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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.