A Literate Adult's Return to the Valley of Twilight, Part Seven: There’s no crying in vampire baseball, though there ARE super awkward conversations about infant death and attempted suicide.

Read Part One here, Part Two here, and Part Three here, and Part Four here, Part Five here, and Part Six here.

My childhood included many trips to Jacobs Field to see the Cleveland Indians play. Though I didn’t realize until later how offensive that team’s name and mascot must be to Native Americans (sorry, Jacob), it took me very little time to figure out that baseball is a boring-assed sport. The players spend the vast majority of the game just standing around and occasionally spitting. 

I’ve always preferred sports that involve a lot of movement, like soccer and basketball. I would have assumed that with their crazy speed, vampires would share my preference for exciting sports. I would have even understood if they loved touch football—that way they could tackle each other with their awesome strength. But baseball? Really?

(My apologies to anyone who really likes baseball. It is, as Edward pointed out, the American pastime.)

A few hours before baseball adventures are due to commence, Edward drops Bella off at home. They arrive to find Jacob and his father, Billy, waiting. If there’s one thing I appreciate about Twilight, it’s that Jacob is barely in it. He obviously likes Bella but Twilight is the Edward and Bella show—it’s not until later books that Jacob starts acting like this:

Shirtless, always shirtless.

Edward calls Jacob a child before he leaves, and reminds us all of what a creepster he is:

I bridled a little at the word child. “Jacob is not that much younger than I am,” I reminded him.

… “Oh I know,” he assured me with a grin.

Is this supposed to be charming? Because it sounds like an admission of pedophilia to me.

Once Bella gets rid of Jacob and Billy, she takes a minute to ignore one of her human friends. Jessica calls to talk to Bella about the dance that she missed:

“It was so much fun!” Jessica gushed. Needing no more invitation than that, she launched into a minute-by-the-minute account of the previous night. I mmm’d and ahh’d at the right places, but it wasn’t easy to concentrate. Jessica, Mike, the dance, school—they all seemed strangely irrelevant at the moment.

Oh, Bella. Don’t pretend that you’ve ever found your human friends to be relevant. You’ve never given a shit about them.

After a “Spanish Inquisition” which consists of Charlie asking perfectly normal parent questions like when Edward is coming over and where he will be taking Bella, Edward and Bella head to a clearing to play some vamp ball. On the way Bella tries to make out with Edward. This bugs Edward because making out makes him want to bang kill Bella and premarital sex murder is wrong.

Bella accuses him of being mad and Edward says he’s not (even though he totally is), and this is how Bella responds:

“Then why?” I whispered, remembering the black moods that pulled him away from me, that I’d always interpreted as well-justified frustration—frustration at my weakness, my slowness, my unruly human reactions…

If I read this out-of-context, I would think it came from an issue book about battered women, and that by the end the heroine would rightly realize that the guy she’s with is an abusive fuckbag. That book sounds way better than this one. I wish I were reading that book.

A tip to my ladies: Don’t be like Bella. If the guy you like acts like a dick to you, it’s not because he’s justifiably frustrated by how weak or stupid you are. It’s because he’s a dick.

The American Vampire Pastime commences and Edward’s vampire mother, Esme, and Bella have a bizarre conversation while they watch the game:

“Well, I do think of them as my children in most ways. I never could get over my mothering instincts—did Edward tell you I had lost a child?”

“No,” I murmured…

“Yes, my first and only baby. He died just a few days after he was born, the poor tiny thing,” she sighed. “It broke my heart—that’s why I jumped off the cliff, you know,” she added matter-of-factly.

“Edward just said you f-fell,” I stammered.

“Always the gentleman.”

This is, like, Bella’s second conversation with Esme EVER. They met earlier that day. Imagine that you’re at a barbecue with your new boyfriend’s family. This is your first time meeting them and so you are nervous. This is also the first boyfriend you’ve ever had, and you really like him, so you really, really want to make a good impression. Things seem to be going well when suddenly your boyfriend’s mom is like, “By the way, I lost a baby once and then I tried to kill myself. Aren’t these burgers delicious?” The fuck would you say to that?

There’s honestly not a whole lot to be said about the baseball game itself. Two reasons are given for why these vampires love playing baseball during storms. One is how noisy it is when the vampires hit the ball:

The crack of impact was shattering, thunderous; it echoes off the mountains—I immediately understood the necessity of the thunderstorm.

That’s ridiculous. A bat hitting a baseball would just never be loud enough. The ball would break first. And as I mentioned earlier, there are plenty of better, more fun sports for the Cullens to choose from that don’t include hitting balls with bats.

Reason two:

Carlisle ran into the ball, and then raced Jasper to first base. When they collided, the sound was like the crash of two massive falling boulders.

Am I alone in the fact that I have no idea what two huge boulders crashing together would sound like? Because I really don’t. I tried to find a sound effect on the interwebs and found this, which I find hilarious for whatever reason:

Read Part Eight here.