T.02.05 Cheater

In Which Bella Buys A Bike

We avoid another "Bella wakes up" chapter intro with Bella at work with Mike. She leaves early and heads toward home so we can have a detailed dream sequence presented through a distracted monologue. ARGH. She's remembering dreams while she's driving and not paying attention!

So Bella is driving and having a crisis where she rants internally about Edward's unfair demand that she not hurt herself AND pretend he never existed. The text ranges from exciting and well visualized to cliche and tedious as we go through two and a half pages. Finally, Bella decides that she can escape her crushing depression, skirt her half-hearted promise not to end her life and (I assume) summon up visions of Edward the Chastiser, by doing reckless things. Sort of like the movie Crank, only with more teen angst. As fate would have it, Bella has driven aimlessly into a neighborhood and spots a pair of dilapidated motorcycles for sale. Since she promised Charlie she'd never ride on one and considers them life-threatening, this satisfies her as a double adrenaline fix. Bella ends up getting them for free, and she and a 15 year old load them into her truck.

I'm tempted to call foul on putting motorcycles into pickups, a task I've actually attempted, but we find out that one of the bikes is a Harley Sprint. While H-D might conjure images of big, monster cruisers, the Spirit was essentially a single-cylinder thumper engine bolted to a tiny, dirt-bike style frame used in flat track racing. I assume the other bike is equally small, but this becomes a different kind of problem shortly given who the other driver is supposed to be.

Bella takes the bikes to Billy's house to see Jacob and convinces him to help rebuild the bikes. She provides the cash, he provides the labor and know-how and at the end they both get motorcycles. Jacob is now 6' '5" tall and is going to look ridiculous on a tiny Sprint, though.

There's a good bit of flirting going on here, and it's played subtle, which is very nice. Jacob is hunky and friendly, which I know from outside the book is leading us to a romance of some sort. I'd grumble, but this is the most realistic bit of book I've had handed to me since the breakup and I'm going to cherish it like a tiny, sick bird.

Then the chapter just ends in the garage. I don't know why, the logical end places would have been coming to the house or after the next bit of garage-talk (sorry to spoil that for you). I guess Meyer is contractually obligated to pump out 25 chapters and by gum she's going to do it somehow.

SumUp: B-
Bella's depression is grating, but here it's played very realistically within the psychological frame described in the last chapter, so I can only complain so much. The references to Edward drag everything back down, though. The motorcycle plan is a little silly, but it sounds like something a teenager would come up with as a way to escape a boring town life, so I'll bite. That's not Bella's plan, of course, but since I'm now pretending her entire relationship with Edward was a horrible psychotic fantasy, it gives me more construction material for my version of the book. The interaction between Bella and Jacob (who is playing the human still) is realistic and vastly preferable to the bulk of time we spent with  Bella and Edward. Which is sort of sad.

That said, don't sign me up for Team Jacob (ugh) just yet. I'm pretty sure he wolfs out at some point and that's going to ruin everything. Still, this is a nice bit of fresh air and sunshine. In fact, sign me up for Team Mike, or better still, Team Jessica.