Thanks jbangelo 
Chapter 6
When Amy the Great Works club president finished speaking she was met with enthusiastic applause. Everyone thought the meeting went really well, and Liz even found herself considering a membership with the club. Giving back to the community in small ways sounded like something she could do.
Margaret smiled when it was over, “Did you like it?”
“Yeah,” Liz said, “it was interesting. It sounds like there is a lot that can be done.”
“Exactly,” she said, nodding. “There is a lot that can be done, and it’s exciting that we have the power to better the world around us.”
“Yeah,” Liz repeated. That was it; this was a chance to make a difference.
“I’ve got to go,” Margaret explained. She stood up and pushed her arms into her jacket, and pulled on her gloves. “I have plans with the girls on my floor over at Thorton, but I’ll see you tomorrow morning, right?”
“Eight o’clock.”
“Eight? Really? I’ve always thought that you came a little bit earlier,” she said with a smile.
“Tomorrow’s lab day,” Liz explained.
“And what time does lab start?”
“Eleven,” Liz said with a smile. “I know I’m going to be early, but I actually really need the study time before. The lab we’re doing tomorrow is really tough. It’s so detail oriented that I worry I might not do it right. There are a lot of little pieces,” she said.
“That sounds hard. This is why I’m a history major,” Margaret joked. “Good luck with everything. Bye, Liz.”
“Bye,” Liz said and she turned around in her chair to pick up her jacket too. When all of her outerwear was on, she walked over to the small staircase leading down from the stage. A small crowd of audience members were gathered there around Amy, and Liz lingered at the fringe of the crowd listening. A lot of the questions that she had thought of during the discussion and the speech were being asked by some of the other people. Then Liz decided to wait and listen to the answers to some of her quesitons. When the crowd thinned, she moved forward more, and that’s when she spotted Max and the girl he was with on Amy’s other side.
She’s taller than I am, Liz noted. The other girl had dark and wavy brown hair that looked almost jet black in the lighting. Her eyes were glittering with excitement from where she stood; she seemed really passionate about the club. She either got frustrated with the pace of the questions or that her own question wasn’t answered because she began to push her way further to the front. Liz could admire how forward she was being, but even she was put of by it a little too. When she tore her gaze away from the unnamed girl, she caught Max looking her way. She gave him a small smile and Max smiled back.
“Hey,” he said when he made his way over to her. He pushed himself up onto the ledge of the stage so he could sit, and Liz hesitated before she did the same too.
“Hey,” she said. “Interesting meeting, right?”
“Yeah, it was great. I didn’t know you were thinking of becoming a member.”
“I wasn’t until this morning. My friend Margaret was the one to actually convince me to come. I’m glad I did; it seems like there’s a lot that can be done. Plus she told me about the ice cream,” Liz said with a smile.
“Yes, that brought me here too,” he said.
“They said we could volunteer at the park on Saturdays in March,” his friend explained when she came over. She looked over in Liz’s direction and smiled, “Hi.”
“Hi,” Liz said.
Max could see it was becoming an awkward situation so he rushed to introduce them to each other. “Liz, this is Karen, my resident advisor and a good friend of mine, and Karen, this is Liz; we went to high school together.”
“Nice to meet you, finally,” Karen said. She didn’t fail to notice that Max had introduced her to Liz instead of the other way around.
Liz’s eyes widened when Karen said finally and the thought that Max had mentioned her to Karen caught her off guard. She was surprised to learn who Karen was too. Before the meeting when she saw her, Liz had assumed that she might be Max’s girlfriend. She didn’t know if she was even interested in starting anything with Max; love was deceptive.
Seeing Karen with Max had brought up something to the surface, but Liz wasn’t sure what it was yet. She hadn’t even seen Max in months and there was so much catching up to do; she still didn’t know him as well as she would like to. No, she thought to herself, I don’t know him like I know Alex. It might not have been fair to compare the two guys, but it had been happening to Liz ever since she had run into him.
Before she said anything, she glanced Max’s way but he was conveniently looking out at the group of members who were starting to leave. “Nice to meet you, too,” Liz said.
Max said, “We should get going because I think they’re going to close up soon,” and he gestured to the room. Some of the group’s members were starting to clean up the tables and the leftover food, and the university’s maintenacne crew had come in to start stacking up the chairs. Karen nodded and she walked over to get her coat from the back of the room. Max got off the stage by jumping the short distance and when he landed, he reached his hand out for Liz to get down also.
She smiled, “Thank you.”
He nodded and they started walking towards to back of the room towards the door. “Liz what time do you have class tomorrow?”
“I have a lab that starts at eleven.”
“Lab? Oh, you’re still doing science?” he asked. She always did science in high school and had probably been one of West Roswell’s best science students in years. She had done many county-wide competitions and research papers towards the end of high school, and that had impressed Max. She had always seemed so focused and determined. And it was a part of why he had wanted to get to know Liz. She seemed happy as she was doing all of the science and academic work. It interested her. One of his regrets from high school was not getting to know some of his classmates well.
Michael, Isabel, and Max had been cautious. They wanted normal lives; one that included the normal high school and college experiences and friends and family that they were close to. Then it only became a matter of keeping one thing back: their true identity. Everything else about them appeared normal. By the end of high school they had survived; they had succeeded. There was no FBI following them or keeping tabs on them, and no one from where they were from had approached them. It was like their alien heritage was only a secret that no one would ever see.
And at the end of the year, they got what they wanted; they had normal lives. Isabel was at UC-Boulder studying spanish and business, and she loved it. Michael left Roswell as predicted. He only held on until the end of high school to get his diploma, and he left the day after graduation. Over the summer he called Max a few times to say he was in Canada or New York, but the calls had lessened. Max wanted to think that he was happy too. And Max had went to UCLA. He transferred out right after he went but having the freedom to do that made him happy too. He had options.
Liz was smiling, and she said, “Still? You remember?”
“Yeah, you were really good in high school.”
“Thanks. Well, yeah I’m still doing science. I’m thinking of majoring in biology, but the major has a lot of requirements. I really hope I can finish in time.”
“I’m sure you can,” he told her.
“Thank you,” she said.
Karen lingered by the door, waiting for the two of them to catch up to her. She knew Max was talkative and that he didn’t have many friends yet, but seeing him around Liz brought a special light to his eyes. When she came over that afternoon with a video, Max had been disappointed that she chose yet another romantic comedy without him being there. She dropped by his room an hour before she went and when he wasn’t there, she figured he was still in class. Her excuse was that the burden of picking the video fell onto her.
“What class did you have?” she asked as she settled down onto the floor. She stretched her legs out in front of her and used the side of his bed as a backing. The credits were just starting and Karen was already hungry. She grabbed the popcorn bowl from Max so she could start on it.
“Psychology,” Max said. He tried to reach for the popcorn bowl but Karen was quicker than he was and she put it just out of his reach.
“How’d it go?”
Max smiled, “It was fine. Callaghan teaches a good class.”
“Oh, class? Max, whatever. That’ll come and go. Any cute girls?” she teased.
She could see Max was about to deny it, but something he remembered at that instant made him smile. “Actually, Liz is in my class.”’
“Liz?” she repeated smiling. “Did you say hi?”
He smiled, “Yes, I did. She’s nice.”
“That’s good then,” she said. She was the resident advisor for the floor his room was on, and she was supposed to help the new students get settled. She met him when she offered to help him move in, and during the two hours that they moved some of his stuff, he didn’t say much. Whatever jokes Karen threw out about how much stuff he had, he let roll off his back, and he came up with a witty response for. But it was rare for him to start up a joke. At first she had figured he was only shy, but as she got to know him more, she realized he just needed to open up. “ It’s about time actually. You’ve been talking about her for about a month now,” Karen added.
“When are you going to see her again?” Karen asked.
“Thursday probably when we have our next class with Callaghan.”
“That’s good; that’s really soon.”
“Yeah, it is. She’s really nice.”
“That’s good,” Karen said smiling again. “You know, there might be hope for you yet, Evans.”
She held the door partially open so Liz could come through it too, and Liz softly said, “Thanks.”
Karen nodded and she and Liz fell into an easy pace together. Max caught up and he walked beside Liz too. Karen’s phone started to ring as they were walking and she slowed her pace to answer the call. Soon she was laughing at whatever the caller was saying.
Liz couldn’t think of anything to say so at first she just kept walking with Max. When she finally came up with something that didn’t sound awkward or forced inside of her head, she said, “Max, did you start the reading yet?”
He smiled.“No, actually, I haven’t even touched it yet. It was a lot of reading though.”
“Yeah, I think he wants to get the introductory parts out of the way so we can start working on the more interesting theories. I think it’s good, but there’s just so much material.”
“That’s true. I think the reading assignment was seventy pages or so. He said it covered a lot of the basic theories.”
Liz sighed, “Yeah he did. I’m really not looking forward to it though.”
“What other classes do you have tomorrow?”
“I have Bio in the morning, and an english and sociology class in the afternoon that ends at four.”
“I finish up my other american lit class at three. Do you want to study together around five?”
Liz looked up at him surprised, and she said, “That works out perfectly.”
“Okay,” he said and he couldn’t hide the smile that broke out on his face.
Karen was finishing up her call and they heard her loudly sing out, “Bye,” into the speaker.
Max and Liz exchanged a smile; Karen had a really wacky personality. She ran the short distance to catch up with them and she explained in a rush, “I have to go, Max. My friend is driving out to Chicago for dinner with a couple people,” she turned to look at Liz and smiled. “It was really nice to meet you, Liz.”
“It was nice to meet you, too.”
Karen smiled and she waved, “Bye.” Then she turned and took one of the paths back to Keller.
Liz looked up at Max and she was trying to decide how to say good night to him too. They were only fifty feet away from Keller now, and she assumed he would go home too. But Max surprised her by answering her unasked question when he said, “I’ll walk you home, Liz.”
“Thanks,” she said. They fell into the same pace again, and they continued to walk across the campus. The snow from earlier in the morning had melted under the afternoon sunshine and there were puddles in the path that they walked down. “Max, you never told me why you chose to come to Northwestern.”
“I wanted a change of pace,” he explained. “After we finished up at Roswell last year, right after we graduated, did you get the feeling that it was the right time for something new to happen?”
Liz nodded, and she admitted, “Yes, like it was time for a new phase in our lives.”
“Exactly. Going tok UCLA was that new phase for me at first, but when I got there, the school wasn’t the right fit. It was too big, and it wasn’t strong enough in all of the academics that I wanted. Last year I got accepted at Northwestern too so when I explained that I wanted to transfer in, it wasn’t hard for them to place their hands on my records. For whatever reason, it wasn’t the right school.”
Liz nodded again. She had felt that way about Northwestern for the past few months. She couldn’t pinpoint anymore what had made her feel like that but Max’s words hit something within her. Maybe it was because she had started school completely alone without any of her friends from high school; by November Alex had been calling less and less. He had found new friends at Nortre Dame and at one point she remembered he even mentioned joining a fraternity. Four months in a new school and Alex had already changed. She wasn’t sure if she herself had changed, but she wanted to. This new phase and the want for it was intense. Hearing Max’s explanation made sense to her. It was like going to a school without your heart being in it. If that was the case, how could you put your heart into it.
“I felt that way about Northwestern,” she confessed. “I thought it was the wrong place for me.”
“You said thought,” he pointed out.
“It’s becoming better,” she said smiling.
: Great part! I'm glad to see them getting closer.
I just caught sight of this story earlier today and I wanted to tell you how much i am enjoying reading it!