Disclaimer: Do not own any part of Roswell. I also have no right to the song this is based on.
A/N: Wrote this after hearing American Girl by Tom Petty. For those of you who know it, this story is about as happy as the song.
A scout came to a small town looking for talent, and found a beautiful voice that he knew he would make a star. This was the voice of a nineteen-year-old girl. This was also exactly what this girl needed to take her mind off heartbreak.
When the girl was twenty-three, her talent was being heard by the world. She was winning awards and getting guest shots everywhere. Most would have loved the job she had. Being in the public eye meant everyone thought they knew what her life was like. She had to be happy, but few really new the girl. She even had two close friends that began to drift away. The walls were coming down around her and she had no escape. The person she needed left five years ago. Nevertheless, she smiled for the camera.
Age twenty-six was getting tough. Now she didn't have any real friends, only those who liked to be seen with such a powerful image. Those who loved her money and not her. She had lost lots of wealth to men who left after getting what they wanted. She knew at night 'he' would be here to hold her and tell her everything would be all right. Sadly, he was an illusion. He was no more than a man in her dreams. Sometimes, he was what she thought he might look like now, and at other times, how she remembered him. But through this fantasy, she held on to love and on to the sanity that was slowly slipping away.
Happy twenty-eighth birthday, your career is over and your life is in the dumpster. By this time her singing was becoming that of yesterday, like the singers she had mocked as a teenager. Now even her phony friends stopped hanging around. They had befriended other famous people to stay in the spotlight and had left her on the road behind. She still had 'him', who gradually was wandering further from her mind, though she tried to hold on with all the strength she had left. She tried to call up those friends of hers who had slipped away, but each time she would hang up after they said hello. She looked down at the world below and wished for the billionth time that she were one of those people. She wished to be a person who didn't know what this life was like and was happy to be who they were. She wanted to be happy to be alive. A second awake seemed like a year and her nightly escape seemed to last a second.
By the time she was twenty-nine, her career couldn't be resurrected and she had lost all will to live. She stood over the edge of the balcony and looked out over the town at the cars passing by. She looked down at the .41 that was in her hand and for a moment he crawled back into her mind. He had become her worst fear, a memory. As a child, she once thought about what it would be like to fly with Peter Pan. "Second star to the right and straight on 'til morning." That is where he was and she knew it when she looked up at the sky. Why he had left her and never come back, she would never know, but she still wanted to be with him now and forever. And with that she slowly pulled her hand up near her head. Maria squeezed her eyes shut as a single tear rolled down her cheek. No more waiting.
fin