Author: Karen
Disclaimer: The characters of "Roswell" belong to Jason Katims, Melinda Metz, WB, and UPN. They are not mine and no infringement is intended.
Pairings/Couples/Category: CC – ALL
Rating: TEEN
Summary: Takes place while the gang is still in junior high; on Halloween night, Alex shares a ghost story and Liz finds a new friend
Author's Note: Just a bit of fluff
Once Upon a Hallows Eve
“Stop hogging the popcorn and pass the bowl, Whitman.” Maria Deluca’s voice was annoyed, demanding.
“Okay, don’t shoot, Princess,” Alex replied, stuffing a handful of the fluffy kernels into his mouth.
Liz Parker watched with dark eyes as he passed the bowl across her, to Maria’s waiting hands.
“I’m a growing boy,” Alex protested around his mouthful of food. “I eat a lot.”
“You’ve always eaten a lot,” Liz tacked on, folding her legs gracefully beneath her. In truth, for all of his eating, Alex had yet to grow very much at all. Liz could still pretty much look him in the eye, a fact that hadn’t escaped every jock looking to pick on a geek at Roswell Middle School. But Liz loved Alex and would never point out to him that he was one of the runts of their eighth grade class.
“And I’m a growing girl,” Maria pouted, clutching the bowl to her flat chest. Liz smiled lightly – it had been a point of envy that she’d started developing much sooner than her friend had; Maria was all arms and legs, elbows and knees. Sometimes she reminded Liz of a young Bambi trying to skate on ice.
“But I’m willing to bet you’re still afraid of the dark, aren’t you?” Alex baited, waggling his eyebrows teasingly.
Maria’s full lips fell into a frown. “Not now, Alex. Not here.”
“Well, since you insist,” he cackled, rubbing his palms together in anticipation.
They were camped out on Liz’s roof, a sleeping back draped over the backs of lawn furniture serving as their tent. It was completely dark outside and there was a bit of a nip in the late October desert air, the kind of draft that made you shiver even though it wasn’t very cold.
Alex grabbed the flashlight they were using for light and deadened it. Immediately, Maria shrieked and Liz felt popcorn slapping her lightly on the arm and leg as the bowl upended.
“Turn it back on, Alex!” Maria cried.
“Okay,” he agreed readily, then flipped the light on beneath his chin, casting his face in eerie shadows.
Scooting across the hard floor of the roof, Maria clutched Liz by the arm. “I hate it when he does that, Liz! Make him stop!”
Liz rolled her eyes affectionately as Alex grinned, then cackled, his appearance rather macabre. She knew in her heart that Alex had never had a sister to pick on and many times Maria became the surrogate.
“Don’t you want to hear a ghost story?” Alex said, his voice low and spooky.
“No!” Maria protested. “I have to walk home tonight and I’ll never make it if you start this crap, Alex!”
“You can stay here,” Liz offered levelly.
Maria whirled on her as if stung. “Are you siding with him?”
Liz laughed lightly. “I could use a good ghost story.” She turned to Alex and shrugged. “Why not?”
Alex’s blue eyes shifted from one friend to the other, a twinkle there. “Or would you rather hear a story about aliens?”
Maria’s death grip on Liz’s arm slackened. “Oh, please.” She was brave again, rolling her eyes. “Haven’t we heard them all? Haven’t we all grown up with them? That’s so cliché, Alex.”
“Is it?” he asked, unaffected by her skepticism.
“It’s Roswell,” Maria pointed out, waving her hand demonstratively. “We’re surrounded by them.”
Liz laughed. “But not for real.”
Alex turned the light toward her. “What do you know?” he demanded, his voice conspiratorial. “Have you had contact?”
Liz giggled a little harder. She would always love Alex and his dorky ways. “No, of course not.”
He turned the light to his chin. “Then I shall continue with my story.”
Maria sighed heavily and retrieved what was left of the bowl of popcorn, munched with the air of someone who was longing to be taken behind the barn and shot rather than have to endure this boring tale.
“Our story begins on a dark night, much like this one,” Alex said, his voice soft and creepy. He glanced around the makeshift tent, as if affirming the two nights were identical. “She was just a young girl, you see, unspoiled by the world around her.”
“Let me guess,” Maria deadpanned. “Her name was either Liz or Maria, right?”
Liz slapped her friend on the knee, partly as punishment for being rude, partly as punishment for interrupting the story.
“Ow, man,” Maria said, rubbing her thigh.
“Please continue,” Liz said to Alex.
He nodded his thanks. “She was a young girl,” he repeated. “Wide-eyed in the world, full of hope and possibility. On this particular night – the night of Halloween, as it were – she was at her grandmother’s house. The old woman was ailing, you see, and it was the girl’s responsibility to check in on her. Not that she minded, because she loved her grandmother with all of her heart. She would do anything for her. Even if it meant crossing the woods by herself, after dark, on Halloween.”
Alex’s suspenseful inflection had both girls enraptured at this point and there was just a bit of glee in his eyes.
“This was long before cars,” he continued. “Or buses or anything else that might provide safety to the girl. She had to walk – and it was a mile from her house to her grandmother’s. But she had nothing to fear, she’d made the trek many times. So, she set out on foot, pulling her coat tight around her body to ward off the cold. The moon was high in the sky, the stars many. They kept her company as she walked, never thinking that she was being watched.”
Eyes round, Maria crept a little closer to Liz, her arm entwining her friend’s once again. “Who was watching her?” she whispered.
Alex looked her way. “The visitors.”
Liz leaned forward. “What did they do to her?”
“Well, she was almost through the woods, only about a hundred yards to go, when she started to realize that she was not alone. Someone was following her. If she stopped walking, she could still hear footsteps that would die a few seconds later. At first she rationalized that it was just the echo of her own steps, until she started to hear them in a different cadence than her own – whatever was following her wasn’t walking on only two feet.”
“An animal?” Maria asked.
Liz nudged her. “No, he already said it was aliens. Pay attention.”
Alex cleared his throat. “So, she realized that every time she moved, it moved. If she stopped, it stopped. She was terrified, but she knew that she would need to stay perfectly still if she never wanted it to catch her. She would need to stand in that one spot all night, until the sun came up and they went away.”
“No one could do that,” Liz said uneasily. “They’d fall asleep or their muscles would cramp or something.”
“She tried it,” Alex continued, ignoring her weak protests. “She tried to stay as still as possible, but eventually she could hear them coming, advancing slowly, from all sides. Inside, she was in a panic, knowing that she wasn’t moving a muscle and yet somehow they were still drawn to her. Much to her horror, she realized that she was moving – every time she drew in a breath, her body moved. And there was nothing she could do about that.”
“Oh, no,” Maria breathed, gripping Liz’s arm to the point of bruising. “What did she do?”
Alex shrugged. “What could she do? If she stopped breathing, she’d pass out and then she would definitely move. If she kept breathing, she would keep moving and they would find her eventually.”
“What happened?” Liz asked, dark eyes round.
“No one knows. She was never heard from again.” Alex flipped off the light suddenly and both girls let out a little gasp. “Can you hear them?” he whispered. “I can. And they can hear you – they can hear you breathing.”
With that, there was a rustling noise outside of the tent and both girls shrieked, Maria’s scream louder and longer than Liz’s. Victorious, Alex flipped the light back on as he fell to the roof, laughing hysterically.
“That’s not funny!” Maria said, pounding him in the leg with a fist.
“Sure it was!” Alex replied, pushing himself up and wiping tears from his eyes. He looked at Liz, who was a little amused, then Maria, who was terrified. “Look, it’s just a story, just for fun. There are no aliens in Roswell.”
“Are you sure?” Liz asked uncertainly.
Alex nodded. “Yeah, they don’t exist, do they? I mean, you’ve never met one, have you?”
She shook her head, long dark hair swaying.
“You’re an ass,” Maria said, indignantly brushing popcorn from her sweater. “And now you have to walk me home.”
He shrugged with a smile – it was all worth it.
With one swoop, Maria pulled the sleeping bag from the chairs and they were once again on Liz’s roof, no longer in a tent in the middle of nowhere. “Come on,” she urged Alex. “I have to get home before Amy has a cow.”
Liz smiled slightly as she stood up and started retrieving empty chip bags, soda cans and the overturned popcorn bowl. Maria was still in the defiant age of calling her mother by her first name…but only behind her back.
Alex gave Liz an awkward hug. “Thanks for having us over,” he said.
“My pleasure,” she grinned. They were at an in-between age – too old to trick-or-treat and too young to go to more adult parties. The last two Halloweens had been spent here, on Liz’s roof, just the three of them, best friends.
Maria leaned in and hugged Liz as well. “Call me tomorrow. Maybe we can go to a movie.”
“Okay,” Liz agreed, then followed her friends through the window and into her bedroom.
“I wonder how Kyle Valenti would like it to know how many times Alex has been in your bedroom,” Maria teased.
Liz smacked her on the arm. “Stop it!”
Alex raised an eyebrow. “What’s this? A crush on the future captain of the football team?”
Liz blushed. “No,” she mumbled in embarrassment.
“Yes,” Maria giggled. “I also wonder what Kyle Valenti would think about Max Evans staring at you all of the time.”
Liz crinkled her nose.
“Max Evans?” Alex repeated, his tone matching Liz’s skeptical expression. “Why is he staring at Liz?”
“He’s not,” Liz denied, ushering both of them to the door and the stairs that would lead to the alley. “Maria thinks he is, but I know he’s not.”
“Why not?” Alex asked, blinking in confusion. To him, Liz was beautiful – why wouldn’t someone else think so, too?
Liz flushed slightly and made a motion down her body. “If you were Max Evans, would you be attracted to this?”
Alex didn’t have time to answer as Mr. Parker met them at the bottom of the steps.
“Ah,” he said, grinning. “I see we all survived this year.”
Maria pouted in Alex’s direction. “No thanks to him.”
“Well, at least I couldn’t hear you scream in the restaurant this time. Be careful walking home, kids.”
Liz slid under her father’s arm and watched as Alex and Maria departed. Jeff gave her a squeeze, then motioned to the stack of trash bags by the door.
“We’ve been really busy tonight, pumpkin,” he said. “Think you could help out and throw those in the dumpster?”
Liz nodded, received a kiss on the cheek, then watched as the man re-entered the bustling Crashdown kitchen. Once he was gone, she let out a sigh and grimaced. She always ended up with garbage duty – uncompensated garbage duty. She couldn’t wait until one day when she was old enough to work there – then some other grunt could take out the trash and she could get all of those juicy tips the waitresses got.
Zipping her sweatshirt up a little higher, she pushed open the back door with her hip. The bags were heavy and she had to take one at a time in order to manage them. She was on the last bag when she felt something cold flutter up her spine. She paused beside the dumpster, her hands gripping the plastic of the bag, and listened for anything out of the ordinary. When she heard nothing, she silently chided herself for being skittish, and started to hoist the bag again.
Immediately she froze, the echo of a rustle not far away. Eyes wide, heart thumping a little harder, she quickly looked from one end of the alley to another. The wind pushed a dried leaf through the wash of the security light and once again she felt stupid. With a quick heave, she tossed the bag into the dumpster and slammed it shut with a loud clang of metal on metal.
A sound, too distinct to be an echo, immediately followed.
Liz let out a squeal and raced for the door, her small feet barely touching the pavement. When she got to the door, however, she found that it had drifted closed, locking as a security measure. Frantically, she pulled on the handle, banged on the door, glanced both ways down the alley. She was certain of it now – something was out there with her.
There was no time to waste. Whatever it was was going to have to beat her in a foot race to the end of the alley. If she could just make it to the sidewalk and the front entrance of the café, then she would be safe.
In her head, she remembered the girl from Alex’s story, only one hundred yards from safety, evil aliens closing in on all sides. Well, Liz Parker wasn’t going to be the one to stand in the middle of the woods and wait for the aliens to take her. She was so spooked that she couldn’t even rationalize to herself that aliens weren’t even real. She kept her eyes fixed on the brightness of the street at the end of the alley, her mind running rampant with monsters her imagination was conjuring, green, foul creatures snapping at her heels as she ran. Just a few more steps, and then she’d be safe –
Liz fell to the ground with a thud, panic finally taking hold. Covering her eyes and waiting to be devoured, she let out a scream. Eventually, when no biting and gnashing came her way, she lowered her hands to find Max Evans leaning over her, his eyes full of worry. Behind him, several passersby were looking at her like she was naked in public.
“Are you okay?” Max asked, his voice soft in the night. He extended a hand to help her up. “I didn’t mean to run into you – you just came running out of the alley.” He looked that way, puzzled.
Liz suddenly felt very foolish. She accepted his help and felt a little curious at the feel of his hand in hers, which she was quick to drop once she’d righted herself. “I locked myself out,” she said sheepishly, brushing dirt and leaves from her clothes as the onlookers disbursed.
Max raised a skeptical eyebrow. “Is that why you were running?”
“No, I was being chased by aliens.” She said it without thinking, then gave him a self-conscious grin. “Never mind.”
There was a moment of awkward silence, then he stepped out of her way so that she could get to the Crashdown entrance.
“Why don’t you come in?” she asked, almost as an afterthought, albeit a good one. “I feel bad for acting so silly.”
Max shoved his hands into his pockets and took a step backward, obviously uncomfortable. “Nah, I should go…”
“I’ll get you some ice cream – on the house,” she baited. “My pop owns the place.”
She gave him a pretty smile and he found himself following her inside, sliding into the only unoccupied booth in the whole place – the first one by the jukebox. He sat silently, nervously, while he watched her walk to the back of the restaurant and speak to her father. The man looked in Max’s direction, gave a laugh, then nodded to his daughter. In a few moments, Liz reappeared at Max’s table with a huge bowl of ice cream.
“I didn’t know what kind you like,” she said, placing the bowl before him. “So I gave you some of every kind.”
He thanked her, then self-consciously started picking at the bowl. She left him to it, afraid of making him uncomfortable, and went into the kitchen. Once there, she dialed Maria’s number and peeked through the kitchen window to watch Max, to find out what ice cream flavor was his favorite.
When Maria picked up, Liz could do nothing to stop her grin. “Guess what,” she laughed. “Max Evans just saved me from the aliens.”
The End