The narrator, teenager Bella Swan, describes her terror and regret as a vampire smiles at her and moves in for the kill.

Bella says goodbye to her dear, “hair-brained” mother, Renée, and flies from Phoenix to Washington State. There, she’ll live with her father, Charlie Swan, police chief of Forks, a small town nestled in the cloudy, rainy forests of the Olympic Peninsula. Her annual visits to Forks are painful memories, and Bella doesn’t want to do this but feels she must.

Her dad meets her at the airport; on the drive to Forks, he informs her that he’s found her a cheap vehicle so she can get to high school and around town without being driven around in a police car. The vehicle is a 40-year-old red Chevy pickup that Charlie bought from a friend. Bella saved up for a transport, but Charlie tells her the truck is hers “as a homecoming gift” (7).

The scenery is beautiful and green, with moss-covered trees but wet from relentless rain. At Charlie’s house, her old bedroom is the same as she remembers, except now there’s a computer on the desk.

In the bathroom, she looks in the mirror: pale skin, slender-but-soft body, definitely not an athlete, especially because she’s so clumsy, and definitely not a people person.