Bella is a smart, precocious, yet quite clumsy seventeen-year-old girl who spent her life in Phoenix with her mother until recently. She moves to cold, rainy Forks to live with her father for the first time. Here she meets and falls in love with Edward Cullen, a teenage vampire. Some of her qualities, like being pale and claiming to be able to smell human blood, make her seem like a vampire herself, but her human mortality is a constant theme in her relationship with Edward.