New Moon

“They were all waiting in the huge white living room; when I walked through the door, they greeted me with a loud chorus of ‘Happy birthday, Bella!’ while I blushed and looked down. Alice, I assumed, had covered every flat surface with pink candles and dozens of crystal bowls filled with hundreds of roses. There was a table with a white cloth draped over it next to Edward’s grand piano, holding a pink birthday cake, more roses, a stack of glass plates, and a small pile of silver-wrapped presents. It was a hundred times worse than I’d imagined.”

Bella loves her friends, the Cullens, but she hates the idea of getting older while they stay young forever as vampires. She tries and fails to downplay her 18th birthday because it reminds her of her mortality. The Cullens are delighted to throw a party for Bella, who has meant so much to their member Edward. Led by the ever-cheerful Alice, who loves festivities, they have pulled out all the stops to fete her. Bella, shy and self-abnegating to begin with, is overwhelmed with all the attention. She’s in the ironic position of having to act happy in front of people she loves at a party she wants nothing to do with.

“I started to worry that I was traveling in a circle, a very small circle at that, but I kept going. I stumbled often, and, as it grew darker and darker, I fell often, too.”

Describing her futile search in the forest for her beloved Edward, who’s long gone, Bella also describes her state of mind as it swirls down into the black hole of depression. She’s completely unable to find a useful path ahead of her and wanders instead around her own sadness until it reaches up, catches her, and pulls her in.

“Tonight the sky was utterly black. Perhaps there was no moon tonight—a lunar eclipse, a new moon. A new moon. I shivered, though I wasn’t cold.”

For Bella, the stars and planets line up to form a horribly bleak combination, a harbinger of doom. A new moon is when the sky is at its darkest, with no light shining from the body that orbits Bella’s world.