On Sunday morning, Lilah prepared herself for her day out with Alice Cullen. She was excited, but nervous. The only person she'd really spent time with in such a capacity before was Morgan. She'd tried to have other friends, but the way she'd been brought up, so isolated and abused, had stunted her ability to have friends. To even know how to have friends.
Even after Phoebe adopted Lilah and made her feel comfortable, she found it hard to connect with those outside of her family. She wanted to do things for the other kids she liked. Teenagers found that weird. Teenagers also found it weird that she freaked out if they did the smallest of things, like offer to lend her a hair tie. Morgan had endlessly attempted to help her with connecting, and Morgan's help did make Lilah better at casual connections, and even dating as they moved to college age, but lasting connections didn't seem to work for Lilah.
So Alice Cullen wanting to be friends was scary. In the best kind of way, but scary nonetheless.
After being up and ready a full two hours before the planned pickup time, Lilah finally observed a now familiar Volvo pull into her driveway. It was Alice, picking her up for their planned day out, on Lilah's only day off. Lilah had said she would drive, and Alice responded by telling her that although she couldn't see her future, she could see the future of her car—and it wouldn't survive a trip to Port Angeles.
When Lilah tried to contest that, she realized that there wasn't a point. Alice was going to drive. It was not a hill that Lilah wanted to die on, so she gave in.
"Good morning!" Alice greeted as Lilah got into the passenger seat. She reached into the back and grabbed two fresh, still warm blueberry muffins that had expertly been wrapped in a silk napkin, and handed them to Lilah. "Emmett thinks he's a master chef since he baked for you on Friday, and made these for you this morning…don't get too worked up about it. He's baked enough to feed a few small armies. Esme and Carlisle have both taken his surplus into their offices, so nothing's going to waste."
Lilah unwrapped the muffins. She couldn't say they didn't smell and look absolutely delicious. She would try to swallow her pride, or stubbornness, whatever it was, and not have another panic attack over someone doing something nice for her.
"They're even better than his last batch," Lilah said. "Please tell him I said thank you."
"Of course," she said. "Try to be careful with the crumbs, please. This is Edward's car and he's a bit anal about keeping it clean."
With that, she threw the Volvo in reverse and floored it up Lilah's street, giving her whiplash and making her feel as though she was going to vomit. She didn't, thank god. She could only imagine what Edward would've thought about her vomiting in his immaculate vehicle.
"Sorry," Alice said, grinning at the witch out of the corner of her eye. "I forgot to warn you that we drive fast."
"Is that some secret vampire thing…?" she asked. She wracked her brain, trying to think how Constance drove. She came up empty. She'd never seen Constance drive, not once.
"At least in the Cullen family," Alice said.
There was some not of pride in her voice. One that faded as she got a good look at what Lilah was wearing: jeans that she'd patched at the knees with mismatched pieces of fabric, and a warm reddish-orange sweater with a purple turtleneck on beneath. She had her Chuck Taylors on her feet and different socks on each foot. One was rainbow striped, the other was floral patterned.
It was the kind of outfit Morgan had gotten used to, but one that appeared to be causing Alice Cullen a migraine. Of course it did. Her clothes were neutral, with clean silhouettes, perfectly tailored to her petite frame. Things that would look perfect on a runway or on an elegant celebrity. Things that looked great and beautiful on Alice, but would've felt like restraints on Lilah.
"We can go clothes shopping too, today, if you'd like. I'm practically an expert at makeovers."
"I can tell," Lilah said. She had committed to trying to be friends with Alice. She knew that her words had come from a good place, too, so she was going to try to be measured and kind in her response. "And I appreciate it, but I really do like the way I dress. I don't think I need to change it."
Alice turned the Volvo and merged onto the highway. Lilah saw her nose scrunch ever so slightly.
"Lilah, you're so beautiful," Alice said. It was her way of trying to reason with her. "I can help you find clothes that match your beauty."
"Again, Alice, I appreciate that. But I'm perfectly happy with my clothes."
"But you could be happier with new clothes. You don't even have to think about it. I'll pick everything out for you! You can be my dress up doll for a couple of hours. It'll be fun!"
Fun. She wished Edward was there, to tell his sister just how much that idea sounded like Hell to Lilah. The last thing she wanted to do was be a dress up doll. She'd already been a doll without free will. She didn't want to go back to doing it again.
Alice frowned. Lilah drew a breath. She had learned from Morgan that friendship involved telling your friends about yourself, all of yourself. So she decided to. It was so new and foreign, talking to a new person—vampire—and making friends that it almost felt worse than if she'd vomited in the Volvo. But she did, for some yet unknown reason, want to be friends with Alice. She was kind, she'd been so friendly, and she was so eager to accept Lilah into her life that Lilah wanted to make an effort.
So she would try.
"You've heard that my father is a tyrant, right?"
Alice snorted dismissively. She'd undoubtedly heard worse than that. Understandably so.
"Well, for the first fifteen years of my life, I lived under his control. I mean, he controlled everything. Including how I dressed and how I wore my hair. I was only allowed to wear long dresses with long sleeves and long skirts, only in blue, black, grey, white, or brown. That was all I was going to be allowed to wear for the rest of my life. So now that I don't have that, and I can choose for myself, I choose to wear what makes me happy, and this is it. I appreciate your offer, really, but I had to wait so long for the chance to express myself with what I wore, that I'm not willing to budge on that now."
There was a long silence between the two, only the sound of the motor and the cars around them filling in the air. Lilah hadn't meant to upset Alice, but she could've sworn that she did.
Alice was, for lack of a better word, embarrassed. She felt like a jerk. It was her way of being affectionate, dressing people up and making them look fabulous. It was not Lilah's way of receiving love. She was so used to her own family and how they bent themselves to make her happy. She only then realized that it had been unfair for her to expect the same as Lilah.
Damn, she really was out of practice with friendship.
"Can I ask you a question about vampires?" Lilah asked.
Laughing, Alice nodded. She was grateful for the change of pace and that Lilah had not held her infraction against her.
"Of course."
"Do you remember much of your human life? Constance says she only really remembers the time right before her death, but she's not sure if that's because the way she died was so traumatic."
Lilah had decided to ask the hard question first. The one that Alice didn't know how to answer, not for herself.
In the spirit of friendship, she would try.
"Some of us do," Alice said. She saw Lilah glance at the dashboard. They were going well over a hundred now. "Carlisle says it tends to vary. He, Esme, and Jasper all have a fairly good memory of their human lives. Rosalie, Emmett, and Edward remember bits and pieces, enough to put their stories together, but not their entire pictures."
She had tried to skirt around giving her own answer, though she knew she wouldn't get away with it, not with Lilah. Unsurprisingly, Lilah called her out on it.
"What about you?"
Alice remained smiling, though it was obviously a much more strained smile.
"I don't remember anything."
She didn't need to say how much that bothered her. How much it ate her up inside. How desperately she wanted to know. How, at the same time, she knew that she might not like the answers, if she ever got them.
Lilah did something that Alice wouldn't have seen coming, even if she was able to see the future. Lilah reached out a hand and gave Alice a gentle pat on the shoulder, a quick, affectionate squeeze, and reeled back her hand as quickly as she'd reached it out. Alice froze, feeling the strange heat that emanated from Lilah. Having never touched a human in her immortal life, she was not used to such warmth.
She'd also never received such emotional warmth from someone outside of her family.
"I'm sorry."
"You don't have to be sorry," Alice said. "I know that I learn of my past and not feel any better. It could be a good thing I don't remember…I'm sure you wouldn't mind forgetting some of your past."
Lilah let the question stew in her mind, and then said, "I wouldn't want to forget."
Alice glanced at her. "You wouldn't?"
"No," Lilah said. She gazed out at the rain-soaked highway in front of them, neatly folding the now empty napkin in her lap. "If I didn't go through what I went through when I was a kid, I wouldn't appreciate what I have now nearly as much as I do. So I think that you deserve to know, even if it's bad. Because that's the worse that can happen. It could be bad, but at least you'd know, and you'd appreciate what you have now even more."
Alice laughed. It was a bright, beautiful, musical laugh. One that Lilah reciprocated.
Alice couldn't help but to laugh. After almost a century of being alive and fretting over her lost past, one human had helped ease her feelings about it with a couple of sentences. Sure, her family had said similar things before, but none of them had given her a reason for knowing a bad version of her past as Lilah had. When she brought up the question, they all stuck with the 'it's better to know regardless' answer. None of them had put a positive spin on it.
Probably because none of them ever had to. Not in the way Lilah had. She knew better than most how to deal with a traumatic past, how to make it as positive as one could.
The drive continued, and with Alice's speeding, the pair made it to Port Angeles in record time, about half of the time it would've taken the average driver. They started at the furniture store where nothing was quite catching Lilah's eye, and then stopped in a cute café so Lilah could get lunch. When Lilah asked her what would happen if she ate human food and Alice didn't have an answer, she indulged her new human friend by taking a bite of her BLT, and then immediately spitting it out in such a dramatic fashion that all of the other patrons stared. The two of them just laughed. It was nice.
After lunch, Alice talked Lilah into looking at clothes. She showed her a small hippie boutique on the next street over, one that Alice had seen countless times before, but never gone into for herself. Lilah's face lit up as she saw the tie dye and rainbow clothing in the window, and though Alice thought all of the clothing was atrocious, it was hard for her not to enjoy herself, seeing Lilah so happy to try on all of the colorful, mismatched outfits. She picked out the most hideous green pinafore off the rack, one that made Alice want to keel over. Somehow, though, the article of clothing looked great on Lilah—it brought out the intensity of her hazel eyes and hugged her curvy body in all of the right places, and Alice would not allow Lilah to leave without buying it for her.
"You can pay me back when you start working on the gardens at our house," Alice said, smiling brightly at Lilah as they exited the store, the pinafore in a recycled paper bag. "Esme hasn't had time to do it, I can't keep plants alive, and no one else has cared enough to bother…but you can work your magic on the garden, can't you?"
Lilah nodded. She grabbed the bag out of Alice's small hands. She already felt guilty enough about her buying something for her, she didn't need to carry the bag as well.
"I can."
Victorious, Alice laughed, and the two bounced back toward the Volvo.
"And then, after we're even this time, maybe you'll realize that friendship isn't transactional."
Fat chance, Lilah thought, though she only said, "Maybe."
Stopping in her tracks, Alice stood right in front of Lilah, forcing her to stop as well.
"I know we're both working on having friends outside of our family," Alice said. "But I'd like to learn together. If you'd like that, of course."
Lilah felt like a little girl meeting a new friend on the playground. A typical childhood experience she was never allowed. She thought of Morgan, too, who would be so proud of her for having a friend who wasn't her sister.
"Of course."