling the damsel in distress act just to get his attention. No one could be this accident prone.

He did, however, appreciate the irony of Bella fainting at the smell of blood. Bella, yet again, failed to notice his snicker. In her defense, however, she was still a little light-headed from the fainting spell, well, and because of the dazzling.

He did not come to school the next day or the next. The sun was shining and Bella wanted to feel happy, but she was almost obsessively preoccupied with Edward's absence. So preoccupied, in fact, that she decided to devote her entire weekend to thinking about Edward, drawing his name in little hearts in her notebooks, but most of all in making some decisions about him.

Bella had decided that she was most certainly in danger of falling irrevocably in love with Edward Cullen, even though she didn't know anything about him except that he was angelically beautiful, had a hero complex, and may or may not be bipolar. But, she was the protagonist in this story, dammit, and she deserved to fall irrevocably in love with the most gorgeous man in the world. Even if she was only 17 and had hardly any life experience at all that would lead her to the conclusion that she was in love, let alone irrevocably so. And, even if her paramour-to-be had a borderline personality and still had not decided if he was going to kill her or not. In his defense, he was leaning very heavily toward not. Even though he was over a century old and hadn't slept since 1918 and had a vaster body of knowledge than Stephen Hawking, he was an idiot about matters of the heart. In his defense, all men are, and he was, for all intents and purposes, in fact, still a man.

As she was reflecting on all of her experiences with Edward Cullen, she was determined to figure him out once and for all. She decided that she would be organized about this, because Bella Swan was a smart girl, and she knew the greatest of organizational minds always used highlighters and steno pads to make decisions. She was going to make a list of everything she knew about Edward Cullen before she jumped to any conclusions. She had read Pride and Prejudice, she knew what happened when a girl jumped to conclusions about a dashingly handsome man.

From Jake, she had learned that the Cullen family were banned from the La Push Reservation, but this could just mean that they were racist.

She also knew that none of the Cullens ever ate any food. When she tried to point this out to her classmates, they looked at her like she was crazy. She was paying attention to the unnaturally beautiful students that were supposed to draw people to them, even though everyone in Forks seemed to have an overactive, self-preservation instinct that Bella Swan absolutely did not possess, making the students of Forks High ignore the gorgeous quintet. Except when they had first moved to Forks and Jessica Stanley tried to dry hump Edward's leg.

Of course, Bella reasoned, they might not eat because they all could have eating disorders. They were all unearthly beautiful and likely had severe eating disorders to stay so beautiful. Bella Swan watched Oprah, so she knew this was a very real possibility. The real ticker was that all the Cullens seemed to look exactly alike. Bella Swan wondered how no one else seemed to notice this. They were all the same whiter shade of pale. Their eyes were exactly the same color. They all got bruises under their eyes periodically. Their hair never seemed to grow or change in any way, which was ridiculous, especially in the little pixie's case because she never, ever, ever wore the same piece of clothing more than once and her clothes were all very stylish. As Bella started to think about all these things, she really started to wonder about the people of Forks. Either she was crazy, even though she was pretty sure she wasn't, or everyone in Forks was suffering from a deep case of denial. Bella remembered seeing The Village and shuddered.

She tapped her pencil on the steno pad impatiently, trying to pull herself together. Something wasn't adding up.

Now, it really isn't Bella's fault that Edward didn't scream vampire. After all, he came out in the day time, and he didn't wear lace, the way Lestat always did in Interview with the Vampire. Nor did he have abnormally large incisors. On the other hand, there were a lot of things Bella was leaving out.

His skin! She remembered, nearly clumsily tumbling out of her chair in her excitement. He was freezing when he touched her hand in biology class. Yes, Bella realized, maybe there was something about his physicality that would give her the answer.

Her mind turned to a daydream about Edward's body, and were she not the sweet, innocent girl she was, she would have rubbed one out at the images her overactive imagination was conjuring. She was no fun, however, and quickly got back on task.

She thought about the time she was cradled to his chest as he protected her from the van, when she did not have a concussion, thank you very much, and she couldn't remember feeling a heartbeat there behind his ribs. In fact, Edward Cullen felt more like a statue than a boy, no, more like a superhero of some kind. Bella had always imagined that being swooped up in Superman's arms one would feel his Kryptonian warmth radiating from him.

But, then, Edward had laughed at her suggestion that he was a superhero, and there was that cryptic comment he made about being the bad guy, or rather, "Perhaps, I am not so honorable as you are inclined to believe."

Bella Swan was stuck.

Edward couldn't be the bad guy. He was too beautiful, too charming, too perfect. In a creepy sort of way.

Bella huffed at her notebook, then tried to clear her mind, starting again with the facts she knew for sure. Let's see - not eating real food, not having a heart beat, being so cold, all of these signs pointed to him not really being alive at all.

And, then, she had it!

Yep, it was obvious.

Edward Cullen was a zombie.