-1-

I hadn’t set eyes on Alex Haley in 74 days.

It was the longest I’d gone without seeing his smug face since he’d started working at the care facility he’d trapped me in. He was usually always here; working away at my dignity and reminding me of the worst mistake I'd ever made in my previous life.

He had been acting odd lately; grinning, chatting endlessly and giggling to himself as he narrated his daily tasks.

75  days.

I’d learned years ago to stop hoping for freedom. The days went by easier when I dulled my mind and gave into oblivion. I stopped myself from dreaming of the future I'd never had. I  let my mind drift while I took in whatever entertainment was on the holoscreen above me.

76 days

My eyes race to the door whenever it opens to see if today is the day he comes back to me.

But it never is.  

When the mid-day nurse comes to change my feeding tube I turn on my assistive tech. I never used it because it had been hacked so I couldn’t speak freely.  I move my eyes to type the word ‘help’ but the system doesn’t let me--which meant wherever Haley had gone, he’d been sure to leave his nasty little hack behind.

I try a new sentence.

WHERE IS—

The machine won’t let me spell Alex or Haley.

WHERE IS A….H ?

The nurse meets my eyes and her expression is one of compassion.

“Oh. I’m sorry no one told you, Mr. Maxwell,” she says. “Haley passed away.”

***

There is a small ache in my heart at her words. But there is a spark of hope burning there too.

Alex Haley.

Dead.

I’d imagined many things from this bed but never that.

He’d  always seemed healthy and carefree.

I hold on to this new information about Haley, turning it over in my head for a few days before carefully plotting my release. I decide I don’t care about revenge. I would get out of this place and live my last decades in peace.

I’d visit my children. I’d been following them in the little ways I could in the news. Gemma was in Spain doing some ridiculous project with animals. Phoenix had been been named the youngest executive director of a major Federation taskforce. 

His office building was only four blocks from this hospital. I imagine striding into that office and telling him all was forgiven. We’d have drinks in a hotel bar and I’ll tell him I was proud of him.

I’d push the mistakes of my past behind me and make good before I left this earth.

I’d even visit Lansing and tell him what we'd had had been real for me. Then I’d buy a small apartment on the outskirts of the Sprawl and live out my life strolling in the sun and breathing fresh air.

When the morning nursing assistant comes to wash my face and brush my teeth I moan like I’m uncomfortable.

“Does something hurt ?,” the woman asks.

I respond with  ****** on my keyboard

 “I don’t know what that means. Yes or No ?”

**** ** ****** * *****

“Is--”

I feign panic and confusion. I respond to every  inquiry by spelling out nonsense and by the end of the afternoon they are putting in a request for a new machine.

I spend that evening planning the message I will write once I’m using an unhacked assistive system , the one that will get me out of here. I try to keep it simple.

Please unhook my breathing tube. I can speak and breathe without it. I believe my spine has been healing as well.  I have been placed here by mistake. Please call an outside doctor and you will see.

That night’s sleep is  the most restful sleep I’ve had in years.  

***

-2-

When I open my eyes the next morning Alex Haley is standing over my bed. 

Or an apparition of him. 

He looks exactly the way he had that day we first met at City of Hope hospital.

His tanned skin is unblemished and free of ink; his lovely face a mix of delicate beauty and youth.

A beautiful vision from my past come back to haunt me.

“Mr. Maxwell,” the attending head nurse says coming into view as well. “We had a special surprise guest for you this morning. This is Grayson Haley-Grace, Alex Haley’s son. He’s come by to visit you.”

I can’t take my eyes off the boy.

He was identical to Haley.

The boy peers down curiously down at me. He had the same big colorless pupils peeking out from a row of elegant dark lashes. The same pale blonde hair, swept back in a high ponytail with the same white satin ribbon.

There were a few differences. The boy’s nose wrinkles in a way Haley’s never had. He also had a single streak of black in the back of his ponytail but other than that---they might have been the exact same person.

“Mr. Maxwell…I came to see you because I heard you were one of Daddy’s favorite patients,” the boy said, his soft voice somehow even more innocent and sweeter than his father’s.

“Oh, we love to hear that,” the attending nurse cooed, putting her hand to her heart

Haley rarely spoke to me about his son. But I’d put together he’d had him the same year Phoenix had been returned to me and  I’d been placed here. That was 16 years ago.

Which meant the boy had to be at least 16 years old now. Yet, something about his demeanor read more childlike.

But Haley had been the same way. Just a naïve boy.

And the man I’d been back then had foolishly decided to exploit that innocence for his own gain.

Grayson turns to the attending nurse and shows her a floral print greeting card with an eager smile.

“Excuse me,” he says to the nurse. “We found this card with a note for Mr. Maxwell in Daddy’s safety deposit box. Um, is it okay if I read it to him ?”

The attending nurse nods and leaves us alone.

I fix my gaze on  the boy as he opens the greeting card. He scans the inside of it and clears his throat to read.

But instead of reading the card, he closes the it. The paper card  flutters to the floor—revealing an empty card and his middle finger pointed directly at me.

“So, you’re Kenneth,” he smirks, tilting his head, causing his ponytail to sway gently. “Since we’re getting to know each other you should know I don’t use the name Grayson. You can call me Nova.”

His voice had lost all it’s dulcet sweetness. In it’s place was a slightly raspier tone edged with juvenile insolence.

He rests his thin arms on the rails of the bed and leans closer to me. His eyes widen and a ring of light flashes around his pupils before their color changes from the familiar gray to a vibrant bright turquoise that pulls at my memory. The light flashes again and his contacts settle into a deep brown.

“Oh, hey guess what, Ken? I was just downstairs installing this thingie on your new system so you don’t have to worry  about, like, trying to break out of here or something,” he continues.  “I figured since I was in the hospital already I should see if I could bullshit my way up here so I can finally meet the evil man. That’s what I used to call you when I was younger. The evil man who did the tattoos cause I didn’t know the word motherfucker back then--”

I turn on my assistive machine and type a message.

Is this a joke ? Is he really dead ?

The boy responds with a devilish smile.  He takes his backpack off his shoulders and starts digging through it.

“Yes,” he replies, pulling something  from his bag.

He takes a step back from my bed, tilts his head back and uses his fingertips to shove something up his nose.

When he moves his hands there is a small flat silver stud piercing his nose.

When did it happen ?

He stares at me like he had all the time in the world as he carefully inserts a pair of round silver studs on the skin just under the left side of his lips.

“Almost two months ago,” he finally answered. “In the French Riviera.”

He sticks his lip out and loops a silver ring into the right corner.

“We were there for vacation,” he continues securing a dangling black saltire cross earring into his right ear. “We rented this fancy house on a private beach.  His room was amazing. You could lie in bed, look out the balcony and see directly out to the beach.”

He pulls the white ribbon from his hair and shakes it out wildly. His hair is shorter than Haley’s, falling just above his clavicle.

“On our tenth night in France  we had this amazing dinner and then spent the night in bed watching the sunset, drinking expensive champagne and eating the best desserts. A little after the sunset he said he was tired and asked if he could go to sleep…Except he wasn’t really asking that. We told him we loved him, said good night and he fell asleep for the last time, happy and comfortable until he took his last breath.”

The boy sounded distance,  like he’s telling me a story. I’d think he was lying but his mask of teenage incredulity breaks for moment before he remembers to put it back on.

He touches the tiny gray dot in his inner ear and projects a snapshot. It’s Haley as I last remember him, although half of his hair is buzzed off. He’s lying on cream colored sheets in a decadent looking bed, his willowy body entangled in an intimate embrace with the cyborg’s.

I never knew what Haley saw in that thug but the cyborg had aged spectacularly. The words chaos and freedom were written in faded ink on his muscular bicep. Haley’s head rested on his broad chest and they were gazing into each other’s eyes like new lovers. The cyborg’s brow is furrowed in annoyance as he looks down at Haley but I imagine that has more to do with the brat who took the snapshot.

“We never went on vacation or did anything fun,” the boy continued snapping my attention away from the photo.  “So I think he planned the trip knowing he was going to die there….It’s definitely better than dying  alone and sad in a place like this. I mean for a place called Bright Seas this place is really fucking gross --”

What did he die of ? I spell out

He looks at my question quizzically as he starts unbuttoning and removing his starched white oxford shirt. Underneath he’s wearing a flimsy dark purple tank top with a band logo that shows yet another piercing-- this one a small bar through his belly button. I hate that I notice the small difference in their bodies. This boy was waifish and slight. He didn’t have the muscle tone or sharp lines at his hips.

“Undiagnosed brain tumor,” he smirked balling the collared shirt up and stuffing it into his backpack. “Yeah, it turns out all the sudden excessive happiness shit wasn’t just some mid-life crisis. It was an aggressive tumor on the part of the brain that feels sadness. By the time they figured it out it  was too late.”

He’d literally died of happiness.

I’m sorry for your loss. I cared about your father. I regret what I did to him. He’s gone now. I’ve served my time. Please…let me out.

He doesn’t even pretend to be think about it.

“Yeahhhh…no.”

He shrugs and starts going through his backpack again. Instead of more piercings he pulls out a bottle of Bluegrass Fine Wiskee and rests it on the sidetable. Bluegrass Fine Wiskee was the lowest of the low cheap liquor brands---their “wiskee”  couldn’t even be legally called whiskey. It was grain alcohol with artificial malt flavoring.

The boy walks around the room until he spots the little medicine cups on the counter. He fills two  of them with the offending whiskey and holds one up.

“Hm. Let’s make a toast. To you going to hell in this fucking bed and…to my Dad,” he smiled and then drained the cup, wincing. “Ugh, this taste like horseshit!”

He holds the other shot out to me but I can’t drink with the breathing tube in. I can’t even feel my arms to reach for it. Not that I would if I could.

“Right,” he says, tossing the shot into the sink. “Okay, wellll….this idea was way more fun in my head. I think I’m going to go now.”

He shoulders his backpack and pauses to look down at me, tapping his fingers on the bars of the bed.

As he takes me in , I take him in. The sparkling  purple on his fingernails is badly chipped. There is a scripted tattoo around one of his delicate looking wrist that begins with I solemnly swear I’m

So much was different.

But the face.

I remember the wide eyed fear on it whenever I came into the room at Ft. Pride. The resignation as he’d let me use his body. The crying and begging to go home. He was a child. Why hadn’t Haley ever seemed so young to me back then ?

Wait. I type quickly. There is a vial of clear solution in the lower cabinet. Inject it into my IV. It will slow my heart. I give you permission. This can end with both Haley and I gone.

His eyes narrow and he runs a petulant hand through his mane of hair. 

“Nah, I’m good,” he shrugs.

He affixes a pair of round oversized gold wire eyeglasses to his nose—I’d noticed on the media streams young people were wearing them again as a fashion statement.

He runs his finger over the thin metal frame and the glass lens turns from clear to deep black and I can see my reflection in it. How I must look to him, a pathetic sad old man begging for the end.

“I don’t really know how any of this works,” he says, walking to the door. “But if I were you I wouldn’t try anything else. I guess there will always be someone watching to make sure you never walk out of here. Okay, bye!”

And then he’s gone.

 

***

-3-

Nova

That was kind of fun.

But now I need to get the fuck out of here.

When I'd  walked through the hospital this morning dressed up like a choir boy the staff would not stop staring at me. Some slack jawed psycho doctor even followed me for a few feet before finally asking if I was Grayson. I fucking hate that name but I didn’t want to get kicked out before I met Maxwell so I’d smiled and nodded-- being  the sweet angel everyone expected me to be.

The people staring thing doesn’t happen so much as I’m leaving because of my glasses and outfit change but I still keep my head down and speed walk to the private secure door in the back of the hospital that I’d come through.

I blow through the door and run right into a pair of security guards.

Fuck.

Did that  motherfucker seriously call security on me ?

But the security guards aren’t paying attention to me. They're looking at my glide board—which I’d left docked up against the hospital door. One guard is trying to pull the board off with his bare hands and the other is calling a technician for help.  I would have brought the board inside with me but Holland had written the word CUNT on the bottom of it in permanent  marker when I passed out at her party last month.

I walk past the idiot security guards nonchalantly and when I get  around the corner I activate the board remotely. It detaches itself from the wall, whizzes through the alley, around the corner and slides itself  under my feet. The moment the bottom of my sneakers touch the worn reflective surface I take off, gliding at full speed through the mid day traffic and crowds until I’m no longer on hospital property.

I was kind of proud of myself for what I did back there. Maxwell looked so pissed. And I’d left out just enough of the story to make him think Dad’s last few days had been perfect.

Sure, we’d really gone on that insane trip to France but it was stressful as fuck. Dad slept a lot and we’d re-played that final sleep routine 5 nights in a row before he died for real. And when it did happen...shit got ugly.

I hadn’t planned on showing Maxwell the image until I did. It had taken me forever to get a picture that didn’t show how sickly Dad had gotten.

I really want to talk to  Holland about what I just did but it’s too much messy family shit.

Speaking of Holland.

I slow down on my glide board and open a chat window on my syn.

Hey, where are you ? I message Holland.

Am I still a  ‘fucking pathetic biker slut’ ?  Holland replies, referring to what I’d called her when we’d fought two weeks ago—the last time we’d talked.

I mean, as long as I’m not a ‘toxic asshole who wants to kill himself’ I reply referring to what she’d said to me during the fight.

I’m just hanging out a Cheek’s….Wait, why ????? she replies

Good. On my way, Biker Slut!

Uh, thought you were grounded, Toxic Asshole ?

Warden furloughed me for a super secret mission I can’t tell you about. *sticks tongue out*

Doubt it, babe

I have cash! Is Joshua  working ?

She sends a winking face, which is Holland for yes.

I’m on my way

I shift on my feet, turning the board in the direction of the train station

---

A/N

For those keeping track at home we’ve jumped forward another 10 years--

CPShawna: Again, b*tch ? Again  with the dead parent ? First Sweet Prince, then One Last Thing, then Sunshine--

SHV: I know, I know but I really needed to get Haley out of the picture for this to work....Trust the process ?

Ever since I wrote Grayson as Haley's genetic clone I noodled with the idea of a much older Grayson meeting Maxwell after Haley died and freaking him out. In that thought experiment Grayson would have been much older but somehow that scene turned into this 17,000 word novella about a16-year-old Grayson who goes by Nova.

You: Um…Shawna, did you change his name to Nova because you didn’t like the name Grayson ?

SHV: No, I promise I have a textual reason he’s using a chosen nickname!

CPShawna: Did they get it ? Did they get it ? The vial of adrenaline Maxwell asks Nova to kill him with is the same one Haley left in Sunshine !

SHV: Be cool

CPShawna: *continuity high fives herself*

SHV: It’s not continuity since we were literally writing both at the same time! I spent the last half of 2019 writing Nova so I can't believe I'm sharing this.

Oh, and ENOUGH WITH THE MIND READING LILE  (and a few others of you) ! I thought I was being real coy about this.