afterthought

introduction

Happiness is relative. It's not something that is drilled into someone's skull but it's known by none and all.

What might appear as the pure definition of happiness to one person can be the equivalent of absolute poison to another. It's the same way that perfection is relative. Something is not perfect the way something cannot be purely good or evil.

A fairytale ending to one, a cursed tragedy to another.

Or more so, a beginning.

Happiness is a facade. A mere oak door is much like a curtain of secrets. A perfect family from the outside is crackling and breaking on the inside.

Some people just have the plain dumb luck to be trapped behind it.

Hailey Anne Upton was one of these people. Barely a person, barely left her mark on the world, still playing stupid games like hide and seek and singing while she played hopscotch. Still running back home before dinner with scrapes on her knees from biking and a smile plastered between chubby cheeks.

At least a handful of childhood years left. Years filled with first and second kisses, spelling bee trophies, and scrapes on each knee.

But soon they meant nothing anymore. The scrapes turned to bruises, and they wouldn't be on her knee, but on her ribcage and cheek, and they wouldn't be from biking up and down the raw pavement, but from the hand that used to tuck her into bed. Her years were littered with marks, like a map on her body that should've meant sweet memories but instead cut through her like a knife.

At the ripe age of eleven, Hailey wished for those years to be far behind her.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Not a day later than when she turned 18, Hailey left.

She hated how much it didn't hurt to leave. How her memories could be packed in one navy blue suitcase and practically kicked out the door.

Her brothers had left years ago. Each to a different edge of the country to live in an attempt of bliss. They said goodbye, but Hailey knew it wasn't sincere.

Hailey hugged her mother goodbye, trying hard to ignore the wince from the frail woman in her arms. Hailey couldn't feel sympathy, sympathy lead to crying, which inevitably came anyway because she had lived through it. She withered away from the embrace and whispered a soft nothing in her mother's ear.

A last-ditch attempt at begging her mother to leave. She knew it was no use.

Her car was soaked with tears and she wiped them away to read the map that was blank cause where the hell was she even going.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Family was always an obscurity to Hailey. The definition she read once on Wikipedia didn't match. 'a group of one or more parents and their children living together as a unit.'

It was never a unit. She never knew what it meant.

Not until she joined intelligence and was adopted into their unit. A unit. Her unit.

A temporary placement turned to one year turned to two turned to five. Five years that taught her Kevin's favorite pastry, and that Kim could sing remarkably well but didn't admit it, that Trudy was a softy at heart. Taught her that Adam loved Kim through the secret stolen glances between them and the ones filled with longing and something else when Kim wasn't looking. Five years that taught her that Jay would rather take a bullet than get the flu shot and that if he smiled the right way, five of his most prominent freckles would shift to form a star.