shesepankh: (o ~ mom)
Isabella Marie Swan ([personal profile] shesepankh) wrote2014-05-03 09:35 pm

ghost

Kindergarten teacher Renée Higgenbotham Swan (36) was killed in a car crash one mile from her residence in Phoenix, AZ, January 9, 2005. She is survived by her daughter Isabella (16). Her service will be held at -


Bella has the entire obituary pasted into a page of one of her compilation notebooks but tends not to re-read past the first lines. It's repellent. The concept of obituaries is repellent. The funeral is over. Renée's vibrant brief life has been summed up over the course of a paragraph, and is also over.

Bella pretends to sleep on the plane. Her neighbor is talkative and she doesn't want to say shut up, my mom just died, because - what if it doesn't work? What if this news doesn't have the power to bludgeon everyone else into stunned silence the way it does Bella?

Charlie collects her. Charlie hugs her. Charlie doesn't make her talk. Good wonderful understanding quiet Charlie does not say a word. He takes her home. Her room's where she left it last August.

It's raining.

Bella stays home, moving in, moping, for a day, and then she shows up at school, gray-faced and withdrawn. First class is English. Okay, whatever.

The teacher wants her to introduce herself. Bella wants to yank on the skinny end of his tie until he regrets making her.

She stands at the front of the room and says that her name is Bella Swan and she's moved here to live with her dad. The teacher makes an impatient go on gesture and she stands there for a moment before robotically saying the same thing she produced at the beginning of the year in her old school in Phoenix when they were doing go-around-the-room-and-share-facts. "I'm one of those people who actually likes Shakespeare."

He lets her sit down.

She sits.
castmyown: (l. Quiet time)

[personal profile] castmyown 2014-05-04 05:16 am (UTC)(link)
The boy next to her is mercifully silent. He looks at her, notices the withdrawn, empty look - but he's smart enough to not ask. He's been on the other end of that forced classroom introduction, a year ago - not fun. Also on the other side of the questioning classmates that followed - even less fun. No, thank you, he is perfectly happy to leave the girl to her privacy.

He also remembers showing up in the middle of the term and being utterly lost, and working double time to catch up. There's no easy way to fix that, but - he does keep notes. They're retrieved, glanced over for spelling errors, and then he writes, 'So you're not lost, not a charity, please return after class' on the first page's header.

Onto Bella's desk they go.