Stella Rose Gold for Eternity Read online

  CONTENTS

  COVER

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  1. STELLA

  2. MYLES

  3. STELLA

  4. MYLES

  5. MYLES

  6. STELLA

  7. MYLES

  8. STELLA

  9. MYLES

  10. STELLA

  11. MYLES

  12. STELLA

  13. STELLA

  14. MYLES

  15. STELLA

  16. MYLES

  17. STELLA

  EPILOGUE FOSTER

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  HELP AN INDIE

  Stella Rose Gold for Eternity

  Copyright © 2019 by Sandra L. Vasher

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law. For information, please contact Mortal Ink Press LLC, PO Box 30811, Raleigh, NC 27622-0811, USA.

  mortalinkpress.com

  ISBN 978-1-950989-00-3 (paperback)

  ISBN 978-1-950989-05-8 (ebook)

  Cover design by Danielle Doolittle | DoElle Designs | www.doelledesigns.wix.com

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses or other entities, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  To Malcolm. Thank you for loving this story.

  1.

  STELLA

  There is a red flag at the top of my Standardized Genetic Screening Test. It happens. Red flags. In a high school class of 500 sophomores, most will voluntarily submit to a cheek swab in October in exchange for a free photo shoot for the yearbook with a professional and an old-school camera. Statistically, fifteen students will later receive red flags on their SGST reports in February.

  Grazie Patel-Compton stands up at a table four over from mine in the cafeteria we’re gathered in. She is flanked by her two best friends, Bette and Thea, whose arms join over Grazie’s shoulders. Grazie seems to sag under the weight of their comfort, and I catch a glimpse of her face as Bette and Thea walk her out of the cafeteria. Tears are already running down her cheeks.

  A black flag. No one got one last year, so statistically, we were due for one this year.

  Grazie’s current boyfriend, Tram, hasn’t gotten up from their now empty cafeteria table. He stares at her back as her friends usher her out. They’ve been dating for a few months, and Tram’s not a jerk, but it would surprise me if he isn’t already thinking of ways to break up with Grazie. Their futures have irreparably diverged. There’s a rumor that if you get a black flag, an Immortality Program representative shows up at your door that night to talk through your options with you.

  “Shit,” Myles says. “Looks like little Miss Perfect isn’t perfect on the inside. What do you think the flag was for?”

  Myles is my boyfriend. We’ve been together for a year and a half, and it’s probably too soon, and it was probably never meant to be, but I love him.

  I didn’t mean to. I didn’t expect to. And most importantly, I never anticipated that he would fall for me. I, Stella Rose Dellucci, come from the wrong side of Detroit. My family lives in an apartment tower called Chrysler Citadel in one of the over-crowded, lower middle-class neighborhoods. Our apartment is on the fifteenth floor, and the tram runs so close to our windows that I know the timetable by heart.

  Myles—Myles Alexander Kayes—lives in the Industrial West Side. His house is one of those ancient factories that was later gutted and turned into a rich person’s manor. His mother just had the whole place redecorated, and the money they spent on that could probably have paid for everyone in Chrysler Citadel to eat for a year.

  There’s sick humor to hearing Myles talk about Grazie being little Miss Perfect when his own SGST report is lying on our cafeteria table for everyone to see.

  Blank. Not a single red flag. Not a single yellow flag. And no surprises there. Myles had genetic fortune and upper-class privilege going for him right from in vitro conception. SGST was redundant for him. The comprehensive genetic testing the Kayes used to select Myles as their only child from a batch of otherwise inferior embryos was far more robust than standardized genetic screening. Mr. and Mrs. Kayes customized those sky-blue eyes for him. Probably that color was listed a few lines above “expected height: seventy-one inches,” “expected weight: one-hundred-fifty pounds,” and “intelligence capacity: genius.”

  He flashes a straight-toothed smile at me. There is a gap between my front teeth that I hate, so I never smile with my teeth. This helps make it seem more natural when I only manage a small, close-lipped smile back.

  A red flag. They aren’t always death sentences, and even when they are, they aren’t the same as the death sentences the kids with black flags get. A black flag means you are genetically predisposed to a serious illness or condition that is more than 85% likely to kill you before age twenty-seven. Usually, it’s a rare cancer. A red flag is for genetic predisposition to an illness or condition that is likely to kill or severely disable you before age fifty.

  “Only the good die young,” Foster Hinks, Myles’s best friend (or best enemy, depending on the boys’ moods) says, slapping his SGST report down face up on top of Myles’s.

  I see the reg flag along with a dozen or so yellow flags before Myles snatches the report up and starts reading with disbelief. Myles lives in a bubble that doesn’t provide oxygen for crappy stuff like flags on his best friend’s SGST report. He rapidly mouths the words, like he can erase them if he simply reads fast enough.

  Foster is as smart as Myles, though Myles thinks he has higher emotional intelligence, something no test can accurately quantify yet. I didn’t like either of them when I met them together the first day of our freshman year in world history, and I thought neither of them had any emotional intelligence. It took half a semester stuck sitting between them as the new girl before I learned to identify Foster’s snarky quips about historic blunders with genuine concern and compassion for the world.

  I didn’t understand Myles’s arrogance and self-righteousness for several more weeks, when he asked me out for the first time. He stuttered through the whole delivery. I said, “You can recite the entire St. Louis Treaty on Immortality, and you’re stressing about asking a girl out for a latte?”

  “Who stresses about reciting the St. Louis Treaty?” he said like I’d said something crazy. “That’s just memorization, and we all know the approximate capacity of our memories. Either you can do it, or you can’t. It’s nothing like asking a girl you like out! A treaty can’t say no to you!”

  I think my fall for him began right there when I first got to see the twisted, sheepish smile Myles gets whenever he realizes he’s done something adorable. He is not smiling now, though. He’s frowning so hard at Foster’s SGST report that you’d think he was trying to solve the Rubik’s Time Warp problem. Good luck.

  “Fine. So, you have an eighty-seven percent risk of death by massive cardiac failure between the ages of forty and forty-three,” Myles finally says, lying the report back down on the table. “Don’t even try to claim you’re good, Hinks. You’re not going to die young. This just gives you the best excuse ever to apply for the Immortality Program.”

  His tone is grim, even though his words are light, but it’s obvious Myles doesn’t see any other choice for Foster. Of course, Foster will apply for the Immortality Program. Of course, he’ll get in. Of course, he won’t be one of the 2% of mortals who don’t survive the transition to immortality.
And of course, he’ll thrive as an immortal. He’ll barely be bothered by the significant downsides, like—

  “Yeah, get used to this guy—” Foster points his thumbs at himself “—with red eyes and a bad attitude.” He manages to pull off the cavalier tone Myles couldn’t quite, but Myles can catch up.

  “Uh, isn’t that you every morning in homeroom?” Myles says, and with that, he is back to normal. The guys make their peace with this tragedy like it isn’t going to change absolutely everything for Foster.

  “Laugh while you can, Kayes,” Foster says. “But when you and Stella Rose are all wrinkly and dying at a hundred years old, I’ll be living my best life in my perfect, perpetually twenty-seven-year-old body.”

  Myles puts his arm around my shoulders, and I think this might be a little how Grazie felt with Bette and Thea’s arms around her. His arm isn’t comfortable like it should be. It’s hot and heavy like a weight I want to throw off.

  “I would take a hundred years growing old with someone I love over thousands of years stuck alone in my late twenties any lifetime,” Myles declares.

  My heart crumbles in on itself while Foster and Myles continue to joke about Foster’s new future. If you had asked me yesterday if I would be with Myles forever, I would have laughed. Sure, we’re in love now, but who knows what might happen in ten or twenty years? Myles, however, is a true romantic. He’d have sworn up, down, and sideways that I am the love of his life. He would never have admitted to the fact that we are teenagers and our hundred-year future together was never guaranteed.

  How am I going to tell him we’re not even going to get a chance at that future?

  Not when I’m genetically predisposed to Early Aggressive Alzheimer’s. Ninety-six percent chance of being unable to remember who I am by age fifty.

  I feel ill. Foster may be cool with applying for the Immortality Program, but it’s not something I ever even considered. I was happy with my mortal life. I didn’t need to put that at risk. Now, the future I’ve been imagining is folding in on itself exactly like my heart.

  “Don’t worry, Foster. Stella and I are going to throw you the best Immortality Transition Party ever.” Myles has moved on to full-on enthusiasm. That’s Myles for you. He doesn’t know how to do misery. He squeezes my shoulders. “Aren’t we, Stella Rose?”

  I can’t speak. If I speak, I might vomit.

  “Stell, you okay?”

  The relaxation in Myles's face begins to fall away as I struggle to meet his eyes. His worry wrinkle—the one that appears at an angle between his eyebrows when something is wrong—appears. Foster’s bravado has fallen, too. A second ago, he was laughing with Myles. But with my failure to answer a question, a look of realization is dawning on his face. They know it’s bad.

  Myles removes his hand from my shoulder.

  “Stella Rose?” he says quietly. “Are you … is there a yellow flag on your report? You know, medicine is really amazing these days. Most yellow flags can be resolved with the right resources, and—”

  Oh, God. If only Myles could solve this with some of his family’s money. But the red flags come because someone on high decided it would be better for us to know when there’s something coming that money, exercise, a strict diet, and a medical retreat can’t fix. There is no help for me. As a mortal, all I have left is blind luck.

  I put my SGST report on the table face down and get up. I am halfway out the cafeteria doors before the boys probably even process what’s going on.

  I have a red flag, and this changes everything.

  2.

  MYLES

  Do you know some people are genetically predisposed to falling in love at first sight? I’m one of them. I saw Stella for the first time in my history class freshman year of high school, sitting there in the seat right next to the one I’d been assigned.

  Her books and papers were neatly aligned like she was pretending to be an organized mind while she doodled flowers into the margins of her e-notebook with a digital gold gel pen. Her hair was long flowing down her back in waves I immediately wanted to touch. Those waves hid a waist with the kind of delicate curves that fascinated me so much I suddenly wanted to be an artist. There was a birthmark at the very top edge of her left cheekbone that reminded me of a star.

  I showed off for her. I was supposed to be beyond that—it had been years since I’d acted like a know-it-all in class—but I wanted her attention. And I got it. I was in love with her from the moment she rolled her eyes at me after I raised my hand to answer an obscure question about the old British monarchy. Her eyes were smooth umber, and she was totally unimpressed. Even after the teacher said, “Thank you, Mr. Kayes.”

  That, more than anything, is what did it for me. Stella Rose has never cared at all about my family name, my ridiculous allowance, or my genetic propensities for achievement of all sorts. It took me a whole date to find something to tell her about me that she did care about. It was the story of the time I started a non-profit organization to save a tree in the park that was growing out of this four-hundred-year-old classic Jeep. I was eight. I liked climbing that tree.

  Sometimes, when I get caught up in all the things I’m supposed to be doing to build my high school resume, she says stuff like, “What do you do because it really matters to you? I don’t care what you do because your parents want you to get into some global league college.”

  Not “some.” Arbordale. We’re talking about Arbordale here. That’s the top school in the United States and one of the top three in the global league. It competes with Oxford and Xi’an Tower.

  And let’s be clear: I don’t have to build my resume to get in. I’m a Kayes. A direct descendant of the man who completely revitalized Michigan in the twenty-second century and made Detroit a world-class city again. The Kayes School of Business at Arbordale is named for my family. We fund their endowment. I don’t have to do anything to get into Arbordale but write my name on the application and show up.

  But Stella doesn’t think that’s good enough. She wants to know what I want because it matters. What counts enough that I would fight for it on my own, even if I weren’t a Kayes?

  Do you know what kind of luck it is to have even one person in your life who believes in you that way? Who challenges you to be better than you ever thought you could be?

  That’s Stella Rose for me. The girl who wouldn’t let me kiss her until we’d been out together six times. Who only smiles with her teeth when I surprise her with something truly genuine. Who has more empathy and compassion in her little finger than most people have in their whole body. Who is smarter than either me or Foster but doesn’t ever talk about it or use it as a reason to slack off. Who loves her little sister and brother, who hates high school jerks, who never misses an opportunity to make a real friend.

  Who has the tiniest tattoo ever of a rose gold petal on her hip. To remind her that life is delicate and imperfect and beautiful all at once, and it’s the little things that are worth living for. I recently bought her a Shinola rose gold petal charm and had it put on a rose gold necklace because I love that petal on her hip. It’s perfect for Stella.

  And because of her, my life is divided into two parts: before Stella Rose Dellucci and after.

  She thinks this is over-the-top, and she doesn’t like me saying lovey-dovey stuff too much. I can tell her I love her, but I can’t tell her she’s the love of my life. I can tell her I’ll never let anything bad happen to her, but I can’t tell her it’s because I am going to stand by her as long as she’ll let me.

  I know where she’s coming from, wanting me to keep it all toned down. I’m sixteen. She’s fifteen. We’re way too young to be making big decisions about our futures with someone else. This is 2412, not 1412. We aren’t thinking about marriage at all. We aren’t talking about sex. We haven’t even agreed to go to prom together. Forever is forever away.

  But personally, I think the “you’re too young for real love” line is bullshit adults say because they’ve already had time
to make all kinds of mistakes, and they think love is the biggest mistake of all.

  Never mind that adults ask teenagers to make huge decisions about their futures all the time. What do they think we’re doing when we choose between an extra math class or an art class? Join the traveling volleyball team or join the marching band? Volunteer to spend the summer helping starving kids in some water-deprivation region of the world or volunteer to spend it assisting elderly people in your own community with the latest communicator apps?

  What do they think is happening when they give us our SGST results during our sophomore years in high school and fifteen students get forced to choose between a mortal life that will likely be too short or an immortal life that will likely be too long (unless the transition kills you immediately).

  Tick tock. This is your one chance to apply to the Immortality Program, and it requires accepted candidates to transition before age seventeen. And that’s not a made-up deadline. After seventeen, your risk of dying from the transition increases tenfold every year. That’s why they do the SGST before then—even though it’s not politically correct to say so.

  So how reasonable is it to tell me that I can’t possibly understand real love at sixteen, but immortality … oh yeah … I can make that decision with a clear head.

  I learned half of what I know about the Immortality Program on the internet about an hour ago, by the way, when Google started sending me articles about immortality, the Immortality Virus, and the Immortality Program. I have no idea how Google knows I’m thinking about immortality, but I am. Since about two this afternoon, that’s all I’ve been able to think about.

  I was going to wait for some special occasion to give Stella that rose gold petal necklace, but now that I know she has, at most, thirty sane years left, time feels different. We don’t have more to waste. She has to apply for the Immortality Program. She has to get in. And the universe has to let her become immortal.