“This is going to sound so crazy. I can’t believe I’m going to tell you.” She knew I was stalling.

“Whatever it is, you can tell me Liz.”

“The fortune teller told me that Max and I would, that we would...we’re were gonna get married.” I smiled at the memory of Future Max telling me about our wedding day.

“Oh my gosh! You and Max are gonna get married!” She squealed, then stopped all the sudden. “Wait, what do you mean ‘were gonna get married?’”

“That’s what I’m getting at. After you dropped me off, I went straight up to my room. I was...um, I was starting some homework,” I blushed, she didn’t need to know about my little daydreams. “All of a sudden, there was like a bolt of electricity outside my window. Then, out of nowhere, he appeared.”

“ ‘He?’ Who’s ‘he?’”

“This is the really crazy part. The guy, that I saw, he was...well I don’t know how to put this. He was Max.”

“So what you’re saying is that Max did some weird kinda alien power thing, and appeared out of nowhere?” Her eyebrows furrowed together.

“No. It was Max, but it was a future version. 14 years from the future. He looked exactly like Max, except he had longer hair, and looked older.” I giggled at the memory of him worrying about his gray hairs.

“So let me get this straight. A future version of Max came to your room. Why, may I ask?”

“H-he told me, well he said that he needed me to help him fall out of love with me.” I bit my lip to hold in the tears.

“Oh Lizzie. Why would he say that?” She moved to my side of the booth.

“Well, according to him, us being together caused the end of the world. Tess got tired of waiting for Max, so she left Roswell. Turns out she was crucial to their survival. So, we made a plan, to help Present Max fall out of love with me,” I wiped a tear off my cheek. “At first I talked to Tess, and we made a plan to make Max try to pay more attention to her, but he found out and kissed me. He said that Tess could never be me.”

I put my head into my heads. This was harder than I thought it would be. But I had decided to tell Maria, and I was going to tell her the entire story. No matter how much it hurt. I took a deep breathe.

“So then, I went to his room. I told him that I didn’t want to die for him, and that I wanted to fall in love with real boys, and that he needed to let me go.”

“Then, that night, when I talked to Max in the Crashdown, that was all a set-up too?” She subconsciously put her arm around my shoulders and pulled me into a hug.

“Yeah. God, Maria, you don’t know how much it hurt. I went to his room, and I knocked on his window, and when he came to it, he had this expression on his face. It was full of hope and love, and I just wanted to melt into his arms. But then I remembered what would happen, if I didn’t do it.”

“So you did it. You told him all that stuff, but you didn’t really mean it. That must have been awful.” She sighed.

“It was so awful. But that’s not the worst part. When telling him that I didn’t want to die for him didn’t work. We had to come up with something more uh, convincing.”

I waited for her to respond, but she didn’t. I took the napkin lying on the table and starting tearing off little pieces of it. Calm down, that’s what I needed to do, relax.

“So, when you told me that you had caught Michael in Courtney’s apartment, and that the look on his face would never leave your head, I knew what I had to do. So..” I choked down a sob. “So I asked Kyle to help me trick Max into thinking that we had slept together.”

The napkin was now completely ripped up, so I took the little pieces and starting tearing them in half.

“Did you and Kyle um, you know.” She stuttered.

“What? No, we didn’t. I would never do that with Kyle.” I looked up at her, as I spoke.

“I just wanted to be sure.” She smiled.

“We made it look like we did, so when Max came to my window, he’d think we did,” I put my head in my hands. “Maria, it was the worst feeling in the world. When he saw us, his face, I just wanted to die.”