Stella Rose Gold for Eternity: The Immortal Mistakes, #1

By Sandra L. Vasher

How long is eternity?

Stella Rose knows her doting boyfriend, Myles, will do anything for her. Then she tests positive for a gene that gives her a 96% chance of developing Early Alzheimer's by age fifty, and their future together falls apart. Stella's best chance is to apply for the Immortality Program. 

If Stella applies, Myles will too, but Myles has everything going for him as a mortal. Plus, his incredibly conservative, wealthy, powerful family abhors immortality. Stella must choose between thirty years of mortal bliss with Myles or a forever without him, unless Myles has other plans…

Stella Rose Gold for Eternity is the first of The Immortal Mistakes, a set of novellas leading up to Sandra L. Vasher's upcoming young adult sci-fi /fantasy series, The Mortal Heritance. Enjoy The Immortal Mistakes as stand-alone stories or to learn more about familiar faces from The Mortal Heritance.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mortal Ink Press
• Release date: Sep 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781393404644

Sandra L. Vasher

Sandra L. Vasher is an indie writer, recovering lawyer, dreamer, consultant, blogger, serial entrepreneur, and mommy of very spoiled dog. She enjoys long drives in fall weather, do-it-yourself projects, animated movies and cartoons, fanfiction, red wine, traveling everywhere, and baking sweet and savory treats. She can often be found trying not to hunch over her computer at her favorite coffee shops in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Book preview

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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