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CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: SUN IN ECLIPSE
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THERE WAS A NEW girl in town. Actually, correction, there was a whole new family in town, and everyone was eager to catch a glimpse of them, to see who on Earth had decided to move to La Push of all places.
It was safe to say their tiny community didn't often see new faces...
Which meant that everywhere Maggie went, the Cooper-Songs were the hot topic of conversation. The only topic on some days. The grocery store, school, even in her own home. In a non-creep kind of way, Maggie felt like she already knew everything there was to know about them, even the things they didn't necessarily want out there...
The patriarch was a man named James Cooper -- which, admittedly, unsettled Maggie at first. But everyone praised the man without even really knowing him, so she supposed that had to count for something. He was the new history teacher at the local middle school, which fellow teachers such as Wren appreciated. He also enjoyed hiking on the weekends with his youngest daughter, and was an all-round nice guy.
Maggie didn't know how the rumour-mill figured this out when the man hadn't even left his house yet, but you know what they say; the devil worked hard but middle-aged small-town mums with nothing better to do with their lives worked harder.
As for the matriarch, her name was Kira Song, a high-class name for a high-class lawyer working in a firm based in Port Angeles. According to Vera, who heard it from a friend of a friend of a friend, Kira and James had gotten married just a few years ago. Their unification was joyful for the most part... kind of. There was always one who had to be the black sheep, right? And for this particular family, their black sheep happened to be James' eldest daughter...
Allison Cooper. Almost twenty-one, away at college studying criminology, Allison was the rebellious child who skipped out on her dad and younger sister sometime after her mother died when she was a teenager. Now, according to Dakota, who had heard it from one of the regular middle-aged wine mums who frequented the diner she worked at, Allison had since patched up her relationship with her family, but things were still kind of... rocky, especially since her dad had remarried so soon. Hence why she wasn't in Washington, and everyone else was.
Next came Maeve, who was the most interesting of the elusive family in Maggie's opinion. Going strictly by Mae ever since Allison dubbed her with the nickname as a kid, she was Maggie's age and set to start school any day now. According to Kim Conweller, who caught a glimpse of the girl out in the woods early one morning, she enjoyed hiking and painting, the perfect combination of her exercise-fanatic father and her artistic, go-with-the-flow mother. Unlike her sister, Mae liked her step-mother and step-sister well enough. Some would even say she was closer to her step-sister than she was to Allison, and they were blood. But of course, she would never admit it.
