She nods. She’s kind about it.
“Are you feeling faint, dear? You look pale. I don’t want you to pass out.”
She tells me to stay put while she retrieves apple juice and graham crackers for me, and then she orders me to eat them. I can’t remember if I’ve been eating this week. I don’t know the last thing I ate. But as I look at those graham crackers, absolute dread settles in my stomach. I made the wrong decision. I know it. He decided to become immortal. Why did I ever think he would decide to stay mortal?
“I changed my mind again,” I say to the nurse, who is now filling in some paperwork. “I can do it. I want the Immortality Virus.”
She shakes her head and frowns. “I’m so sorry, but our procedures don’t allow us to give the virus to someone who has already rejected it. The change is too life-altering. There’s no going back now. You’re a mortal. You will be for life.”
I feel light-headed. I will never be immortal. I lost my chance. I’m stuck with a mortal, red-flagged body for life. And thirty years from now, when Myles is still young and healthy, he’ll have forgotten about me, and I’ll be wandering the halls of an Alzheimer’s center, trying to remember where he’s gone.
16.
MYLES
I lose ten pounds the week I’m sick with the Immortality Virus. I hallucinate. I wheeze for air. I blackout at the worst of it all, and I’m not conscious again for three days.
When I wake up, my dad is sitting at my bedside. Just my dad. My mom is nowhere to be seen. But I didn’t expect anyone to come for me, so I’ll take whatever I can get.
“How do you feel?” he says with hesitation.
“Like I got run over by a bus,” I say.
“You coded a few times.” He taps his fingers on the armrest. “You’re lucky you were here. This is the best hospital for immortality injections in the country.”
I realize what he’s saying immediately.
“You pulled strings.”
“Of course, I did,” he says. “Didn’t want to miss out on the last five years I have with my son.”
“The last—” Something new dawns on me. Why didn’t I know before? “You have a red flag. What is it?”
He doesn’t look away. I know I’m getting honesty here that I’ve never had before.
“Aneurysm. And before you ask, yes, I’d have chosen immortality, too, if it had been a choice at the time. It may have been a mistake, but that’s what I would have done.”
I let that sink in for a few minutes. I feel weak, but I’m hungry, my head doesn’t hurt, and I kind of want to get out of bed. Oh.
I’m immortal.
Oh. Stella.
I take a deep breath.
“She hasn’t called yet,” Dad says. “I’ve been checking your com. But no news is good news, right?”
Right. Except I have an uneasy feeling now. Did something happen? Is she dead? Why don’t I have a call? She should have come out of this the same time I did.
I recover for a few days. Then Dad and I fly to Detroit together on the Kayes jet, and he drives me back to the Immortality Center himself. I wish it had been like this before I decided to become immortal, but I sort of understand why it couldn’t be. I think my dad and I will be okay for the years we have left.
Still, I’m crazy worried about Stella. I’m checking my com every other minute as we pull up to the Immortality Center. She isn’t calling back or returning any of my messages, and Foster is radio silent, too. What happened? Is she still recovering? Is this how they tell you when someone died?
“Things will be okay with Stella,” Dad says.
Why don’t I believe him?
Ultimately, Foster tells me what happened, not Stella. She apparently can’t bring herself to do it. Also, she is no longer allowed within thirty feet of the Immortality Center. Strict rule. If I want to see her, I can, but I am advised to do so at my own risk.
“Sometimes the ones who back out at the last minute get really unhinged with regret,” Foster tries to explain.
“Stella isn’t unhinged,” I say. Honestly, though, I can’t understand yet what’s happened. She’s alive. She’s supposed to be immortal. She’s supposed to be here.
“She didn’t go through with it,” Foster says slowly, loudly. “She’s mortal, Myles. And that’s how it’s going to stay. They don’t let them change their minds after they reject the virus.”
He keeps saying stuff like this, and I keep feeling like I’m in a nightmare. Stella is mortal. Stella will never be immortal. Stella won’t return any of my calls.
Stella.
Stella.
Stella.
Then finally, a couple days pass, and it all sinks in. I’m furious. I’m hurt. I’m disappointed. I’m heartbroken. I don’t understand why she won’t call. I don’t get any communication from her until a week after I’ve been back.
She sends me a quilt she made herself and a handwritten letter in which she writes that she changed her mind at the last minute.
Because she didn’t think I would go through with it.
I almost rip up the quilt, I’m so angry. I’ve never been this angry before. Never. Ever. Not in my whole life. Not even when my parents tried to break up Stella and me. And it isn’t because I’m immortal and she’s not. It’s because this only happened because she broke her promise. If she’d chosen for herself, she’d be immortal, too. We’d have eternity together. Instead, she made her decision based on me. Now we have nothing together. Nothing. Because she made the stupidest choice ever, because she made it on the assumption that I couldn’t be trusted when I told her I wanted immortality, and it’s going to cost her eternal life. I’ll still be trying to figure out what to do with my first hundred years, and she won’t even know who I am.
I stop trying to call her after I get the letter. I start trying to forget her. After all, if she’d truly regretted it, she could have answered some of my calls. She has to know that if she wants to make a different decision, I’m probably one of the only people on the planet who could find someone with access to the virus to give her a second try. But she never even asks. She’s resigned to this reality.
I channel my anger into the reason I most wanted to become an immortal other than her. Space exploration. Word comes out that they’re taking applications for crews to man the ships they’re going to send out to try to correct for the original immortals in space right now. We’re all eligible. Even newbies like me. They’re calling it Project Dispatch. I have a swanky new apartment at the Immortality Center in Lansing. I do tons of research alone while Foster goes through the immortality process.
Foster comes out unscathed (except for the fifteen pounds he lost) and immortal, and I tell him all about Project Dispatch. I’m going to apply. I mean, why not? They aren’t launching for a decade. My dad is going to be dead in five years, my mom isn’t speaking to me, my ex-girlfriend is a mortal … what do I have to lose ten years from now? These treks are going to be long—like thousands of years long—so I can apply with a friend if I want. I say this to Foster idly, thinking there’s no way he’ll be interested in applying with me, but he’s stoked.
“Are you kidding? As if I would turn that down,” he says.
“They probably won’t let you bring all your books,” I say.
“That’s what e-readers are for.”
“You’ll lose your chance to take all the classes you want at all those universities.”
“No way. You don’t send a ship off into space with a bunch of humans and not load that ship with as much information about the universe as possible beforehand,” Foster says. “I won’t miss out. I’ll take any class I want on the ship.”
“What about Grazie?”
He shrugs. “What about her? We’ll date until I leave. Grazie and I were never committed to a long-term thing.”
I really didn’t think Foster would go for Project Dispatch, and I recently got burned by too much togetherness. I press further. “You sure about this? It doesn’t see
m like it was in your plans.”
“That’s because I didn’t know your plans before,” he says. “Now that I know my best friend Myles Kayes needs someone to apply with him to an awesome space program, my plans have evolved.”
Oh. Finally, I get it. “You mean you think you’re a shoo-in if my name’s on the application.”
He grins. “You know that’s what’s gonna get us both in, Myles.”
I throw myself into the application process, and when we’re both accepted, I throw myself into Project Dispatch, which takes the place of the other training me and Foster would have done as new immortals.
It’s interesting, and it’s hard work, and I’m good at everything. Also, I think it’s a very good thing that Project Dispatch is going to take up a few millennia of my life because I feel like I might still be angry ten thousand years from now.
I know. That makes me sound like a jerk.
But the truth is that the only reason I’m still this angry is that I still love Stella.
After all that, here’s the thing I was entirely right about from the beginning: we weren’t too young for that kind of love. Love like that isn’t limited by age or time or space. It exists whether you want it to or not.
There will never be someone else who takes Stella’s place in my heart. And I’ll love her for eternity. I suppose now I’ll probably hate her for eternity, too.
17.
STELLA
I lose ten pounds before I start my junior year of high school, and nothing feels the same. Twenty faces are missing, and one is the face of a guy I loved all wrong.
I don’t know how to talk to Myles, so I don’t call or message. Myles is off-limits. If I try to fix things with him, I know I’ll just be making everything worse. Digging a hole in a wound that is already too big to recover from. If I care about him, I need to let him forget me. That’s the kindest thing I can possibly do now.
I write one letter to him as a compromise. I desperately want him to know I regret everything. I want to tell him that I feel like maybe I went to sleep one night in that dingy hotel room in Omaha and fell into a bad dream and just got stuck there forever. I want to beg him to forgive me. I want to beg him for help.
What I write is that I broke our promise, they won’t let me take it back, and I’ll love him forever.
I can’t eat for three days after I send that letter.
He stops calling me after he gets it.
My red flag is at the top of my mind now. I am terrified of what Alzheimer’s will be like for me. I take as many science and chemistry classes as I can because the Kayes were right. As a mortal, my best chance at life is to find a cure. Or to get back into the Immortality Program, if that ever becomes possible. Or maybe somehow do both since the Immortality Virus is the most promising potential Alzheimer’s cure there is.
Thankfully, Grazie keeps in touch with me. She thinks I should come to Washington University and study with her. She says there’s all kinds of Alzheimer’s research going on. She says we’ll help each other.
Foster Hinks calls me about once a month, too, because he knows I can’t forget Myles. Foster always has more compassion than he cares to let on.
He doesn’t lie to me about Myles. “It’s going to be a while before he forgives you,” Foster says. “Probably you’ll be dead before it happens. But he’s always going to love you.”
I say thank you, and as the years pass, Foster turns into another person I can compare notes with about my research into Alzheimer’s and the Immortality Virus. Foster isn’t studying the Immortality Virus for the same reason I am, though. He’s studying it because he plans to use his research to develop a new strain of the virus that can be used to help the IV-933 immortals. This is important work—important as in, important to the universe—because he and Myles have been accepted into Project Dispatch.
I’m devastated about it anyway. It means that Myles is going to leave Earth in a few years, and I’ll never even have a chance to see him again. I’m glad he’s moving on, but knowing that I am going to permanently lose him—that there will never be a way to reconcile—cuts me more profoundly every day.
“Is he okay?” I ask Foster once.
“As okay as Myles ever is.”
“Do you think he’ll ever let me say goodbye?”
“Never say never,” Foster says.
Never is a long time. It’s finishing high school and four years of college and getting into a graduate school program at Washington University specializing in disease research.
All that while, Myles ignores me. Mostly. About a year after we break up, he sends me a gift for my birthday. It’s my seventeenth birthday. The gift is a charm bracelet with a rose gold petal on it. I cry and cry.
For eighteen, he sends me a leather-bound journal with my name embossed in gold letters across the front. Inside he writes, This is for if you ever have anything you want to say to me. Like ‘I still love you.’ Leave it for me in your will, and I’ll read it when I get back one day.
I cry even harder over that one. But it also means something to me. He hasn’t forgotten, and he hasn’t let me go. For some reason, it feels like hope. Cruel hope.
Every year after that, he sends me another gift on my birthday. A rose gold pen. A photo of us from when I was fourteen and he was fifteen, framed in wood painted rose gold. Two tickets to Paris in a rose gold envelope (always thought we’d go together, maybe take your sister instead?). A signed copy of a journal with an article in it that he wrote about the Immortality Ships and Project Dispatch.
Every year, the gifts are more thoughtful than the last. Every year, the gift comes with a note that ends with I still love you. Every year, I cry for hours, and I always write a thank you note that says, I love you, too. But I never send those. I tell Foster to tell Myles thank you for me instead.
And then the last year, a month before I turn twenty-six, Myles sends me a note, asking if we can meet in person.
The all-night coffeehouse by your old apartment, he writes in the note. Project Dispatch launches next month, and I know this isn’t fair, but I want to see you one more time.
I finally send back a return note. It says, Yes. Thank you for thinking of me. I can barely sleep until we finally meet again.
It happens a week later, and it’s like seeing a ghost. An incredibly fit ghost with a filled-in chest and sturdy hands and an all-too-serious face.
“Myles,” I breathe, and I get a tight-lipped smile that seems sadder than happy in return.
“Stella Rose,” he says. He kisses my cheek like we’re old acquaintances and nothing more.
It hurts my heart.
I’m not sure what I expect him to say next—something brutal or cold or maybe something sweet that will feel even worse—but instead he just says, “Can I get you something to drink?”
“Cold-pressed chamomile lavender tea with honey,” I say automatically. Then I blush as I add softly, “that’s what I always get.”
He smiles for real then. Gently. Sadly. But for real.
“Cold-pressed chamomile lavender tea with honey it is,” he tells me, and when we have our drinks, he asks me to walk outside with him.
“To see the stars?” I say.
“To see where I’m going,” he says.
“Why don’t you tell me where you’ve been first?” I suggest. “Tell me about your life.”
He says okay, and we walk for a while and talk about our lives, sharing only the good parts that make us both seem okay. I know from Foster that Myles is not okay, and he probably knows the same from Foster about me, but it doesn’t seem polite to say it out loud.
Somewhere along the way, we stop under a streetlamp, and Myles says the thing I’ve been afraid of him saying:
“You broke our promise. And I have been so angry at you for it. But even though I’m still hurt and angry and frustrated as hell, I need you to know that I still love you, too. I’ll probably love you for eternity.” He laughs, and it is heartbroken and horrible.
“I think eternity might be a while.”
I have tears in my eyes threatening to spill all over this, our last moment. I take his hand. I mean … I might never get to see him again, so what do I have to lose?
“In the end, I couldn’t stop thinking about you,” I confess. “You were right. I couldn’t take love out of the equation. I’m sorry I made the wrong decision, though. So sorry. I still regret it. I’ll always regret it. And … I’ll probably love you for eternity, too.”
He looks over my head and then points. “Look, the first star. Can’t believe you can see any of them from here anymore.”
“Where you’re going, I bet you’ll be able to see millions all the time.”
He looks at me again, and in a flash, he’s got the back of my head in his hand, and he is kissing me, and I remember thinking that the way he kissed as a teenager was good, but he’s gotten much better since then. It dawns on me that there might be someone else. Foster mentions girls they’ve made friends with. Has some other girl been kissing Myles? Who taught him this?
I forget about that soon enough, though, and just savor the moment. Get lost in it. Let it wash over me and hope that this will be enough to sustain me for the rest of my life.
“We should have had eternity to do that,” he says when it’s over.
A tear slides down my face. I can’t help it. He wipes it away with his thumb, and I think this is where somebody’s supposed to say something that changes this to make it all better. He’s supposed to tell me he’s going to stay after all. Maybe he’ll tell me that it doesn’t matter to him if I get older than he gets. Or maybe he’ll tell me he found a way for me to take the Immortality Virus as a twenty-six-year-old. This time, I’d say yes in a heartbeat. No matter the risk.
“I got you something,” he says instead. “It’s the last birthday present I’ll ever be able to give you.” He pulls a little box out of his pocket—my heart skips a beat as I realize that if I’d gone through with the plan, this might have been where he asked me to marry him—but what is inside the box is a watch.
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