The class’s laughter is louder this time, and I can see Foster’s chest rise with a huge, exasperated breath.

“I’d like the report tomorrow,” he says. “Do you understand?”

“Absolutely,” I answer and then drop my voice to a mumble. “There are tons of Jane Eyre movies.”

The students around me snicker under their breaths, because of course I can’t read a whole novel and write a report on it with cheer and swim tonight. I end my taunting, satisfied that I won that argument. In their eyes, anyway.

The air is cool and fresh as it fills my lungs.

“What about Twilight?” someone calls out.

I pause at the deep voice behind me. Mr. Foster stands in front of his desk and looks up, focusing over my head.

“Twilight?” he asks.

“Yeah, Rocks?” Masen prompts me. “Did you like Twilight?”

My heart starts beating harder. What is he doing?

But I turn my head to the side, fixing him with a bored expression. “Sure. When I was twelve. You?”

The corner of his mouth lifts, and I’m once again drawn to the piercing on his lip. “I’ll bet you loved it,” he says, the entire class listening. “I’ll bet it was what got you interested in reading. And I’ll even bet you were at the movies opening night. Did you have an Edward T-shirt, too?”

A few chuckles go off around me, and the little high I felt a moment ago is sucked away at the sight of his gloating eyes. How could he have known that?

I picked up a Twilight paperback when I was younger, because Robert Pattinson was on the cover, and hey, I was twelve, so…

But immediately after reading it, I asked my mom to go buy me all the books, and I spent the next two weeks reading them with every free moment I got.

I arch an eyebrow, looking at the teacher. “While it’s fascinating that it’s finally speaking and all, I’m, again, wondering what the point is.”

“The point is…” Masen answers, “wasn’t Edward like a hundred years older than Bella?”

Eighty-six.

“See,” he keeps going, “you’re judging stories about older men and younger women as some sick, superficial perversion on the males’ part, when actually it was quite common during those times for men to wait until they had finished their education and established a career before being ready to support a wife.”

He pauses and then continues. “A wife, which was almost always younger, because she needed to bear many children. As society dictated. And yet, your precious Edward Cullen was over a hundred years old, still in high school, living with his parents, and trying to get in the pants of a minor in the twenty-first century.”

The whole class erupts in laughter, and my stomach sinks.

I catch sight of Masen out of the corner of my eye, leaning his desk forward, closer to mine, and whispering, “But he was hot, so I guess that’s all that’s important, right?”

I keep staring ahead, the knots in my stomach pulling tighter and tighter. Sure, Edward was decades older than Bella. But the fact that he was good looking had nothing to do with her loving him anyway.

Masen continues his attack. “Now if he looked like most hundred-year-old men looked,” he calls out, and I see him stand up, “it wouldn’t have been romantic, would it? There would be no Bella and Edward.” He walks up to the front of the class and rounds the teacher’s desk, gesturing to the laptop. “May I?”

The teacher nods, looking wary but allowing it.

Masen leans down, and I refuse to look as he types something into the search engine. But when more laughter breaks out, louder this time, I can’t help myself.

I glance up at the screen and instantly feel anger curl my fingers into a fist.

A huge image of an old man, withered with wrinkles, missing teeth, and bald but with wiry, silver hairs sprouting from the top of his nose smiles back at us, and I glare at Masen, who grins back.

“Old geezer Edward is a happy guy,” he gloats, “because he’s about to get naked with Bel-la.”

“Aw, yeah!” J.D. hollers, and everyone loses control. Students double over laughing, and their amusement surrounds me like a wall closing in. Everything is getting smaller, and I start to feel the space in my lungs shrink as I pull harder to take in air.

I clench my teeth together. Motherfucker.

Masen crosses his arms over his chest, looking at me like a meal he can’t wait to eat again. “Shake your pompoms, Rocks,” he says. “You just reminded all of us that love is truly only skin deep.”

I walk as quickly as I can, a cool sweat spreading down my neck and back as I dive into the girls’ locker room. The weight on my chest gets heavier, and I pass girls undressing for P.E. as I slip into one of the shower stalls, draw the curtain closed, and turn on the water.

I step to the left so I don’t get hit with the spray. The white noise of the water shields me from listening ears, and I grab my inhaler from my pocket, taking two quick pumps and leaning back against the shower wall, closing my eyes.

Four years. I haven’t had a fucking attack triggered by panic in four years. It’s always exercise-induced. My lungs start to open up, and I slowly breathe in and out, forcing myself to calm down.

What the hell is wrong with me? The guy’s not a threat. I can handle this. So he was challenging me. So what? Am I going to flip out every time that happens? Sooner or later I’ll leave safe Falcon’s Well, and I’ll no longer be Queen Bee. I’m acting like a baby.