I'm reading "Twilight," so you don't have to (ch. 16)

Our Story So Far

Here's my synopsis of Chapter 16 of Twilight, by Stephenie [sic] Meyer.

Chapter 16. Carlisle

Edward and Bella go into Carlisle The Wise Leader's office. (Meyer really missed out by not calling it his "study." The Beautiful Gloomy Mansions of Beautiful Sparkly Vampires should have "studies," not "offices." I'm surprised Meyer overlooked that one, because normally she never passes up a flowery word where an ordinary one would do.)

Edward asks Carlisle The Wise Leader to tell his history, but Carlisle The Wise Leader conveniently has to leave, so Edward tells it instead.

When Carlisle The Wise Leader (living in England in the 1650s) realized what he had become, he tried to kill himself, but it's not easy to kill a Beautiful Sparkly Vampire. Jumping off stuff from great heights, drowning, starving, nothing worked.

Carlisle The Wise Leader's resistance to eating people was weakening, but one day he ate a deer and realized he liked it. Thus, he could be Beautiful and Sparkly and eat animals instead of being Mean and Ugly and eating people.

So he went to France. By swimming across the English Channel. Swimming is easy for Beautiful Sparkly Vampires, because they don't need to breathe. They just do it out of habit. Bella thinks that's kinda freaky, and Edward worries that someday something will be so freaky that Bella will leave, but Bella says there's no way you could be too freaky for me.

Carlisle The Wise Leader spent the next 200 years going to college in Europe and learning how to be a doctor. He also got over wanting to eat his patients when they bled. Plus, he met some Italian vampires, who were Beautiful and Sparkly educated and refined, unlike the louts in London, and they all got their pictures painted by an artist who wasn't covered in my college Art History class as far as I can remember, although come to think of it I vaguely recall seeing his Death of Messalina at the Getty.

But Carlisle The Wise Leader couldn't convince the Italian Beautiful Sparkly Vampires to stop eating people, so he decided to go to America. He was working nights in a hospital in Chicago when the big influenza epidemic hit. Since he was lonely, he decided to turn the dying, orphaned Edward into a vampire to be his "companion."

Edward has been with Carlisle The Wise Leader ever since, except for a few years when he went off to eat people instead of animals. Bella finds this "intriguing" and "reasonable" rather than frightening or repulsive. (Because True Love means never having to consult your moral compass; whatever your lover does must be good and right.) Eventually, Edward got tired of killing people and went back to live with Carlisle The Wise Leader and Esme The Motherly One.

Bella and Edward go into Edward's room. He has lots of CDs and a stereo that intimidates Bella. Edward enjoyed confessing to Bella, but he's still kind of surprised she's not scared of him (since he apparently doesn't yet understand the morality of True Love). Bella says he's not scary, so Edward pounces on her and wrestles her onto the sofa. Alice The Nice One and Jasper The Other Boy One come in and say there's going to be a Beautiful Sparkly Vampire baseball game that night. I can hardly wait.

(Check the pull-down menu under "Ongoing Series" in the left side-blog for more Twilight chapters.)