Word: bellas
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...destiny that links Bella to Edward? That's what she feels shortly after she leaves desert-dry Phoenix, where her mother has just married a semipro baseball player, to spend time with her police-chief father (Billy Burke) in rainy, misty Forks, Wash. Bella calls herself "the suffering-in-silence type," but instantly all the nice kids in her junior class are clamoring to be her BFF. Not so Edward. His pained, brooding, utterly irresistible gaze says, I have depths you don't want to dive in. After sitting next to Bella once, he has to take some sick days...
...reactions of the girls in the theater (TIME surveys the fangirls behind the Twilight phenomenon). There's an audible shiver as they first spy the teen vampire Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson), his impossibly gorgeous face caked in a mime's pallor, sitting in biology class next to young Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart). When he holds an apple in his hands to present to her - the novel's cover image - the girls emit an awestruck sigh, as if they'd just seen Zac Efron in the flesh or a puppy on YouTube. And when he tells Bella, "So the lion fell...
...word among the local Native Americans (who in movies like this are never wrong) is that Edward and his family are vampires. That doesn't stop Bella from falling into a love whose toxicity is its lure, just as Edward is risking being with someone he's severely tempted to devour. Her nearness is like vampire heroin; his love for her has become his religion and his sin. Edward knows he should just say no, but, as he tells her, "I don't have the strength to stay away from you anymore...
...days of playground tag. Melodrama comes so naturally: friendships dissolve into feuds, rivalries ripen, parents are useless, nothing goes according to plan, temptation is everywhere. These stories throw all that normal teenage drama into such high relief that the picture is suddenly clearer. The stakes in Edward and Bella's world really are life or death; if things go wrong, your heart could get broken - or your veins opened. Loyalty may require risking your life; betrayal could cost it. Self-restraint takes superhuman control. It's exhausting but cathartic to take one's own first experience of love or jealousy...
...concede that there are times I wish Bella were a bit more Buffy, slaying vampires and not just falling for them. Edward's gallantry is noble, but you wish Bella didn't need to be saved all the time, that she were less clumsy or prone to fainting. But in these days of supergirls, when our daughters seem to be confident and competent in ways I couldn't have fathomed at 14, I'm not so worried about some embedded antifeminist message. I watched way more TV growing up than my kids do and read more junk and seem...