reunion
twilight. alice and bella get ready for their high school reunion.
“Hold still.”
“What are you doing?”
“In what universe does fluttering your eyelashes constitute holding still?”
“Sorry, sorry.” A beat. “Are you sure this is okay?”
“Carlisle wasn’t worried.”
“But… what if they know?”
“I thought you’d known be long enough to have faith in my cosmetic skills, dearest Bella.”
Bella was careful not to make a comment disparaging the woman currently wielding a lethal-looking eyelash curler. But there was a reason she usually did her make-up - no matter how sporadically it was applied - by herself. She and Alice didn’t exactly see eye-to-eye on the line between ‘light brushing of mascara’ and eyelashes leaden down with gunk. Even her super-strength eyelids sometimes floundered under the weight of Alice-applied cosmetics. But Bella supposed this didn’t really count in the same sphere. She didn’t read fashion magazines but she had gathered that make-up was usually applied to make one look younger and more alluring; they had slightly different motives on this occasion.
“Why didn’t Rosalie and Em do this last year? They were in town.”
“Do you think Rosalie would have left the house looking anything but her best? I think she’d rip her face off if she ever found a wrinkle.”
They both heard the distinct sound of Rosalie huffing indignantly downstairs, rustling the pages of her magazine like a disgruntled cockatoo ruffles her feathers.
Alice and Bella shared an amused look in the mirror over the smoothed tresses of her wig. The brunette-turned-faux-graying-middle-aged-mom fingered the ends of the fairly convincing hair piece, rounding one tendril around her finger. Alice spun her around in the dressing chair once more, inspecting the strategic shading she’d filled in around her eyes, mouth. She actually looked almost forty. Alice nodded, pleased.
“You’ll do.”
Alice had already given the same aged treatment to her own face and when the sisters-in-law stood side by side facing the lighted mirror, Bella could almost believe it; that they were growing old, gracefully; that they would one day be white-haired and stiff-kneed and tilting over the arms of wing-backed chairs to just make out the tiny words of their grandchildren. The one chink in their illusion was their hands; Alice said there wasn’t much to make their fingers and palms show the years they’d lived. So their hands shone out, pale and unlined, from the sleeves of a thirty-eight year old that was finally wearing a face that matched the number.
“Twenty years,” Bella murmured, almost not believing it had been that long since she’d walked across that stage, wearing that hideous yellow gown, heart thumping nervously as she tried not to trip. “I feel old.”
Alice chuckled, briefly linking her arm around Bella’s waist before skipping over to the closet to pick out the perfect pair of ‘thirty-eight but still fashionable’ shoes. “Try celebrating your one-hundredth.”