The Deathday Letter

by Shaun David Hutchinson

  There’s nothing I can’t see from up here. The boats on the ocean are smaller than the ships I used to play with in the tub. The Moriville Lighthouse, in the process of being restored (for, like, the last five years), is a sore red thumb poking high in the air. I can even see my dad’s restaurant. Okay, I can see the brick wall and the Dumpsters on the side of the building, but still, I can see it. I wonder if Dad’s actually at work. I mean, it’s still too early for him to be there, but I wonder what he and Mom decided to do after I left. I feel a little bad that I’m not spending more time with them on my last day, but I know that if I’d stayed with them I wouldn’t be standing at the top of a bridge getting ready to jump off. I’d probably still be sitting around the kitchen eating Return of the Living Eggs and avoiding my parents’ hugs.

  “It’s fucking awesome up here!” I yell it as loud as I can, and a couple of fishermen way down the bridge stare at me like I just announced I was running for Miss America on a platform of peace on earth and puppies for everyone.

  Ronnie slides her arm around my shoulders and I don’t stop her. I do, however, get a little jiggly in the netherworld. “Nothing really matters up here, does it?”

  “It’s not the up here that bothers me,” says Shane. He leans against the railing and gazes down into the water. “Just because Ronnie and I don’t have letters doesn’t mean this can’t kill us. Or maim us. Ollie, I’m too pretty to maim.”

  I can’t help laughing at Shane. There’s really nothing the kid’s afraid of except for heights. I’ve seen him pick up a rattlesnake with a pair of kitchen tongs. Hell, I’ve even seen the kid brave the Porta Potties at Moroso Raceway on chili dog day. But put the kid on anything taller than he is and he turns into a big blubbery mess. He’s actually holding it together far better than I expected, but I suspect that has more to do with my impending date with death than increased intestinal fortitude.

  I slip away from Ronnie and pat Shane’s arm. “You don’t have to do this,” I say. “I’ll understand.”

  “I won’t,” says Ronnie. “It was on his list. Grow a pair, Grimsley.”

  “Ouch, Shane. That sounds like a challenge.”

  “It sounds like it’s easier to say I want to jump off the bridge while I’m sitting safe, at ground level, in my desk in sixth grade. That was years ago. This is now. And now is—” Shane peers over the side again. “Now is high.”

  “Then we’ll meet you back at the car.” I dance back and forth on my bare feet. All of us are stripped down to what we thought we could get away with. We’re all barefooted. I ditched my hoodie and am left in jeans and a shirt so holey it could be pope. Shane had nothing to take off, so he’s still in his same old shorts and T. And Ronnie. Well let’s just say that God was smiling on me when Ronnie dressed this morning. All she’s got on under her shirt is a white tank top and a black bra. A bra I’m actually pretty familiar with, if you know what I mean. If staring is a crime, I’m going to the gas chamber.

  Shane looks like he’s actually considering my offer, which I mostly didn’t mean, when Ronnie grabs him by the front of his shirt. “Do you really want the last thing Ollie remembers about you to be that you wussed out on one of your own Deathday list items? How lame can you possibly be, Grimsley?”

  I’m pretty floored. Ronnie’s not usually the guilt-trip kind of girl. She isn’t the kind of girl who makes fun of you for being afraid of animals that talk like people. Who forces you to watch Finding Nemo and Chicken Run and The Lion King even though they make you break out in a cold sweat and have nightmares for a month. Yeah, I’m talking to you, Mom.

  No, Ronnie’s usually not that girl, so I can’t believe that she pulled that card on Shane. It’s pretty low, pretty sneaky, pretty genius.

  Shane slumps his shoulders and sighs. I can see it in his eyes: No matter what he says from this point on, he’s committed. We might have to push him, but he’ll jump.

  Without waiting, I climb over the rail and lean forward. The water is calm and blue. I imagine floating on it and sailing all the way out to the ocean, the horizon, and right off the map. It occurs to me that this could be how I die. I know that I’m not gonna actually die until tomorrow morning, but I could drown and then be revived and end up on life support, with tubes breathing for me. Just an Ollie-shaped head of cabbage. Tomorrow morning could just be when my parents finally decide to yank the plug and put me out of my misery.

  All my emotions surge through me as I contemplate the water. Fear squats in my feet, trying to claw its way up to my belly. Excitement rushes into me with every breath. I’m not just standing at the top of a bridge getting ready to jump, I’m taking my life into my own hands. Yeah, having a Deathday Letter is giving me more courage than I’ve ever had, but instead of waiting for Death to come and drive me away in a little yellow bus, I’m daring it to scoop me out of the water. And I’m dragging Shane and Ronnie along with me.

  “Hey, guys?”

  I look behind me. Ronnie and Shane are whispering. But they’re arguing. They’re whispguing. Argpering? Whatever.

  “Guys!” Shane and Ronnie stop and turn. “What’s going on?”

  “Nothing,” says Shane. “Right, Ronnie?”

  Ronnie looks at Shane and then me. She starts to say something and then looks at Shane again before saying, “Right. We were just discussing whether we should jump from this side or the other.”

  “Definitely this side,” adds Shane. “Now, what did you need, Ollie?”

  There’s something going on, something I can’t quite figure out. They’re acting like the time in fifth grade when Shane had to tell me that he was going away for the summer with his parents and wasn’t going to be at day camp with Ronnie and me. I assume it has something do with my letter but the truth is that if I spend the rest of my day trying to sort out everyone’s supergirly feelings, I’m never gonna get anything done. So I ignore it and move on.

  “I’m not sure you guys should jump after all.”

  “What?” says Ronnie. Shane looks a little relieved but he tries to fake indignation.

  I’m on one side of the rail and they’re on the other. It feels like maybe that’s how it’s supposed to be. “I know I’m gonna croak. And it’s possible that this is where it happens. I just don’t want to be responsible for you guys getting hurt.”

  “Well good—,” starts Shane, but Ronnie pushes him out of the way and climbs over the rail. She doesn’t speak. She doesn’t need to. Her brown eyes have gone all crazy. Shane sighs and follows her, caught in her gravity. And everyone knows you can’t fight gravity. Or Ronnie.

  “I’m not made of glass,” says Ronnie. “If you’re doing it, then so am I.”

  “Then let’s do it.”

  “On the count of three?” asks Ronnie, and I nod. “Okay. One, two, three.”

  Nothing.

  My arms are taut behind me. The muscles are stretched as long as they’ll go and my fingers are anchored to the railing. Ronnie’s looser than I am but she’s wearing all her fear on her face. Shane is just a mess. He made it out onto the ledge, but now he’s facing the road again, and he looks like he might cry.

  “Hey, what’re you kids doing?” yells one of the fishermen. We’ve also drawn the attention of the bridge attendant, who’s up in his tower waving at us like he’s trying to land a plane.

  “Shane,” I say. “We’re running out of time here.”

  “Hey, if I’m going to do this, you’re going to have to let me do it on my terms. How about you guys jump and I’ll follow you down?” Shane crouches down and hugs the cement post. His whole body shakes.

  Ronnie holds the railing with one hand. “Shane. Shane, look at me.” Ronnie waits until Shane gives her his total attention. “I know this is scary, but it’s fun too. And you’re conquering your biggest fear. Just the fact that you’re up here right now, on top of this bridge, dangling over the water, is pretty damn incredible.”

  Only that doesn’t really help. Shane latches onto the railing tighter with
every word.

  The fishermen keep yelling but I tune them out. It’s also a safe bet that the bridge dude in the tower has probably called the cops.

  “Ronnie. Switch places with me.” Ronnie nods and grabs the railing. I turn back toward the road and swing one of my legs around Ronnie so that I’m straddling her. My plan? Maybe not the best. Our faces are close. So close I can see the tiny little hairs in her nose move every time she breathes, and even her nose hair is hot. Not that nose hair is sexy. Just Ronnie’s nose hair. She could be covered in nose hair and she’d still be sexy. If it wasn’t for Shane’s stifled whine, I’d be totally content to stay like this, looking into Ronnie’s eyes, smelling her coconut lotion. But Shane needs me, so I move my other foot and let Ronnie scoot sideways until she’s on my left and Shane’s on my right.

  “Shane. Look at me, dude.”

  “Ollie.” Shane’s so scared he can barely talk.

  “You can get down if you want, but remember what you said to me in the hall: We do everything together. We took a blood oath.”

  “Tabasco,” Shane growls.

  “It doesn’t matter. What matters is that you’re here. I’m gonna jump. I need to jump. I can do it alone, but I’d rather do it together.” I hold my hand out to Shane.

  “You know I’m right here, right?” says Ronnie, but I ignore her for now.

  “Come on, Shane. Let’s do this. Preferably before the cops get here.”

  Shane takes my hand with his, which is wetter than the river below us. Seriously, it’s crazy wet. “You owe me, Ollie,” he says through clenched teeth.

  “I’ll pay you back tomorrow.” I wink at him. “First, let’s get rid of these glasses.”

  “But—”

  “If you can’t see how high you are, maybe it won’t be as scary.” I pull my hand out of his and pull off his glasses before he has a chance to argue, fold them, and tuck them in his pocket.

  “Oh, yeah. That makes it better,” Shane says dryly. “You want to blindfold me too?”

  “Guys?”

  I look over at Ronnie. She points down the bridge where a couple of cars have parked and people are running toward us.

  “On three?” I say. Shane and Ronnie both nod. “One, t—”

  Shane leaps off the bridge with a scream. It isn’t even remotely manly. It’s the squeakiest, craziest scream I’ve ever heard come out of that boy’s mouth. Even crazier than the time we watched all the Nightmare on Elm Street movies in one sitting and Ronnie taped chopsticks to her hand like razors and hid outside his window.

  “Holy shit!” says Ronnie, and there’s nothing I can say to top it. “I can’t believe he did it.”

  The men behind us are yelling and more people are running toward us, but all I can focus on are Shane’s flailing arms as he plummets. I lose my breath as I realize just how high up we are and how long that fall really is.

  Then the splash.

  Ronnie looks at me. She’s excited. I can practically smell it. “You ready?”

  I nod and take her hand. “On three?”

  “Screw three.”

  “Jump!”

  I won’t lie. There’s a part of me that’s scared as hell. That part of me is buried in my gut, under layers of scary feelings about Ronnie. But it all goes away in the instant that I jump.

  One second I’m holding Ronnie’s hand, glued to solid ground, or at least a solid ledge, and the next second I’m suspended in the air and the rest of the world is nonexistent. Even Ronnie’s gone. I don’t know when I let go of her hand, but I know that my hands are waving out at my sides, and I’m screaming out the last fifteen years of my life. I don’t need my past anymore because living in this one second is perfect. I forget about dying and my parents and Ronnie and being dumped and never seeing Shane again and how I never got to finish taking the Little General to the firing range. All that’s me is contained in this one second.

  And then it all speeds up. My stomach is in my throat and the sky whizzes by me. The jagged air stings my eyes. The water rushes up and for the first time I think that maybe we should have waited until Shane had a chance to swim out of the way. But it’s too late. There’s nothing I can do about it.

  I’d piss my pants if I could but, really, all I can do is try to straighten my arms and legs as I hit the water.

  The crash into the water is probably what being sprayed with a fire hose feels like. I don’t even feel the wet—not right away. All I feel is the need to breathe. I blew air out of my nose as I hit so that water wouldn’t go up my nose, and now I have no air left.

  Flailing like crazy, I scrape my way up. I don’t even know how far the surface is, I just know that I’m alive and I’m moving and I need to breathe. But I can’t get to the surface fast enough.

  A hand takes mine and helps me up.

  I break the surface of the water and slurp up all the air I can handle, managing to drink about a gallon of water in the process.

  The sun’s bright, the water’s warm, and I’m alive. Really alive. And I realize the truth: I was dead yesterday, and I’ll be dead tomorrow, but today I’m alive.

  “Huzzah!” I yell at the top of my lungs. Ronnie laughs somewhere near me, and I hoot and holler at the tiny people at the top of the bridge.

  “That was the coolest thing I’ve ever done,” says Shane. I don’t know where he came from, but he’s on my right side and Ronnie’s on my left, and we’re laughing like we’re insane. Which we pretty much are.

  “Oh my God, I thought I was going to puke,” says Ronnie.

  “Thank you, guys.” It’s all I can say.

  We bob up and down in the water for a minute, just basking in the fact that we jumped off the motherfucking East Indiantown Bridge. Pardon my language but, until you’ve done it, you just can’t understand that there’s no other way to describe it. I hereby rechristen it the MFEI Bridge.

  “We should swim now,” says Ronnie letting go of my hand.

  I look at where she’s pointing and see the crowd of people staring down at us. One of them is a cop.

  Shane’s not the best swimmer in the world, so it takes forever to get to the shore, but we finally crawl those last couple of feet and Shane kisses the sand.

  “Oh, blessed ground, I’ll never leave you again.”

  “I can’t believe we just did that,” I say, and howl again.

  “I know!” Ronnie runs at me and I sweep her up in my arms, caught in a spray of adrenaline and emotion and . . . other stuff.

  For the second time in less than an hour, I’m nose to nose with Ronnie, staring into her eyes. “I’m glad it was with you,” she says. Her eyes flutter and start to close. Our lips are centimeters apart. I lean in and Shane yells, “We gotta run!”

  I look over at Shane, ready to kill him, but he’s pointing at a cop car coming down the service road. Its blue and white lights are strobin’ freakylike.

  Ronnie lets go before I have a chance to. She’s embarrassed and I’m torn between scooping her up in my arms and leaving our past up on the top of that bridge or adjusting the rocket on the launch pad before it fires prematurely. I don’t get the chance to do either because Shane and Ronnie both look to me to save them.

  “We can’t make the car,” I say. “The cop will just run us down.”

  “Just show him your letter,” says Shane. “He’ll give you a pass, I’m sure.”

  I shake my head. “Hell no. Yeah, okay, maybe if I show the cop my letter, he’ll let us go, but it would invalidate the whole experience. Jumping off the bridge is about more than challenging gravity, it’s about challenging everything. It’s about breaking the rules. If the cop gives us a pass, then we may as well have gone to see a movie.”

  “Then what?” asks Ronnie.

  “There,” I say. “We’re making a run for it.” I point at the old lighthouse. “Last one there buys lunch!” I dig my feet in and run.

  19:16

  Adrenaline floods my veins, completely replacing my blood. There isn’t
anything I can’t do right now. The hill up to the lighthouse is crazy steep but I dig my toes into the grass and climb. I’ve never been able to run as fast as I’m running right now.

  There’s a buttload of historical stuff I can tell you about the Moriville Lighthouse. Or rather, there’s a load of stuff I could tell you if I’d actually paid attention in fifth grade when we did a term on local history. But I didn’t pay attention, so all I really know is that the lighthouse is old, it’s been under renovation for years, and a lot of kids go there to do drugs. If you want to know the historical stuff, ask Shane.

  I try to worry about what we’re gonna do once we get inside—let’s face it, there aren’t a lot of places to hide inside a lighthouse—but instead all I’m thinking about is how close I came to kissing Ronnie. It’s not like we’ve never kissed before, we kissed a bunch of times during the week we dated, but this time felt different. Maybe because I’m different. Maybe jumping off the bridge made me a new man and her a new girl and we can forget our problems and go back to the ways things were before she broke up with me. She wants to; I know she does. I felt it in the air between our lips like static electricity.

  Ronnie reaches the door first. Except it’s not a door, it’s a giant piece of plywood. It’s graffitied with giant penises and lame tags like “Razer” and “Killbot”—the sort of crap only Moriville kids think is cool.

  While catching my breath, I check down the hill.

  “Looks like Tubby’s gonna be a while,” I say. Ronnie snorts and Shane takes a second to get some of the smeared water off his glasses. We’re all wet. Soaked. Even the Florida sun can’t bake us dry fast enough.

  “Do you think he called for backup?” asks Shane.

  I shrug. The Moriville cop shouts something at us as he chugs up the hill. I know it’s a stereotype, the fat cop and all, but if the belly jiggles . . .

  “What now, fearless leader?” asks Ronnie. She punches me in the arm and smiles.

  Shane grins right along with her. Whatever they were arguing about on the bridge is forgotten. “I don’t . . .” I look up at the lighthouse and something in my brain clicks. It’s probably more of a clunk but you get the picture. “Come on, follow me.”