Still In Bloom ↠ Twilight ✓

33 ; shelby mcatee

At eighteen, Shelby McAtee knew that without a doubt, she would never be a teenager again.

Maybe it was looking into Wallace's ten-year-old eyes that settled that for her. The blue eyes that matched her own that had made her grief over her youth feel so minuscule. After all, who else would Wallace have if their only sane parent was in a body bag?

Daniel couldn't have been trusted and surely not their father from his jail cell. So Shelby had stepped up, as not only the remaining McAtee woman but also the only stable one left. Not once, even when she had struggled to keep the lights on, had she regretted her choice in choosing Wallace and forsaking all the other things teenagers her age had been getting into.

Shelby had watched as her younger brother had grown into a man before her. Yet there was something about Wallace's eyes that always brought Shelby back to that night. The night in which they had stayed in a hotel. The two of them walking into a hotel lobby, their mother's purse hanging off Shelby's shoulder as she watched the receptionist use her dead mother's credit card to pay for their room.

It was the first time either of them had stayed the night at a place that wasn't their childhood home. Shelby is sure Wallace doesn't even remember that night. As he had fallen asleep the moment Shelby had tucked him into the hotel bedsheets. But Shelby, she remembers that day like it was yesterday.

The loneliness that had encroached on her soul as she had cried into her palm in the clean hotel bathroom. Trying to muffle her sobs in order to not wake her younger brother, who had had to wear one of her old oversized shirts to bed because the one he had been wearing at the house had been covered with blood. The police had taken that quickly, much to Wallace's mortification and Daniel's indignation.

That night, Shelby had no clue where Daniel even was. She theorizes that the night their mother had died, was the same night Daniel had started using. She'll always blame herself for not following after him into the night when he had left, the red and blue lights reflecting on his tear-streaked cheeks. Shelby also knows she'll never forgive him for it either. As sick as that sounds.

For years, Shelby had kept Wallace in motion. Trying to overcompensate for their parent's two-person void with her single presence. And that's why Shelby supposes, seeing Wallace so still is making her feel more lonely than anyone else in the Cullen home.

"We theorize he'll finish his change in a couple of days," The bell-toned Cullen states. Alice, her name is Alice, Shelby chides herself mentally.

Turning her gaze away from her brother, where he lays on a delivery bed beside the likes of Bella Swan, Shelby meets the other female's gaze. Noting the way that Alice walks like she's on the runway and Shelby supposes that's easy to convey since the brunette looks like she's never eaten a day in her life. Unlike Shelby who can put back twelve Twinkies without breathing but pays for it severely when she grabs her love-handles in the mirror a few days later.

"Change," Shelby echoes, biting her thumbnail which is pinched in between her teeth.

"Only the physical of course," Alice soothes like that's supposed to help in some way.

Shelby clenches her jaw, wanting nothing more than to spin on her heels and let Alice have it but instead she swallows the anger. Not even letting it show on her face as she works to keep her expression placid like a lake.

She isn't like her brother in that regard, Shelby hides her anger internally.

"When he...when he awakens or whatever, he'll have to eat right?" Shelby asks, pushing a blonde hair behind her ear as she turns fully towards Alice. Whom of which seems to have come into the room in an attempt to soothe the only human remaining in the house.