CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Truths

Maxim checked Rainy’s nebulizer levels. Red digital numbers flashed on a small screen behind her head. Rainy swatted at him, but he hovered out of reach.

“Leave her alone, bothead.” Pell stuck out her tongue. I gave Pell a stern look. “He’s making sure Rainy can stay longer.” Maxim ignored the girls and glanced back at me, his eyes intense.

“We have time.”

Time was only half the problem, but I didn’t want to face the truth alone.

We walked into the kitchen and I scrounged up my courage. Valex and Len were reviewing birthday pictures on their camera. They looked up at me and Maxim with wary frowns.

“We have to finish a school project, so we’re going to my room where it’s quiet.”

“Doesn’t Rainy have to go home?” Len’s voice was soft, careful.

“Rainy’s good for another hour or so.” Maxim leaned against the countertop, looking suave, like he asked to go into girls’ bedrooms all the time. “Plus, she wants to stay.”

“Can’t you study in the living room?” Len pressed, her fingers turning white as she tightened her grip on the camera.

As if to illustrate my dilemma, Pell shrieked and Rainy clapped as Pixie Swap’s winning tune blasted behind us again. I gave Len a pleading stare. It was my birthday, after all. If you didn’t count the

years I was frozen, I was eighteen, and I didn’t need their permission. Though it was their apartment.

“Oh, all right.” Len quirked an eyebrow in warning. “Don’t dally for too long.”

In any other circumstance, I’d have been giddily nervous to take him to my room, but my parents’ mysterious deaths hung over me like a shroud. I’d gone from dreading truth to seeking it, and the complete one-eighty left me feeling the universe had chewed my heart up and spit it out.

I wished I’d taken the time to fold my rumpled tunics. Maxim stepped over my clothes like he didn’t even notice the tragic state of my room and glanced at the recycling chute. “Up there?”

“Yup.” I stepped beside him, kicking away stray socks. “We’ll have to climb on my bed, and you’ll have to lift me.”

“Cyberhell, Jenny, why you’d make it so hard?”

“Because I didn’t want to be tempted to watch the videos. I didn’t want to know.”

He gave me an overprotective look. “Now you want to know?”

I sighed in exasperation. Every second counted. “Yes.”

“Okay. But if your guardians catch me on your bed holding you up, I’m done for.”

The corner of my lips curled. “They never come in here. Now get up there and hoist me up.” I’d shoved the discs so far back that it would keep me from watching them when temptation hit.

He slipped off his shoes and climbed on my bed, looking like a surfer riding an especially unpredictable wave. I summoned my courage and jumped up to join him.

“Ready?” His breath touched my cheek.

“Ready.”

Maxim wrapped strong hands around my waist and hefted me up. I reached over my head and felt for the discs. Dust wafted down and I sneezed.

“Can you feel them?”

“I think so.” My fingertips brushed a hard plastic case. “Just a little higher.”

Maxim stretched his arms and I swiped my arm across the chute. The discs tumbled out all over my bed, some of them hitting us in the head.

“Ah! You could have warned me.” Maxim sniffed. “I just swallowed a dust bunny.”

“And I thought you were all vegetarians in the future.” I double-checked with my arm to make sure I hadn’t left any behind. “Got’em all.”

Maxim lowered me. “Good. I don’t think I could stomach another round.”

We climbed off the bed.

“Look for twenty-eight through thirty-one.”

Maxim coughed like a cat hacking up a hairball. “Yes, ma’am.”

We dug through the pile and I checked for any that might have fallen under the bed.

He dusted one off and discarded it over his shoulder. “Nope. Eighteen. Why’d you stop at twenty-eight, anyway?”

The truth punched me in the gut. “I didn’t want to accept the fact that my family moved on without me.”

Maxim put his hand on my shoulder, and I had to resist leaning into his touch, accepting his sympathy, drowning the hurt in his warmth. It would be so easy to rub against him, fall on top of him, press my lips against his…

Blinking back my raging hormones, I flung up two discs. “Here are thirty and thirty-one.”

It didn’t take long to find the other two. I clicked on my wallscreen and Maxim held the disc in front of the drive. “Are you sure?”

I nodded, afraid if I spoke, my voice would break.

Maxim popped the disc in and joined me on my bed.

A narrator’s voice echoed in my room. “This is the journey of the dwindling population of polar bears on Earth…” The scene panned out from a shrinking glacier to the vastness of the ocean.

“What the—”

“Try the next disc.” I handed him disc twenty-nine.

Sure enough, after Maxim popped the disc in, Angela came on the screen holding a baby in her arms. She looked older, her body a little more filled out, with tired wrinkles around her eyes. “Jenny,

I’m so sorry I haven’t talked to you in so long. I’ve been busy.” She flashed that all-knowing, secret smile I knew so well, and the old Angela came back for a second. “I want you to meet the newest member of our family, baby Todd.” “Who’s that?” Maxim whispered.

I froze up. Should I tell him the truth? What would he think of me after knowing I’d been best friends with his great-great-great-grandmother? I didn’t want to weird him out, but at the same time, he’d done so much for me that I thought he deserved a decent answer.

“That’s my best friend, Angela.” I wrapped a thread from my blanket around my finger so tightly the tip turned red. “She’s also your ancestor.”

Maxim shook his head like he hadn’t heard me correctly. “What?”

I had to tell him everything. While baby Todd cried in the background, my mind traveled back to that fateful day I forgot my shoes in gym. “I had a crush on this guy named Chad.”

Maxim crossed his arms like he didn’t like hearing about Chad one bit. “And?”

“After I was frozen, my best friend dated him. They went to prom together and eventually got married. At first I felt betrayed, but now I’m glad she found someone to love. Anyway, when I watched the videos, I realized something.”

I looked down, wrapping the thread tighter. “There’s always been something about you that I was drawn to. Something familiar, something I liked. I couldn’t put my finger on it at first, but then one day Angela’s face froze on my wallscreen.” I reached out and touched his dark hair where it curled against his neck. “You have the same hair as Angela.”

Maxim’s lips tightened in denial. “That doesn’t mean anything. There are thousands of people with this type of hair.”

I raised my finger to silence him. “I had C-7 go back through your family tree. Maxim, my best friend and the boy I liked were your ancestors.”

Maxim rubbed his hands over his face, stretching his cheeks out. He tangled his fingers in his hair and held them there. Spiky clumps stuck out between his fingers. “What does that make us?”

I knew it. Freak-out time. I took a deep breath. “If anything, it brings us closer. I loved my best friend. When I look at you, I see everything I liked about her.”

“Isn’t it messed up? I mean, you kissed me.” Maxim furrowed his eyebrows until his forehead was a bunch of wrinkles. “Isn’t that like kissing your best friend?”

“At first I didn’t know what to think, but then I realized the connection just made me like you more.” My cheeks burned with the truth.

He sat back against the wall, and I felt guilty for not telling him sooner. “I didn’t want to tell you because I didn’t want to scare you away.”

“You’d never scare me away, Jenny.”

So what? He’d just lurk on the edge of my sight, teasing me every day of my life? Frustration built up like lava inside me. “Look, it doesn’t matter anyway. We’re not supposed to be together, right? You have your responsibilities.”

Angela’s disc stopped and the screen turned blank. “Let’s just get this over with and pop in the next disc.”

Unwilling to argue, I got up, ejected Angela’s disc, and popped in the second to last one, hoping it wasn’t more polar bears or messages from my best friend.

Crashing waves stretched out on my wallscreen above a white railing. Mom leaned against the side, her hair blowing in the wind. She laughed as the camera turned on Dad’s face. He wore a Hawaiian shirt and carried a margarita with an orange umbrella.

Maxim’s face instantly softened. “Is that them?”

“Yeah.” My heart broke all over again as they twirled across the deck. “This must be an old vacation video someone threw in.”

“Do you want to keep watching?”

As much as the sight of my parents together, healthy and happy, comforted me, I needed to know the truth. “Fast forward. See if there’s anything else.”

After a luau with fire dancers and a walk along a sandy beach, the video faded out.

Maxim held up the last disc. “Just one left.”

Maybe there was no answer on the discs after all. For all I knew, this last one could be another vacation video or another season of National Geographic. I felt stupid for bringing Maxim here, for making him sit through old family movies. “Maybe I was wrong.”

“We have to give it a try.” Maxim stuck the disc in and sat beside me on the bed. We waited, my heart beating faster each second as the wallscreen read the old disc.

Timmy’s adult face stared back at me, darkness tingeing the corners of his eyes. “Hi, Jenny.” Standing in Dad’s study, he wore a black suit with a long black tie, and the solemn tone of his outfit took the breath right out of me. The white lilies in the back screamed funeral.

Timmy let out a heavy sigh. “This will be the last entry in my video collection to you. I know I haven’t kept up with it, but life has gotten in the way, and to tell you the truth, I’ve spent so many hours waiting.” He rubbed his forehead like he had a headache. “I need to move on.”

Beside me, Maxim threaded his fingers through mine. I held on, glad he was there.

Loosening his tie, Timmy angled the camera so he could sit down at my dad’s mahogany desk. He picked up Dad’s paperweight, a golden globe of Earth, and ran his fingers along the impressions in the surface. “I considered leaving it be, but if you ever wake up one day, I want you to know what happened to Mom and Dad.”

My heart leapt to my throat and I struggled to breathe. My chest felt like a python had squeezed around it. Maxim tightened his grip beside me.

“I was at school when it happened.” Timmy rubbed his eyes, almost looking as though he’d changed his mind and would shut off the video before I had a chance to learn the truth. I leaned forward, my eyes glued to the wallscreen. Please, Timmy, I need to know.

“It was their anniversary. They were driving on route 102 to Luigi’s when an old Chevy hydroplaned and hit them head-on. They’re gone, Jenny. Just like you. I couldn’t freeze them. The coroner said after the fire there wasn’t enough left.

“I’ve decided I don’t want to be frozen, no matter what happens to me. The doctors promised Mom and Dad that they were close, but now they’re saying they’re nowhere near a cure. Who knows if we’d even wake up in the same decade? Besides, I’ve met someone, a woman I can’t live without. We’re going to get married after I graduate, and I want to be by her side forever, even if it means I go with her in this lifetime. Jenny, I’m sorry. I always thought we’d be together, and I’ve loved you forever, but I need to let you go.”

The video clicked off and the screen went as black as the hole in my chest. I’d lost them all over again. Somehow knowing my parents’ lives had been cut short, while mine had been prolonged, made it worse. They’d had so many plans, so many hopes and dreams. Dad wanted to expand his business. Mom always said she’d retire early and finally have time to spend with us. Their untimely deaths made me realize that I had to live my dreams now. You never knew how much time you really had.

Maxim held me as my body convulsed with sobs. He wrapped me in his arms and I let the sorrow overtake me in an inevitable tidal wave.