CAPACITY FOR WONDER. | alex albon

viii. no family of mine

It would've been rare for everything to actually go to plan. They had gotten through security too easily, Lilia hadn't been stopped for liquids in her bag and Kamri managed to get through passport control all by herself for once. Juniper even managed to find their bags on the first rotation of the conveyer belt in baggage collection too.

They had even caught the first shuttle out of the airport, something unheard of for the sisters who always found themselves split up in the final shuttles of the day. Finding the villa their parents had booked out was as painless as it could've been too, the jumble of Juniper's Italian passing them through the front gates before, again, if she had any bags, she would've dropped them.

Her parents stood in front of the three of them, and the course of their reaction showed perfectly their train of thought - her mother's eyes creased into a smile as they graced over her two younger children, creases that loosened and turned impassive as her gaze settled on Juniper, her father acknowledging his oldest first, parting lips as his gaze faltered and his expression dared to, for once, reveal his emotions before he corrected to his usual stone-cold demeanor.

"Surprise!" Her mother filled the silence, "We had Isla fly us out here, remember her Juniper? You went to University with her before you lazed it and dropped out."

"Yeah, I saw Isla last month, she flew me back to France."

"You're living in France now? Monaco get too expensive?"

"There isn't an airport in Monaco, you have to fly into France."

"Ah. Why are you in Italy then?"

Juniper Maddox learned to lie to her mother at 7. She wasn't sure how many truths she had told her since then, especially when lies didn't lead to the kind of lectures that the truths would. So, yes, Juniper had done all of her homework and achieved the best grades in all her classes and no, there were no parents evenings at her school. She threw a truth in occasionally, she'd told her mother she was moving to Monaco, which was true to an extent. She wasn't ever there for very long and she still had her apartment in Watford, as well as being located in multiple places in Europe all at once -- because she told nobody nothing, it all depended on who you asked where Juniper was that week.

She supposed her mother thought Juniper finally sharing her 'permanent location meant that their relationship was on the fix, but Juniper wouldn't forgive herself to allow this so easily. It wasn't that anything particularly bad had happened in her childhood, instead small occasions that played on her mind repeatedly, in ways she knew didn't happen to her mother after they argued. She didn't care, Juniper supposed this was who she modelled this trait of her own after.

"Some of my friends are meeting me out here in a couple of days, it's George's birthday and he wanted to celebrate it in Italy. I came to scope the place, ran into Kam and Lil on the plane."

"You just happened to run into them?"

"Yeah, I just said that."

Juniper's patience had never been thick, everyone who spent enough time with her knew that, she even thought Alex would probably be aware of such a fact. Yet, her mother turned her patience to salt water, where no thickness existed at all, no clarity either.

"They flew from England, Juniper."

"So did I, it was cheaper to fly from NCE to England and then England to Italy weirdly."

"That's unbelievable."

Juniper sighed. "Either way, I'm here now."

"And here you shall stay."

These were the moments Juniper wished she could erase, where the walls between them seemingly crumbled into settling ash between them -- settling ash that they could walk through, find each other through, finally able to come together after separation. They gave her too much hope. Her grudge against her mother wasn't born out of boredom or teenage antics, instead, grown from isolation and confinement where Juniper swore that at 14, her mother's fear was the thing that stopped her from anything, everything. Nobody knew how such a fear had overtaken Mrs. Maddox, or what the fear even was, but she wrapped Juniper in bubble wrap as tightly and excessively as she could. She vouched such a wrapping made the girl better, where her once carefree demeanour was necessarily replaced with the suffocation the bubble wrap brought.