Chapter 11
After a week in bed as all the cuts on my feet healed, Carlisle finally allowed me to put on shoes and get out of the house. The only place I really wanted to go was the grocery store. I was craving the weirdest things and Alice had also decided we needed to have a girl’s night. That meant me and Alice and a bunch of junk food and a chick flick.

I walked down the aisles, throwing whatever looked good into my cart. And that seemed to be everything. Frozen pizza with just about every topping that Digorno’s offered, a big bag of milky ways, bagels and cereal and Poptarts, a bag of those cherries where you have to stain your fingers purple and spit out the seeds to eat, string cheese, jelly beans, triple chocolate fudge ice cream, whip cream that I really wanted to eat straight from the bottle, and just about anything else you could imagine.

I double checked the list Alice had given me, realizing that I had gotten nearly everything plus a bunch more. The only thing left was a quickly scrawled word at the bottom. Tampons. I gritted my teeth, thinking I should just give Alice the jumbo box that was sitting on the top of my toilet at home, unopened for the last few weeks. I resisted doing the math as I made my way to the tampon aisle, not really wanting to know how late I was. That’s what scared me. I had never been late before. Now it had been roughly two months since my last period, a month late.

I threw a big box in the cart without even checking the brand or anything. I headed to the checkout but the little corner at the end of aisle stopped me. Condoms hung in little boxes from the rack, most with overwhelming and just plain weird extra uses other than protection. Edward and I had never been daring enough to try out any of the more peculiar ones than the ones that were just to keep you from getting pregnant. Underneath them, though, were the pregnancy tests. I slid one of the boxes off the rack and held it my hands, my fingers shaking slightly.

Maybe everyone was right. Maybe it was time to take the test, just to see.

“Can you believe that Isabella Swan?” someone asked from the aisle behind me, her snooty voice carrying far. “Oh, sorry, Cullen.”

“Cullen my ass,” another voice said. “Sure didn’t act like it. Didn’t even show up for her own husband’s funeral.”

Stupid, gossiping old women. I couldn’t name the voices exactly but I did recognize them. The women in the towns of Forks had nothing better to do but gossip and with good reason, I guess, since there’s not much you can do in a town as small as Forks. And while I knew people had good reason to be saying things because I wasn’t at Edward’s funeral, it didn’t give them any right to be saying I wasn’t a Cullen. I wanted to keep walking and stop listening, maybe walk passed the women so that they’d be more careful what they said where and around who next time, but I couldn’t move. I wanted to hear what else they had to say. I needed to know what everyone was thinking of crazy old me.

“She’s a black widow, that’s all she is,” the first voice said. “Who else would get married at eighteen if they weren’t pregnant if it wasn’t for money?”

“Oh, but rumor is she’s pregnant now.”

“Bet that’s something she wasn’t counting on when she married him for her money. Do you reckon she knew she was pregnant when she killed him or that she found out after she’d done it?”

“Murder, really? You think she murdered the poor guy? I mean, I know she only married him for his family’s money, but does she really look like a killer?”

“Do they ever look like killers? I once knew a guy who murdered his whole family in an outrage and he looked like nothing more than a scrawny high school mathlete with horn-rimmed glasses and even pocket protectors. Yet he went and hacked up his wife and three kids. It don’t matter what they look like. A girl like Bella could do something like that if she really wanted money that bad. She’s got that entire family eating out of her hand and I’m sure they’d be willing to give her any amount she asks for, no matter what it’s for. They’ll never even stop to think that maybe the circumstance under which Edward died were fishy, that she could have easily killed him.”

“Wow, you’ve put a lot of thought into this.”

“Well, I don’t like that girl. My grandson was infatuated with her for the last few years and yet she never gave him the time of day except to mooch off of him. Took his friends and even a job at my son’s store. Mikey even once said that she was only with Edward for his money. And, boy, was he ever right. I don’t like her one bit.”

A store attendant walked passed my aisle, her bleached hair in a fried ponytail atop her head and her wrinkled eyes over-made with blue eye shadow. “Do you need any help, honey?”

Tears stinging my eyes, I shook my head. She looked from welling eyes to the aisle I was standing at to the pregnancy test still clenched in my white-knuckled hands and mistook the reason for my tears. She made little tut-ing noises with her tongue and gave me a pitying glance.

“Just remember, deary, abortion is never a solution,” she said and went on her way.

I threw the pregnancy test back on the rack, a lump in my throat nearly suffocating me, and hurried through the self checkout so that I wouldn’t have to deal with any more pitying glares from people who knew who I was or worried glances from people who didn’t know but could assume from the fact that my eyes were filled with tears and my face was permanently tear-stained.

Once I was out in my car with the heater blasted, I allowed myself to cry. Edward was alive but that didn’t mean anything at the moment if people thought I had only married him because I wanted his money. What if my family was having the same doubts? What if everyone was thinking I never cared about Edward? THAT I KILLED HIM? Why the hell did people have such a freaking problem with me? Did they not understand that I and the whole Cullen family were going through a hard enough time without there gossiping and sniping? Why couldn’t I just have Edward back in my arms so I didn’t have to deal with all this crap alone?