"In here," the familiar voice responded from the living room. Maria swung her legs over the edge of the bed and padded towards the couch Liz was sitting cross-legged on. Her head was tilted forwards, causing her dark brown hair to fall in front of her face like a veil, shielding her face from view. It was a tactic she used often when upset, largely unconsciously. She looked up when Maria reached the end of the couch and tucked her hair behind her right ear, revealing the tear-tracks on her face.

"Oh, Lizzie," Maria whispered, climbing onto the couch next to Liz and gathering her into a hug, rubbing her shoulder while she cried. Soon Liz sat up, wiping her eyes and picking up something lying on the couch next to her. "I know it's stupid, but I couldn't help it. I tell myself to either throw it away or send it back to Roswell, but I can't let go of it."

Maria took the well-worn copy of their high school yearbook out of her hands and bit her lip. "I understand, Lizzie." She began to flip through the pages, suddenly marveling at the emptiness and vapidity held in its pages. "My God, look at them. All so clueless, so naive. Worrying about things like shoes and lipstick. I wonder if some of them never make it beyond that . . ." Her voice drifted off as she flipped through the pages, one after another filled with football stars and cheerleaders, drama club members and basketball players. The candid pages all filled with the same people over and over, the self-designated 'popular' ones who knew so little and pretended to know so much.

And then she found it. It wasn't hard to; the binding had cracked so that the book would naturally open to page 62. By all accounts the picture shouldn't be in there, least of all as a full half-page shot. None of them were particularly popular, excepting Isabel, and even she had fallen a few notches since she had drifted away from the 'in' crowd and towards their small crew over the years. By Senior year they had become what one saw on the page, a group of six souls set apart from the rest, needing no others.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The yearbook had come out, she remembered, on a Friday. She had stuffed it into her bookbag and forgotten about it almost instantly, finding its triviality annoying. Who cared who was picked Most Likely To Succeed? They were gone, and that was all that mattered.

She had found the picture, she remembered, quite by accident. Her bookbag and its contents had remained forgotten in the corner of her room until that Sunday, when she had opened it to get her Calculus book. Strangely enough, she found that the patterns of derivatives and integrations calming now, and it was the only homework she really kept up with.

The yearbook, she remembered, had laid alongside the gray calculus book in her bag, and her hand had reached for it without thinking. She was almost certain her had heart stopped when she came upon the picture. All of them together, something that would never be again. They would never all be together again.

She hadn't cried, she remembered, before that. She had been empty, void, dead inside. It worried her that she didn't cry. It worried her mom, her friends, everyone that she didn't cry. Liz had cried, as had Alex, and her mother and everyone else -- people who barely knew them in life but mourned them in death -- but she simply couldn't summon tears. She had drawn away from them, from everyone, going through the motions of life and feeling nothing. Alex called daily, Liz nearly hourly, but she either avoided their calls or exchanged mere pleasantries before begging off.

The tears had come then, she remembered, and they had come both hard and fast. The sobs seemed to steal all the air from her lungs, making her wonder if one could suffocate from tears. She began the fall into grief, and it terrified her.

Liz had recognized her voice, she remembered, despite the fact that she wasn't able to get many words out on the phone. She and Alex had been there within minutes that felt like hours, and had held her while she cried.

Liz and Alex had cried too, she remembered, and she had realized for the first time that she wasn't alone. They had lost as much as she had. Her soulmate was gone, yes, but these two still remained, kindred spirits who shared her pain.

Liz, she remembered, had spoken first. She coughed and dried her tears, but when she spoke her voice was still thick with them. Her eyes seemed desperate, as if she was about to ask for something that she couldn't live without. "I need you," she had said, "both of you. No one else understands what happened, no one else knows how much it hurts. I need to know that I'll never lose you, that we'll always be together. I need you guys to remind me of how wonderful they were, remind me of all the adventures we had, remind me of everything I'm afraid I'll forget. I can't forget, and the only way I can be sure I won't is if I have you guys."

Alex, she remembered, had reached out and grasped Liz's hand in his. "You'll always have me, Liz."