The Deathday Letter

by Shaun David Hutchinson

Mom stops dancing nervously around the kitchen, making lists of things she wants to buy for dinner. Nana stops flipping through her photo albums, looking at pictures of me like I’m already gone. And Dad stops stirring the toxic sludge formerly known as hash browns.

  “Ollie,” says Nana. “You are going to die.”

  I know that everyone’s thinking it, and I love Nana for having the balls to say it. Of course, that doesn’t mean I’m ready to go coffin shopping.

  “Maybe, but you don’t have to act like it.” I push away the plate and hunt for my backpack. The twins love hiding it, but there are only so many places they can hide a backpack heavy enough to give me scoliosis.

  “Oliver—,” begins Dad.

  “Everyone gets a Deathday Letter!” I yell again. I don’t mean to yell, but sometimes yelling just happens. I count to ten and try again . . . without the yelling. “At some point, everyone gets a letter. My life’s been pretty solid and I don’t want to spend my last day locked in this house while you all stare at me, waiting for me to drop dead. I want to go to school, hang with my friends, come home, and try to ignore you all until I go to bed. The only difference between this day and any other day is that I won’t have to worry about making up an excuse for why I didn’t do my homework. Okay?”

  Wow. That sucked, but it had to be said. And I know they get the point because Mom starts yelling at the twins, who haven’t brushed their hair yet—likely hoping that she’ll cave and let them stay home. Nana’s already reading the paper like normal, which means she’s brutalizing it. It’s a crinkly black and white bloodbath. Oh, and Dad goes back to terrorizing more eggs. I don’t know whether to feel worse for the newspaper or the eggs.

  “You’re going to be late,” says Mom. She looks at me out of the corner of her eye and I know it’s eating her up not being able to cry and hover and mother the crap out of me, but I’m not about to stay home and watch Oprah all day.

  I get ready to leave, and maybe my sisters have just a sliver of humanity between them, because I find my backpack sitting in front of the door.

  I know everyone’s pretending and it makes me feel like a real dick. I also know that the second I leave, the crying and moping will resume. And since I’m not a total douche, I give each of them a hug before I leave. Even my sisters.

  “Here,” says Dad, and he hands me a wad of cash. “For lunch.”

  I look down at the money. School lunch, which Dad abhors, is only about five bucks, but he’s given me enough for, like, sixty lunches. “What’s this for?”

  Dad shrugs and winks at me. “You never know where the day might take you.”

  “Actually, I do,” I say. “First period is History, then Alge—”

  “I swear, if you didn’t have my good looks, I’d think you were the garbageman’s son.” Dad chuckles and closes my hand around the money. “You’ll figure it out. Now go or you’ll be late.”

  The whole thing is kind of surreal, but Dad’s right about being late. And you know, there is a giant neon sign above my head flashing, FOR A LIMITED TIME ONLY.

  23:23

  Getting out of my house is probably for the best, even if the only alternative is school. I hate Moriville High but it’s where the girls are. And girls equal sex, which, even though I’ve never technically done it, is sort of my whole reason for being. I can pass an entire period of Mr. Barnes’s history class just staring at Miranda Hilley’s rack. It makes me want to plant a flag in it and claim it in the name of Ollie. Of course, when I say “flag,” I mean “my face.”

  Girls are lucky ’cause they get points for showing off their assets. I, on the other hand, have to wear the baggiest jeans I own in case my bald avenger decides to turn into a rock python at the exact moment Mrs. Keane decides I need to solve for x in front of the whole class. It’s a lot of pressure for a guy. All I have to do is rub a wall the wrong way and I’m perpendicular. Ever wonder why so many dudes sit in the back of class and act like they don’t know what’s going on? Because a teenage guy with a penis is like a twitchy marine with a live grenade. Got it?

  If you’re keeping score: I like girls. School is a giant place filled with girls. It’s horny math even I can do.

  As I walk to my best friend Shane’s house, I realize that bringing my backpack was just plain stupid. I don’t crack open my books on the days I am gonna be alive to take the test. But I don’t want to deal with my parents again so I’m stuck with it.

  It’s cool, I guess, that Shane’s a couple months older than me and gets to drive. One awesome perk is that I don’t have to ride the bus to school. The bus driver, Dozie, is insane. And I can’t prove it, but I’m pretty sure he’s legally blind. It’d be nice if Shane would get off his butt and pick me up, but he claims that the extra block is too far out of his way. Which is crap, but he who has the car has the power.

  Another perk should be that it helps us out with the girls. It’s a simple fact: Girls like boys with cars. Except when the car in question is a rust red ’85 Honda Accord named Miss Piggy. Let’s just say that the girls aren’t exactly shoving one another out of the way for rides. In fact, Marissa Sheldon once told me she’d rather ride home on her ten-year-old brother’s handlebars than be seen in Miss Piggy. It puts our cool quotient slightly below the school janitor, Lewis, who buys beer for some of the jocks, and slightly above the girl in the library who eats her own fingernails.

  “Are you ever on time?”

  I look up and see Shane Grimsley leaning against his car. Waiting.

  Shane and I have been best friends since before birth. Literally. My mom and Shane’s mom met at their lady doctor. By lady doctor, I don’t mean a doctor who’s a lady, though she was. I mean a doctor who says things like, “Put your feet in the stirrups,” and boldly goes where no dude should ever go on his own mom. Anyway, we were born just a couple months apart.

  “So I think I’ve figured something out, Shane. I think we were switched when we were babies.” I stop in front of him and drop my backpack on the sidewalk. It clunks.

  “It hurts me when you think, Ollie.”

  “Just hear me out. I think that one day we were playing together, our moms were having some tasty cocktails, talking about laundry detergent and particle physics, and someone took the wrong baby home. I’m really Shane Grimsley and you’re really Oliver Travers.”

  Shane looks at me like I’ve shoved a handful of poo in his face and he’s taken a huge whiff. And seen some corn. There’s always corn.

  “Sure,” Shane says after a second. “Except, you do remember I’m black, right? My mom’s black, my dad’s black, my granny and gramps are black.” Shane points at himself and his invisible family. “We’re all black.”

  I shrug. “So what?”

  “You’re not black. You’re the polar opposite of black. You’re so white I should probably wear shades.”

  “Minor details.”

  I wait for Shane to ask me where I was going with the switched-at-birth thing but instead he pulls his cell phone out of his pocket and flips it open. “So, we’re going to be late.”

  I look at my own phone. “We have time.” Yeah, time for me to get all blubbery and tell you about my letter. Except I don’t do it. Because I’m chicken. Extra-crispy.

  “I’m hungry and in need of unhealthy breakfast sandwiches.” Shane walks around to his side of the car. The door screeees as it opens and I feel it in my teeth. “You haven’t eaten, have you?”

  I give him my crazy look. It’s more scary than crazy, with a healthy dose of squinty. “Um, I have, but what’s that got to do with the price of sloppy joes on Wednesdays?”

  Shane slides into his seat. The upholstery is the color of wet cardboard. “Then what’re you waiting on, Travers?” calls Shane. “You know the Grimsleys don’t know how to cook anything they don’t know the chemical composition of. This belly needs food.”

  I get in the car and decide to wait to tell Shane. I’m afraid that once I tell him, this will all end and he’ll start acting
like my parents. Is it so wrong to not want to spend my last day under a microscope?

  I put on my seat belt because Shane’s car is pretty much held together with happy thoughts and centrifugal force. He figures the faster he goes, the better chance Miss Piggy has of not flying apart. And while I know I’m going to die, I certainly don’t want it to be this morning in Shane’s crappy car.

  I barely hear Shane babbling about Tim Palachik’s latest escapade because I’m leaning out the window staring at stuff I’ve seen like a million times before. But as we pass each gas station and every crossing guard, I know that it’s probably going to be the last time I see them. I’m gonna miss the Country Corner Store’s sign advertising FOOT-LONG SPICY WIENERS. Cracks me up every time.

  “Did you hear what I said?” asks Shane as we pull into the drive-thru.

  “No?”

  “I said that Tim said that he made out with Kaylee Sanders. It’s all over his CrowFlow page.”

  Moriville High’s mascot is the Great and Mighty Crow. Pretty lame. Even lamer is that we have our own social networking site called CrowFlow. It’s like Facebook but without peedos.

  While Shane is ordering my bacon, egg, and cheese biscuit, I pull out my phone and check for myself. “Dude,” I say as we pull away in a haze of exhaust and painful squeals, “this says Tim screwed Kaylee.” I make a vulgar hand gesture involving the okay sign and my index finger poking through it to emphasize my point, which probably doesn’t need any emphasis.

  “Right. Made out.” Shane tosses me my sandwich while simultaneously stuffing half of his in his mouth.

  “No.” I put my phone away. “That’s not what ‘screwing’ implies. Did you not see my visual aid?” I unwrap my steamy breakfast sandwich and hold it on my lap while it cools. “‘Screwing’ implies panty spelunking. It implies power ballads in the background and grunting in the foreground. It implies playing the front nine. Or the back nine, if you’re lucky.”

  Shane rolls his eyes at me. It’s kind of funny because he wears these thick glasses that make him look all bug-eyed. And when he rolls his eyes, I always expect them to keep rolling and fall right out of his head.

  “Remember the time Tim said he made out with Jen Green and it turned out all he’d really done was accidentally brush up against her boob in the hall?”

  “Right,” I say with a little relief. “The Rule.” No matter what you actually do or don’t do with a girl, when you tell the story, you have to embellish some, er, a lot. If you kiss a girl, you

  say you felt her up. If you make out with a girl, you say you did her. And if you ever actually manage to go all the way, well you just have to tell the boys that you ruined her for all mankind. What can I say? Half a dude’s brain is in his shorts.

  I gulp down my second breakfast and hold on for dear life. Shane doesn’t have a stereo in his car. His parents believe that if he’s busy listening to the radio, he won’t be paying attention to the actual driving. Unfortunately it just forces him to entertain himself in other, more distracting ways.

  “So where’d Tim hook up with Kaylee, anyway?” I ask once I’m done chewing. “It’s not like they hang out with the same group.”

  “Party,” says Shane.

  “How come we never get invited to parties? Just once before I die I’d like to be invited to a party.”

  Shane snorts. “Not much chance of that.”

  “You have no idea,” I mumble.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Just concentrate on the road.”

  While Shane drives badly and babbles about all the parties we’re likely to never be invited to, I stick my head back out the window and breathe in the air. It’s a little nipply, but it’s not like I’m worried about catching pneumonia. Fall’s my favorite part of the year, and not ’cause it’s close to my birthday. We don’t get much in the way of fall down in Florida. Still, it’s the one time of year when people actually celebrate stuff getting old instead of trying to cut it out, cover it up, or stretch it tighter than a snare drum. Age is yellow and red and orange and brown, and I think that makes it kind of awesome.

  Before I know it, we’re pulling into the underclassmen parking lot and Shane is swearing because we have to park so far in the back.

  “Get your bag, Travers,” says Shane as I slam the door.

  I turn around to get my books but hesitate. “Yeah, I don’t think so.”

  “Completely giving up the pretense of being awake?”

  “Something like that.” I shrug and start walking. Shane follows.

  So school sucks hard, but Mom always made me go so I could get into a “decent college.” I guess that doesn’t matter anymore. Still, I want to know whose awesomely idiotic idea it was to cram a whole bunch of teenagers into one giant, hermetically sealed bubble and expect us not to kill and devour each other. There’s a reason caterpillars go into cocoons to turn into butterflies. Because teenagers are monsters.

  My letter is still tucked safely in my front pocket as I walk the halls. Every time Shane looks in my direction I grin and hope that this is all a big mistake. Like maybe I’ll find out the letter is meant for another Oliver Aaron Travers.

  I wait while Shane gets some stuff out of his locker. He needs his books even less than I do. I don’t need mine on account of I’m getting ready to curdle, but Shane can go sans books on account of the kid’s a freaking genius. The worst part is that our teachers know it. It’s gotta be tough knowing one of your students can teach your class better than you.

  Shane’s still babbling about some commercial he saw on TV that made him blow soda out of his nose when I see Veronica Dittrich. Ronnie. It’s like Hiroshima all over again. In my pants. But she’s not just any girl. She’s the girl.

  I should go to first period. I should turn around and run to Mr. Barnes’s boring history class. But I don’t. Because my eyes are stuck on Ronnie. She walks through the halls like she’s the only person in the entire school. At least, that’s how I see her. There’s music playing—the kind they play in saptastic

  romcoms—and it’s like she’s got her own personal wind machine and lighting crew following her around, making her look perfect all the time.

  Ronnie looks my way and tries to smile and wave. One of those little down-low things. Real casual. I want to smile back. I want to run across the hall and unbreak up so I can toss her over my shoulder and spend the whole day doing R-rated stuff. Instead, I look like I’m gonna puke. Every girl’s dream, right? But I can’t help it. I’m frozen and freaked and probably a little green.

  Shane grabs my arm and drags me out of the line of fire. I look over my shoulder and watch her stomp away.

  Ronnie, Shane, and I had been friends growing up. Best friends. Ronnie had always been one of the guys until one day she turned into a girl. She left eighth grade with microdots and a wicked curveball and came back freshman year with C-cups and a purse.

  Don’t get me wrong, Ronnie was pretty before. She’s got longish brown hair and a pointy nose and eyes and stuff, but it’s her girl attributes that turn my brain to oatmeal. Raisin oatmeal.

  We dated briefly and then she broke up with me. On our one-week anniversary. I’d made her an iTunes mix and everything. We stopped talking after that. I got possession of Shane and our lunch table, and Ronnie got my balls. Well, that’s what Shane says anyway. Most of the time I wish we could all just go back to being friends.

  And then I realize Shane’s snapping his fingers in front of my face. “Dude,” he says. “It’s been six weeks. Six weeks since Ronnie dumped you. Six weeks of pathetic, vomit-worthy moping.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “You only dated for a week. That’s like one week of moping for every day you dated.”

  “No math before lunch, Shane.”

  Shane growls. “There are other girls, man. Colleen Wright’s totally got it for you.”

  I stop in the middle of the hall and shove a freshman out of the way. “She’s also got a stutter.”r />
  Shane wriggles his eyebrows. “She’s not the kind of girl you take out for conversation.”

  “Shane.”

  “Ollie. I’m your best friend. Trust me, Ronnie is not the girl for you. She dumped you. You need to move on.”

  “Yeah,” I say, knowing he won’t leave me alone until he gets his way. “Screw Ronnie.” I almost sound like I mean it. There are days I wake up and draw devil horns on Ronnie’s picture, and days I look at Ronnie’s picture and get a devil horn of my own. It was complicated enough before I found out I’m dying.

  The warning bell rings and we file into class. Mr. Barnes’s room is like a Schoolhouse Rock! parody. There are cartoon animals and giant talking president’s heads spouting facts about everything from how many men died in World War I to where Lincoln was when he got his Deathday Letter.

  Mr. Barnes is kind of a cartoon too. He’s busy chalking it up at the front of the class as Shane and I slide into our seats. He’s got this thumb-length ponytail that quivers and bobs as he writes his notes. I feel bad for the guy. His ponytail is about the only hair he has on his head that’s not coming out of his nose. Every year at least one student leaves him a nose hair trimmer for Christmas. Funny? Cruel? I guess it depends on which side of the desk you sit.

  The bacon, egg, and cheese biscuit swirls around in my stomach, trying to make me fall asleep. Mr. Barnes’s voice doesn’t help. Being that it’s my last day, I try to fight it, but the more Mr. Barnes drones, the more I just want to close my eyes.

  Maybe the letter got it wrong. Maybe it’s come a day late. Maybe I’m going to die of utter and complete boredom right here in Mr. Barnes’s class.

  Shane is busy taking notes. I swear it looks like the kid’s writing down what Mr. Barnes is saying before Mr. Barnes knows he’s gonna say it.

  Miranda Hilley’s wearing this lime green V-neck thing with a gold cross hanging in the sweaty crease of her boobs. Resurrection indeed.

  The seconds move backward. Not even Miranda Hilley’s fog lights can make class go by any faster. And yet, as slow as the class is passing, I can feel my last day rushing past me like I’m in a wind tunnel. I can see my parents standing over my grave sobbing, “He went to school!” I can read my own epitaph. It says, OLIVER TRAVERS. HE DIED.