During that year, on the inside, Liz was a bid 'ole mess, but on the outside Liz looked like a perfectly normal, healthy young girl, she was a straight-A-student, she was senior and was Valedictorian of her class, she had 6 best friends that she will now and forever love even though 1 is not here anymore and 3 were on a completely different planet somewhere in the universe above, and she was perfect in ever way except one. One little item that was so big that it took up most of her heart, soul, mind, and body...that one "little" detail was of course...Max.

Even thinking about it now, she doesn't know how she even lived through that year, but she knew she did it with the help of Maria and Kyle, and that she will never forget. It was hard on all of them beacuse people started to ask questions about were the four teenagers had gone to and then Max and Isabel's parents started to ask questions about that video that their children left them. They had so many questions that Jim and the others could not answer. Some nights Liz stared up at the V constellation and thought about how she soooo wanted to be angry at Max and the others about leaving here to go off to a world they didn't know or understand, and excpecting Liz and the others to answer or come up with the answers for everybodys questions, but for some unexplainable reason Liz could not be mad at Max or any of them, and some reason Liz already knew why.

Sipping on her tea, back in the kitchen, Liz thought about how she had gotten to this tiny apartment with Jeremy in Berkeley, California. Liz remembers graduation and how happy her parents were of her, and she remembers packing her clothes and stuff, giving her parents, Maria, Kyle, and Jim Valenti a big hug good-bye and leaving the small town that had been her home for nearly 18 years of her life, to go off to Harvard, and then finding out that Harvard was defenintly not the school for her and then moving across the country to Berkeley, so that she could go to college at UCBerkeley. Then one day she meet Jeremy in one of her classes and it took her awhile to even remotely agree to go have coffee with him, but then finally she did and the n...VOLIA...here is sitting in the kitchen of their apartment with her fiance sleeping in their bed in the next room.

It's not like she completely forgot about Max, but he was gone and she had to move on and get on with her life, and that is what she thought he would have wanted her to do, but she still has a piece of Max in her heart. She will always love Max. Liz thought to herself, with a smile. But she TRULY does love Jeremy, and he could always make her smile, just like Maria always could. Thinking about Maria made Liz long for the comfort of her best friend, and the safe security of her parents and the little town that she called home.