This addition to the MLSELY extras has been rattling around in my head since November. I've worked on it in fits and starts since then, changing the perspective and tense and wrestling with Alice's thoughts until it felt right.

Though the first two Extra one-shots were all about Edward Aengus, this is a slice of Alice's story.

So here is Alice in high school.

This is wholly un-beta read. I'm feeling impatient and uncharacteristically confident in my proofreading skills. Please turn a blind eye to my typos, and feel free to send me a nice PM if you catch something glaring.

ALICE

I put my elbows on the desk in front of me and rest my head in my hands. I don't know what to do. Nothing I say works. Nothing I do works. Emmett is in college and can't help. He can't keep coming back here just to look out for his kid sister. That's my job now that Em is gone: look out for Bella. Be her buffer between her head and the rest of the world.

Why, why won't she just...socialize?

No, that isn't right. 'Won't' is not the case. Bella almost, almost can't. There is something within her that doesn't let her connect and relate to people like I do. Like Emmett does. The way our parents do. There are times when Bella just retreats back into her mind and stays there. She doesn't share it with me. With family, Bella is loving. Giving. She connects to us.

It is as though there must be a bond of blood for her to feel and react to someone.

This makes no sense to me. We are the same age. We are cousins in fact but sisters by bond and upbringing. I have been with Bella her whole life. There has been no trauma. No significant injury. Nothing to recover or hide from.

But she hides.

When we were little, she tried to blend in. When I had a sleep-over birthday party in fifth grade I invited every girl in our class.

Everyone came of course. There were only about twenty other girls. Of those twenty, Bella only talked to me and Angela Webber.

And barely Angela, at that.

Six years later and it is still only me and sometimes, on a social day, Angela.

Scratch that. Until yesterday on the bus ride home from Vancouver, it was just me and sometimes Angela. Jasper, it seems, is in the rotation now.

I know my cousin. I know that the boys in school have next to zero draw for her. Tyler asked her to the the Spring Dance in eighth grade and she ran from him and hid in the girl's bathroom. She let Mike kiss her under the bleachers our freshman year and hasn't spoken to him since. She watches no boy, reacts positively to no boy's attention. The entirety of the junior and senior classes know it: Bella Swan is frigid.

I asked her once if this bothered her. She shrugged and said it was true. "I have," she told me, "no interest in boys. I'm curious, but not enough to...to. I don't know. Lower my standards? Dabble in something that can't last because I already know it isn't what I want? I don't know how to put it into words, Alice, but there is something more waiting for me later. These boys seem like a waste of time."

Clearly the girl changed her mind.

No one told Jasper she is frigid and not willing to play with high school boys, I guess. Maybe he doesn't care because he is a year ahead of us. A senior can unfreeze the junior class' ice queen, right? You would think. But no one else has succeeded.

I dig the heels of my palms into my eyes until I can stop the tears by focusing on the pressure my hands are creating behind my eyes. It hurts, that Bella would choose Jasper. I've had my eye on him for ages. I was too shy in the face of her dismissal of our schoolmates to tell her I finally found someone who seriously catches my interest. I have no problem babbling on about who is cute or has good fashion sense. But to tell the girl who cares nothing for boys that I have crush? That my crush has moved past 'crush' stage and full-on into love-from-afar?

I couldn't, can't do it.

And now the ice queen has the only boy I actually care about feeling her up on the field trip bus while I, Alice, the girl who is in everything, knows everyone, sit alone in my own thoughts.

Fuck irony.

Irony is not poetic, or romantic, or karmic or any other "ic." It is a bitch.

For just a moment, for the first time in my life, I hate my cousin. I hate her for unknowingly intimidating me into silence when I should be comfortable talking to her as my sister and confidante. I hate her for accepting Jasper's advances. I hate her for indulging in curiosity about boys with him. I know my cousin, and I know that this will not be a relationship. This is not a crush or even love. It is curiosity, and if I know her she's been quietly thinking on who she finds worthy to learn with. I hate her for not telling me she was contemplating this.

I cry because I was too much a coward to talk to her the way I should have, as a sister, telling her my thoughts and crushes and hopes regarding him. I cry because obviously there is something about me that discouraged her from talking to me, too. I cry because what if this means I have forever lost my chance with him?

I had such a strong Feeling that we would be together. My Feelings are always right. Always.

Until yesterday's bus ride from Vancouver.

My fucking best friend, my sister, my cousin, has me doubting my infallible Feelings now.

It isn't working. The tears are leaking down my face no matter how hard I push the heels of my hand into my eyes. I am going to look like shit. I know my eyeliner and mascara and carefully shaded eyeshadow are smeared all over now.

I take a shaky breath.

Maybe this bit of high school normalcy is what my cousin needs.

Maybe a boy like Jasper is what it takes to get her to leave her head for at least a little while, and come participate in life like the rest of us.

I can do this.

I can love her even when she doesn't know she hurts me.

I can plaster a smile on my face and talk fashion, superficially talk about boys, join her in harassing Emmett.

I am Mary Alice Cullen, and if Jasper is what my cousin has been looking for, if he is what she needs, I will support her.

Family comes first.

Sisterhood before unrequited love.

I can do this.

She'd better be fucking happy with him.

That is the only way I can make this work.

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