Present Day

I'd been tossing and turning for hours before I finally sat up in bed, turning on the lamp on the nightstand. I rose, went over to the windows and pushed them open, closed my eyes as I breathed in the outside air. It was warm, still faintly humid from the recent rain. As I released the breath slowly, I opened my eyes and looked out over the expanse of sand that stretched outwards. Beyond there was the freeway, but it was far enough that the sounds could be barely heard, and I could easily pull up memories of the summers I'd spent in Phoenix when I was younger.

My mom had decided to split from sleepy little Forks not long after my first birthday. She'd wanted to take me with her, but my dad had put his foot down. She'd only been nineteen when she'd had me, my dad had been twenty-three. She was leaving with no definite plans for the future, and no defined place to go. My mom had relented after a heated debate, and left me behind. It took her a few years before she finally got settled in Phoenix... and a few more before she'd gotten through college and had gotten a steady enough job to get a place big enough to be able to raise me. By that time I was eight years old.

In those eight years, I'd grown to love my life in Forks. For the first few years of my life, before I was old enough for school, my dad had taken me down to La Push to his best friend's house. His wife Sarah watched me along with her son Jacob, who was a year older than me. We'd become best friends almost right away, inseparable from the time I was able to get about fast enough to keep up with a rambunctious toddler.

When his mom had his little sisters when I was three, I experienced that lovely little stage in my life where I decided things were mine and not to be shared with anyone else. So Jake became "My Jacob" every time I spoke his name to anyone. And it stuck for years.

Once I started school, my entire days spent at La Push ended, but Sarah would pick me up after school and any weekends my dad worked, I was still down there. Life on the reservation came as naturally to me life in Forks. So by the time I was eight, I was adamant about staying in Forks. My mom was upset, of course, but she settled for just continuing to come fetch me in the summer to stay with her for a month or so in the summer, frequently joining Charlie and I for Christmas.

A knock on the door broke me from my thoughts, and I turned and smiled to see my mom walk in. In her hands was a rectangular package, my dad's name and address written in the return address corner. "I ran down and picked it up from the mailing center this morning. Figured you'd want it as soon as possible." Placing it in my hands, she kissed my forehead. "But I've got to get running or I'll be late getting to work. Need me to get anything for you once school's out?"

"No, I'm alright. Thanks for getting this, Mom."

"No problem, baby. I'll see you later."

By the time she shut the door, I was already sitting on the bed, tearing eagerly at the simple brown paper my dad had used to wrap and protect the package. Reaching in, I smiled a little as I pulled out the photo album of rich, deep reddish-brown leather. I loved it, but my eyes always fell to the little imperfections. The occasional clumsy stitch along the edges where the seams were sewn, keeping in the thin wooden boards that helped to keep it sturdy. That part I'd done on my own, but the burnt-in image of a small pack of wolves on the front had to be done with Billy's assistance. Running my fingers across the image, I released a little sigh before I flipped open the front cover.

Inside were bound pages of card stock paper, which I used to place photos on, write little captions next to or underneath them. My whole life was bound up in these pages. And every year I just had to carefully remove the stitches in the binding and add a few more pages.

The first few pages were pictures that had been taken of me when I was little, and I captioned with little more than dates, places, and names of the people that my parents told me to. Christmases, summers, first and last days of school and the in between. Photos of me playing with my best friends Leah, Sam, and of course, Jacob. One in particular always made me laugh, and I pulled it out with a smile.

It was a picture of Jacob and I stretched out on the floor with a book in front of us when we were still fairly little. Apparently, he had taken it upon himself to help me learn how to read, and I had my finger pressed onto the page asking what a certain word was. His mom had managed to catch the picture right as Jake rolled his eyes at me. When I asked later, she said it had been because I had called him "my Jacob" when I asked for the word, and that he got into the habit of rolling his eyes for a couple years when I called him that. It had been at that point in life when any boy would go through the usual "girls have cooties!" phase, but he endured my presence with patience. She'd asked him later about it, about why all other girls must have cooties but I didn't, and he'd simply replied "Because she's my Bells," and run off.

With a sigh, I slid the picture back into its place, and continued flipping through the pages. Slowly, I grew up in the pages. I skimmed my fingers over the photos. The year after Sarah had passed, there had been a shadow in Jake's eyes that even in my youth I could see, and that I could still see through these photos.

Slowly, I started coming upon pages where pictures had been taken by me and my friends instead of the adults in my life. Photos from my middle school years, when I'd gotten to know my only real friend in Forks, Angela. The occasional school dance I got talked into going to by her and other girls. I only managed to get Jake to go to one before he swore off the silliness of school dances forever, so there was the odd dance here and there with boys in my grade like Mike Newton or Eric Yorkie. Photos from when I'd dated Eric the last year or so of middle school before we decided that we were really just too opposite to be more than friends.

Then there were pictures of when Billy had been patiently teaching both me and Jake how to work with wood when I was about twelve years old, my fingers and hands covered with varying amounts of band-aids before I finally became diligent enough to avoid injury. Jake had been far better at it, as clearly evidenced by the multiple small photos where we stood our finished projects side by side.

Then came a couple of my favorite pictures in the entire album. They each had their own page, facing one another, the rest of the page absolutely covered with comments. The first had me at fifteen years old, my hair absolutely tousled and tangled as I looked up at him and stuck out my tongue, and his hair was in a similar state. We'd just got done wrestling outside and his friends Quil and Embry were having an absolute laughing fit over the state our our hair, and had snapped a picture. Jake had been exactly like a big brother to me all my life. Teasing me, rough-housing, tolerating and viewing me as something outside the concepts of the female gender. Still a girl, but not to be viewed as he was beginning to view other girls.

The next picture had a story all its own... A story that I felt was the beginning of a whole new world for me. A new life that had taken me from being an awkward and lost teenager into the woman who knew where her life was headed.