❝later that night, i held an atlas in my lap, ran my fingers across the whole world and whispered 'where does it hurt?' it answered 'everywhere, everywhere, everywhere.'❞
the twilight saga / embry call
eclipse ― breaking dawn pt 1
...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
CHAPTER SIX: HIDDEN SKELETONS
■■ ■ ■ ■
"HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO YOU! Happy birthday to you! Happy birthday, dear Allison. Happy birthday to you!"
At that, Mae burst into hushed cheers, grinning as Allison's face grimaced across her computer screen, a slight delay blurring her features. It was another early morning in Washington, and Mae was sitting in the living room this time, FRIENDS playing low on the television as she reached out to her sister for her birthday.
Allison Cooper was twenty-two-years-old to Mae's sixteen almost seventeen years. James and their biological mum, Imogen, had Allison when they met in college. The same college that Allison had chosen for a degree in criminology. They decided it was best to stay together for her and later Mae's sake, and lived a seemingly happy existence alongside each other as more platonic companions than lovers.
Then, Mae turned ten. Just after her birthday, Imogen came down with a cold, a cold that soon transformed into so much more. Cancer took her in just under a year, and by the time Mae turned eleven and Allison sixteen, their mum hadn't been with them for months. It broke young Mae's heart. Eleven-years-old with a lot to learn about the world, she didn't understand the severity of visiting a sickly Imogen Carter in the hospital, not like Allison did. But unlike Mae, Allison swallowed her grief whole and kept it locked up inside her never to be seen again. The moment she turned eighteen, she applied for college and deferred for a year, disappearing onto the open road for several months with nothing but the occasional postcard in the mail for her father and sister to know that she was safe. Several months went by before she showed up on Mae's fourteenth birthday as if nothing had changed, as if there wasn't an undeniable rift between her and her family, not to mention her dad's new fiancé and her future step-sister.
But somehow, despite the odds, things slowly went back to business as usual. Allison returned to college where the world of criminology waited for her. James and Kira Song got married (Allison even attended the ceremony without showing any outward resentment) and Mae found the companion she'd lost and never quite found again in Lina Song, Kira's only daughter who, despite being so different from Mae, was like her other half. Nevertheless, a tiny fragment of the tension lingered in her chest, kind of like a scar from a wound that didn't quite heal properly. She and Allison never spoke a word about her absence. Allison seemed happy enough when she came back, and James never chose to breach the topic with her, arguing that everyone faced loss in different ways. So Mae decided to leave it alone until so much time had passed and it seemed almost wrong to mention it, even though the words desperately needed to be said.
The Cooper family had more skeletons in their closet than people realised.
"Mae?" Allison's voice clucked through her computer speakers, amused but a tad impatient. "Mae, you with me?"
