"Adopted By" Oneshots!

What Happened?

Book: Adopted by Heathers Threequel
Oliveira's Age: 16
Eleanor's Age: 13
Levi's Age: 10

Eleanor's POV

"Hey guys." I said, looking through some boxes in the attic. "I think I found Mama and Mom's senior yearbook."

"Lemme see." Oliveira said, crawling over a box and sitting down next to me. "Woah! This thing is cool!"

"Yeah, let's try to find our moms and aunties in the yearbook." Levi said, flipping to the pages where the senior portraits were. "I found Mom!"

I leaned over and a photo of Mom when she was a senior graced the page. Her hair was much shorter when she was a teenager, and she must've gotten contact lenses when she was in college or before all of us were born. What was weird about the picture was that there was a sticky note over Mom's senior quote.

"What's her senior quote?" Veira asked. I pulled the sticky note off and said, "'I'm very gay for Catlynn McLemore.' Wow."

"Mama's isn't much better. It's just 'Why does everyone call you Sunshine?'" Levi said.

"I've been wondering that too! Nana always calls Mama 'Sunshine,' and I never knew why!" I said. We all laughed and then Mama came up to the attic.

"There you kids are! Whatcha looking at?"

"Your yearbook!" Levi said. Mama took the yearbook from us and laughed. "Wow, this is a throwback. I forgot how weird I looked in my senior picture. And I forgot Red had glasses back then."

"Hey Mama?" Oliveira asked. Mama looked at us and said, "Yeah?"

"Whatever happened to you in middle school? How did you get adopted? Auntie Jess said she was gonna tell us the story the next time we came over to her place, but I thought you would know the story better than she did." Veira asked.

Mama sighed and sat on an upside down paint bucket that was in the corner. "Um...so...when I was twelve years old, my biological dad got really mad at me and decided to...pin me against a wall outside of the New World Stages, that's a theatre off Broadway, where some of your aunties and uncles performed. I think I took you guys to see a show there. Anyway. My mom, your Nana, saw me through the window and rescued me. And that was that, at least for a bit. That was until...I don't think you guys want to know what happened on August 7th."

I knew deep down in my heart that Mama didn't want to relive what happened on August 7th, and even though I was curious, I wanted to respect her wishes. And I hoped my siblings felt the same way.

But I was wrong.

"What happened?" Levi asked.

"Levi! Can it!" I snapped.

"It's fine- you guys deserve to know, you're old enough. Um...your auntie Jess, and your Papa, Ryan...on the night of August 7th, 2014...they got in a car accident. A bad one. Jess was in a coma for a day or so, and Ryan made it out with only a few broken bones. But that event...traumatized me, and a few years later, I got in a car crash of my own, and I was paralyzed for a year or so."

"Oh." Levi said.

"Yeah. But what matters now is that I'm here, I'm alive today with a wife and three beautiful children of my own. I love you all, and I'm so grateful I'm here."

"We love you Mama." Oliveira said.

"I love you guys too."