Chapter 7

"You said that she hasn't always been like this," Liz said. "What was she like?" Alice had almost forgotten that she had said this out loud.

"She was happy. And she had a lot to be happy about. She had friends and family. She had a boyfriend who she loved more than anything and who loved her more than anything."

"Were you one of those friends?" Liz asked softly.

"Her best. She was like my sister, and I wanted to be sisters. We should have been sisters," Alice answered. Liz didn't understand. What did she mean by they should have been sisters?

She decided not to ask the question. "What happened to the boyfriend?" Liz asked instead. Alice looked at her hard before answering.

"He's sitting outside of your front door." She said without any emotion or inflection in her voice. "He's my brother."

"The guy that came to our door is your brother? And was Bella's boyfriend? What happened?" Liz asked, even more interested now than she was before. She now understood what Alice had meant when she said they should have been sisters.

"He left her. And it left both of them broken."

Liz thought about that for a moment. There was no way that a breakup could change someone so drastically. "There has to be more to it. I mean, they must have been in high school. High school relationships never last. How can a breakup be so devastating that it changes your entire life?" She thought out loud.

The hard look Alice had given Liz returned. "You may not understand, and you don't need to understand. They were in love. Think what you want, but that's that. She was a part of our family, and she lost us all. How do you think it would make you feel?"

"I don't know. I guess I am just trying to understand. Can you tell me more? I mean, for two years I've been trying to get to know this girl, and for two years I have been denied. You say that she was different, but in two years she hasn't changed once."

Alice looked away from Liz and turned her gaze back toward Bella's stirring body. Her once luminous hair now lay dull and lifeless against the pillow. The scars from self-inflicted wounds marked her arms, and her frail, thin body looked as if it could just disappear at any moment.

"She was beautiful. She still is beautiful, but she was even more so then. It wasn't due to any conventional standard of beauty, though she would not have been considered plain by human standards. It was her heart, her ability to put everyone else above herself. It was her adorable clumsiness and the ability she had to love those people who were never worthy of her love that made her beautiful." Alice knew that Liz could take what she wanted from that statement, but to her family, it meant something entirely different.

"Maybe that's why she loves Kevin then. Nobody else would, he's such a horrible person," Liz said in disgust. Though she didn't want to believe it, maybe Bella had some sort of masochistic issue she was dealing with.

"No. She doesn't love him. I don't know why she is with him, but I know that it's not because she loves him," Alice said firmly.

Liz contemplated this for a moment, wondering if it were true. After a few moments, though, she realized that it didn't matter. Bella and Kevin were over. And that wasn't due to any determination on Liz's part.

She saw the way Bella looked when she first saw her old friends. She saw the way they looked at her. And she had seen the utter despair on the face of the man at the door. Bella really did have a family. She really did have people who loved her.

No, she and Kevin were over. And, just maybe, Liz would finally know the Bella that she had always known existed.