I didn’t understand how the pain could stop so suddenly after it had tortured me for hours. My heart seemed to have exploded in my chest and then – nothing. I must be dead. There’s no other solution for the sudden void of pain. They had finally managed to kill me.

They? I wondered. Who were they?

I realized with what felt like a punch to my stomach that I couldn’t remember anything but pain. Pain and darkness. The pain hadn’t lasted nearly as long as the echoing darkness in my mind. The everlasting darkness of my memory seemed worse than the pain.

I had to be dead. There was no other way to explain the painless feeling in my body and the darkness of my mind. Maybe death made you forget everything. Did that mean that this was Heaven? Or was it Hell? If the life I had had were worse than the darkness, this must be Heaven. But what if my life had been amazing, filled with perfect memories. This would be Hell.

I peeled my eyes open and found my face parallel to the cobblestone ground. Instead of digging into the side of my face painfully like the cold stone should have, it felt soft against my cheek, warm almost. I ran my hand against the ground and the cobblestone felt silky under my finger tips.

That’s when I caught sight of my skin. It was white. Whiter than anything I had ever seen before. It glistened, sparkling like snow in the sunlight. Despite the fact that I couldn’t remember anything of my life before this moment, I knew in the back of my mind that my skin had never looked like this.

What had happened to me? If I could just remember something….Think –

I realized it didn’t even remember my name.

I had to figure out what was going on!

Trying not to stand up too quickly, I raised myself off the ground. One second, I was on the cobblestone and the next I was standing, not even remember the movements I made to stand up. My head didn’t even spin with dizziness like it normally would have if I had made such sudden movements.

How had I moved so quickly? What was happening to me? Surely I hadn’t always been this way. I must have been a normal teenage girl at one point. Somehow I knew that normal teenage girls didn’t have shimmering white skin and couldn’t move super fast.

I bolted out of the alley, again moving too quickly. It was exhilarating, though, and I didn’t want to slow down. I was basically flying, not feeling the ground under my feet. There was no way I was human anymore.

The street was empty, the clouds rolling in looking dangerous and black but I could still see the sun low in the sky. Where was everyone? I would never expect the streets to be empty this early in the morning.

How did I know whether the streets should or should not be empty when I didn’t have any memories?

I came to a halting stop in the middle of the road. Old, rusted cars sat on each side of the street though there weren’t many. They were all empty. The stores around me were desolate. The town was like a ghost town.

That’s when I saw the sign hanging over the seamstress store. Alice’s was written on it in curly letters.

A pain stabbed me in the side of a head like a knife. It wasn’t as bad as the other pain I remembered but it was so sudden and blaring enough to make me scream out. I collapsed to my knees, my vision blocked by endless blackness.

Images flashed before my eyes. I knew they weren’t real, weren’t really what was in front of me, but they were so realistic, like I was actually there. Faces and buildings, beautiful people with pale white skin and golden eyes rimmed with purple shadows, a huge white house in a raining little town. Few of the faces stood out to me. A plain-looking girl with blushed cheeks and thick brown hair, a young, gorgeous guy with the same white skin as most of the faces but with blood-red eyes with blond hair flopping into it.

Then, the slide-show stopped. Abruptly, I found myself sitting in a room, surrounded by a lot of the faces I had seen. They were all looking at me with kind smiles though there was a hint of curiosity in most of their eyes. The blond-haired boy sat at my side, holding my hand. I looked over at him though the movement was involuntary. I didn’t do anything to control it. He smiled at me, his eyes a more burgundy than crimson.

A man sat in front of us, a smile on his pale face. His eyes were like liquid butterscotch and his blond hair was slicked back. He wore round glasses down his nose though I doubted he needed them.

“Well, Alice, you really are the most amazing thing I have ever seen,” he said. “I’m sure most people will agree that your story will top even mine and people say mine is strange. I knew what I was and was able to resist but you – you are simply amazing! You had no idea of anything except for what you’ve seen in visions. How could you know to trust those?”

“This is it,” I heard my voice say. I felt my lips moving but I had no control over them. “This was my vision. This is how I knew – knew I was a vampire and had to resist human blood. And you, too, Jasper.”

I looked over at the boy again and he squeezed my hand.

“I’m glad, ma’am,” he said with a slight twang of a southern accent.

“Alice,” I said, laughing.

“Alice,” the man sitting across from me laughed. “And Jasper. Welcome to the Cullen family – both of you.”

“Thank you, Carlisle,” my voice said. “Thank you.”

The room dissolved around me and I found myself back in the deserted town. I knew what I was, what I had to do, and what the future held. The unknown that was still in the past made no difference anymore. I was a vampire.