“That sounds like…quite an interesting predicament brother,” Alice remarked, “What do you plan on doing? I hope it doesn’t involve what I have foreseen, you’d best change your mind…”

“Alice!” I growled, and I could tell as well as she could I was becoming irritable. “I’m sorry,” I whispered as she recoiled her arms away from me. “I don’t know what to do right now, to be perfectly honest. I hope my control will enable me to resist her, or else I have no other choice: I’ll have to leave.”

“Ed, you’re Head Boy, you can’t just leave,” Alice reminded me softly, catching my gaze with her own and holding it. “And remember why we’re here in the first place.”

I sighed and replied, “I know, I know, the werewolves confuse our scent.”

“And they make me blind,” she pouted, looking down and crossing her arms. That was one – okay, the only unsafe one – disadvantage to us attending school here in Seattle. If we didn’t have the wolves to confuse our scent though, the Volturi and a number of other vampires would be on us Cullens – and Tanya’s coven, for that matter – in a heartbeat. They hated us, though the Volturi had been respectful up until about five years ago. It was a bothersome long story… We’d have to leave this place eventually, however, and none of us knew quite what to do then. I didn’t want to have to think about it until the time came…

“Hey Ed,” Alice poked my arm, and it took me a minute to register the teasing expression on her face, “trying to fall asleep?”

“Very funny Al,” she knew how I disliked being called Ed, so I’d dubbed her Al earlier on, and it got on her nerves too. It was only fair…

“Hey, no fair, at least Ed’s still a guy’s name!” She retorted, crossing her arms and huffing. She deliberately turned her body away from me, most literally giving me the ‘cold shoulder.’ She started to giggle after a few seconds of this. Then she grabbed me by the hand and towed me easily off the bed and out the still-open door.

“Where are we going?” I asked skeptically as I allowed myself to be pulled down the stairs and through the courtyard. I supposed I could look, but I let her have her fun. With Alice, you never knew where you’d end up. One night she’d dragged Jasper all the way down to the kitchens at the south end of campus to have an ‘eating contest’ – the one to cough up the food first lost. Of course, she’d already foreseen herself winning, but she’d only won because Jasper could feel her disgust at the pizza as well as his own.