Infinite Bliss || Volturi Kings

|17| GRADUATION

Eliana didn't do parties, really, or any kind of social events for that matter. Hence that week she spent at the Cullen household couldn't have gone by much slower.

Since she had nowhere else to go, that seemed to give Alice the perfect excuse to drag her out dress shopping just two days before the graduation party. No matter how much she insisted that she didn't need a dress, reasoning with someone with a willpower like Alice's was just not worth it.

They'd gotten through dozens of dresses in the 2 hours they spent in that store, all of which were either tacky and instantly discarded by Alice, not Eliana's thing, or just plain awful. By the end, once Eliana was simply far too tired to argue, she agreed on the next dress that was handed her way, a mid-thigh length short-sleeved baby blue dress with a floral print, fitted snugly around her bust. It wasn't terrible, at least, and she'd managed to reason Alice out of making her wear any kind of heels, so all-in-all things could've gone plenty worse.

It was to the point where the only positive aspect of the whole trip seemed to be that she was getting far better at Wii Sports than she used to be. Obviously, playing any kind of video game against people with reflexes ten times better than a human's was never going to be fair, but at least she wasn't consistently losing quite as badly as previously.

The morning of the graduation, she had no idea that it was the morning of the graduation, or what day it was at all for that matter. She'd somehow allowed herself to stay awake until 5am playing Wii Sports Resort with Jasper, and she was pretty sure that her motivation from that was mostly him manipulating her emotions to keep her excited to play.

"Eli, if I have to tell you to wake up one more time, I'm not gonna be happy."

Alice yanked her curtains open as far as they would go in one clean swipe. All Eliana did was groan and pull the covers over her head.

"Why?" she muttered, knowing that she'd be able to hear her anyway.

"Because it's graduation day! Now I have to take this," She heard her lift up what sounded like a box, "to Bella, so go and get ready. I can't wait to see the dress on you!"

Eliana couldn't exactly say she was listening for the last half of her sentence. She'd completely dozed off again, only waking up properly when it was about 10 o'clock in the morning. She was pretty certain that they'd be leaving for the graduation at literally any moment, so she very reluctantly rolled out of bed and got herself ready.

By the time she was down the stairs, yawning as she went but being mindful to not smudge her makeup, everyone else was already completely ready to go. It seemed that she'd walked in on Alice, Jasper, and Edward having their photos taken, but acting as though she hadn't seen them in the first place, she made a beeline for the kitchen and grabbed a brioche roll.

Edward stopped by her on his way out of the house. "Nice dress," he commented. "Did Alice get to you?"

Eliana simply nodded and took another bite out of her brioche. "Unfortunately," she replied, covering her hand with her mouth to avoid spewing out any crumbs as she spoke.

"I heard that!" Alice snapped from the other room.

She stared tiredly in the direction her voice had come from. "Good."

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Since Eliana was still fairly delirious throughout the graduation ceremony too, she found herself mostly zoning out through the entire thing. The sheer boredom of it really didn't help, what with tedious speech after tedious speech, followed by each and every name being called out one by one.