Title: In another world 2/5
Author: Chris Kenworthy
Email: kelworth@chriskweb.net
Rating: PG?
Disclaimer: I do not own the characters or premise of 'Roswell,' look for Melinda Metz, Jason Katims, or the Fox head honchos. I just write stories here. :]
Category: Very AU, skewed reality version of... well, early season 1 to start with. UC couples leading to CC couples - yes, it's homecoming backwards. ;-)
Spoilers: Well, if you haven't seen the pilot, what are you doing here? ;-) Any events from the show might appear here, somewhat distorted. Familiarity with early season 1 will probably help you to make sense of all the clever things I'm trying to do. :-D
Home archive: http://www.fanfiction.net/~chriskenworthy
Dedication: To all you rabid dreamers and candygirls. I dunno if you're gonna love this or hate it, but either way it's *all for you.* hehehehe.
It was... Liz wasn't sure. Ten minutes after everything had gone down? Twenty?? Time didn't seem to have its usual meaning. She sat in one of the Crashdown Cafe's vinyl-padded chairs, staring idly at Miss UFO nut's half-eaten Sigourney Weaver. Nothing was processing through her brain yet. Nothing made sense.
A familiar voice cut through the daze. "Lizzie, oh my god." **I'm on.**
Sure enough, there was her father, Mister Jeff Parker... almost certainly having hurried back from the potato products distributor as soon as he heard about what had happened in the restaurant. "No, dad, look, look at this," Liz said, holding up her apron, which was brightly marked with red stains and clearly smelled of tomato and vinegar - but not blood. "See, I'm fine, I just spilled ketchup. I'm really... I'm okay."
"Are you sure?"
"Yeah."
As her father started to make some reply, Liz inexplicably focused on the voice of the old Native-American deputy who had been the first lawman to arrive on the scene. "I'm gonna need a better description than that. I assume that they weren't actually cartoons." From what Liz could pick up, Maria had been giving a description of the customers from hell from whose table the shooting had come, since she had gotten a better look than anybody, taking their orders, getting them their food.
A few seconds later, a tall man with an off-white cowboy hat opened the front door and stepped into the cafe. He wore dark shades that reflected the world around you in shades of black when you looked at him - blue jeans, a light blue button-down shirt, and the green jacket overtop had a bright gold star pinned to the chest, and another one on each shoulder. This was Sheriff James Valenti the second. Every teenage in town knew him on sight, and most were scared shitless of him, whether or not the guys would admit it to their macho buddies.
Liz didn't have any reason to act macho. *She* was scared of the Sheriff, even though she knew he was the father of Kyle, one of her closest friends. She'd admit it to anyone who asked.
Fortunately, no-one ever had.
"Cyprus oil, it, um, it reduces stress," Maria volunteered. She had been caught in the middle of taking a sniff out of a tiny bottle when Valenti made his entrance, an action which obviously felt suspicious enough that she felt she had to explain herself. Jim didn't even nod, he just paused a second in acknowledgement and walked up to where Liz and her father were sitting.
He took off those shades before he spoke. "You okay?" That helped, without those dark glasses he looked somewhat less frightening and a considerable margin more concernes - possibly even protective. There was still a no-nonsense air that Valenti carried about himself like an insisible cloak, though.
"Yeah, thanks, I'm just a little shaken up," Liz said, forcing a smile. What would she say if he started asking more questions?
Fortunately, the deputy spared her that, for the moment anyways, "Sir, the suspects ran out right after the in-cident o-ccured," he drawled, taking his superior aside in a relaxed gesture. "Couple of outsiders, no apparent robbery, no injuries other than the girl that fell. Just seems like an argument that got outta hand." A second after he finished his report, the door to the kitchen squeaked, and the deputy growled out, "Hey, I told you two to *stay outta* there!"
It was the UFO-nuts-couple, who turned around guiltily after being yelled at. "Couple of tourists, in town for the Crash," the Deputy explained for Valenti's benefit. He had already taken their statements.
Around this point, Alex got up, sat down next to Liz on the opposite side from her father, and very unobtrusively took one of her hands in his. Liz smiled shyly at him, grateful for the moral support.
"Uh, Sheriff, hi?" the UFO nut guy said, waving sheepishly at the lawmen. "Um, um, I'm sorry, I really need to talk to you. I think something *happened* here."
"What do you think 'happened?'" Valenti asked unflappably. He was always unflappable, it seemed.
"The gunman was... was, was standing right over there, right?" the UFO guy stuttered. Uh-oh. This did not sound good. What had this bozo's wild imagination managed to reconstruct? "And the gun was fired into this direction." He waved from the far table towards the kitchen window. Liz couldn't keep herself from standing up in alarm. "Now, Jen and I..." brief nod to blonde short hair, "We searched this entire place up and down, and -- I mean, there's... where's the bullet?"
**This is bad.**
"We haven't found a bullet hole yet, Sheriff," the deputy added.
"Yeah, and uh, Sheriff, before it happened, the girl gave me this." The nut guy handed Liz's picture to Valenti. **Oh, god, no.** At least that had no real connection with what actually happened, but it would just make the situation look more strange.
Valenti handed the photo off to Mister Parker, who had stood up. "Jeff?"
Jeff Parker barely even needed to look at it. "Lizzie?"
Liz sighed. "Yeah?"
"I told you about showing the alien photo to tourists."
Meanwhile, Valenti was nosing around the table where Max and Tess had been sitting. Eager to prove that she could cause even more trouble than her boyfriend, UFO girl... **he called her Jen right?** put in "There were two kids sitting over here when it happened, a boy and a girl about her age. And then one of them went--"
"Uh yeah, that's right, there were," Liz broke in, rushing up to the sheriff. She didn't want anything about Max Evans' involvement here to reach Valenti. She still didn't understand what had happened - didn't know if *anything* had happened beyond her imagination, but if there was any chance that Max had... helped her, she didn't want to betray the one thing he had asked of her. "But you know, I didn't recognize them, so they must have just been tourists."
"No, no, it sure looked like she knew them to me..." the nut guy persisted...
* * * * *
Afternoon was turning to evening by the time Liz had finally (she hoped,) thrown Valenti off of Max's trail. She hurried up the stairs to her family's apartment above the restaurant, and kept on going until she had closed the door to her room. Opening up the suede jacket she had been using to deflect any attention from the blue one-piece waitress uniform, she prodded delicately at the part of the stomach where *it* had happened.
No soreness, but the stains had hardened in a way that ketchup alone definitely did not react. And it almost looked like there were... powder burns? **Ridiculous. You only get powder burns at close range. I was - what, thirty-five feet away from that gun??** Still... there was a black powdery-ness there that couldn't help but seem suspicious, even if it was only dust and dirt that had gotten mixed in with the blood and the ketchup.
Suddenly dynamic, Liz pulled the buttons apart and shucked off the uniform. **I have to keep this away from ANYONE until I can find a way to clean it. Or dispose of it...** From the inside of the outfit, Liz could see the bullet hole clearly, without the ketchup stains confusing the situation. Even if she cleaned the uniform, that hole could arouse questions. **So what do I do, bury it out in the desert somewhere??** Unable to come to an immediate decision, she shoved the uniform into her bookbag, carefully, so that neither the stains nor the bullet hole were immediately exposed.
Sighing with at least some sense of satisfaction, Liz crossed over towards her dresser, to get some street clothes to wear. But on the way, something caught her attention in the mirror.
As she turned to face her reflection, Liz didn't spare even the usual half a second for her mid-length, dark hair with the perm wearing out, for the silver chain her Grampa Cameron had given her for her birthday around her neck, for her trim figure in the black underwear she had had on underneath the Crashdown uniform.
On her stomach, spanning across the area where the bullet had struck her, a pattern was marked out in glowing silver against Liz's skin. An elliptical blob here, a longer line there, and a comblike pattern with four parallel strokes.
Together they made an unmistakeable handprint pattern.
Max Evans' handprint.
* * * * *
"...For this experiment, you'll be working in teams of two," Miss Goldson, the so-called 'biology teacher,' (in Liz's opinion, the young woman was clearly an artsy teacher's school graduate who had been picked to cover the retirement of Doctor Schwidt as cheaply as possible. So far, the evidence would suggest that Liz already knew more about science than the teacher.) Uh, anyways... after that little announcement, Liz shot a glance nervously towards the classroom door.
Max Evans was her lab partner, about the only thing they knew each other from before yesterday, and he hadn't shown up for class yet. Was he avoiding her because of... of whatever had happened in the cafe? Ah well, if he didn't arrive, Liz could probably just do the assignment hers-- and then there he was, making his way through the door with a long drawn-out sigh, and looking as handsome as ever in a slate blue sweater with a small V-neck.
"Mister Evans, so nice to have you join us," Miss Goldson quipped. Max sat down on the stool beside Liz, his books going into the lab table and a pencil into his mouth without a word. That much was par for the course - well, not Max chewing on a pencil, because he didn't often. But he didn't talk much. Oh sure, occasionally when they were waiting for a long boring experiment to finish Liz could prod him into some small talk. But even then he always steered carefully clear of anything too personal - his family, his friends, his own opinions on anything more serious than the pros and cons of rap music or the latest Ryan Phillipe movie.
"Partners on the left, prepare a slide with the vegetable sampling," the teacher continued. "Partners on the right, take a toothpick and get a sample from your cheek." Liz and Max each glanced at each other and took a fraction of a second to work it out. Max was on the right. He took the pencil out of his mouth and stood up. "Mister Evans?" Miss Goldson sighed.
"Could I get a bathroom pass?" Max asked nervously.
"High maintenance today, aren't we?" the teacher joked, waving him up and taking one of the small slips of paper off of her desk and jotting a few words down on it. As she started to ramble on again about what makes the millions of species of life different from each other, Liz watched Max go and wondered what that had all been about.
Sigh. She'd probably better do both sides of the experiment herself, just to be safe. Liz snagged a few toothpicks from the girl sitting in front of her and drew the end of one against the inside of her mouth. After following painstakingly the correct procedure for making a microscope slide, Liz peered through the eyepiece and started jotting down notes. Very ordinary-looking cells... pink even though she hadn't dyed them with any of the color solutions... she could even pick out a few of the organelles from inside.
After checking the vegetable sample, Max still hadn't returned. Liz started to wonder about the reasons for his disappearing act? Was it possible that Max was actually afraid of something that might be seen on a slide sample??
**Well... if he was so worried, then... then he SHOULDN'T have left his pencil sitting right there.**
Liz suspected on some level that she shouldn't be doing this. But her curiosity about all the strangeness around Max Evans had gotten too high. Quickly she reached over, took hole of the pencil carefully near the point, and scraped carefully from the other end where it had been in Max's mouth. Wondering whether she actually had any cells or not, she added a few drops of the vibrant green dye and put it under the microscope.
She had cells here all right - and what cells!! They were more blocky and angular, more elongated than her regular human cheek cells, and seemed to be surrounded by a tough but supple barrier - not rigid and unyielding like a plant cell's cellular wall, but not thin and flexible like any animal or human cell she'd ever seen before either.
And that wasn't all the strangeness either. Inside the cells - the interior was clearer than any sample Liz had ever taken before - most of the protoplasm seemed to be glowing with a greenish intensity that brightened and dimmed on about a two and a half second cycle. The nucleus was about normal, but there were subcellular structures here completely unfamiliar to Liz - including some that almost seemed to gleam with purple and orangle lights, like tiny little stars.
"Fascinating, isn't it, Miss Parker?" Liz looked up from the microscope in total terror, only to find Miss Goldson smiling blandly at her. **She has to think you're only doing the usual experiment.**
"Uh, yeah..." Liz answered vaguely, not sure what she would say next. She didn't have to. Miss Goldson grinned momentarily and moved on to the next table.
Suddenly panicking, Liz took the slide out of the microscope, took off the tiny plastic cover, and sprayed both it and the sample area on the slide with the sterilizing solution that she had used to clean and prepare the slides before beginning. Another check on the microscope revealed nothing out of the ordinary. Max's pencil went into her pocket.
Max showed up just in time to collect his books and Liz's notes before the class bell rung - he had to have timed it that way. As Max hurried off with the first tide of students eager to leave bio 201, Liz made a decision. **I can't leave it like this.** She rushed after Max Evans and soon was within a few feet of him in the east hallway. "Max, Max!!" A stoner-looking short guy bumped into her, costing precious momentum. "Excuse me," and she pushed her way around him, calling again. "Max, I have to talk to you!" She was hurrying up to his side by the time she said that, and Max turned to her curiously, and with a worried expression on his face.
She grabbed his arm and made a split-second decision as to where to go. The music room was nearby, and she didn't think any band class would be in session this period. As she led the way, the concentric semicircles of chairs were all empty, except for one. Liz immediately recognized the unruly dark hair and the ears cutely sticking out too far. **Alex.**
He didn't notice her at first. Alex's trusty bass guitar was slung over his lap and he was riffing around - obviously just having fun with it. **You can't deny it, though... the guy's got a good sense of sound.** Liz shook off her temptation to listen longer and spoke up. "Alex?"
He looked up at her, smiling. "Hey!"
"Hey," Liz answered back quickly.
"Hello, Max." Liz glanced to her side - Max had pulled up next to her.
"Hey, Alex."
"So... you doing okay today?" Alex asked her with a nod of friendly concern... or was that 'more-than-friendly' concern? Liz could never tell.
"Oh, yeah, I'm good. Sorry for blowing you off last night, I was just so..."
"Shaken up," Alex finished for her.
Liz stumbled momentarily at that intercepted completion. "Um... yeah. When the gun went off. But hey, you know, boom!! Way loud and then it's over."
Alex nodded his eyes narrowing for a moment and then he was back to normal. "So, what are you guys doing in here?"
"Umm... I was looking for..." As usual, Liz felt like she could never come up with a really good lie on the spot. "For a place we could study for our bio midterm."
"Oh, right." Alex unclipped the shoulder strap from his guitar and pulled out the case. "Biology. Lab partners. Well, I'll just get out of your hair."
"You don't have to," Liz heard herself saying. "You were here first, you've got first dibs if you wanna practice..."
"Naw, I should be getting down to the computer lab anyways." He finished packing up the bass guitar. "Good luck with the biology. Uh, Liz..." He pointed a finger in her direction, then did a double-take and swiped it away when he realized how much it might resemble a pointing gun. "You wanna go see 'Bowfinger' sometime? C'mon... Show business con artist hijinks!! Plus, Eddie Martin caught up in many strange situations that he doesn't understand!"
Liz had to laugh. "Okay... call me after school."
Alex smiled and headed for the door. "You got it. Have a nice day, Max Evans."
Liz watched him leave. "What's the deal with you two?" Max asked. "Are you dating?"
"Not... officially..." Liz sighed. "That's not what we're here to talk about." She turned to face Max. "Okay, first of all...." No words seemed to come that would fit so she just finished, ever so lamely, with "this." And she lifted up the fabric of her red tank top to show the still-glowing handprint on her midriff.
Max stared at it, obviously completely taken aback. "Wow."
Liz brought her hem back down. "And... and I scraped some cells from your pencil," she continued. "This - this is really hard to say -- I'm trying to keep from blacking out here. Um: the cells aren't normal." She blurted that last phrase out. Deep breath. "So, Max... what I'm going to suggest to you is that we just go back to the bio lab now, so that I can take a sample so that we can both see what went wrong, you know? That I got the wrong cells." There. She'd said it.
Max sighed. "You didn't get the wrong cells, Liz."
Liz blinked in surprise. She certainly hadn't expected him to say *that.* "Okay, um... so help me out here, Max. I mean... what are you?" She hadn't meant to blurt it out like that, but maybe it was for the best.
"Well, I'm not from around here," he said, shaking his head slightly.
"Where you from?" Max just pointed up into the air with one finger. "Up north?" Liz whispered, knowing that she was playing dumb, but she couldn't quite get her brain around what Max seemed to be hinting.
Max just pointed his finger even higher, and Liz shook her head. It didn't help that the light was behind his head from her perspective, throwing out a surreal nimbus of light about him like he was E. T. "I mean, you're not an... an *a-alien*, I mean... Are you?"
"I prefer the term 'Not of this earth." Max whispered softly. Liz shot him a dark look. "Sorry, just, it's not a good time to joke." He heaved a deep breath. "Yeah, I am. Wow, it's weird to actually say it."
Suddenly, Liz *so* didn't want to be here for the epiphany of Max Evans coming to terms with his transstellar heritage. Instinctively, she pulled her backpack on tighter and turned to go. "Liz," Max called out to her.
"Um, Max, you know, I have..." she babbled. "I'm gonna be late for my US government class, so I'm just gonna..."
And suddenly he rushed forward, slamming the music room door before she could open it and holding it closed. "Liz, listen to me. You can't talk to *anyone* about this. Not Alex, not Maria, not your parents. *No one*. You don't understand what'll happen if you do! Liz, please? Now *my* life is in YOUR hands."
She looked up into those big brown eyes of his, nodded ever so slightly, and then turned to go.
Author: Chris Kenworthy
Email: kelworth@chriskweb.net
Rating: PG?
Disclaimer: I do not own the characters or premise of 'Roswell,' look for Melinda Metz, Jason Katims, or the Fox head honchos. I just write stories here. :]
Category: Very AU, skewed reality version of... well, early season 1 to start with. UC couples leading to CC couples - yes, it's homecoming backwards. ;-)
Spoilers: Well, if you haven't seen the pilot, what are you doing here? ;-) Any events from the show might appear here, somewhat distorted. Familiarity with early season 1 will probably help you to make sense of all the clever things I'm trying to do. :-D
Home archive: http://www.fanfiction.net/~chriskenworthy
Dedication: To all you rabid dreamers and candygirls. I dunno if you're gonna love this or hate it, but either way it's *all for you.* hehehehe.
It was... Liz wasn't sure. Ten minutes after everything had gone down? Twenty?? Time didn't seem to have its usual meaning. She sat in one of the Crashdown Cafe's vinyl-padded chairs, staring idly at Miss UFO nut's half-eaten Sigourney Weaver. Nothing was processing through her brain yet. Nothing made sense.
A familiar voice cut through the daze. "Lizzie, oh my god." **I'm on.**
Sure enough, there was her father, Mister Jeff Parker... almost certainly having hurried back from the potato products distributor as soon as he heard about what had happened in the restaurant. "No, dad, look, look at this," Liz said, holding up her apron, which was brightly marked with red stains and clearly smelled of tomato and vinegar - but not blood. "See, I'm fine, I just spilled ketchup. I'm really... I'm okay."
"Are you sure?"
"Yeah."
As her father started to make some reply, Liz inexplicably focused on the voice of the old Native-American deputy who had been the first lawman to arrive on the scene. "I'm gonna need a better description than that. I assume that they weren't actually cartoons." From what Liz could pick up, Maria had been giving a description of the customers from hell from whose table the shooting had come, since she had gotten a better look than anybody, taking their orders, getting them their food.
A few seconds later, a tall man with an off-white cowboy hat opened the front door and stepped into the cafe. He wore dark shades that reflected the world around you in shades of black when you looked at him - blue jeans, a light blue button-down shirt, and the green jacket overtop had a bright gold star pinned to the chest, and another one on each shoulder. This was Sheriff James Valenti the second. Every teenage in town knew him on sight, and most were scared shitless of him, whether or not the guys would admit it to their macho buddies.
Liz didn't have any reason to act macho. *She* was scared of the Sheriff, even though she knew he was the father of Kyle, one of her closest friends. She'd admit it to anyone who asked.
Fortunately, no-one ever had.
"Cyprus oil, it, um, it reduces stress," Maria volunteered. She had been caught in the middle of taking a sniff out of a tiny bottle when Valenti made his entrance, an action which obviously felt suspicious enough that she felt she had to explain herself. Jim didn't even nod, he just paused a second in acknowledgement and walked up to where Liz and her father were sitting.
He took off those shades before he spoke. "You okay?" That helped, without those dark glasses he looked somewhat less frightening and a considerable margin more concernes - possibly even protective. There was still a no-nonsense air that Valenti carried about himself like an insisible cloak, though.
"Yeah, thanks, I'm just a little shaken up," Liz said, forcing a smile. What would she say if he started asking more questions?
Fortunately, the deputy spared her that, for the moment anyways, "Sir, the suspects ran out right after the in-cident o-ccured," he drawled, taking his superior aside in a relaxed gesture. "Couple of outsiders, no apparent robbery, no injuries other than the girl that fell. Just seems like an argument that got outta hand." A second after he finished his report, the door to the kitchen squeaked, and the deputy growled out, "Hey, I told you two to *stay outta* there!"
It was the UFO-nuts-couple, who turned around guiltily after being yelled at. "Couple of tourists, in town for the Crash," the Deputy explained for Valenti's benefit. He had already taken their statements.
Around this point, Alex got up, sat down next to Liz on the opposite side from her father, and very unobtrusively took one of her hands in his. Liz smiled shyly at him, grateful for the moral support.
"Uh, Sheriff, hi?" the UFO nut guy said, waving sheepishly at the lawmen. "Um, um, I'm sorry, I really need to talk to you. I think something *happened* here."
"What do you think 'happened?'" Valenti asked unflappably. He was always unflappable, it seemed.
"The gunman was... was, was standing right over there, right?" the UFO guy stuttered. Uh-oh. This did not sound good. What had this bozo's wild imagination managed to reconstruct? "And the gun was fired into this direction." He waved from the far table towards the kitchen window. Liz couldn't keep herself from standing up in alarm. "Now, Jen and I..." brief nod to blonde short hair, "We searched this entire place up and down, and -- I mean, there's... where's the bullet?"
**This is bad.**
"We haven't found a bullet hole yet, Sheriff," the deputy added.
"Yeah, and uh, Sheriff, before it happened, the girl gave me this." The nut guy handed Liz's picture to Valenti. **Oh, god, no.** At least that had no real connection with what actually happened, but it would just make the situation look more strange.
Valenti handed the photo off to Mister Parker, who had stood up. "Jeff?"
Jeff Parker barely even needed to look at it. "Lizzie?"
Liz sighed. "Yeah?"
"I told you about showing the alien photo to tourists."
Meanwhile, Valenti was nosing around the table where Max and Tess had been sitting. Eager to prove that she could cause even more trouble than her boyfriend, UFO girl... **he called her Jen right?** put in "There were two kids sitting over here when it happened, a boy and a girl about her age. And then one of them went--"
"Uh yeah, that's right, there were," Liz broke in, rushing up to the sheriff. She didn't want anything about Max Evans' involvement here to reach Valenti. She still didn't understand what had happened - didn't know if *anything* had happened beyond her imagination, but if there was any chance that Max had... helped her, she didn't want to betray the one thing he had asked of her. "But you know, I didn't recognize them, so they must have just been tourists."
"No, no, it sure looked like she knew them to me..." the nut guy persisted...
* * * * *
Afternoon was turning to evening by the time Liz had finally (she hoped,) thrown Valenti off of Max's trail. She hurried up the stairs to her family's apartment above the restaurant, and kept on going until she had closed the door to her room. Opening up the suede jacket she had been using to deflect any attention from the blue one-piece waitress uniform, she prodded delicately at the part of the stomach where *it* had happened.
No soreness, but the stains had hardened in a way that ketchup alone definitely did not react. And it almost looked like there were... powder burns? **Ridiculous. You only get powder burns at close range. I was - what, thirty-five feet away from that gun??** Still... there was a black powdery-ness there that couldn't help but seem suspicious, even if it was only dust and dirt that had gotten mixed in with the blood and the ketchup.
Suddenly dynamic, Liz pulled the buttons apart and shucked off the uniform. **I have to keep this away from ANYONE until I can find a way to clean it. Or dispose of it...** From the inside of the outfit, Liz could see the bullet hole clearly, without the ketchup stains confusing the situation. Even if she cleaned the uniform, that hole could arouse questions. **So what do I do, bury it out in the desert somewhere??** Unable to come to an immediate decision, she shoved the uniform into her bookbag, carefully, so that neither the stains nor the bullet hole were immediately exposed.
Sighing with at least some sense of satisfaction, Liz crossed over towards her dresser, to get some street clothes to wear. But on the way, something caught her attention in the mirror.
As she turned to face her reflection, Liz didn't spare even the usual half a second for her mid-length, dark hair with the perm wearing out, for the silver chain her Grampa Cameron had given her for her birthday around her neck, for her trim figure in the black underwear she had had on underneath the Crashdown uniform.
On her stomach, spanning across the area where the bullet had struck her, a pattern was marked out in glowing silver against Liz's skin. An elliptical blob here, a longer line there, and a comblike pattern with four parallel strokes.
Together they made an unmistakeable handprint pattern.
Max Evans' handprint.
* * * * *
"...For this experiment, you'll be working in teams of two," Miss Goldson, the so-called 'biology teacher,' (in Liz's opinion, the young woman was clearly an artsy teacher's school graduate who had been picked to cover the retirement of Doctor Schwidt as cheaply as possible. So far, the evidence would suggest that Liz already knew more about science than the teacher.) Uh, anyways... after that little announcement, Liz shot a glance nervously towards the classroom door.
Max Evans was her lab partner, about the only thing they knew each other from before yesterday, and he hadn't shown up for class yet. Was he avoiding her because of... of whatever had happened in the cafe? Ah well, if he didn't arrive, Liz could probably just do the assignment hers-- and then there he was, making his way through the door with a long drawn-out sigh, and looking as handsome as ever in a slate blue sweater with a small V-neck.
"Mister Evans, so nice to have you join us," Miss Goldson quipped. Max sat down on the stool beside Liz, his books going into the lab table and a pencil into his mouth without a word. That much was par for the course - well, not Max chewing on a pencil, because he didn't often. But he didn't talk much. Oh sure, occasionally when they were waiting for a long boring experiment to finish Liz could prod him into some small talk. But even then he always steered carefully clear of anything too personal - his family, his friends, his own opinions on anything more serious than the pros and cons of rap music or the latest Ryan Phillipe movie.
"Partners on the left, prepare a slide with the vegetable sampling," the teacher continued. "Partners on the right, take a toothpick and get a sample from your cheek." Liz and Max each glanced at each other and took a fraction of a second to work it out. Max was on the right. He took the pencil out of his mouth and stood up. "Mister Evans?" Miss Goldson sighed.
"Could I get a bathroom pass?" Max asked nervously.
"High maintenance today, aren't we?" the teacher joked, waving him up and taking one of the small slips of paper off of her desk and jotting a few words down on it. As she started to ramble on again about what makes the millions of species of life different from each other, Liz watched Max go and wondered what that had all been about.
Sigh. She'd probably better do both sides of the experiment herself, just to be safe. Liz snagged a few toothpicks from the girl sitting in front of her and drew the end of one against the inside of her mouth. After following painstakingly the correct procedure for making a microscope slide, Liz peered through the eyepiece and started jotting down notes. Very ordinary-looking cells... pink even though she hadn't dyed them with any of the color solutions... she could even pick out a few of the organelles from inside.
After checking the vegetable sample, Max still hadn't returned. Liz started to wonder about the reasons for his disappearing act? Was it possible that Max was actually afraid of something that might be seen on a slide sample??
**Well... if he was so worried, then... then he SHOULDN'T have left his pencil sitting right there.**
Liz suspected on some level that she shouldn't be doing this. But her curiosity about all the strangeness around Max Evans had gotten too high. Quickly she reached over, took hole of the pencil carefully near the point, and scraped carefully from the other end where it had been in Max's mouth. Wondering whether she actually had any cells or not, she added a few drops of the vibrant green dye and put it under the microscope.
She had cells here all right - and what cells!! They were more blocky and angular, more elongated than her regular human cheek cells, and seemed to be surrounded by a tough but supple barrier - not rigid and unyielding like a plant cell's cellular wall, but not thin and flexible like any animal or human cell she'd ever seen before either.
And that wasn't all the strangeness either. Inside the cells - the interior was clearer than any sample Liz had ever taken before - most of the protoplasm seemed to be glowing with a greenish intensity that brightened and dimmed on about a two and a half second cycle. The nucleus was about normal, but there were subcellular structures here completely unfamiliar to Liz - including some that almost seemed to gleam with purple and orangle lights, like tiny little stars.
"Fascinating, isn't it, Miss Parker?" Liz looked up from the microscope in total terror, only to find Miss Goldson smiling blandly at her. **She has to think you're only doing the usual experiment.**
"Uh, yeah..." Liz answered vaguely, not sure what she would say next. She didn't have to. Miss Goldson grinned momentarily and moved on to the next table.
Suddenly panicking, Liz took the slide out of the microscope, took off the tiny plastic cover, and sprayed both it and the sample area on the slide with the sterilizing solution that she had used to clean and prepare the slides before beginning. Another check on the microscope revealed nothing out of the ordinary. Max's pencil went into her pocket.
Max showed up just in time to collect his books and Liz's notes before the class bell rung - he had to have timed it that way. As Max hurried off with the first tide of students eager to leave bio 201, Liz made a decision. **I can't leave it like this.** She rushed after Max Evans and soon was within a few feet of him in the east hallway. "Max, Max!!" A stoner-looking short guy bumped into her, costing precious momentum. "Excuse me," and she pushed her way around him, calling again. "Max, I have to talk to you!" She was hurrying up to his side by the time she said that, and Max turned to her curiously, and with a worried expression on his face.
She grabbed his arm and made a split-second decision as to where to go. The music room was nearby, and she didn't think any band class would be in session this period. As she led the way, the concentric semicircles of chairs were all empty, except for one. Liz immediately recognized the unruly dark hair and the ears cutely sticking out too far. **Alex.**
He didn't notice her at first. Alex's trusty bass guitar was slung over his lap and he was riffing around - obviously just having fun with it. **You can't deny it, though... the guy's got a good sense of sound.** Liz shook off her temptation to listen longer and spoke up. "Alex?"
He looked up at her, smiling. "Hey!"
"Hey," Liz answered back quickly.
"Hello, Max." Liz glanced to her side - Max had pulled up next to her.
"Hey, Alex."
"So... you doing okay today?" Alex asked her with a nod of friendly concern... or was that 'more-than-friendly' concern? Liz could never tell.
"Oh, yeah, I'm good. Sorry for blowing you off last night, I was just so..."
"Shaken up," Alex finished for her.
Liz stumbled momentarily at that intercepted completion. "Um... yeah. When the gun went off. But hey, you know, boom!! Way loud and then it's over."
Alex nodded his eyes narrowing for a moment and then he was back to normal. "So, what are you guys doing in here?"
"Umm... I was looking for..." As usual, Liz felt like she could never come up with a really good lie on the spot. "For a place we could study for our bio midterm."
"Oh, right." Alex unclipped the shoulder strap from his guitar and pulled out the case. "Biology. Lab partners. Well, I'll just get out of your hair."
"You don't have to," Liz heard herself saying. "You were here first, you've got first dibs if you wanna practice..."
"Naw, I should be getting down to the computer lab anyways." He finished packing up the bass guitar. "Good luck with the biology. Uh, Liz..." He pointed a finger in her direction, then did a double-take and swiped it away when he realized how much it might resemble a pointing gun. "You wanna go see 'Bowfinger' sometime? C'mon... Show business con artist hijinks!! Plus, Eddie Martin caught up in many strange situations that he doesn't understand!"
Liz had to laugh. "Okay... call me after school."
Alex smiled and headed for the door. "You got it. Have a nice day, Max Evans."
Liz watched him leave. "What's the deal with you two?" Max asked. "Are you dating?"
"Not... officially..." Liz sighed. "That's not what we're here to talk about." She turned to face Max. "Okay, first of all...." No words seemed to come that would fit so she just finished, ever so lamely, with "this." And she lifted up the fabric of her red tank top to show the still-glowing handprint on her midriff.
Max stared at it, obviously completely taken aback. "Wow."
Liz brought her hem back down. "And... and I scraped some cells from your pencil," she continued. "This - this is really hard to say -- I'm trying to keep from blacking out here. Um: the cells aren't normal." She blurted that last phrase out. Deep breath. "So, Max... what I'm going to suggest to you is that we just go back to the bio lab now, so that I can take a sample so that we can both see what went wrong, you know? That I got the wrong cells." There. She'd said it.
Max sighed. "You didn't get the wrong cells, Liz."
Liz blinked in surprise. She certainly hadn't expected him to say *that.* "Okay, um... so help me out here, Max. I mean... what are you?" She hadn't meant to blurt it out like that, but maybe it was for the best.
"Well, I'm not from around here," he said, shaking his head slightly.
"Where you from?" Max just pointed up into the air with one finger. "Up north?" Liz whispered, knowing that she was playing dumb, but she couldn't quite get her brain around what Max seemed to be hinting.
Max just pointed his finger even higher, and Liz shook her head. It didn't help that the light was behind his head from her perspective, throwing out a surreal nimbus of light about him like he was E. T. "I mean, you're not an... an *a-alien*, I mean... Are you?"
"I prefer the term 'Not of this earth." Max whispered softly. Liz shot him a dark look. "Sorry, just, it's not a good time to joke." He heaved a deep breath. "Yeah, I am. Wow, it's weird to actually say it."
Suddenly, Liz *so* didn't want to be here for the epiphany of Max Evans coming to terms with his transstellar heritage. Instinctively, she pulled her backpack on tighter and turned to go. "Liz," Max called out to her.
"Um, Max, you know, I have..." she babbled. "I'm gonna be late for my US government class, so I'm just gonna..."
And suddenly he rushed forward, slamming the music room door before she could open it and holding it closed. "Liz, listen to me. You can't talk to *anyone* about this. Not Alex, not Maria, not your parents. *No one*. You don't understand what'll happen if you do! Liz, please? Now *my* life is in YOUR hands."
She looked up into those big brown eyes of his, nodded ever so slightly, and then turned to go.