Disclaimer: Too bad for me, I don't own Dark Angel. I do own Heather, Sara, Lauren, and Mrs. Woodman.
Time Frame: Total AU, 2005. No Pulse, no Manticore, no virus, no breeding cult psychos! Yay!
Author's Note: Thanks SO MUCH for the reviews: RubyStar, mackenzie karls, Nina, Abregaza, Natters, Dark Phanton, Gozer, chiancat87, CharmedOneJayme, Bonita, and Winking Tiger, JessicaMackenzie, dleep, beth, and my DAR buddy MLFan!!
Keep em coming; an author survives off of feedback!
To address the AU thing, if you read the Time Frame: You'll see that it says AU, No plans to bring in OC yet, but Bling may be coming to visit...
Who is Heather? Heather's my best bud in the whole world. She's the best mother figure/support group any girl could have, and I thought that would be good for Max...
Four - You've Got to be Joking
Max burst into the lively cafeteria with a look of horror plastered on her face. She couldn't breathe. The air in her lungs had stopped moving since honors English I with Mr. Patrekki. The day had started off badly and had gotten worse before lunch. She hadn't thought it could be possible, but she soon realized that in high school, anything was possible. Moving quickly through the bustling mass of people hugging, laughing and talking, she plopped down on a bench at a deserted lunch table.
My life has just ended. My life has just ended. My life has just ended. My life has just-
"Max!" Heather sat across from her and looked at Max's pale face, concerned. "Max? Are you okay? What's wrong? Did you finally see this year's cafeteria ladies?" Heather chuckled to herself, but stopped quickly when she saw Max wasn't laughing with her.
Heather's words barely processed in Max's head. She only picked up bits and pieces breaking through the waterfall of thought going through her mind. All of a sudden the waterfall ran dry when she felt a hand smack her upside the head.
"Hey!" Max remarked, rubbing the back of her head tenderly. "What the hell was that for?"
Heather smiled at her sister, ignoring her evil glares. "Do you think I coulda gotten your attention by sitting here talking and hoping that if I talked long enough, you would start paying attention? You underestimate your big sister's tolerance levels."
"Oh," Max managed to get out. "Sorry."
"Now, tell me why you look like your life just ended for the second or third time this week?"
Max groaned and put her head down on the plastic table. "Because it did," came her muffled response.
Heather looked at her skeptically. "That's not possible, we haven't even walked through the cafeteria lines yet," she joked, hoping to get a laugh out of her baby sister.
Max lifted her head and shot a sarcastic look at her sister. "Ha, ha, very funny. I'm being serious though-my life has just ended. Again."
"Tell Heather what's going on then," Heather said softly, patting her sister's arm sympathetically.
Max let out a sigh of relief as the bell rang; first period was finally over! Algebra seemed to have slugged by, leaving Max bored stiff. Cautiously, she navigated though the busy corridors to her English class. As she walked through the halls, she could see people fly by her, some alone and angry, others already paired with their semester soul mates, sap pouring out of their ears. It made her sick to her stomach... but at the same time it made her long for Logan. She wanted to be in his arms again on that beach in LA without a care in the world. Max wanted all the textbooks and morons and rules and syllabuses to disappear and for Logan to take their place. She would do anything to see him again.
"Hey, kid, we don't have all day! Move!" an angry voice called out, bringing her back to the stark reality of the here and now.
Max looked around and realized that she was just standing in the middle of the hall right in front of her next class, frozen in time. Mutely, she walked forward and opened the old wooden door circa 1970-something. The class was full of people, some of whom she had known since she wore Velcro shoes and pigtails, others she had never seen in her life. Max spotted an empty desk at the back of the class and slid into the cold, plastic seat. Resting her head against the wall, she tried to push Logan from her mind. Max tried to erase the moments: the tension, the dance, the café, all those sunsets...but the more she tried to delete them forever, the more she felt his presence ruling over her again. 'If only I had gotten my act together and told him where I live! Maxie, you are a total idiot. A complete and total idiot!'
The bell screamed from some hidden place as her English teacher, Mr. Patrekki, got up from his desk and stood before the class. He was an older man with a head of dissipating hair clad in a dull eighties blazer and pants that needed to be taken to the Smithsonian for their age and horrible fit. 'Students must put him through hell.' The rather dated reading glasses sitting on his desk seemed to be too large for his head and the nosepiece too loose. He gave every student a silent evaluation, staring intently at their faces, clothing, and how well prepared they had come to class. Heather had warned Max in the car that morning that Max had gotten one of the shrewdest, most conservative English teacher in the whole building. But of course, she didn't need Heather's warning. Max could tell he was a "rightie all the way" by the bland set up of his classroom. The institutional beige walls were only covered in dust and fire escape routes, and his desk had only been graced with neat little stacks of paper and his reading glasses. 'Geez, Heather was right,' she thought. 'Thank God this isn't geography,'
"Good morning, class," he said in a rather bland voice. "My name is Mr. Patrekki. I will be your honors English teacher this year. Sorry, but you're stuck with me," 'Hello, Ben Stein,' Max thought. The balding man moved to his desk, picked up a neat stack of papers, and waved it in the air. "This is your assignment. You have a week to procrastinate and spoil your brains with that MTV stuff before you get written down in my book."
'Ah yes, the book'. Max had heard those words earlier. She thought back to that morning in the car when Heather had told her about Mr. Patrekki.
"I told you he'd mention it!" Heather said triumphantly, interrupting Max's recollections of the morning. Max looked at Heather expectantly, waiting for something else. "Oh, no, I'm done. Go on."
As Max started to speak, Heather cut her off. "But I told you he would! Don't you remember this morning on the way to school?"
"Now, if he writes you down in his book, you're gonna be hawked for the rest of the year." Heather was filling Max in about her lovely new teacher. So far, it didn't look pretty.
"Mafia style kinda hawk or Big Brother kinda hawk?"
Heather glided to a stop. "You remember when my friends and I had that whole Mafia joke and I thought someone was spying on me?"
Max recollected back to when her sister was in eighth grade (and she was in sixth). She remembered Heather's eighth grade friends talking about the Mafia following them around and waiting by their bus stop with the classic tinted-window cars. She let out a small laugh.
"Could you imagine an old, crusty, elephant-loving teacher staking out our house with Class One tinted windows?" Heather mused. Max laughed again, answering her question. "So what about this book dealio?"
The light turned green and the rubber of the wheels began to roll over the concrete again. "He keeps this book off to the side where no one can see it, but we all know it's there. If something goes wrong with a student, he'll whip out his book and write it down," she warned her little sister. "He won't leave anything out either; this is a big ass book, a Tolstoy kinda book. He'll continue to watch you all throughout high school if you're not careful."
"He sounds like he need to attend one of your seminars," Max joked. "Maybe the obsessive-compulsive one this November?"
Heather laughed and did her trademark clap. "Great idea! I can book at the Westin and everything!"
"Of course I remember!" Max said, drumming her knuckles on the laminate table. "Can I go on now?" Her patience was starting to grow thin as Heather's interruptions grew more numerous.
"Yes, I give you my blessing to go on with your story," Heather said with a religious air about her.
Max smiled sarcastically, tilting her head to the side. "Why, thank you!"
"I want it to be 12 point font, double spaced, and justified. If you can't comply with my instructions, they go in the trash. I won't even look at them. The first lesson you learn in life: follow the rules or suffer the wrath of the justice system."
'Pleasant,' she thought.
"I'm being extremely kind by giving you a free response essay with three different prompts. Write the prompts and nothing else. I don't care how much you cry over this essay, I just want to see how much I'm going to have to teach you cretins this year."
With his little rant finished, Mr. Patrekki started to pass the papers to the students, all of them shocked and dismayed with the teacher they had gotten this year. When his job was done, he returned to his desk and opened the Business section of The Seattle News. 'What a great teacher,' Max snorted to herself. The prompt finally came flying over the shoulder in front of her and onto her graffitoed desk. She rummaged around in her backpack for a pen to write her name on her paper, even though she would throw it away in due time. 'Come on, come on! There's gotta be a pen in here somewhere!'
After finally pulling out a pen, Mr. Patrekki lifted his head from the newspaper and said, "Don't even think about writing on those prompts. I have to use those little prompt papers until eighth period. So if you wrote on it, pray that your wrote it in pencil."
Groans arose from the students, causing Mr. Patrekki to do his best impression of an impish smile, which really looked like an odd grimace of pain. He went back to his paper. Max rolled her eyes, reaching in her backpack again to fish out an empty spiral. She flipped to the first clean page and started to copy the prompt down:
English Prompt
Write a free response essay about one of the three prompts:
Life Story
- leave out irrelevant anecdotes
- basics only
Goals in Life
- explain one to three
- be specific
She read the last prompt and tried not to cry or get up and slap Mr. Patrekki. How could she do a prompt like this? How, how, how? Max gripped her pen tightly, barely getting the last prompt down without resurfacing another painful memory.
Summer Vacation
- hit key points
- include details
- school appropriate
"I can't write this paper, and that means I'm going to fail!" Max cried. "Fail my first assignment! In high school! I just can't do that! This-"
Heather covered Max's mouth, stopping her from creating the longest run-on sentence known to man. "Hun, listen to me. Relax!" Slowly she took her hand away from Max's face.
"Easy for you to say-" Max muttered.
"I'm serious! I know you can do this assignment! You won't fail, and this assignment will not ruin your high school transcript. I know this."
Max looked at her sister skeptically. "How do you know?"
Heather smiled and leaned in closer. "Because I can foresee the future!"
The two girls burst out into giggles. Heather looked at her sister's happy face and couldn't help but smile. Don't worry, Sis, things'll get better.
Later that night Max sat in the middle of her bed with a tornado of homework encircling her. She found it hard to believe that she had gotten so much homework on just the first day. Max suddenly felt a longing for middle school, when things were easy and social problems took rank over schooling.
"Oh, the good ol' days," she mused aloud.
It wasn't like her homework was an uphill battle; it just took time. Time she would rather spend on her small and currently unsuccessful search for the guy who stole her heart. She had called all around Los Angeles looking for his number. She had phoned his aunt and uncle's house, the major high schools, public and private, and even some colleges. In all of her time with him, she had never found out his age or where he went to school... things she was paying for now. Heather had helped her out as much as she could, but it was still difficult to search for Logan with her mother watching over her like the CIA.
Nicole Guevara was a rather odd character compared to Max and Heather. Raised in a Hispanic neighborhood in Southern Los Angeles, Nicole and her mother, Maria, worked double shifts and fought to survive. The two did almost everything they could to keep their heads above water and poverty. But as Nicole got older, her mother married an uppity businessman out of Pasadena who seemed to magically fix all of the family's financial problems. By high school, Nicole had to say goodbye to her girlfriends and hello to a new, pristine high school with rich kids who were fed with silver spoons. After a rocky start, she soon rose to the top of the social ladder, becoming the squad leader of the cheerleading team, winning Homecoming Queen every year, and being crowned prom Queen. She graduated high school with a full cheerleading scholarship and a brand new Ford Mustang, making her friends turn greener than they ever had in the past. In college she met the love of her life, Ray Guevara, and was soon married.
When Nicole had met Ray, he was a freshman as well, and Nicole had never made an attempt at dating older men after seeing where it had gotten her mother. Nicole's father had left her and Maria right after Nicole was born, taking all the money and the car with him. She did everything she could to emphasize the fact that she greatly disapproved of dating older men. Nicole claimed, "Once you get too old or too ugly, they'll drop you like that for another pretty face and tight body."
Max knew Logan would never do that, though, and she had told that to her mom, Nicole never seemed to believe her. Logan wasn't the type to check out "arm jewelry"... was he? Max pushed the thought away and started to search for what was left of her homework. Algebra: check. Geography: check. Biology: check. Syllabuses: check, check, check, check times a thousand. So everything's done except- "English."
She sighed and grabbed her laptop. Once the operating system had finally booted and she had opened a word document, Max opened her XTC mp3 and started her last assignment.
I'm the man who murdered love. Yeah!
Whaddya say to that?
"I say go you, buddy," she muttered, thinking over which prompt to do. Should I do the life story or the Wheaties box goals... hmm... Well, I guess my life story wouldn't include Logan at all, so how about that... Her fingers danced across the keyboard as she started from the beginning of her rather uneventful life. After a while, she stopped to reread what she wrote.
I was born in a rather bleak and ugly hospital on your typical stormy night late 1991. My mother Nicole was screaming her head off swearing that she was going to kill my father if she could actually stand, but she couldn't, because she was having me. My father was trying not to faint or allow his hand to be broken. My sister, who was the tender age of three, was secretly escaping from hospital daycare and doing the Rugrats thing, except she wasn't bald and could stand properly, but that's ok.
The city was Gillette and the state, Wyoming, but that soon changed. My uppity entrepreneur father walked in one day when I had just learned to market cookies by being cute and told us that we were moving to Seattle. Being the understanding sister that she is, Heather had no problem with this. But being nine and completely irrational, I ran away (after throwing the mother of all tantrums), and hid out in our neighbor Mr. Lydecker's basement for five hours until he found me crying around shards of a broken cocktail glass. It goes without saying that he pulled me back to my house, which was now filled with packing tape and boxes.
So we moved away to Seattle and have never been back to Gillette since. I came to love Seattle and it's little quirks, mostly because Bill Nye was rumored to always be in one of Seattle's science museums all the time. My favorite part of Seattle is definitely the Space Needle. It was originally built for the World's Fair, but was later bought over my some suits as an "investment." Yeah right. I've always wanted to climb onto the Needle; maybe one day I'll break the law and sit up there. Maybe then my problems would disappear and I could be a normal girl with normal problems...
But anyway, after adjusting to Seattle, I came to love it and started a happy life here.
Max looked over the end of her paper so far and cringed. Maybe Heather will know what to do and help me fix it...
She stopped the mp3 and closed her laptop, heading for Heather's room. As she walked in, Max was immediately welcomed by "London Calling" and Heather's pristine "psychologist's" couch. The two sisters had a long-running joke that Heather was a psychologist because she was so good at helping her friends solve their problems and analyzing their dreams. Max often went to Heather just to spill her problems or dreams and have Heather find some hidden meaning or desire in them. "One day I'll start my own practice," Heather often joked.
Max walked farther into the room to find it empty. "Heather?"
While Max's room was the size of her parents' walk-in closet, Heather had gotten the sweeter end of the deal. Heather's room was more like two rooms in one: an area for leisure and an area for her computer and schoolwork. Heather had separated them with a curtain drawn between the two rooms to keep the vibes and feelings from mixing and fighting with each other.
Pulling the curtain aside, Max finally found Heather talking on the phone.
"Heather, I need you to look at this," she whispered.
Heather nodded and took the laptop. "Yeah, Michael, it's my sister. Wanna say hi?"
After briefly listening to his reply, Heather handed the phone to Max, opened the laptop, and began to read.
"Hey, Michael! How's Kansas City?" Max asked trying to hide her own frustration.
"It's great! How do you like being back in Seattle?" Michael's question seemed so innocent. Heather obviously hadn't told him why they came back two weeks early. Max could feel tears start to prick at her eyes and a lump grew in her throat.
"It's okay," Max managed to get out. "Oh, look, Heather wants to talk to you again. Nice chattin' with ya!"
Before he could say anything, Max handed the phone to Heather who was still reading Max's paper. She bolted out of Heather's room, tears now sliding down her cheeks, and ran back to the safety of her own, crashing on top of the bed and sending stuffy rules and syllabuses flying to the floor.
How can I survive without you if I can't even carry on a phone conversation without crying over you?
Rain softly pelted her window as the day melted into the night. She moved her head to watch the rain streaming down the smooth glass, reminding her of all the tears she had shed for him... for them.
Where are you, Logan Cale?
Time Frame: Total AU, 2005. No Pulse, no Manticore, no virus, no breeding cult psychos! Yay!
Author's Note: Thanks SO MUCH for the reviews: RubyStar, mackenzie karls, Nina, Abregaza, Natters, Dark Phanton, Gozer, chiancat87, CharmedOneJayme, Bonita, and Winking Tiger, JessicaMackenzie, dleep, beth, and my DAR buddy MLFan!!
Keep em coming; an author survives off of feedback!
To address the AU thing, if you read the Time Frame: You'll see that it says AU, No plans to bring in OC yet, but Bling may be coming to visit...
Who is Heather? Heather's my best bud in the whole world. She's the best mother figure/support group any girl could have, and I thought that would be good for Max...
Four - You've Got to be Joking
Max burst into the lively cafeteria with a look of horror plastered on her face. She couldn't breathe. The air in her lungs had stopped moving since honors English I with Mr. Patrekki. The day had started off badly and had gotten worse before lunch. She hadn't thought it could be possible, but she soon realized that in high school, anything was possible. Moving quickly through the bustling mass of people hugging, laughing and talking, she plopped down on a bench at a deserted lunch table.
My life has just ended. My life has just ended. My life has just ended. My life has just-
"Max!" Heather sat across from her and looked at Max's pale face, concerned. "Max? Are you okay? What's wrong? Did you finally see this year's cafeteria ladies?" Heather chuckled to herself, but stopped quickly when she saw Max wasn't laughing with her.
Heather's words barely processed in Max's head. She only picked up bits and pieces breaking through the waterfall of thought going through her mind. All of a sudden the waterfall ran dry when she felt a hand smack her upside the head.
"Hey!" Max remarked, rubbing the back of her head tenderly. "What the hell was that for?"
Heather smiled at her sister, ignoring her evil glares. "Do you think I coulda gotten your attention by sitting here talking and hoping that if I talked long enough, you would start paying attention? You underestimate your big sister's tolerance levels."
"Oh," Max managed to get out. "Sorry."
"Now, tell me why you look like your life just ended for the second or third time this week?"
Max groaned and put her head down on the plastic table. "Because it did," came her muffled response.
Heather looked at her skeptically. "That's not possible, we haven't even walked through the cafeteria lines yet," she joked, hoping to get a laugh out of her baby sister.
Max lifted her head and shot a sarcastic look at her sister. "Ha, ha, very funny. I'm being serious though-my life has just ended. Again."
"Tell Heather what's going on then," Heather said softly, patting her sister's arm sympathetically.
Max let out a sigh of relief as the bell rang; first period was finally over! Algebra seemed to have slugged by, leaving Max bored stiff. Cautiously, she navigated though the busy corridors to her English class. As she walked through the halls, she could see people fly by her, some alone and angry, others already paired with their semester soul mates, sap pouring out of their ears. It made her sick to her stomach... but at the same time it made her long for Logan. She wanted to be in his arms again on that beach in LA without a care in the world. Max wanted all the textbooks and morons and rules and syllabuses to disappear and for Logan to take their place. She would do anything to see him again.
"Hey, kid, we don't have all day! Move!" an angry voice called out, bringing her back to the stark reality of the here and now.
Max looked around and realized that she was just standing in the middle of the hall right in front of her next class, frozen in time. Mutely, she walked forward and opened the old wooden door circa 1970-something. The class was full of people, some of whom she had known since she wore Velcro shoes and pigtails, others she had never seen in her life. Max spotted an empty desk at the back of the class and slid into the cold, plastic seat. Resting her head against the wall, she tried to push Logan from her mind. Max tried to erase the moments: the tension, the dance, the café, all those sunsets...but the more she tried to delete them forever, the more she felt his presence ruling over her again. 'If only I had gotten my act together and told him where I live! Maxie, you are a total idiot. A complete and total idiot!'
The bell screamed from some hidden place as her English teacher, Mr. Patrekki, got up from his desk and stood before the class. He was an older man with a head of dissipating hair clad in a dull eighties blazer and pants that needed to be taken to the Smithsonian for their age and horrible fit. 'Students must put him through hell.' The rather dated reading glasses sitting on his desk seemed to be too large for his head and the nosepiece too loose. He gave every student a silent evaluation, staring intently at their faces, clothing, and how well prepared they had come to class. Heather had warned Max in the car that morning that Max had gotten one of the shrewdest, most conservative English teacher in the whole building. But of course, she didn't need Heather's warning. Max could tell he was a "rightie all the way" by the bland set up of his classroom. The institutional beige walls were only covered in dust and fire escape routes, and his desk had only been graced with neat little stacks of paper and his reading glasses. 'Geez, Heather was right,' she thought. 'Thank God this isn't geography,'
"Good morning, class," he said in a rather bland voice. "My name is Mr. Patrekki. I will be your honors English teacher this year. Sorry, but you're stuck with me," 'Hello, Ben Stein,' Max thought. The balding man moved to his desk, picked up a neat stack of papers, and waved it in the air. "This is your assignment. You have a week to procrastinate and spoil your brains with that MTV stuff before you get written down in my book."
'Ah yes, the book'. Max had heard those words earlier. She thought back to that morning in the car when Heather had told her about Mr. Patrekki.
"I told you he'd mention it!" Heather said triumphantly, interrupting Max's recollections of the morning. Max looked at Heather expectantly, waiting for something else. "Oh, no, I'm done. Go on."
As Max started to speak, Heather cut her off. "But I told you he would! Don't you remember this morning on the way to school?"
"Now, if he writes you down in his book, you're gonna be hawked for the rest of the year." Heather was filling Max in about her lovely new teacher. So far, it didn't look pretty.
"Mafia style kinda hawk or Big Brother kinda hawk?"
Heather glided to a stop. "You remember when my friends and I had that whole Mafia joke and I thought someone was spying on me?"
Max recollected back to when her sister was in eighth grade (and she was in sixth). She remembered Heather's eighth grade friends talking about the Mafia following them around and waiting by their bus stop with the classic tinted-window cars. She let out a small laugh.
"Could you imagine an old, crusty, elephant-loving teacher staking out our house with Class One tinted windows?" Heather mused. Max laughed again, answering her question. "So what about this book dealio?"
The light turned green and the rubber of the wheels began to roll over the concrete again. "He keeps this book off to the side where no one can see it, but we all know it's there. If something goes wrong with a student, he'll whip out his book and write it down," she warned her little sister. "He won't leave anything out either; this is a big ass book, a Tolstoy kinda book. He'll continue to watch you all throughout high school if you're not careful."
"He sounds like he need to attend one of your seminars," Max joked. "Maybe the obsessive-compulsive one this November?"
Heather laughed and did her trademark clap. "Great idea! I can book at the Westin and everything!"
"Of course I remember!" Max said, drumming her knuckles on the laminate table. "Can I go on now?" Her patience was starting to grow thin as Heather's interruptions grew more numerous.
"Yes, I give you my blessing to go on with your story," Heather said with a religious air about her.
Max smiled sarcastically, tilting her head to the side. "Why, thank you!"
"I want it to be 12 point font, double spaced, and justified. If you can't comply with my instructions, they go in the trash. I won't even look at them. The first lesson you learn in life: follow the rules or suffer the wrath of the justice system."
'Pleasant,' she thought.
"I'm being extremely kind by giving you a free response essay with three different prompts. Write the prompts and nothing else. I don't care how much you cry over this essay, I just want to see how much I'm going to have to teach you cretins this year."
With his little rant finished, Mr. Patrekki started to pass the papers to the students, all of them shocked and dismayed with the teacher they had gotten this year. When his job was done, he returned to his desk and opened the Business section of The Seattle News. 'What a great teacher,' Max snorted to herself. The prompt finally came flying over the shoulder in front of her and onto her graffitoed desk. She rummaged around in her backpack for a pen to write her name on her paper, even though she would throw it away in due time. 'Come on, come on! There's gotta be a pen in here somewhere!'
After finally pulling out a pen, Mr. Patrekki lifted his head from the newspaper and said, "Don't even think about writing on those prompts. I have to use those little prompt papers until eighth period. So if you wrote on it, pray that your wrote it in pencil."
Groans arose from the students, causing Mr. Patrekki to do his best impression of an impish smile, which really looked like an odd grimace of pain. He went back to his paper. Max rolled her eyes, reaching in her backpack again to fish out an empty spiral. She flipped to the first clean page and started to copy the prompt down:
English Prompt
Write a free response essay about one of the three prompts:
Life Story
- leave out irrelevant anecdotes
- basics only
Goals in Life
- explain one to three
- be specific
She read the last prompt and tried not to cry or get up and slap Mr. Patrekki. How could she do a prompt like this? How, how, how? Max gripped her pen tightly, barely getting the last prompt down without resurfacing another painful memory.
Summer Vacation
- hit key points
- include details
- school appropriate
"I can't write this paper, and that means I'm going to fail!" Max cried. "Fail my first assignment! In high school! I just can't do that! This-"
Heather covered Max's mouth, stopping her from creating the longest run-on sentence known to man. "Hun, listen to me. Relax!" Slowly she took her hand away from Max's face.
"Easy for you to say-" Max muttered.
"I'm serious! I know you can do this assignment! You won't fail, and this assignment will not ruin your high school transcript. I know this."
Max looked at her sister skeptically. "How do you know?"
Heather smiled and leaned in closer. "Because I can foresee the future!"
The two girls burst out into giggles. Heather looked at her sister's happy face and couldn't help but smile. Don't worry, Sis, things'll get better.
Later that night Max sat in the middle of her bed with a tornado of homework encircling her. She found it hard to believe that she had gotten so much homework on just the first day. Max suddenly felt a longing for middle school, when things were easy and social problems took rank over schooling.
"Oh, the good ol' days," she mused aloud.
It wasn't like her homework was an uphill battle; it just took time. Time she would rather spend on her small and currently unsuccessful search for the guy who stole her heart. She had called all around Los Angeles looking for his number. She had phoned his aunt and uncle's house, the major high schools, public and private, and even some colleges. In all of her time with him, she had never found out his age or where he went to school... things she was paying for now. Heather had helped her out as much as she could, but it was still difficult to search for Logan with her mother watching over her like the CIA.
Nicole Guevara was a rather odd character compared to Max and Heather. Raised in a Hispanic neighborhood in Southern Los Angeles, Nicole and her mother, Maria, worked double shifts and fought to survive. The two did almost everything they could to keep their heads above water and poverty. But as Nicole got older, her mother married an uppity businessman out of Pasadena who seemed to magically fix all of the family's financial problems. By high school, Nicole had to say goodbye to her girlfriends and hello to a new, pristine high school with rich kids who were fed with silver spoons. After a rocky start, she soon rose to the top of the social ladder, becoming the squad leader of the cheerleading team, winning Homecoming Queen every year, and being crowned prom Queen. She graduated high school with a full cheerleading scholarship and a brand new Ford Mustang, making her friends turn greener than they ever had in the past. In college she met the love of her life, Ray Guevara, and was soon married.
When Nicole had met Ray, he was a freshman as well, and Nicole had never made an attempt at dating older men after seeing where it had gotten her mother. Nicole's father had left her and Maria right after Nicole was born, taking all the money and the car with him. She did everything she could to emphasize the fact that she greatly disapproved of dating older men. Nicole claimed, "Once you get too old or too ugly, they'll drop you like that for another pretty face and tight body."
Max knew Logan would never do that, though, and she had told that to her mom, Nicole never seemed to believe her. Logan wasn't the type to check out "arm jewelry"... was he? Max pushed the thought away and started to search for what was left of her homework. Algebra: check. Geography: check. Biology: check. Syllabuses: check, check, check, check times a thousand. So everything's done except- "English."
She sighed and grabbed her laptop. Once the operating system had finally booted and she had opened a word document, Max opened her XTC mp3 and started her last assignment.
I'm the man who murdered love. Yeah!
Whaddya say to that?
"I say go you, buddy," she muttered, thinking over which prompt to do. Should I do the life story or the Wheaties box goals... hmm... Well, I guess my life story wouldn't include Logan at all, so how about that... Her fingers danced across the keyboard as she started from the beginning of her rather uneventful life. After a while, she stopped to reread what she wrote.
I was born in a rather bleak and ugly hospital on your typical stormy night late 1991. My mother Nicole was screaming her head off swearing that she was going to kill my father if she could actually stand, but she couldn't, because she was having me. My father was trying not to faint or allow his hand to be broken. My sister, who was the tender age of three, was secretly escaping from hospital daycare and doing the Rugrats thing, except she wasn't bald and could stand properly, but that's ok.
The city was Gillette and the state, Wyoming, but that soon changed. My uppity entrepreneur father walked in one day when I had just learned to market cookies by being cute and told us that we were moving to Seattle. Being the understanding sister that she is, Heather had no problem with this. But being nine and completely irrational, I ran away (after throwing the mother of all tantrums), and hid out in our neighbor Mr. Lydecker's basement for five hours until he found me crying around shards of a broken cocktail glass. It goes without saying that he pulled me back to my house, which was now filled with packing tape and boxes.
So we moved away to Seattle and have never been back to Gillette since. I came to love Seattle and it's little quirks, mostly because Bill Nye was rumored to always be in one of Seattle's science museums all the time. My favorite part of Seattle is definitely the Space Needle. It was originally built for the World's Fair, but was later bought over my some suits as an "investment." Yeah right. I've always wanted to climb onto the Needle; maybe one day I'll break the law and sit up there. Maybe then my problems would disappear and I could be a normal girl with normal problems...
But anyway, after adjusting to Seattle, I came to love it and started a happy life here.
Max looked over the end of her paper so far and cringed. Maybe Heather will know what to do and help me fix it...
She stopped the mp3 and closed her laptop, heading for Heather's room. As she walked in, Max was immediately welcomed by "London Calling" and Heather's pristine "psychologist's" couch. The two sisters had a long-running joke that Heather was a psychologist because she was so good at helping her friends solve their problems and analyzing their dreams. Max often went to Heather just to spill her problems or dreams and have Heather find some hidden meaning or desire in them. "One day I'll start my own practice," Heather often joked.
Max walked farther into the room to find it empty. "Heather?"
While Max's room was the size of her parents' walk-in closet, Heather had gotten the sweeter end of the deal. Heather's room was more like two rooms in one: an area for leisure and an area for her computer and schoolwork. Heather had separated them with a curtain drawn between the two rooms to keep the vibes and feelings from mixing and fighting with each other.
Pulling the curtain aside, Max finally found Heather talking on the phone.
"Heather, I need you to look at this," she whispered.
Heather nodded and took the laptop. "Yeah, Michael, it's my sister. Wanna say hi?"
After briefly listening to his reply, Heather handed the phone to Max, opened the laptop, and began to read.
"Hey, Michael! How's Kansas City?" Max asked trying to hide her own frustration.
"It's great! How do you like being back in Seattle?" Michael's question seemed so innocent. Heather obviously hadn't told him why they came back two weeks early. Max could feel tears start to prick at her eyes and a lump grew in her throat.
"It's okay," Max managed to get out. "Oh, look, Heather wants to talk to you again. Nice chattin' with ya!"
Before he could say anything, Max handed the phone to Heather who was still reading Max's paper. She bolted out of Heather's room, tears now sliding down her cheeks, and ran back to the safety of her own, crashing on top of the bed and sending stuffy rules and syllabuses flying to the floor.
How can I survive without you if I can't even carry on a phone conversation without crying over you?
Rain softly pelted her window as the day melted into the night. She moved her head to watch the rain streaming down the smooth glass, reminding her of all the tears she had shed for him... for them.
Where are you, Logan Cale?