Previously: New vampires in town, so new offensive stereotypes too!
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Annie: This chapter opens with Bella on the phone, reminding her father that they’re on a need-to-know basis and that it just isn’t a good time for Charlie to come visit the Cullens right now. Because the house is full of vampires that would see Charlie as lunch. But Charlie doesn’t need to know that. (M: I, too, generally do not like to know if I’m going to be murdered.)
Bella asks if she can bring the toddlerbaby to see Charlie and he thinks that’s fine as long as they come in the morning. Sue’s bringing him lunch, because apparently, this adult human man who has lived on his own most of his life, can’t manage to feed himself.
K: Also, because we gotta keep those female characters in the kitchen where they belong.
Annie: Charlie asks if Jacob will be coming with Bella and R, because apparently Charlie’s picked up on that disgusting mess:
“Though Charlie didn’t know anything about werewolf imprinting, no one could be oblivious to the attachment between Jacob and Renesmee.”
LOL, it’s cute that Meyer is now trying to sell this as a mutual thing, that there is attachment on both sides. Forced attachment, maybe. She’s a toddlerbaby. She can’t make these kinds of decisions. Ew, gross, no.
Annie: Charlie wonders about inviting Billy, but then decides against it as there is clearly some kind of shit going down between the two of them. Bella gives zero fucks about her father’s worries, and she’s only half paying attention to what he’s saying anyway, because he’s not Edward and she has more important things to obsess about.
We get a paragraph about how Bella is using this as an excuse to leave the house, but that it wasn’t her real reason for leaving.
We’re left in suspense about her real reason (K: Let’s be real – do we even care??) (M: decidedly not), because Jacob is complaining that Bella isn’t driving her fancy ‘after’ car, a Ferrari that she wasn’t excited about. Her ‘after’ car is pretty and fast, but Bella likes to run. That part is inexplicably in italics.
Okay.
1- ‘After’ car? Gross. That sounds like some weird, creepy-ass version of a push gift (Which is a weird practice in itself): The fancy gift Edward gave Bella for dying in childbirth and being turned into a vampire.
2- Is pretty and fast the new Wow. Free. Truck?
Mari: It can never be.
Annie: Fun fact: While googling all things Twilight, I discovered that Wow. Free. Truck was so popular it was memorialized in toy model form. Don’t believe me?
Bam:
RIP, Truck.
Annie: Anyway. They’re going to take Edward’s Volvo, because it is less conspicuous than Pretty and Fast Ferrari. Jacob gets into the passenger seat and toddlerbaby climbs into his lap. NO THANK YOU PLEASE. I don’t need the toddlerbaby on or near Jacob. It’s just getting to be too much.
K: Also, IF SHE LOOKS LIKE A FUCKING BABY, PUT HER IN A BABY SEAT WITH AN ACTUAL SEATBELT SO THAT YOUR OWN FATHER DOESN’T ARREST YOU FOR CHILD ENDANGERMENT.
Annie: Bella asks Jacob how he’s doing, and he complains about the smelly vampires, especially the weird Romanian ones with weird skin. Bella agrees that she finds the vampires from Romania creepy, but that R finds them fascinating, so much so that she tries to talk to them! Using real words, not the creepy toddlerbaby picture show, because they won’t let her touch them.
Renesmee wanted them to explain their weird skin, and Bella was worried they’d be offended by the question, but glad R could get away with asking it cuz she was curious and racist, too. Vladimir told R that they basically cosplayed as statues and that he’s excited about the possibility of gouging out the Volturi’s eyes.
Bella decided to try to keep Renesmee from them after that. (K: Nah. Let her hang with them. Maybe then she’ll become a proper vampire who’s legit scary.) Sure, Bella needs to protect her kid from the intense vampires, but the grown-ass man that is in love with her toddler? Totally cool with that to the point where she lets her toddler sit on that grown-ass man’s lap.
Okay.
Jacob asks Bella how long they’ll be visiting with Charlie for and she tells him that it will be a long visit. Jake wants to know more, but Bella, while driving, somehow manages to nod and ‘cut’ her eyes towards Renesmee to tell Jacob she doesn’t want to talk in front of the kid.
Jacob spends the rest of the car ride thinking about what Bella has said. Bella knows this thanks to her cheater narration. (M: *screeches*) Her contact lenses are bugging her, but she has to wear them to hide her vampire eyes from Charlie. These are the details that I do not care about. But here they are. Taking up our time.
Thanks to Bella’s cheater narration, we know that Jacob is still thinking about their super brief conversation as they get to Charlie’s. Charlie’s excited to see them and lectures Bella about how skinny Renesmee is in true grandparent-fashion. Bella greets Sue, and then we get a list of all the things that Bella can smell. Which includes tomatoes and also packing dust? IDK.
Charlie asks about Edward’s whereabouts. Jacob says he’s entertaining guests and Bella punches him in the kidneys? Because that’s not at all dangerous when you have super-vamp-strength. Maybe she’s not so cool with him wife-ing her toddler after all.
Mari: Nah, she’s more concerned with him outing her husband, don’t be silly.
Annie: Bella explains that she has some errands to do, and Charlie helpfully provides her with an excuse by asking if she still needs to finish her Christmas shopping. Sue calls that lunch is served, so Bella heads out on her mystery errands, leaving Jacob to have a nice lunch with his child-bride and his future grandfather-in-law. Awesome.
K: My favourite part of this is that Bella has literally forgotten that Christmas is a thing. Charlie’s all “You only have a few more days!” and she’s all “Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight. Christmas. I remember that…” Girl. You’ve been a vampire for like 5 minutes.
Mari: And you have a super fast special brain.
Annie: Bella gets in her car and drives. The roads are slippery and it’s dark, but the fact that she’s a vampire means she doesn’t have to worry about driving safely anymore? IDK. (M: Bitch, you forgot Christmas was a thing. Pay attention.) She doesn’t even pay attention to what she’s doing and is only worried about making sure she isn’t driving too fast to draw attention to herself. Mainly, she just wants to get back to the vampire house and keep practicing how to use her shield of contrivance and how to kill vampires.
K: She talks about how anger is a great way of using her shield. If I had a shield, I’d be able to protect the entire planet just by thinking about this book.
Annie: Bella describes how she’s getting better at using her shield for a few paragraphs, and then moves on to talking about how she’s memorized all the maps for her mystery mission.
She had no problem finding the address for J. Jenks that she couldn’t find online? More proof this book was set in the ’90s.
The neighbourhood is dodgy, and apparently the buildings are all leaning and are homes converted into apartments, with the most random of businesses in the lower half of these homes. A bar, a psychic supply store, a tattoo parlour and a daycare. It’s really interesting to see what Stephenie’s idea of a rundown, dodgy, low-income neighbourhood looks like. And by ‘interesting’ I mean confusing.
Bella parks in front of a boarded up law office, where a man is sitting on the front porch reading a wet newspaper and whistling cheerfully. (M: Hokay…)
The whistling man is on the porch of the address Bella was looking for, but she doesn’t want any witnesses so she has to think about what to do. The whistler calls out to Bella, so she’s failed the ‘don’t get noticed’ part of her plan. Bella rolls down her window, even though she heard him, because a human with regular old hearing wouldn’t be able to have heard him. Or something.
The whistler puts his soggy paper down and Bella is surprised by how well dressed he is? Apparently guys who sit on porches whistling and reading soggy papers are supposed to dress like hobos from the 1920s? IDK, guys. IDK.
Bella decides that maybe this whistling guy could answer her questions, so she gets out of her car and walks towards the guy. She can hear his heart racing and hard-swallowing as he sees her coming towards him. I don’t know if his reaction to her is because she’s a vampire or because she’s perfect and beautiful and I hate everything.
Mari: At least it isn’t PLUM.
Annie: Bella says she’s looking for someone named J. Jenks. The whistling man is not J. Jenks but he does know J and tells Bella that she doesn’t look like his usual customer. Bella agrees that’s probably true, but she still needs to find him. The whistling guy, whose name is Max, explains that J’s customers that look like her would meet him at his other, fancy, office in the skyscraper. Bella explains that she was given this address for J. This is tedious at best.
Max tells Bella that she must not be up to any good if she’s coming to this location. Bella tries another tactic, asking if he’s ever seen anyone like her before. She tells Max that her sister is shorter than she is, with short hair, and she takes off her sunglasses to let him see her eyes.
Bella gets Max to call J for her and see if he recognizes her or her last name. Max calls J, and he asks Max to describe Bella. I swear this is only a thing so Stephenie can tell us how hot and perfect and attractive Bella is now. Bella’s super vamp-hearing lets her hear both sides of the phone conversation, so she can hear that J is having none of this. J is about to end the call when Bella reminds Max to mention her name to J.
When J hears that Bella is a Cullen and pale and beautiful, he is suddenly interested. Max gets off the phone. Apparently Bella is a priority client, but she didn’t know that. They share some pointless and tedious ‘banter’ where Max tries to guess what crime business Bella is in. Max gives Bella a new address.
Mari: Does J hire a guy to read a soggy paper on his porch and direct his clientele? I’m confused.
Annie: Bella arrives at J’s other office, where we find out he’s a lawyer and his name is Jason Scott. Bella greets his receptionist, who she calls ‘blandly pretty’. Bella says she’s there to see Jason, but she doesn’t have an appointment. The blandly pretty receptionist tells Bella she’s going to have to wait a while, then.
Jason shouts through the phone intercom that he’s expecting a Ms Cullen and that she should be brought right in as soon as she arrives. Bella indicates that she is Ms Cullen, so BP receptionist, whose name is April, ushers Bella right into the office. The lawyer, AKA J. Jenks, AKA Jason Scott, is described as a mid-50-year old wearing what sounds like a really ugly suit of a red tie, white and blue striped shirt and a navy blazer.
K: I’m now picturing him as Buddy Garrity from Friday Night Lights.
Annie: He’s nervous to meet Bella, to the point where he defers to her about what name to call him. They settle on J and he asks if Bella is Jasper’s wife. Bella explains that she’s his sister-in-law, and he’s currently on vacation.
J asks Bella what he can help her with, and she says papers. That seems to have been the magic word and J asks her whether she needs birth certificates, death certificates, social security numbers, driver’s licenses and passports.
Bella figures that if Alice has sent her to J that probably means that Renesmee will be on the run, and if she’s on the run and in need of documents like forged passports, that means that Edward and Bella are probably not with her. Which means they lost. But because Renesmee was able to run, that must have at least meant that they had a good shot at killing Dimitri. So Bella was going to have to leave Renesmee to someone, and it wasn’t going to be Charlie, because he was a stupid weak human who shouldn’t be anywhere near the vampire fight, so OF FUCKING COURSE it has to be Jacob.
Bella thought all of that so quickly with her fancy vampire brain that J didn’t notice a pause or hesitation in their conversation.
How fucking stupid is that?
K: Also, I hate that just as tension was FINALLY starting to build in this 700 page monstrosity (on page 625, I should add), we stop in the middle of everything to have Bella go and look into getting fake IDs. Like…….W.H.Y.
Mari: She literally takes us to TWO LOCATIONS for fake IDs. And would a lawyer be in the business of fake IDs? Why is that his side-hustle, with his fancy skyscraper office?
Annie: Bella tells J that she needs 2 passports, 2 birth certificates and a driver’s license. She picks Jacob and Vanessa Wolfe (K: -_____-), a man of 27 and a child of 5. She picks Wolfe because she thinks Jacob will get a kick out of it, and Vanessa, because it’s completely believable that Nessie could be short for Vanessa and OMG why isn’t this fucking chapter over yet?
J tells Bella that he will need photos to finish the documents, and Bella gives him the photo of Jacob and Renesmee that she had in her wallet from Alice. So, awesome. Alice’s plan was also to leave R with Jacob, the pedo-wolf.
J comments that Bella’s daughter looks a lot like her. Bella isn’t happy that J’s made the connection, and she tells J that her daughter takes more after her father. J comments that the man in the photo is not Renesmee’s father. lol, no, that’s her future husband, dude.
Bella isn’t happy and says he’s a close family friend. J apologizes and asks when she’ll need the documents. Bella says she’ll need them in a week and J explains that’s a rush order and will cost a heap of money, before apologizing again when he remembers Bella is a VIP, magic, perfect Cullen so money isn’t an issue.
J writes the amount on a legal pad, because for some reason, despite all the other useless details Stephenie Meyer gives us, the amount J is charging for these forged documents has to be kept secret from her readers.
K: Probably because it required actual research and that seemed too much like hard work??
Mari: Honestly, at this point Meyer could’ve written that it would cost 15 blue bananas and her apologists would’ve been like “yes, beautiful, makes total sense, blue bananas, I love it, give me more.”
Annie: Bella has thousands of dollars in her person, paper clipped in $5K amounts. She counts out the money and gives it to J. He explains she doesn’t have to pay all now, but Bella says she trusts him and will pay him the same as a bonus when he delivers on the documents.
They agree to meet in a week’s time at a restaurant. Bella shakes J’s hand as she goes to leave and notices (through cheater narration) that he has something he’d like to say or is nervous about. Bella asks if he won’t be able to meet their deadline, but J assures her he will.
Bella wishes Edward was there with her, because she can’t function without his perfectness there, but she’s got to keep this secret from Edward so he won’t give it away to the Volturi. She tells J she’ll see him in a week and OMG, this chapter is finally over.
K: And what a pointless chapter it was.
Mari: Are you kidding? We learned so much about how a vampire would get a fake I.D.! All that’s left now is to go cry and cry and cry.
Next time on Breaking Dawn: Christmas in Chapter 34.
I'm a 30-something south Floridan who loves the beach but cannot swim. Such is my life, full of small contradictions and little trivialities. My main life goals are never to take life too seriously, but to do everything I attempt seriously well. After that, my life goals devolve into things like not wearing pants and eating all of the Zebra Cakes in the world. THE WORLD.
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I am a 30-something year-old human woman who lives in Maine. I'm a freelance writer who mostly spends time that I should be doing that, watching T.V. I also love reading and comic books way too much.
I'm a 30-something librarian and I still live with my parents because I'm super broke. Leader of Team Heartless Cow. I have an inexplicable love for 90s television, eat too much chocolate, and read more than is good for me.