Chapter-by-Chapter: New Moon, Chapter 2

I'm sorry if bits of this blog post look a little strange. At the moment I'm trying to get my voice recognition software up and running in preparation for NaNoWriMo. I'm trying to go back and edit my mistakes; I'm getting a lot of practice at doing that! Apparently the more I practice, the better the computer will be at understanding me. I'm really getting the hang of the voice commands, so clearly I'm learning something, even if my computer isn't.

Anyway, let's get on with reading New Moon. This chapter is called Stitches.

What happens:

Carlisle patches up Bella's arm and has a discussion with her about religion and souls. We also learn a little about what happened the night he turned Edward. With Bella all put back together again she's able to go home, and as usual, Edward stays the night. But it seems like he might be preparing to go somewhere.

Thoughts as I read:

As the last chapter ended with Bella falling into a glass table, I'm fairly certain that the stitches in the chapter title are going to refer to those. There was an awful lot of glass in Chapter One so I'm guessing there's going to be an awful lot of stitches needed. The chapter is also about twenty pages long, so there'll almost certainly be some stuff with Edward being angry with Jasper (and himself, for putting Bella in danger, again). And Bella will probably use it as an excuse for Edward to turn her into a vampire, which he'll refuse to do. And this will cause grumpiness.

Carlisle takes charge of the situation and orders Emmett and Rosalie to haul Jasper away; Rosalie is obviously enjoying this, or at least is pleased that things have turned out the way she was expecting them to. Meanwhile everyone else tries to stem the bleeding and decide whether they can fix the damage here or if Bella needs to go to the hospital.

Bella doesn't want to go to the hospital because then she'll have to explain why her arm has been cut to ribbons, for the second time in however many months since she 'fell down some stairs and through a plate glass window'. Edward's being all intense and watching Bella, which I thought was because he was worried, but then Bella says something which makes me realise that's not why he's being all hard and intense:

"I can handle it," he insisted. But his jaw was rigid; his eyes burned with the intensity of the thirst he fought, so much worse for him than it was for the others.

I actually kind of like Bella for a moment when she basically tells Edward to get over himself. Carlisle takes her side as well and soon Edward is despatched in search of Jasper. It doesn't take long for Alice to follow him; clearly Bella just smells too good to resist. Carlisle must have nerves of steel!

Just as I'm wondering how Carlisle is able to resist temptation when everyone else has had to leave the room to save Bella from being ravished, Bella asks him how he's able to do it. Apparently it's just a matter of practice. Bella continues to make small talk with her doctor as he pulls numerous bits of glass out of her arm.

We do learn that Carlisle is able to smell what is wrong with people and so is able to use his skills to save people who might not have been able to be saved through normal medical procedures. I wonder what sort of things he is able to tell about people using his sense of smell. Considering Edward tasted the morphine at the end of the last book, I'd guess he could probably tell if someone had taken an overdose, perhaps if they had diabetes or leukaemia or sickle cell anaemia, stuff that would make a person's blood smell differently.

While I'm wondering this, Carlisle starts preparing to sew up Bella's arm. Surely she's still going to have to explain the bandage and stitches to her father, even if she's avoided a trip to the hospital! Bella's not thinking about this though, she's still pushing for information about why Carlisle works as a doctor if it takes so much effort to not nom on his patients.

This prompts a recap of Carlisle's history, whilst he burns all of the stuff with Bella's blood on it. So now the house is going to smell like a Bella barbecue, I'm not sure that's going to help matters particularly!

The conversation then takes a turn towards religion. Carlisle's questioning his faith and Bella's revealing that neither of her parents are religious either. I'm curious because I'd read that this series of books promote Mormon values pretty heavily. I was expecting this conversation to reveal Bella's beliefs. Perhaps that's actually something which Meyer's been subtle about. It'll be interesting reading on to find out.

Oh and now we're moving on to what Edward believes:

Carlisle guessed the direction of my thoughts again. "Edward's with me up to a point. God and heaven exist… and so does hell. But he doesn't believe there is an afterlife for our kind." Carlisle's voice was very soft; he stared out the big window over the sink, into the darkness. "You see, he thinks we've lost our souls."

This is all getting very deep for a book in the Twilight series.

Actually I'm starting to get a bit lost in this conversation. They're talking about souls and what that has to do with Edward being with Bella. Oh, I think Carlisle knows Bella wants to be turned but that doing that could endanger the soul that Edward may or may not have. I think.

The direction this conversation has taken makes me wonder just why Carlisle decided to turn these other people into vampires in the first place. Looks like he's read my mind because the next thing I know we're getting Edward!Backstory.

"Yes. Her name was Elizabeth. Elizabeth Masen. His father, Edward Senior, never regained consciousness in the hospital. He died in the first wave of the influenza. But Elizabeth was alert until almost the very end. Edward looks a great deal like her – she had that same strange bronze to her hair, and her eyes were exactly the same color green."

This is starting to get a little Harry Potter now.

Carlisle promised Elizabeth, as she lay on her deathbed, that he would save her son. And he got the impression that somehow she knew what he could do. So he did it. It basically involved hurting Edward the way he had been hurt, because although he'd decided he had to have a companion, he didn't actually know just how he was supposed to go about doing it. Oops.

Speaking of the devil vampire, Edward shows up, all ready to take Bella home again. Bella decides that she'd rather Carlisle take her home, she is still covered in blood after all. It's one thing wanting to be with someone forever, it's an entirely different thing to be left alone with that person when there's a chance they want to eat you.

She found me a shirt of Esme's that was close to the same color mine had been. Charlie wouldn't notice, I was sure. The long white bandage on my arm didn't look nearly as serious when I was no longer spattered in gore. Charlie was never surprised to see me bandaged.

Just like that the party is over and Bella's heading home and apologising for getting the paper cut that caused all of this trouble. This annoys Edward because if it wasn't for her being with him a paper cut would've been just that, a paper cut, not an invitation for his family to suck her blood. It just escalates from this point onwards, now Edward's suggesting that Bella would've been better off hooking up with Mike rather than him.

Which annoys Bella. Which just causes the argument to keep on going.

And despite this, Bella still asks Edward if he's going to spent the night with her.

"For my birthday," I pressed.
"You can't have it both ways – either you want people to ignore your birthday or you don't. One or the other."

He has a point.

Whatever issues he's having right now, Edward decides that he would much rather spend the night with Bella. So he promised to meet her upstairs. I hope he's going to let Carlisle and Esme know what he's doing otherwise they might think that he's chowed down on Bella on the way home or something!

Inside Charlie makes fatherly small talk with his daughter, asking how the party went. He does notice the bandage on her arm but doesn't seem overly concerned about just what happened to his incredibly accident prone daughter. If I was Charlie I'd be a little bit suspicious that on two occasions when my daughter was visiting this guy's family she ended up injured in some way.

Up in her room, Edward does the honours and starts unwrapping Bella's presents, presumably in order to make sure that she doesn't injure herself again and drive him into a feeding frenzy of his own. Inside the gift from Carlisle and Esme are two plane tickets to Jacksonville. Is that where one of the colleges is? Despite it being all sunny there, Edward is happy to go along with her and never leave the house. That sounds fun. Imagine how cranky he'll get when he has to spend all of his time cooped up indoors!

The other gift is from Edward. That good old standby, the compilation CD, featuring the music that he composed for her. Okay, that is kind of sweet. Unfortunately Bella's arm has started to hurt so Edward takes it upon himself to get her some pain relief:

"Charlie," I hissed. Charlie wasn't exactly aware that Edward frequently stayed over. In fact, he would have a stroke if that fact were brought to his attention. But I didn't feel too guilty for deceiving him. It wasn't as if we were up to anything he wouldn't want me to be up to. Edward and his rules…

Jeez, if you're going to sneak around and break your parents' rules, at least do something interesting and worthwhile.

It's okay anyway, Edward is able to get the Tylenol before the door even closed and then he very carefully puts Bella to bed. She asks for a goodnight kiss and the pair of horny teenagers suddenly start acting just like that. It's not clear whether Edward is being fuelled by lust or by the desire to eat her. They stop before it goes too far and Bella agrees to go to sleep.

Except she has a strange sort of sense that the kiss was like one before; one when Edward was saying goodbye to her for what might have been forever.

Ooh. I think this means he'll be going away soon. He's probably do it to be all noble like he's taking her away from danger, and she'll be all mopey and devastated because it's the end of the world. God this is going to be a long book!