This is Not the End

by Chandler Baker

  But really all this talk about my great, big, epically magnificent, cowabunga awesome birthday surprise has done is get me thinking of my birthday and what it means. How I’ll have to sit alone among strangers in the waiting room, scan my fingerprints, fill out my paperwork for the resurrection, arrange for the body to be brought to the resurrection site, wring my hands while that body lies on a cold metal gurney and is injected by faceless doctors with the lifeblood, then try to breathe while the vitalis process restores the dead cells until they’re completely undamaged. I’ve run through the steps in my mind a thousand times.

  And none of this is Will’s fault. He doesn’t know what I’m planning to do on my eighteenth birthday.

  One resurrection, one choice, one person, and unlike Will’s and Penny’s, mine is already spoken for.

  I unfurl my arms from around Will and together we crawl up to shore. Penny reversed the Jeep so that the wheels are backed up to the sand. She honks the horn and sticks her hand out of the roof, waving us in. Penny has the kind of Jeep without doors or a roof and instead just a roll bar on top. During the summer we practically live in this car, like a band of sand-crusted beach bums.

  Will and I trudge up the rest of the shore and climb into the Jeep, sandy feet and all. I take shotgun next to Penny, and Will scoots to the center seat in back so he can poke his head through. Penny wouldn’t mind if I sat in back with Will, and I know we’re lucky for that. She’s not the type of friend to tell us to get a room or to lay off the public displays of affection even though there’ve been girls at school who’ve made sidebar remarks to me about how it must be annoying for Will and me to have to cart around a “third wheel” all the time, comments that I’m sure Penny’s heard before too. And that’s exactly why none of them are my best friends.

  Penny has never once made me choose between time with her and time with him. Not that I could possibly. The three of us are like our own little self-sustaining island. We once spent an afternoon negotiating a fake custody arrangement for Penny in case Will and I ever broke up, and I only won primary custody by a hair. The whole exercise made us laugh until Penny peed a little in her shorts and had to run to the bathroom. I mean, Will and I are an institution.

  “I can’t believe you chickened out.” I gently shove Penny’s shoulder from my spot in the passenger seat. This is nicer, I decide, than saying I can totally believe you chickened out, you big chicken, since Penny’s skittish about spiders, global warming, the potential of contracting a deadly virus, and basically anything else I can think of, which is funny since what she doesn’t find frightening is sporting fashions that have never been in style, well, ever, or making impassioned pleas to save the whales to a roomful of her peers while they are playing Minecraft on their phones. I prefer to let my actions do the talking—it’s way simpler.

  Penny flicks her gaze to the rearview mirror and slides her unpainted nails down the base of the steering wheel. “I’m like a fine bottle of wine, Lake, I’ll be ready in my own time.”

  I reach over and begin to flip through the radio stations.

  “What do you think’s going to happen exactly?” I ask. “I mean, you watch us jump. Do you think you’re just going to spontaneously combust in midair?”

  From the backseat, Will puts his toes up on the console between me and Penny. Penny wrinkles her nose and pushes them back onto the floorboard, then sighs, putting the Jeep into drive and pulling out of the small beach-access road onto a rarely trafficked two-lane highway. “I don’t know. I’m scared I’m going to spaz out or not jump far enough, and then I’ll just plummet straight down the side of the cliff and, yeah, die. That’s the scenario. I’m going to die a gruesome, bloody death. That’s what I see every time I step up to the edge,” she says, sliding a pair of cat-eye sunglasses over her nose. “Now is that really so far-fetched?”

  “Yes,” Will and I both answer in unison.

  Penny tosses her hair over her shoulders and waves us off. “What took you guys so long anyway?”

  Will leans between us. “We were discussing Lake’s great, big, epically magnificent, cowabunga awesome birthday surprise. She was trying to pry hints from me, but as you all know, I’ve got it under lock and key like it’s a goddamn national treasure.” Will settles himself back into the seat. I look back to see him looking smug. We all know Will is the actual worst at keeping secrets. Far too excitable. In fact, I give him a week on this whole birthday thing, tops.

  That’s why it’s Penny who sneaks a sideways look at me, then reaches over and squeezes my hand. Penny’s the only one who knows that, for years, I’ve been approaching my eighteenth birthday with a sick sense of anxiety. Because she’s the only one who knows my resurrection has been earmarked to be used for someone who’s not even dead yet.

  I squeeze back twice so that she knows I’m fine. I have the two of them.

  Penny follows the curve of the road, and the wind begins to air-dry my skin and hair. As if to echo my thoughts, though, we pass a billboard on the side of the road that reads: ARE YOU PREPARED? SUMMER SAVINGS ON CRYOPRESERVATION FOR THE WHOLE FAMILY! The billboard, which features the left half of a beautiful female model’s face—skin frosted with beads of ice, frozen crystals glittering from her hair and eyebrows—wasn’t there last week. In the last few decades, facilities specializing in cryonics, the process of low-temperature body preservation, have multiplied, giving families a low-cost means to preserve their loved ones while they wait for a member of the family to reach resurrection age. Parents even purchase cryonics insurance for their kids. But lately, I’ve wanted to ignore the resurrections. They only remind me of death. And so I’m thankful when the advertisement disappears in the distance behind us.

  I stare out at the white jasmine that lines the side of the road, interspersed with red and orange wildflowers. We’re whizzing along the stretch of road when I feel a tap on my shoulder. I turn to see Will unbuckling his seatbelt.

  “What are you—?” I ask.

  He tucks his legs underneath him, and pushes himself to stand on the seat, his fingers wrapped around the Jeep’s roll bar, gripping tightly.

  Penny does a double take in the mirror. “Will!” She stretches her arm back and tugs on his ankle. “Will, get down from there. You’re going to make me get a ticket.”

  But Will tilts his face up to the sun like he’s praying.

  “Not funny, William.” Penny looks back at the road. And I can tell she kind of means it. Penny rarely gets mad. Occasionally she and Will get into it about something dumb—bound to happen after eighteen years of friendship—but overall, when it comes to minor annoyances, she’s, like, some sort of Zen master.

  Will reaches a hand down for me. “Come up here,” he says. Fine bits of salt crinkle into the folds of skin around his eyes as he squints in the sun. Sometimes I think that I love Will so much that my heart will combust. It actually embarrasses me, because I know that it’s the type of thing that if I tried to put into words would just sound weird and stupid and make both of us uncomfortable. So then I get this feeling of trying to carry it all around in my chest, a feeling that’s too big to fit, like a balloon on the brink of being filled with so much helium it pops. Luckily for both of us, Will’s the one who’s good at this sort of thing, at grand romantic gestures and sappy words that, even though they make me blush or even occasionally cringe, somehow fit him. More than that, they make Will Will. Something about the tone and rhythm in the way he speaks that makes it all sound confident, casual, earnest, and innocent at once.

  My heart performs a little tap dance in my chest. The air is warm. The water has evaporated from my skin, leaving behind a layer of sea grime. The sky is so saturated with blue, I swear if I could reach up high enough, my finger would come away dripping with it.

  And I’m seventeen. There’s only three measly weeks left in my life that this will be true. I’m seventeen and this is our last summer together, at least like this, and in three weeks, after my resurrection choice, it’ll all be
different.

  I swallow down the sick feeling that wells in the back of my throat every time I think about my birthday, and grab Will’s hand. He’ll be starting senior lacrosse practice in a few weeks too, and everything we do has the weight of the last days of our last high school summer ever coloring it. He pulls me to my feet and I grab the bar for support. The wind blows back my eyelashes and the corners of my mouth, and I can’t help but smile because up here it feels as if we’ve been untethered from the world. I look down into the Jeep’s cabin and Penny is shaking her head. But then I feel her hand, warm from the baking steering wheel, snake around my ankle, anchoring me to the spot protectively.

  Another car sweeps past us in the opposite direction, honking its horn. Will and I let out rowdy whoops after the car, our voices carried away. Penny digs her fingernails into my ankle and I relent. I latch my hands onto the ledge at the top of the windshield and drop back into my seat. I’ve learned to listen to Penny when she tells me I’m about to take a stunt too far, because when I haven’t, I’ve wound up with stitches, broken toes—once I nearly knocked out a tooth. A couple of seconds after, Will lands safely in the backseat. I can feel the happy flush in my cheeks as I click my seatbelt into place. Will spreads his arms across the top of the entire backseat and puffs out his bare chest like he’s king of the whole car.

  Penny turns the music down a few decibels. “My mom will freak out if I get pulled over, you guys,” she says in her calm but meaningful voice. It’s true, Tessa is wonderful, but you do not want to cross her.

  “Sorry, Pen.” I squeeze her shoulder and the crease in her forehead disappears. Because in the same way she’s there to make sure I don’t go too far, I make sure she lives beyond the confines of that beautiful brain of hers. The world just isn’t as scary as she thinks. “From this point forward, we’ll keep our butts planted firmly in our seats.”

  The road back to town is twisty, the kind that, if you’re prone to motion sickness, turns your insides to slime.

  “Where’s your phone?” Will leans between us and asks Penny when the song changes over to a hair-removal commercial. “Put on that playlist I made.”

  “What playlist?” I ask.

  Penny sticks her hand into the cup holder. “I could have sworn it was in there. Shoot, I hope I didn’t leave it on the—” Penny pops open the center console and torques her back only a fraction to look into the cubby. “Found it,” she sings out, retrieving her cell.

  It’s a split second. That’s all it takes. Her hand shifts the wheel to the left. At the same time, half a ton of metal in the shape of a silver Lexus is barreling toward us in the opposite direction.

  “Penny!” I shriek. But she jerks the wrong way and the other car charges toward us like a bull.

  We’re going to hit it. The thought is so obvious and sharp in my mind, it’s as if someone has said it out loud. I feel Will jolt to attention behind me.

  The moment stretches. I never knew how long a single moment could be even as it occurs to me that if it were any amount of time at all this situation—this problem—could be fixed.

  A horn wails. The sound of screeching tires fills the perfectly warm blue-blue sky and I know that this is going to hurt with a certainty that drills down into my still-intact bones. The space between the two pairs of headlights vanishes.

  When the hoods make contact, my head slams forward. Glass splinters. Screams ring through the roar of crunching hardware. We spin to the side and I’m reminded of the teacup rides at the fair. There’s a violent lurch. On my end of the car, the wheels jump off the pavement and the Jeep flips onto its side. I throw my hands over my head.

  Pain shoots through my wrist and elbow as we flip upside down. Something clamps over my chest. Hard, jagged edges rake the top of my scalp. My vision goes blurry. At last, the movement stops, but the melody of tinkling glass lingers even as the last sliver of conscious thought is wiped from my mind and I sink down into nothing.

  This is not the end, I tell myself as I struggle for the surface, kicking and fighting against an invisible weight. If I were dead, there’d be no pain, I figure.

  So I hold tight to the deep, throbbing ache in my arm and the soreness that encases my whole body like a straitjacket.

  If I were dead, there’d be no beeping. I listen to the electronic chirp of a machine and, once convinced, I open my eyes to find that I’ve guessed right and that, yes, I’m alive.

  And as my eyes adjust to the light, I spot the lump of my legs underneath a thin blue sheet. Baby blue. I always thought hospital sheets were white. Across the room there’s a sink and a biohazards waste dispenser fastened to the wall below an illustrated poster of a nurse washing her hands.

  Seafoam-green curtains hang from a single window. The ceilings are speckled white tile. A clear tube snakes out of my arm. I cling to each of these details as evidence that the room I’m in is real, that I’m real. I’m pleased at how quickly I recognize where I am. I take this as a good sign. My brain works.

  It takes another second to realize that this also means the accident was real.

  My mind keeps going fuzzy and in and out of focus like a camera lens. I feel very light on the mattress. The only image I can conjure from the last day is of glass glittering off the asphalt.

  It hurts when I swallow. It also hurts to sit.

  I stare at my toes and tell them to wiggle. When they do, I breathe a sigh of relief that scrapes at my raw throat.

  The whir of a wheelchair sounds like a robotic bee approaching. I think I must be too doped up to startle. My brother puffs into the contraption to guide his chair since he doesn’t have the use of his arms or legs. The whole apparatus spins to face me, and for a second my heart no longer feels like it’s being choked out and I’m a little sister again with someone there to protect me.

  “Hi,” I say, weakly.

  “Don’t worry,” he says, and the feeling of security vanishes so that it’s like I’m being dropped flat and hard onto a cold surface as I remember who it is the two of us have become. “You haven’t turned out like me.”

  I peer back down at my toes. “I wasn’t—” I begin to protest, but Matt rolls his eyes, his favorite—okay, one of his only—expressions.

  “Please. I still go for the toe wiggle myself.” He peers down his nose. “Nope, nothing. Ah, well, there’s always tomorrow, right?” His left cheek dimples with a sly, cruel smile that I should be used to by now. He’s wearing a heather-gray sweatshirt that’s baggy around the chest and arms. The blond in his hair disappeared a long time ago, as though someone had colored over it with a darker crayon, and now only his eyelashes, pale against even paler skin, are leftover reminders of a boy who spent summers on the beach and autumns out on his dinghy collecting crab traps.

  “Where are Mom and Dad anyway?” I ask, staring straight ahead at the empty wall in front of me.

  “They went downstairs for coffee. They’re going to piss their pants when they find out they missed you waking up.”

  I attempt to scratch my nose and discover that a plaster cast covers my left arm from my knuckles to an inch above my elbow. That explains some of the throbbing.

  “How long have I been out?” I ask, ignoring the piss statement. I tend to keep things formal when it comes to my brother. Conventional wisdom says we’re supposed to be extra nice to people with disabilities, which means that when it comes to Matt, I should be a saint. He’s a C-2 complete quadriplegic, practically the king of disabilities.

  “Eight hours or so,” Matt says. “Gave me a real scare, Lakey Loo.” He uses the nickname he gave to me when I was a kid. I mask a wince. It sounds mocking when he says it now. “Don’t forget. Without you, there’s no resurrection for me. You’re my golden ticket, Willy Wonka.”

  I let my head fall to the side and glare at him. “You’ll get your resurrection, but thanks a lot for the concern.” He knows I hate to be reminded of the deal he made with my parents. If he lived until my eighteenth birthday, they would help hi
m die so that I could use my resurrection choice on him and he could return able-bodied thanks to the restorative work of vitalis. After he’d attempted to self-destruct by driving his wheelchair off a flight of stairs more than once, they agreed. I wasn’t asked my opinion.

  He stares back, his expression unreadable. Matt has a way of going blank when he wants to, as though his face were paralyzed along with the rest of him. It’s infuriating.

  I go back to looking at the wall since that at least seems preferable. It turns out this day totally sucks. If Penny’s mom was going to kill her for getting a ticket, she’s going to freak when she finds out Penny flipped the Jeep.

  The Jeep. I drum the fingers of my good hand against the plastic rail of the hospital bed. RIP.

  I groan at our misfortune. Our parents will look at us and say, It could have been so much worse.

  I hate that. It could always be worse. We could be starving kids in Africa. That doesn’t change the fact that we made a lot of great memories in that car and now it’s going to be junkyard food. We won’t even get to give it a proper sendoff.

  Tears well up in my eyes. Stupid, I tell myself. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Penny is going to be so upset. I bite down on my tongue until I can taste blood like nickels in my mouth, and the tears vanish before they can spill over onto my cheeks.

  “When can I see them?” As soon as I ask, a pounding starts up behind my eye sockets.

  “Who? Mom and Dad?” The signature smart-aleck laugh creeps into Matt’s voice. “I’m sure they’ll be back in, like, five seconds. Chill. You’re still their favorite child.” You would think that Matt’s condition would have made him ultrasensitive in times of crisis, but it’s the exact opposite. It’s like he called dibs on all the world’s bad luck and no one else is entitled to feel sorry for a damn thing.