Chapter Three

Chapter Three continues by breaking into some new territory: Bella grumbling about the weather, although most people could relate to this one. Who doesn't despise something as ugly and undesirable as (SPOILER ALERT) snow? With nothing good possibly coming her way, she begrudgingly prepares for the day, rehashing her unending inner dialogue of obsession with Edward, mixed in with her suspicions of his dishonesty (healthy for any new relationship) and her subsequent embarrassment of acting too emotionally vulnerable around him.

Why did I know this was coming? Like most classic fantasy narratives, each romance requires a catalyst to drop our heroes into the throws of sexually-charged, forbidden love. From Luke and Leia to Gandalf and Galadriel to Harry Potter and Hermoine, (hell, we'll even throw in Dumbledore and Gellert Grindelwald just for good measure,) great stories utilize adversity and tragedy as a sort of latter-day Marvin Gaye to get their protagonists in the mood.

Taking a page from the Smallville playbook, Stephen Meyers pits girl against such peril, only to have Edward (Clark Kent) come between our damsel-in-distress Bella (Lana Lang, or Lex Luthor from Season One if you want to get adventurous) and the ultimate obstacle of total destruction: Tyler (some dweeb.) Battling the elements of ice with less than apt driving skills, Tyler's vehicle goes out of control and nearly turns Twilight into a three-chapter short story with no point (...) by crushing Bella before she can do it herself. (Okay, that was kind of a low blow. She seems more the type to just write about her problems in a blog full of depressing song lyrics and overly-revealing, hyperbolic statements about her life, fostering a self-pity and decadence that is inherently cyclical...kind of like this one.)

Anyway, she's totally about to get creamed by Tyler, when Edward, who'd been standing a good distance away, very mysteriously is able to push her aside and then stop the vehicle with his bare hands, all in the blink of an eye. Bella does her best Lana impression and demands to know how he did that, ignoring less important facts like the one where she's still alive. She is so onto his ass, yet Edward plays it cool, insisting he was right next to her the whole time (but we as the reader are onto his ass as well, so we don't buy it either.) He insists he's no superhero, because that would be ridiculous. Instead, he declares, "I AM A VAMPIRE!!" and begins manically biting every flesh-covered being in a twenty foot radius while screaming students run frantically to escape the vicious carnage. Not really, but if there's one thing I did learn from the 1998 film Blade, it's that vampires are always the bad guys, unless you half ass it like Wesley Snipes does. (Edward is no Wesley Snipes.)

The entire school flips out upon witnessing this spectacle (car crash; remember my vampire thing was fake) and they even travel with her to the hospital. Conveniently enough, no one else caught Edward in his very public display of superpowers except for Bella. This exclusive knowledge feeds her paranoia, and consequently her attraction to him (if we're really going to split hairs here.) Even after the crash, she immediately begins to argue about the physics of his heroics, though he wisely stalls her by agreeing (falsely) to explain later.

The day only gets worse for her as her father, Charlie arrives (who had woken up early that morning by himself to fix a set of chains on her wheels so she could drive safely through the snow) to make sure she's alright. Even more terrible, the entire school anxiously waits in the lobby to show support for their new student. Suffice it to say, one can only be happy when they're left alone and are ignored. At the hospital, she gets checked out by the elder Cullen (a rare DILF, unless you count a heterosexual Anderson Cooper.) Lucky for the good doctor, Bella does NOT fall in love with *him*. Tyler meanwhile continues to apologize like a giant wiener from an adjacent bed in the same ER, oblivious to the fact that he just fulfilled for Bella every girl's wish to be saved by a ridiculously good-looking vampire, only to have him deny it like a badass. As soon Tyler voices his suspicions over Edward's immaculate exploits, she quickly lies to protect him (this quirky obsession is hers, and hers alone!)

She eventually confronts Edward for a second time, but he of course just lies again while she, of course, just gets angry again. Bella then asks why he even bothered saving her (a decision he immediately regretted after this annoying string of questions,) but she is only left disappointed by his shrugging it off as a right-place, right time scenario, and even by some hilarious uncertainty on his part as to why he did it. In the end, Edward doesn't do himself any favors by his acts of old fashioned chivalry, i.e. being "the nice guy" and pushing her out of the way of a moving vehicle (girls can smell that sort of thing...trust me, I know.) After all, she's not upset because he's being dishonest; she's upset because he's all of a sudden acting overeager by saving her life as opposed to playing hard-to-get or appearing unavailable to her (see: previous comment.) Seriously, heroics at this point in the relationship? Too soon, bro, too soon.

This is beginning to play out like the best of CW dramas, but without Tom Welling (sadly,) or all the absurd and foreboding dreams that characters incessantly experience to foreshadow future episodes.