"Okay," I said, somehow knowing that I was giving Liz a setup line, but not sure what the punch line would be, "you're not going to let me do this. How are you going to stop it?"

And she reached forward and put her hand on the rope, next to mine. "Stop it? Max, I'm going down with you!"

Well, I'd been expecting a punch line, hadn't I?

Even though I felt the usual protectiveness, something deep down clued me in that it wouldn't be a good idea to try to stop Liz Parker in this moment. "Okay, who goes down first?"

"Is it worth bringing up what Sam Gamgee said about ropes, or would that be too much Tolkien for one day?"

"I'm not sure if there's such a thing as too much Tolkien," I admitted, a bit reluctantly. "What did Sam have to say?"

"That you put the one who's more likely to fall first going down and last going up, so that they won't knock anybody else off the rope. But I'm not sure who that is - and I have to say, you probably shouldn't risk yourself unless there's no other choice, because if I get hurt you can save me. Maybe you should stay up here unless I really do need you."

"My talents aren't absolute, remember that, Liz Parker," I said warningly. "For one thing, if you actually died before I could reach you, I don't think that there's anything that alien powers could do. You can go first if that makes you feel better, but I'm following right after."

"Okay, okay, twist my arm," she said, and I had to wonder if she'd just mentioned the bit about me staying behind altogether so that I wouldn't raise too much of a fuss about her going first. But at least I could wonder silently.

As I was wondering, Liz walked calmly over to the edge of the drop, picked up the rope in both hands, and backed up to the cliff edge, looking behind her as if uncertain just how to proceed when she got there. I got a very bad feeling. "Wait a second," I blurted out.

But she didn't wait. Quickly enough that I didn't get a good sense of the tradition, she sort of stepped backward off the edge, and paused when most of her legs were hidden from view. "Take a chill pill - Relax, Max," she quipped with a reassuring smile, and then more of her sank out of view.

I rushed forward; more curious about how she was managing than anything else at this point. As far as I could tell from peering over the edge, Liz's body was gracefully curved, so that her feet went flat against the sheer surface while her head was nearly upright. At least she hadn't gone for impractical high heels when she dressed to impress this morning - well, anything but sensible shoes would already have driven her crazy as we hiked through the desert, I supposed. The jeans were probably also alright for that kind of thing, (and somewhat mesmerizing as she shifted her hips back and forth when looking for new footholds,) and if the sweater got torn against a rock - well, she'd be lucky if that was the worst that happened to her, I supposed. Not that that made me feel particularly better.

"Are you coming down?" Liz prompted when she was at least ten feet down. "The rock is the perfect temperature - not too warm, and not too cold." She giggled enthusiastically at her own joke.

"Umm - shouldn't you wrap the rope around you or something?" I asked her nervously. It didn't seem to be that much security held in her hands. If her grip slipped...

"Ehh - not now. I thought about that, but wasn't sure how to actually make that work helpfully without a proper safety harness, and neither of us know how to make one," she called back. "Didn't want to just get rope burns all over, which seemed the likeliest result. I'll be fine this way."

Hmm - she did have a point. "Okay, umm..." I tried to pick up the rope myself, but it was impossible to budge it - or at least I didn't want to tug hard enough to affect Liz's balance. "Do you think that you could stay in place for a little while, and hand me back up some slack in the rope?"

"Oh, right, I didn't think of that one," Liz admitted. "Um - we can try it, but that means that you'll be steadying a lot of my weight still, right?"

"Yeah," I agreed. "I won't let you fall."

We tried it, with some more calling back and forth, but that approach didn't really work out. I could hold the rope against all the force that Liz was exerting upon it as she leaned against the cliff - but I couldn't really figure out how to back over the cliff and steady myself against it, while still carrying Liz's weight. (I shudder to think how she would have fared if I'd been the one to go down first, now.) Eventually, I fed Liz back the slack in the rope until it was taught, and scrambled down over the edge while hanging onto the top with my hands, like I used to get into the pool when I was a little kid because I was scared to just jump in. That analogy was probably unfortunate, as I had to deal with a mental picture of myself jumping - or worse, diving - into this ravine. Not fun.

But I was able to climb down to the point where my hands were straight over my head, and then to use the taut rope as a handhold without having to take any slack in it myself, and thus not having to support any of Liz's weight myself, just letting it take some of mine. This was working pretty well, when I felt the rope jerk a little, which was scary, and then heard a cry from fairly far below me, which was even scarier. I knew that I couldn't look down, not even to see if Liz was alright, without getting sicker of the height than I could afford at that moment. "Liz? Please answer me," I called out clearly.

"Yeah, Max, I'm - I'm not too badly hurt, but I guess I'm in a bit of a tight spot," Liz admitted, and let out an awkward sounding grunt. "My - my left foot got wedged into a crevice, I guess it was bigger than I thought, or the wrong shape or whatever. It - I can't get it out, and I still can't balance here without putting most of my weight on the rope. My hands are really starting to get tired."

"Okay, is that it? Any sharp pain in the foot?" I asked, hoping to reassure myself with the answer.

"Well, yeah actually. Something might be broken, I'm not sure," Liz admitted. Dammit.

"Okay, plan A. I'm coming down to you. Let me know at once if I'm doing anything that's making it harder for you to keep a grip on the rope."

"Umm, okay, but what are you going to do once you're right above me?" Liz asked.

"Err - just let me know when I get that close, okay?" I said.

"Alright, Max." She kept making little soft whining sounds as I climbed, but the words I was so worried about hearing: 'Stop Max, I can't hold in like this,' didn't come. Finally, it was, "Okay, I can see your shoes, maybe a foot and a half above my head. Now what?"

Now what, indeed? I had a few ideas, but first I really did need to get a sense of how high we were, and risked one quick look down. It wasn't that bad, mostly because I'd climbed nearly all the way down. Liz was actually close enough to the floor of the ravine that if she hadn't been the one with her foot stuck, she could probably have dropped or jumped down and been okay. But if she lost her grip on the rope now, that would probably send all of her weight on that one leg in the wrong way, breaking bones below the knee, and she still wouldn't be free, just hanging in a very awkward angle.

Well, could I manage to drop or jump down, or even climb without the use of the rope? Possibly - that would get me where I needed to be at least, on solid ground within reach of Liz, able to help investigate the tight place that she was stuck in and use my powers if I could see a way in which they would avail us. But I was either too scared or too cautious to commit myself to that jump without a backup plan - if I hit too hard the wrong way and passed out, then there would be nobody left to help Liz.

And luckily, there was a 'second chance' sort of an idea that had been hovering in the back of my mind since not long after the camera had fallen. Now seemed to be the time when I had little to lose in trying it.

"Just keep holding on, Liz," I implored her, and reached out for a rocky projection, just big enough to get a grip on with a few fingers, that was conveniently just as far to the left as my arm would span. In a moment I was hanging into that spur with both hands, one over the other, and my feet were instinctively scrabbling for a foothold and finding none. Right. Really nothing to lose now. I swung myself a bit further left, just to make sure I would be clear of Liz, took a moment to gather what energies I could, let go...

And I used my powers to push the ravine floor down as hard as I could manage.

Of course, the rocky ground couldn't possibly go any further down - it was supported by deeper and denser stone, all the way down into the Earth's crust. But that was the point. We've all learned about action and reaction in science class, equal and opposite reaction, and I've learned that alien powers are subject to that same effect too.

When I used alien powers to pull a heavy trophy from the fireplace mantel to the couch, I felt the reaction tugging me back towards the fireplace.

And when I pushed the ground down, the reaction pushed me back up. Not enough to overcome gravity and let me float in midair, but just enough to cushion the fall, somewhat.

I landed on my right foot an instant before the left came down too, and the impact on both was enough to wind me, but I knew that I couldn't just stand around waiting for my breath to come back. I rushed over to Liz, not quite sure what I was supposed to do to help her, and all of a sudden she was falling into my arms, and I couldn't support her and we both fell down in a pile on the ground. "Liz - Liz!" I panted. "Are you okay? Your leg?"

"Yeah, it's - well, it's still not in perfect shape, but it's no worse than it was," she said, rather more brightly.

"How did you get it out of the crevice?"

"Well, you did it," she said, sounding confused. "Or at least you helped - didn't you realize what you were doing?"

"Uh, I don't think I realized much in that moment, except that you needed me," I admitted.

"You sort of supported my back and - and my behind, with your chest, as soon as you came near," Liz explained. "With that leverage, it was easy enough to pull the foot out - it almost came by itself as my weight shifted. And then - I was so relieved that I let go of the rope."

"Okay, well, all's well that ends reasonably well," I said. "But we're still losing light that we need. First thing, I need to take a closer look at your foot, and fix it up right. Second, we need to find that camera."

"Sorry to spoil the order, but I think I'm looking right at the cam," Liz explained. "Maybe fifteen feet away from us."

"That's alright I guess."

"And third," Liz said with a sigh. "We need to find some better way out of this ravine than climbing up the rope again."

"Yeah, I won't argue with that idea," I said reluctantly. Gravity had helped us both somewhat going down, and Liz had been hurt. Once we had the camera, what was left of the urgency seemed to be over with. Even if we'd have to stay out all night and have our midnight kiss alone, that seemed better than taking more immediate risks.

So with a bit of reluctance Liz climbed off of me, sat down on a slight rise in the rocky valley bottom, and started to untie her shoelaces, wincing in pain at even that much sensation near the source of her injury. I reached out to take her hand and meet her eyes, initiating enough of a connection to put her in a sort of an anaesthetic trance, before carefully pulling the shoe off myself - and gasping at the blood and the messy condition of her two smallest toes. In a few more seconds I had confirmed that they were both broken.

But that wouldn't take me long to fix.

#

"Okay, yeah, this should work, I hope," I said, looking up at the pathway that seemed to make its way up the side of the ravine - the other side from where Liz and I had gone down, but I was pretty sure that we'd be able to find our way from that point to the place where I'd parked the Jeep. The quarter to half mile that we'd walked along the valley floor was already ground covered in mostly the right direction.

I breathed a silent sigh of relief that Liz hadn't thought to leave her purse - with the journal still in it - at the top of the cliff where I'd taken her picture. Holding it as she climbed down might have been part of the reason that she'd gotten her foot into a tight spot, but I wasn't about to tell her so now, as the twilight started to close in. My old knapsack was sitting up there still, next to the place that the rope was tied, but it didn't have anything important in it or indeed identifiable, mostly just empty snack food packages that I hadn't wanted to litter the desert with. My wallet and my car keys were in my pockets, and they were the important things, aside from ourselves and the frickin' camera.

"So, I guess it's back to questions time," Liz said as we started to climb along the fairly easy route up - not really a ramp-like path, but a sort of an angled bite out of the rock face - steeper than a pathway I'd want to hike along for long under normal circumstances, but much more inviting than true rock climbing. We both went very carefully and grabbed holds wherever we could. "So when did you learn to - well, to fit in with people as well as you do? I've been watching you for the last few months a lot, you know, and you really are very good at it. Not too surprising I guess, at least for a 'normal' guy, but I guess I have a hard time reconciling that with the little boy who didn't even understand how he was so different from everybody else. There has to have been a learning process, obviously."

"Hmm - I don't know, I never really thought I was that good at hiding the alienation inside," I muttered, trying to think of a better answer. "I guess I'd say that Isabel was the master at social camouflage, blending into any situation. I've learned a lot from her, and the lessons haven't always been fun."

"Wha huh?" I'm not sure how often I've ever heard Liz Parker reduced to quite such low depths of bad enunciation.

"Around the time that we were finishing junior high - well, Isabel started to brood on the notion of public discovery. She'd lecture me and keep on my case about anything that wasn't 'normal' - including things like science club and what remained of my fascination with comic books. I suppose some of it wasn't that different from how any other popular sister, conscious of the herd mentality, might nag her considerably dorkier brother, but the unspoken truth about our true heritage hyper-charged the whole business."

"Somehow more than anything else, I can never really picture you as a dork, Max," Liz commented with a soft, pleased sigh.

That was about when we got to the end of the climb and I pointed us off along the edge of the fissure - giving it a wide clearance, of course. We'd gotten up there just in time to admire some pretty sunset effects, although the sun itself could no longer be glimpsed over the horizon. We kept talking about more and more trivial things, starting to become each comfortable with the other's company, and I felt growing inside me such a deep sense of happiness and contentment that I could hardly even imagine why I'd been afraid of this, how I hadn't been able to tell that everything would be alright as long as Liz and I leaned on each other and talked out our fears.

And, I have to admit, I also wanted to kiss her so bad that it was making my toes tingle, but managed to resist that impulse. We'd both sworn that we could hold out the day, no matter what, and focusing on how great it could be when all that anticipation finally paid off at midnight helped out somewhat.

"Are you sure that we're headed in the right direction?" Liz asked after finishing answering a question about something in her and Alex and Maria's shared history that had managed to make the grapevine for a few days last spring at West Roswell High.

"Come on. You should know that this isn't going to work if you don't trust me too," I teased her.

"If you're sure, then I have faith," she insisted. "I was just asking. And pointing out that it's - huh, only quarter after six?"

"The sun sets early this close to winter solstice," I reminded her. "We'll probably have plenty of time for some other activity once we get back to the car. I don't particularly want to show up at my Mom's party earlier than eleven - unless you do."

"Hmm - no, that's okay," Liz admitted. "Let's see - there won't be any place open where we can get the pictures developed, but it'd probably be a good idea to hide the camera - like in my hidey-hole spot for the journal, unless you have any better ideas."

"Wait a moment," I said, grinning. "Even if the photo mart was open - do you really want to let a semi-professional look at these shots? I think that the only really safe course is to expose them ourselves. And neither of us really have legitimate access to a darkroom. So why not - on a night when nobody will be around, say, the school building?"

Liz laughed. "I love it. Except - isn't the school one of the usual places for clues to that Enigma secret party thing?"

"Oh, right, I hadn't thought of that," I admitted. "Well, that could work in our favour, actually. We wouldn't have to break in, not if somebody else left a door open so that other people could sneak in and take a look, and if anybody spots us, then..."

"Then we're just a pair of precocious sophomores who wanted to take their shot at finding the most mysterious party of the year?" Liz asked.

"Yeah." I sighed. "But first we need to get back to the wheels."

#

We'd been going in the right direction, but it was nearly an hour longer before Liz and me, tired and walking at a slow plod, caught a glimpse of some pickup truck heading down the road. A few minutes later, Liz nearly bumped into the Jeep before she spotted it in the dark.

We'd gotten onto a game of free association by then, so nothing was said beyond the back-and-forth of single word concepts as we both got into the front seats and drove back off. The game must have lasted for at least nine hundred turns, and finally ended when we spotted a Quick Stop at the side of the road. I parked in record time, and we both piled out to buy giant tumblers of Gatorade and more snack food. (It had been a long day, much of it spent out in the desert without a lot of supplies available, especially drinkable supplies.

"So, how do you think Michael and Isabel are going to react to the news that we're back together again?" Liz asked as I entered town along the main road from the north.

"Umm -what do you mean?" I asked, playing it a bit too dumb.

"Come on, Max - they like me fine, well, Isabel does, but neither of your peoples are that wild about the idea of the two of us getting serious. Nobody said anything during the lost week, but I could tell. And - well, not trying to be mean about it, but I could see how Michael might feel like you were being hypocritical if you really came down on him about messing around with Michael during the heat wave."

"Oof. Trying to be mean or not, that does hurt." I sighed. "Because it's fair. But - well, is it hypocritical if your standards really have been changed by your circumstances. The reasons that I was - was concerned about Michael and Maria were the same ones, deep down, that made me back away from you, Liz. Now that you've sold me on us, I wouldn't give Michael any more grief about Maria - if either of them pursue the other again. I got the impression that whatever has happened between them, it's not still happening at the moment."

"Hmm." Liz took a long swallow of the Gatorade. "Okay, that's fair. And it might be a good point to tell them about that up-front, but that would be your call."

"Yeah. As far as the rest of it - I don't know, I've never got any impression that Isabel disapproves of us, or approves either - at least, not since Marathon. She wasn't exactly wild about some of what I told her about - well, you know, right after you got shot. But it could be that she's better at keeping up a poker face for me than you, because she's known me for longer."

"That's an odd way to put it," Liz decided. "Usually greater familiarity and experience is supposed to work in favour of the perceiver, not the - the person who's trying not to give anything away, isn't it? Shouldn't you be better at seeing through her poker face than I, because you've known her for longer?"

"Normally, yeah, but I'm not sure if the usual rules apply to my sister," I admitted. "As far as Michael - well, he's been upset lately at things he was used to changing, and you and me being a couple would be a big change. I do think that if he was upset the week that you and I were dating, that was probably more to do with Indians and cave wall drawings than the status of our relationship."

"Could well be. And the two things could have reminded him of each other, since I was with you when River Dog showed you the cave wall."

"Yeah." I bit off half a Twinkie in a single bite and turned the Jeep to the right, heading west towards the school now. "But he's going to have to get used to changes now, I guess."

"Certainly seems like it to me," Liz agreed.

Just at that point, her purse let out a chime, and Liz pulled out her little discount cell phone and consult the screen. "Two voice messages, five missed calls. All from my mom."

"Okay, so you're going to call her back," I said. It wasn't even really a question the way I said it, though I'm not sure why I didn't ask.

"No," Liz replied a little defensively. "I mean, I know that I should, but - but at this moment, it would be way too much like coming back to Earth. I'm not ready for that yet. I have a pretty good idea that she and my Dad are going to be over at your house tonight."

"Oh, really?" I said, slightly surprised. "Wait a second; doesn't the Crashdown cafe have some sort of private New Year's Eve party? I know that I saw a sign saying that they were closed this evening."

"Yeah, but it's for the old folk's home," Liz explained with a slightly regretful sigh. "They're back there by eleven, which does actually work out okay in that the staff can generally get to their own festivities by midnight, and come back to clean up on the morning of New Year's day, before opening again in the afternoon."

"Interesting," I said, and meant it. "I'm not so sure I like the idea of our parents getting together and comparing notes. I mean, I can only think of one reason why my mom would have invited the Parkers, and it suggests that she understands more about you and I than I thought."

"Just so long as you understand more about you and me than you did this morning," Liz said with a laugh, "I'll worry about our parents tomorrow."

#

There was no sign of activity, Enigmatic or otherwise, when I pulled into the West Roswell High parking lot. A few other cars were in the parking lot, but for all that I knew, all of them could easily have been from the neighbourhood residents, parking there because it was convenient while school was out for the Christmas holidays.

"What do you think?" Liz asked me after we'd sat there and 'cased the joint' for a few seconds. (If sitting in a vehicle and looking at a building qualifies as casing a joint - I'm not quite sure on the proper usage of that lingo.)

"Be careful, like always," I rattled off before even thinking much about it. "As it happens, I've actually thought a bit about how best to use my talents to enter the school after hours, just in case it ever turned out to be necessary - not that I was really thinking about a situation. East side doors are our best bet, right over there - the lock's a deadbolt, but that shouldn't be a problem for me, and the master security keypad is right there. You keep the door propped open until I re-arm the system, and then we slip in and stay well away from the external doors until we're ready to leave. I'll bypass the security entirely for that one. It's a good thing that only the outside doors and windows are wired in."

"Yeah, but reasonable," Liz agreed. "Wouldn't they have to secure all the classroom doors before locking up the school, if all of them were wired in?"

"Hmm - yeah, probably. Unless the security programming was very slick and could keep track of which internal doors were closed and which weren't, when the system was armed, and then just went into alarm if any of them opened or closed. That's probably not in the budget."

"Yeah." Liz reached for the door handle, and then paused to look back at me. "Are you sure that you can handle this, Max? Re-arming the system after we go in, and bypassing it when we come out, without leaving any significant trace or letting it phone home?"

"I'm sure," I insisted. "It's not that sophisticated a piece of hardware, and I've been practicing, a little. I wouldn't do it, not even for your sake and these photos, if I didn't think that we'd be safe."

"Alright then." Liz opened her door. "Let's do some crime."

#

Twenty minutes saw us both in the school photography club darkroom, with ABC Monitoring co. none the wiser that anybody had come to the school this particular New Year's Eve night. Actually, the darkroom is used by an actual for-credit photography class too, as well as the extracurricular group, so I'm not sure why I thought of the club first.

And even though it had been my idea, I really didn't have much of a clue how to use the darkroom equipment to develop negatives from the film on the camera and make prints of the pictures. It turned out that Liz had been in a summer-school photography class when she was in grade seven, (there's a program in town that has an emphasis on 'fun' summer school classes for pre-teens so that they're not underfoot at home all the time or out getting into more serious mischief,) and remembered all the steps very well. My job was pretty much to sit in the corner and make conversation when she didn't need to concentrate too hard on what she was doing.

"So, what about your friends, about Maria and Alex?" I asked her during one of those pauses, while the solution that she had mixed up was reaching the proper temperature. "And how they'd react to the news that we're together again, I mean."

"Well, there's no real way of knowing for sure until we see it for our own eyes, like the cat in the box," Liz commented, "but - well, Maria will be happy for us, I think. She just wants what's best for me, and ever since she heard about what happened after we brought Michael back home, she's become convinced that I needed to fix what you screwed up or I'd regret it forever. As you guessed earlier this morning, it was her influence, her enthusiasm, and mostly her plan that brought you to my door." She sighed softly. "And I'm not sure if it was you or me who brought up the idea that she's probably sublimating her frustration at Michael into you and me, but..."

"I don't think I'd have thought of that in the first place, but you're probably right if you think so," I agreed. "What about Alex? I know that when we went out last time, he was still a little freaked about just having heard about us, and wasn't yet dealing very well. Has that situation improved at all, by the way? I had to sit through more than one earful from Isabel about the way he was behaving at the UFO Museum just before Michael collapsed and went blind - how he'd blurted out the wrong thing in front of Milton."

"Yeah, umm - I haven't been spending that much time with Alex," Liz admitted. "It'll take a little while for our friendship to heal, yet, though I think it's on the mend, and he's calmed down considerably himself. In fact, the last I heard from Alex was that he was trying to ignore the alien stuff, and just concentrate on his music as much as he could, and keeping his grades up, when the winter term starts up." She chuckled. "Which suggests that he might not be wild about my spending a lot of time with you, and even spend lest time with me, if he interprets ignoring the alien stuff as trying to just stay away from the people that he's found out are aliens. But - well, Alex is Alex, and I do know that I need to let him work through all of this stuff in the time and the way that he decides to himself. The last time any of us tried to push him, it didn't really work out too well."

"No, I guess not," I admitted. "Do you think that there might be more than the obvious going between Alex and Isabel, anyway?"

"Umm," Liz muttered, and I instantly realized that she needed to concentrate on what she was doing with the film, so I stayed silent. After a moment it became clear that she needed more from me than that. "Can you handle the lights?" she said, pointing over to the switches near the door of the darkroom."

"Yeah," I said, quickly getting up and pushing my chair over there. "Just say when. The cream switch turns off the regular lights, and the black one turns on the red light, right?"

"Yes, but don't," Liz blurted out. "Whatever you do, do not turn on the red light unless I tell you to, and I won't, not anytime soon." She was speaking very quickly but precisely, obviously needing to be sure that I understood this before the current stage of the process was done. Everything seemed to be completely dependent on timing - she had her watch propped up in front of her in stopwatch mode. "Even red light will ruin the film at this stage, before it's been completely fixed."

"Okay, okay, I understand," I said. "Or I think I do. I just cut the main lights and leave us in complete darkness?"

"Yeah, that's exactly it," Liz said. "I can do what I need to do by touch, and you're not up to anything important, are you?" I chuckled weakly, and Liz set down an open jar of photo chemicals on the table in front of her and picked up the camera. "Hit it."

I flipped the cream switch, and we were in darkness. Left my fingers on the switch for a few moments, trying to accustom my hand to that position for when I'd have to turn the main light back on, and then withdrew it so that I wouldn't need to worry about itchy fingers and a subconscious craving for light.

"Good." I couldn't see Liz's fingers working, but there was some kind of a faint clicking coming from over that side of the room, and it fit with what I'd expect of the back of the camera opening up. I didn't expect Liz to be too talkative, but once again she surprised me. "To get back to your question, I'm not entirely sure what's obvious to you, about Isabel and Alex."

"Umm - that he had a crush on her, along with a fair proportion of the guys going to this school, that she was willing to play on that to keep her secret, but that didn't work, and now that the truth is out..." I stalled momentarily, and could hear the faint sound of a miniscule amount of liquid flowing. "She doesn't seem sure if she wants to try and be friends or just go back to ignoring him."

"Oh, Max." Liz sighed. Another click. "We're sealed up tight again. Lights?" I turned the switch back on, and blinked a bit at the incandescent glare. "Is it possible that all guys, all over the galaxy or whatever, could be so entirely clueless?"

"What?" I protested faintly.

"Nuh-uh," she insisted. "I'm not going to explain this one to you. You're going to have to figure it out for yourself. That'll be good practice."

I grunted sourly and tried to change the subject. "What's the red light for, anyway, if you can't expose the film to it?"

"That's for the print paper, Max," Liz explained. "Black and white photo print paper is light-sensitive at the appropriate stage of the process too, but only to the blue-green spectra." She shook the little grey and black film canister as she answered. "The light that is shone through the negatives and focused on the print paper turns the white paper to black. That's a more complicated process that loading the film into a canister, and I guess you can make the paper selectively sensitive without throwing off the colors of the original pictures, because the paper just gets the same light that the negative has."

I smiled. "Okay, that makes sense. So how long until we have our negatives, and can start making prints?"

"Ehh, five minutes or so." Liz cocked her head at me. "Are you impatient or something? We still have plenty of time before we go to the party at your place."

"Yeah, but I have another idea for spending some time together here at the school," I told her with a grin.

#

Before Liz started to print the pictures, I left her in the darkroom and headed up to the second floor of the school. It was oddly creepy to be moving around the dark space, alone, at night - the middle distance seemed to be full of sounds that I couldn't quite make out, but I found what I'd been after and headed back downstairs with it. I knocked on the door of the darkroom once I got back to the photography classroom, but Liz didn't open the door for nearly ten minutes.

"Sorry, I thought that you understood when you said that you wanted to take a stretch and a look around," she explained. "Once I'd started the paper going, I couldn't open the door and let light in from the room outside without ruining it all."

"What light?" I asked her, a bit irritably.

"Even if the fluorescents are turned off and it's dark outside, there's enough light coming in through the windows that - well, I'm not sure that it would be a problem, but I didn't want to take the chance. Sorry." Liz made a cute face that I probably wouldn't quite define as the classic 'puppy dog eyes' look, but it came pretty close.

"It's alright. So, are all the pictures done, then?" I asked, a smile spreading across my face because I didn't really want to fight it off that hard.

Pretty nearly. Just one more rinse, to make sure that they'll last okay and won't go bad over time in the air. You can help me out with that," Liz decided.

So help I did, and we packed the prints and the negatives away in one of the white craft envelopes that were stocked on the shelves just outside the darkroom, and cleaned up after ourselves as best we could. As I was washing my hands once the rest of the cleaning was all done, Liz stepped out into the room proper, took a look at one of the desks next to the windows, and chuckled.

"So, white or black?" I asked her, gesturing at the chessboard that I'd set up on the desk.

"You had to borrow from the chess club as well?" Liz asked, starting towards the seats on either side.

"Why not? As you said, we had some more time, the chess sets were here in the building with us, we're both pretty smart and I had a notion that you've played a bit before. I was curious who had the more logical mind."

"We're also both pretty competitive," Liz pointed out. "And we've only just reconciled our differences. Do you really think it's the best thing to put our egos up against each other head to head?"

"If we can't handle a single game with some sort of grace, then we probably shouldn't be dating," I pointed out.

"Okay, then - I'll be white, of course," Liz said, sitting down at the appropriate spot. "And I should warn you, I play a mean Queen's gambit."

"Bring it on," I insisted, sitting down on the Black side.

That game lasted nearly two hours, with a break in the middle to see if we could scavenge anything decent from the closed cafeteria, and in the end it came down to a black pawn supporting the black king, versus the lone white king who had lost the rest of his army by this point. I thought that I would be able win victory easily by getting my pawn to the white side of the board promoting it to a queen, and then using my new queen along with the black king to trap the white king, but Liz managed to slip the white King into a stalemate when I wasn't watching out for it. I stared at the position on the board in surprise and more than a little frustration. There was no legal move that Liz could make, but as I wasn't attacking her directly, it was a tie, not a win for my side. I felt an impulse to lose my temper, but controlled it - she'd gotten out of a tight spot in the only way she could, rather cleverly, and maybe it was good that the game had ended without a clear winner or loser.

"Thanks, sweetie," Liz told me when I shook her hand in gentlemanly fashion and expressed that sentiment. "And now, we'd better pack up the set, slip past the burglar alarm again, and make tracks across town. Our parents are probably starting to get twitchy by this point."

"Yeah, alright," I said, arranging my black pieces in their compartment of the box, and then picking up Liz's white king. "I'll put this back where I found it - you meet me at the East doors again.

"But don't touch them," Liz finished before I could even think of it. "Gotcha." And she blew me a kiss as I hurried away, which stopped me in my tracks. "Whoops - should I not have done that? Do I get another warning?"

I sighed to myself and hurried up the stairs again.