Chapter Twenty-Two (In which Bella actually does something)

Well, toastyreaders, here's another woefully lengthy chapter that demands an over-long summary. However, if you read the whole thing, you'll be rewarded, and someone will beat the flaming snot out of Bella.

CHAPTER SUMMARY-- Bella returns to the front room to find Alice mid-vision. Jasper, who's just returned from checking out of the hotel, asks what she saw, to which Alice dazedly replies 'Bella'. She then shakes it off and says it was nothing new, but Bella realizes the jig is up and Alice knows what she's going to do. There's a tense drive to the airport, wherein Alice and Bella make stunted conversation to cover the fact that Alice knows and Bella knows Alice knows (let's not forget that Jasper now knows, and can probably sense that Bella knows that they both know...). At any rate, when they get to the airport, Bella announces she's going to get 'breakfast' and takes Jasper with her instead of Alice so that she can pull the ol' Ladie's Bathroom Trick-- Jasper, a dude, has to wait outside the bathroom, so Bella leaves through the other exit and makes a run for it. Once again, Jasper and Alice have to sacrifice their established intelligence and act monumentally thick for a few moments so that Bella can have a cunning bit. Once Bella gets outside, she snatches a cab from a nice, 'tired' couple and throws some money and her mum's address at the driver, then spends the duration of the ride lost in a nauseatingly soggy daydream about Edward. Her reverie is broken (huzzah!) when the cabbie asks her to confirm the address, then dumps her at her mother's house. She follows James' directions and calls the number he's left next to the phone, at which point he tells her to go to the dance studio. You may be wondering about all this runaround when we--and practically every character in this book--have known for a while that Bella's going to end up at the dance studio, but realize that James doesn't know that we know and she knows and they know. Shmeyer, with her (alleged) degree in English literature, has invoked the idea of third-person omniscience in a first-person book and beaten us over the head with a Useful Fact to be Used Later so that even the dullest among us can feel prescient. Anyway, after some dreary and forgettable reminiscing about life, Bella trips her way to the dance studio and bursts through the doors, only to find that her mother's voice was just the VCR playing all along (you may recall that I mentioned the VCR wreaked of trap-iness a chapter or two ago... Shmeyer clearly didn't give my third-person omniscience its due credit). James then shows up to gloat about the fact that he was able to trap her with the clever use of a VCR (hell, that he was able to USE a VCR), and promptly begins monologuing--the cardinal sin of villains, yes, but he's doing it properly. Monologuing is a problem when you have a frayed bungee-cord loosely wrapped around Batman and you wax poetic about world domination with your back turned, but when you're staring down the world's clumsiest damp sock of a character and she has nowhere to go, nothing to do, and no backup, exposition has never been more fun. And at first, it is-- with his delightfully twisted politeness and friendly demeanor, James is probably the most interesting thing in this book so far. He's a top bloke, despite how he wants to eat Bella--scratch that, ESPECIALLY since he wants to eat Bella--until he goes a little too far with the exposition. At first, he's just setting up a camera to film dinner, saying how this was all too easy and he wants Edward to come after him to make things fun, but then he starts going on about his previous exploits and suddenly we've got Alice's entire mysterious back-story hurled at us from heaven-knows-where. It seems this has all happened before-- back in the 1920's, a vampire was in love with a girl who was institutionalized for having visions, and to save her from James, the vamp broke the girl out of the loony bin and turned her vampy, too. She was James' only target to have ever escaped, so in revenge he killed the vampire who turned her, and somehow Bella deduces that the girl was Alice. James then briefly dwells on the irony that he's taking Bella from the Cullens, but they still get the only prey he's ever lost. Finally, he decides to get on with things; he circles, Bella tries to run, and he kicks her into a few mirrors and breaks her leg before she realizes she's bleeding and hopes he can't toy with her much more before killing her--the best ending of any chapter so far? I think so.

NOTABLE NOTES--

1. James mentions that Bella's lack of self-preservational skills is interesting. If he'd had to read about every instance of her tripping, falling, dropping things, running into doors, and generally failing at life, I'm willing to bet he'd rethink that statement.

2. While going through Alice's backstory and whatnot, James mentions that she smelled even better than Bella. He then apologizes and assures Bella she has a very nice smell. What an oddly charming bastard.

3. After being little more than a topic of conversation the last few chapters, James is finally being interesting-- which means Shmeyer's going to kill him off very, very soon. Things that steal the spotlight from Bella aren't allowed to live (other characters' intelligence, for example).

INTENSITY OF EDWARD'S STARE-- Wonderfully absent this chapter. Wherever it is, though, God forbid it makes for a more enjoyable read-- then Shmeyer might have to blind Ed for the remainder of the series.