Now tell me what an attractor is.

You can't and neither can I. An attractor can never be explained."

--from the principle of the Strange Attractor in Chaos Theory

**

The past roars.

Writers tell you that the past whispers and sighs. Singers tell you the past is a murmur or an echo. The past is supposed to haunt you or soothe you. It's supposed to be background noise, it's supposed to be the static that sits behind your now.

But the past roars. It does. You just can't hear it because your present is even louder, because you are overloaded with the you that you are at your particular moment of now. You can't hear your past because *you can't*--to hear it would be too much. It's too much to remember everything that you once did or once were during your present. So you filter it, you block it, you "forget" it.

But sometimes your present shifts, a change you did or didn't expect--and then the roar of your past comes through again and your memories can't be hidden and for a moment (I'm not sure of how long it lasts, but what is a moment anyway?) you are reunited with your past moments and your past yous and it makes the roar of the present a little dimmer. And sometimes that's a good thing. Sometimes it's necessary.

**

"Where are you going?"

My mother is still up, still watching tv. She is probably waiting for the Sheriff to call her, although she would never admit it. I know she wonders why he doesn't call, why he hasn't called.

I blame Michael for my broken heart, for my bruised ego--and I blame him for my mother's loneliness too. I know I shouldn't; really, what does he have to do with my mother's social life or lack of it? I know he isn't responsible for *everything* that's happened; I know that he is as confused and as hurt and maybe even as scared as I am.

But I'm still mad at him. It was hard enough when things were "normal." It was hard enough to deal with the fact that he was an alien, that he was terrified of a relationship, that he was unsure of what he could offer me, of what he wanted to offer me.

But now...now I have to compete with Destiny.

I have come to hate that word. I always thought that people who claimed to hate inanimate objects like speed bumps or concepts like Monday were morons. But now I completely understand what they mean. Ideas can be just as awful as everything else can be.

"I'm going for a walk."

It used to be that my mother would point out that it was almost midnight on a Tuesday and that I have school tomorrow. It used to be that she would remind me that Roswell has a curfew. It used to be that she would give me a look and remind me that she was my age once and look what happened to her.

Now she just sighs. "Maria...I hope you know what you're doing."

That makes two of us, Mom. But I don't say that because she doesn't want to hear it and I don't think she would listen if I said it. I know the answer to her unspoken question isn't one she can deal with now. She thinks she wants me to tell her that Michael and I are over but she isn't ready to understand how much us being over hurts me and why it hurts me.

You know what the worst thing about growing up is? Realizing that no one has all the answers. Realizing that sometimes there are no answers, and that there is no grand plan guiding your life. That sometimes you are just *living*. It all seems pretty pointless, and sometimes I relish that pointlessness because at least pointlessness doesn't hurt, at least it can't hurt.

"I won't be gone long, I promise." I tell her, and I might break that promise but it is a small one and it won't matter if I break it. My promise to her is just words and there is no weight behind them, no meaning that has to be puzzled out and savored. I know the value of promises now.

I walk out of the house, the light from the tv illuminating the front steps, making them orange and blue and green and special. Since Michael, I have refined my definition of special, made it smaller, simpler. Easier. Steps can be special. Light can be special. Special doesn't mean shit. It's just a word. That really does make everything easier.

**

I have never been one for walks. Liz likes them--pre-Destiny, she used to like to go walking with Max and the two of them would talk and hold hands and kiss and she was forever getting in trouble for getting home late. I know she liked that. It was a normal thing, you know? Getting in trouble for coming home late because she was with her boyfriend. Having her parents worry because she was dating. I can remember listening to her talk about Max with her father while we were all at work one day. He told her, "You're just growing up so fast. And your mother and I don't want anything to happen to you. Maybe you're too involved with this boy Max."

"I know what I'm doing Daddy" she said. I like to think that if I had a father, I would have talked to him; laughed with him, told him I'd always be there, that he'd always be special to me. But I suspect that if I did have a father--if I had a father like Liz does--if he'd always been there, if he'd always been around, I wouldn't have even had told him that I knew what I was doing. I probably just would have ignored him. Maybe my dad just saved himself a lot of grief by taking off all those years ago. Maybe he just saved me a lot of grief. I have a hard enough time with my mother these days.

But Liz told her father that she knew what she was doing and he said, "Just be careful, ok?" And she nodded and kept going out with Max. I think her parents still worried, still wanted her to spend less time with Max. Sometimes when my mother is mad at me, she tells me that one day I'll have kids and that I'll worry about them like she worries about me and I pretend that I'm not listening but once in a while when I'm at school and I'm walking down the hallway I think about the things I think about during the day, I think about things I've done or things that I want to do and I think that if I have children I'll be reduced to ulcers and gray hair in no time at all.

Liz's parents got their wish though--they got a Liz who spends less time with Max. Liz is now Max-less and she is miserable. I can't get her to do anything. She goes to school and to work and that's it. She says she can't do anything else, that it's too hard. That all she can do is go from day to day. "It's just so hard to see him, you know?" she tells me. "I see Max and I miss him. I know I should move forward. I know I should. How do you do it Maria? How do you not miss Michael?"

Because I can't. I sometimes think about trying to explain that to her--that if I miss Michael, if I stop and think about how he is gone from my life, I'll end up like her, just going through the motions and not even seeing the pointlessness of it all. But if I said that to Liz, it would hurt her feelings and I don't want to do that. I refuse to do that, in fact. And I refuse to let Michael take any more of my life. He chose to leave me, and now I'm choosing to live without him. And I don't care how small and dark and pointless my life seems now, it is at least still mine.

I called Liz right before I left tonight. Her mother went and got her. She said "Hello?" when she picked up the phone and when I heard her voice I bit my lip so I wouldn't start to cry. Not because I was sad, but because I was angry.

She still thinks Max will call. I could tell just from her voice, from the hint of hope in her "Hello." As much anger as I have towards Michael, I think I'm actually angrier with Max. At least Michael didn't promise me forever, or tell me that he thought we were meant to be. He was always clear about the fact that it was a strange twist of fate that brought us together. But Max promised Liz forever, and promised some more and he broke all of his promises (I don't care that he didn't want to, the fact is that he still broke them) and he isn't around to see how upset Liz is. I am though, and I see Max looking at me sometimes, wanting to say something to me, wanting to ask me to intervene on his behalf with Liz and I just stare at him till he looks away. And then I think "Good." Good for me, good for Liz, good for Max, good that this will all end sometime soon. I don't know the good that will come after that, but so what? It seems to me that knowledge is highly overrated. Destiny rears its ugly head again.

I call Liz every night and our conversation is always the same.

"Hey Lizzie. How are you doing?"

A pause.

"Fine." I figure that when she can finally tell me she's not doing well she'll finally be doing better.

After she lies and tells me she's fine, I ask her if she wants to go for a walk and she says no. Then I tell her I'll see her tomorrow (at school, at work or both) and she says ok.

And then I go walking by myself. I go because one day Liz will be ready to walk and she'll want to talk about everything and I have to get ready for that day. I'm memorizing the streets so I can stumble blindly down them when she is ready to talk, because that will be the day that I realize it's finally over. That 'The End' has come. When Liz can look at me and tell me that her soulmate isn't coming back to her, I will know that what started at the Crashdown the day she was shot will have come back around again. I will know that a random series of events started on an ordinary day that blossomed into something extraordinary is gone, or is at least ready to fade into the recesses of my mind. And you can bet that from that day forward when someone offers me something that will change my life, I will smile and say "ok" because I'll know what that means.

I am really starting to like the word "pointless." If our stupid English teacher makes us write another essay on the cosmic unconsciousness or whatever we are supposed to glean from Shakespeare I may just elaborate on what I think it really all means. I don't think my grades could get much worse.

**

I walk by Alex's house first. Alex is doing better than Liz in some ways and worse in others. That is my take on it. I am sure that Alex's take is different. I am sure Alex thinks he is doing fine because Alex has the most amazing skill I've ever seen. He can adapt. He can change what he wants, what he needs, to what he gets.

After Max and the others went out into the desert, Alex and I went to his house and we just sat quietly, too stunned to talk. When I think about that day, I'm amazed we were all standing by the end of it. We went through so much--waiting for Michael and the others to rescue Max, working with the Sheriff (who quite frankly, still creeps me out), finding Max and everyone else...god, all of it is just too long and too scary and too messy to think about. But the end result is that all the aliens left and Alex got a hug and I got dumped and Liz went into the desert only to come back out in tears, going on about Destiny and how Max was meant to be with Tess. And she mentioned Michael and Max's sister and Alex and I just looked at each other. Alex and I have never talked about them--we haven't discussed Michael and Max's sister, or what sort of relationship they have-- and I don't think we ever will. It's not worth it to me (again with the pointlessness) and Alex will never see what happened the way I do.

The aliens (I like calling them that, I like remembering just what they are) all came back to Roswell, which Liz wasn't expecting at all (I was though) and she just sank into the depression that she's still mired in. Alex still hangs around Max's sister, willing to take whatever time and companionship she will offer him. He says he's ok with it, and I think he is. He's just happy to be near her. That is what his need is now.

Michael and I haven't spoken. Not one word, not one gesture. When I am feeling small and petty, I sometimes sit in the classes I share with him and resent the fact that he breathes air that I might have breathed. I think about what he would say if I said that to him, of how he would look incredulous and then argue with me because he knows it is what I need. And that is why I can't talk to him.

I see him in school and sometimes I think he is getting ready to say something and I just walk away. I don't care if I'm in the hall or in class--I don't care where I am, I just walk away. I don't want him to say anything else to me. At least now my last conversation with him involved him admitting that he loved me. I don't want him to take that away from me. And I don't want to find out that I'm more like Alex than I think I am, I don't want to hang around for shards and scraps and find that my happiness can be defined by a thirty-second conversation while the person I love ponders being with someone else.

Alex's window is dark and I think about throwing pebbles at it and asking him to come with me on my walk. I do this every night. And every night I bend down to pick up a handful of stones, pull my arm back, and drop all the rocks on the ground. It's not that I don't want to see Alex, or talk to him. It's just that his acceptance of what has happened isn't the kind of acceptance I need or want.

I keeping walking and now I am heading out into the heart of Roswell. Heart, hah! I once told Michael that there was something better out there for me than Roswell, New Mexico, and I now wish I hadn't told him that. I wish I didn't know that we had that in common; I wish I didn't understand how he feels. But I do understand and although I blame him and resent him and sometimes hate him almost as much as I love him, I still have that understanding. He is just reaching for his dream, his damned Destiny, and I suppose I would do the exact same thing if I were in his place. I know I would do the exact same thing if I was in his place and in moments where the clarity of my hurt is dimmed a little, I see that that was one of the reasons why Michael let himself love me. Because he knew, on some level, that I would always understand his choices.

**

Roswell is not very exciting at night, and it's extremely unexciting at almost midnight on a Tuesday. All the houses are dark and all the businesses are locked up tight and there is nothing to distract me from the sound my feet make as I walk on the road, then the sidewalk, then the grass.

Roswell has a park, of sorts, and that is where I go every night. I have a spot now, and I sometimes think of it as mine. I have never been here with Michael, so it can actually be mine. It is nice to finally have a place to go and be that doesn't have his memory clouding everything. Do you know how hard it is to sleep in a room that reminds you of someone you once loved, that reminds you of a night he came to you, he chose *you*, and you slept together, just slept and held each other and you woke up and you got to run your fingers though his hair and you'd never really done that before and it brought tears to your eyes and you swore that you'd never ever ever forget that moment?

It's impossible to sleep in a room like that. I moved all the furniture around and told myself that he only came to me because he felt that Max and Max's sister had abandoned him and ruined his life, but it still doesn't change the fact that when I close my eyes at night and rest my head on my pillow I still smell his scent. The sheets on my bed now aren't even the ones he touched but he still lingers. He is not someone I once loved, he is someone I still love and he is still in my heart, and worse yet, still in my head. He is still stuck in my present and I am stuck waiting for him to move into my past.

My almost spot is right around the next bend in the path. I breathe a little easier as it comes into view, feel safe as I see the trees and the bench and the fountain that actually has no water in it because the park never has enough money in its budget to actually turn the water on.

"Hey, DePukeah"

The voice that greets me is a familiar one. I sit down on the bench next to him, resting my feet on the fountain.

"Don't call me that," I say mildly. "It was old when we were both four."

He laughs and swings his feet up next to mine. "Your feet are almost as big as mine are. Maybe I should start calling you Sasquatch."

I throw my elbow out and it catches his ribs. He grunts and says, "By the way, that didn't hurt at all." He rubs his side and I smile even though I know he is only doing it so I will smile. I can't stand pity from anyone normally, but I've found that I don't mind it from Kyle. Probably because he is so bad at feeling sorry for anyone other than himself, and his idea of pity isn't really much in the way of pity at all.

"What's going on?" I know what he will say, but I still ask anyway. I ask because it's a comfort knowing that he will always give the same answer.

"Nothing."

"What's your dad doing?"

"Worshipping at the temple of Max." Kyle laughs at his own joke and then sighs when I don't laugh with him. "He's working, of course. What else would he be doing?"

I shrug. "My mom hasn't heard from him in a while, that's all."

He moves his feet over, knocking them against mine and then resting his heels on top of the tips of my shoes. "Do you want me to say something to him?"

"God, no. What would you say anyway?"

"Uh...call Maria's crazy mother?"

"Very funny." I move my feet and watch as his tumble down off mine and rest on the edge of the fountain.

"Your mom could do better than my dad."

I look over at him, surprised. He shrugs. "What do you want me to say, 'Ria? That he's a great guy? I've seen him for maybe ten minutes tops since this whole bullshit with Saint Max went down. If he can't bother to spend time with his Lazarus boy, why would he have time for anyone else?"

Kyle has such an ego. But he's right. Since that night at the UFO Center, Jim Valenti has been transformed into a believer in Max's cause. He spends all his time trying to cover up what happened and, according to Kyle, making daily professions of faith at the Evans house. I'm sure there's some exaggeration on Kyle's part, but I suspect that the majority of it is true. Why wouldn't the Sheriff turn from over-zealous enemy into over-zealous friend?

"Is he working tonight? Seriously?"

"Yeah. Another one of his famous double-triple-quadruple shifts."

"So...your house then. Right?"

"Fine. But wipe those big feet of yours off before we go inside. I don't want to spend tomorrow afternoon trying to get your mud prints off the floor."

I shove him and he laughs and stands up. He reaches his hand down towards mine and I take it, let him haul me off the bench. He keeps his hand wrapped around mine as we walk towards his house, pulling me along with him and I smile because it seems I am always stuck with boys who will hold my hand but will never walk with me. At least with Kyle it's just because he's clueless. With Michael it was because he didn't want to be with me, or more likely, because he couldn't face the fact that he wanted to be.

**

With Michael, I know that everything will have come back around full circle the day Liz tells me that she and Max are over. That chapter of my life will be written--it will have a beginning, a middle, an end (oh, Michael is so good at endings--so good at giving you your dream and then cutting it right out from under you) and even an epilogue. Max healed Liz once, and when this is all over, she will have a scar. I don't think it will be a big scar--I think Liz is stronger than that--but I think it will be a lasting one.

But I got the re-opening of another circle with Michael's exit from my life. Kyle fumbled his way into the little group we'd established (in typical Valenti fashion) and Max saved him just like he saved Liz and Kyle got to deal with the knowledge that Max and the others are aliens and I never ever thought that would happen. I didn't think the Sheriff would find out and Kyle...I didn't even see it coming.

But it did come, it did happen, and Max and his sister and Michael and Tess were all too busy wrestling with Destiny to have the same "Don't tell" talk that they had with Liz and me and Alex. And although Kyle had a parent who knew, his father was more interested in... who knows? I don't, and I don't think Kyle does either. The other cruddy part about growing up is realizing that your parents are people--that they have their own lives and thoughts and guess what? You aren't always at the center of them.

Liz was too depressed to worry about Kyle telling anyone and every time we talked about it I could tell she wasn't thinking about what happened with Kyle and was instead thinking about what happened between her and Max out in the desert. And Alex...Alex was trying to salvage what he could with Max's sister and considered Kyle to be even more of an alien that Max and the others are. Kyle is popular and loud and none of the things that Alex is, so Alex didn't know what to do about him. He would look at me and I would make soothing noises and close off the part of my mind that listened while he talked about Max's sister and how happy he felt when he was with her.

I didn't plan on doing anything about Kyle. Except, in my weaker moments, consider slipping a list of tabloid phone numbers into his locker and imaging how horrified Michael would be if a reporter showed up on his doorstep one morning. What did I care about Kyle Valenti or what he knew? So I did nothing too and didn't even really think about it much. At first I was too busy with my own pain and then I was too busy worrying about Liz's.

And then one night I was out walking and I went by my spot and someone was sitting on the bench where I usually sat and I sort of glared at the shadow of the person and the shadow said "Hey DePukeah" and the stupid nickname that I hadn't heard since I was almost five triggered something inside me and I sat down beside Kyle and we had our first real conversation in years, and I met a friend I'd forgotten I had.

**

Lizzie hasn't always been my best friend. I say she has been, and I tell everyone she has been, but that isn't really the truth. Liz became my best friend when I was almost five and I sat next to her on the first day of kindergarten.

But before that, I had a different best friend. A boy. Kyle.

We met when we were very young. I don't remember how young, and I've never asked my mother about it because I don't really think it matters. Kyle and I were both in county preschool together. I was in county preschool because it was subsidized and Mom had even less money when I was a baby than she does now. Kyle was in county preschool because his father was an up-and-coming star on the police force and it probably looked good to use county services instead of sending Kyle to The Huggy Bear Center which was the other day care place in town (and is where Liz went for preschool).

Anyway, we were the class terrors. One of my earliest memories is sitting on the floor of a room, eating paste and occasionally stopping to pause and rub some of said paste into someone's hair. That someone was Kyle and he didn't mind that paste was in his hair because he was trying to glue my feet to the floor.

We didn't play well with others--both of us misbehaved for what I'm sure the teacher said was a "variety of reasons." Mine was probably that "mother feels guilty due to lack of father figure and subsequently spoils child" and Kyle's was probably "hyperactivity." I suspect that real reasons for why we were such monsters were that I was lonely and Kyle was living with two people who never should have gotten married. But in spite of our poor social skills, we got along for some reason ("Both losers" is what Kyle would say) and we spent a lot of time together.

We both liked playing tag, and we were both not above shoving people we had a hard time tagging. That goes along with the not playing well with others. And there was the paste thing. But we also were the only kids in the class who knew how to read and we spent a lot of time sitting in a corner of the classroom, reading books together while the other kids did who knows what. I learned to read by accident--I had one book that I had to have read to me every day and after a while, I knew it so well that I could recognize the words and then I could read it to myself. It was the same thing with Kyle.

So we would read together and play together and when my mother would ask me if I wanted to have anyone over to play, I would say "Kyle" and she would say "Ok" slowly and then go and make a phone call. Sometimes we would get the phone call, but my mother's voice was always the same. She always sounded either vaguely angry or vaguely embarrassed.

Now, of course, I'm able to put it all together--she was either talking to the Sheriff or his wife, and talking to either one of them was hard for her. I can remember watching her waiting for me to get my stuff together at Kyle's one time when the Sheriff was there and how they both stood there, all stiff and awkward, and wouldn't look at each other and she pointedly called him "Officer" when she left and he sort of grinned and looked sad at the same time. And how once when it was Kyle's mom that was there she and my mom just stood there and they smiled at each other but it wasn't really very happy smiles and my mother's hands were shaking on the steering wheel as she drove home and I asked her if she was getting arthritis like Kyle's grandmother and she laughed and said she hoped not.

I have to respect the Sheriff and Kyle's mom and my mom for letting Kyle and I be friends and I don't want to know the details of whatever was in the past because some things should just be left alone (Thank you Michael, for teaching me that). And Kyle and I were friends. We were best friends. He was the only person I wanted at my fourth birthday party and my mother bit her lip when I told her that and asked if maybe I didn't want to invite that nice little girl whose parents owned the Crashdown and I said "No, just Kyle."

I'd totally forgotten that moment until two weeks ago when Kyle and I were talking one day and he said "Oh stop whining! You're acting like you're the Ugly Little Duckling. Trust me, you don't need to wear a bag over your head to school. Yet." The Ugly Little Duckling was the book he gave me for my fourth birthday and we sat on the floor of the living room and read it the whole time and didn't even eat the so-called "cake" my mother had baked (she was on a health-food kick then and I bet the "cake" was wheat germ, tofu, and carob. Ugh.)

And so how did our friendship end? What happened to my friend Kyle? My memories of that are as hazy as my memories of our friendship, but I believe that on the first day of kindergarten I didn't want to sit with him because I wanted to be like every other shiny little girl in the class, and they all looked like they'd never tried to eat worms and they acted like boys had many diseases. So I sat next to Liz and now that I let myself, I remember seeing Kyle look at me and the way his lip trembled because I ignored him and set about making friends with Liz. Children can be every bit as cruel as adults--don't let anyone tell you otherwise. And Kyle, who had called me "DePukeah" every chance we got, always called me "Maria" after that day. And you know what? Until a month ago, I didn't care. I didn't even remember. My present was too loud for me to hear the past. But I'm listening now.

**

"Twinkies or Snowballs?"

We are walking up to his house when he asks me this. His house is unremarkable except for the fact that his father has installed security lights that come on when you walk up to the house and has put what seem to be million-watt light bulbs in then. So the nights we go to his house we are always forced to blink and squint and stagger around like we are blind until our eyes adjust to the light.

"Duh. What do you think?" He likes playing dumb and I like calling him on it.

The lights come on, as they always do, and his hand tightens around mine for a moment as we both stop to squint at the replica of the sun that is now beaming out into the Valenti's front yard.

"At least he didn't buy a barking dog record." Kyle mutters.

I laugh as we make our way to the front door and turn to look out at the yard while Kyle fumbles with his key. Past the bright lights that guard the brownish grass of the Valenti lawn sits the dark. I sometimes like to pretend that Michael is out there, watching me. I like to pretend that he is jealous, that he worries that I have already forgotten him.

"He's not out there." Kyle's voice is almost gentle and I turn to look at him. He is inside the house now and he is looking out at me.

I ignore him and push my way inside, bumping him with my shoulder. He doesn't say anything.