They Both Die at the End

by Adam Silvera

  RUFUS

  7:53 a.m.

  I’m lucky to have a Last Friend, especially with my boys locked up and my ex-girlfriend on block. I get to talk about my family and keep them alive.

  The sky is getting cloudy, and some strong breezes come our way, but no drops of rain yet.

  “My parents woke up to the Death-Cast alert on May tenth.” I’m gutted already. “Olivia and I were playing cards when we heard the phone ring, so we rushed to their bedroom. Mom was on the phone and keeping it together while Dad was across the room cursing them out in Spanish and crying. First time I ever saw him cry.” That was brutal. It’s not like he was mad macho, but I always felt like crying was some little bitch move, which is freaking stupid.

  “Then the Death-Cast herald asked to speak with my pops and Mom lost it. It was that this-must-be-a-nightmare shit. Nothing scarier than watching your parents freaking out. I was panicking but I knew I would have Olivia.” I wasn’t supposed to be alone. “Then Death-Cast asked to speak with Olivia and my pops hung up the phone and threw it across the room.” I guess throwing phones is in our genes.

  Mateo is about to ask something, but stops.

  “Say it.”

  “Never mind,” Mateo says. “It’s not important. Well, I was wondering if you were nervous about being end-listed that day and not knowing. Did you check the online database?”

  I nod. Death-cast.com is helpful that way. Typing my social security number and not finding my name in the database that evening was a weird sort of relief. “It didn’t seem right how my family was dying without me. Shit, I make it sound like I was getting left behind from a family vacation, but their End Day was spent with me already missing them. And Olivia could barely look at me.”

  I get it. It wasn’t my fault I got to keep living, and it wasn’t her fault she was dying.

  “Were you two close?”

  “Mad close. She was a year older. My parents were saving up money so Olivia and I could attend Antioch University in California this fall. She had a partial scholarship but hung back here at the community college so we wouldn’t be separated until I could go with her.” My breaths are tight, like when I was laying into Peck earlier. My parents tried convincing Olivia to take off to Los Angeles without me and not settle at a school in a city she was hating on, but she refused. Every morning, afternoon, evening, I always think she’d still be alive if she’d listened to our parents. She just wanted to reboot our lives together. “Olivia is the first person I came out to.”

  “Oh.”

  I don’t know if he’s playing it off like he doesn’t know this from my Last Friend profile or if he’s impacted by this piece of history between me and my sister or if he overlooked this on my profile and is some ass who cares about who other people kiss. I hope not. We’re friends now, hands down, and it’s not forced. I met this kid a few hours ago because some creative designer somewhere developed an app to forge connections. I’d hate to disconnect.

  “Oh what?”

  “Nothing. Honestly.”

  “Can I ask you something?” Let’s get this over with.

  “Did you ever come out to your parents?” Mateo asks.

  Avoiding a question with another question. Classic. “On our last day together, yeah. I couldn’t put it off any longer.” My parents had never hugged me like they did on their End Day. I’m really proud I spoke up to get that moment out of them. “My mom got really sad because she’d never get a chance to meet her future daughter- or son-in-law. I was still a little uncomfortable, so I just laughed and asked Olivia if there was anything she wanted us all to do, hoping she’d hate me a little less. My parents wanted to ditch me.”

  “They were just looking out for you, right?”

  “Yeah, but I wanted every possible minute with them, even if it meant being left with the memory of watching them all die in front of me,” I say. “I didn’t know any better.” That idiocy died too.

  “Then what happened?” Mateo asks.

  “You don’t have to have the details,” I say. “You might be better off without them.”

  “If you have to carry this around, I will too.”

  “You asked for it.”

  I tell him everything: how Olivia wanted to go up one last time to this cabin near Albany where we always went for her birthday. The roads were slippery on our way upstate and our car flew into the Hudson River. I’d sat shotgun because I thought it bettered our chances of surviving a head-on car crash if both of my parents weren’t in the front. It didn’t matter. “Same song, different verse,” I tell Mateo before going on about the screeching tires, the way we busted through the road’s safety rail and tumbled into the river. . . .

  “I sometimes forget their voices,” I say. It’s only been four months, but that’s fact. “They blend with the voices of people around me, but I could recognize their screams anywhere.” I’m getting goose bumps up my arms thinking about it.

  “You don’t have to go on, Rufus. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have encouraged you to keep talking about it.”

  Mateo knows how this ends, but there’s more to it. I stop because he has the basics and I’m crying a little and need to keep my shit together so he doesn’t freak out. He places a hand on my shoulder and pats my back, and it reminds me of all the other seniors who tried comforting me over texts and Facebook but didn’t know what to say or do because they’d never lost someone the way I had.

  “You’re okay,” he adds. “Let’s talk about something else, like . . .” Mateo scans the area around us. “Birds and beat-up buildings and—”

  I straighten up. “That was pretty much it anyway. I ended up with Malcolm, Tagoe, and Aimee. We became the Plutos and that was exactly the kind of company I needed—we were all lost and okay with not being found for a while.” I dry my eyes with my fist and shift toward Mateo. “And now you’re stuck with me until the end. Don’t run away again or you might get kidnapped and find yourself the inspiration for some shitty thriller movie.”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” Mateo says. He has a kind smile. “What’s next?”

  “Game for whatever.”

  “Should we go make a moment?”

  “I thought we were already making moments, but why not.”

  MATEO

  8:32 a.m.

  On the way to the Make-A-Moment station, Rufus stops in front of a sporting goods store. In the window there are posters of a man cycling, a woman in ski gear, and a man and woman running side by side, with celebrity smiles and zero sweat.

  Rufus points at the woman in ski gear. “I always sent Olivia photos of people skiing. We went skiing every year, up at Windham. You’re gonna think we were stupid for always going back. My pops broke his nose on the first trip by smashing it against a rock; we were really shocked he didn’t die, even though Death-Cast hadn’t called. My mom sprained her ankle on the next trip. Two years ago I got a concussion after skiing downhill. I suck at braking and almost ran down some kid, so I switched left at the last second and slammed into a tree like some fucking cartoon character.”

  “You’re right,” I say. “I have no idea why you kept going back.”

  “Olivia put her foot down after I was admitted to the hospital. But we continued driving up to Windham whenever we could because we loved the mountains, the snow, and playing games by our fireplace in the cabin.” Rufus keeps it moving. “I’m hoping this spot is as safe and fun as that was.”

  A few minutes later we reach the Make-A-Moment station. Rufus stops and takes a picture of the entrance and its blue banner hanging above the door: No-Risk Thrills! He uploads it to Instagram in full color. “Look.” He hands me his phone. It’s open to the comments on his previous picture. “People are asking why I’m awake so early.”

  There are a couple comments from Aimee, begging him to pick up his phone. “What happened with Aimee?”

  He shakes his head. “I’m done with her. Her boy is the reason Malcolm and Tagoe are in jail for something I did, and she’s s
till dating him. She’s not loyal.”

  “It’s not because of any feelings you have for her?”

  “No,” Rufus says. He chains his bike to a parking meter.

  It doesn’t matter if he’s telling the truth or not.

  I drop it and we head inside.

  I didn’t expect this place to look like a travel agency. The wall behind the counter is half sunset orange, half midnight blue, and there are framed photos of people doing different activities, like rock climbing and surfing. It’s easy on the eyes, I guess. Behind the counter is a young black woman in her twenties writing in a notebook that she puts away once she sees us. She’s in a yellow polo shirt and her name tag reads “Deirdre.” I’ve seen this name before, maybe in a fantasy novel.

  “Welcome to Make-A-Moment,” Deirdre says, not too cheery, not too distant. The right amount of solemn. She doesn’t even ask us if we’re Deckers. She slides a binder toward us. “There’s currently a half-hour wait for the hot air balloon rides and swimming with sharks.”

  “Who the hell . . . ?” Rufus turns to me, then back to Deirdre. “Is swimming with sharks something people really feel like they’re missing out on?”

  “It’s a popular attraction,” Deirdre says. “Wouldn’t you swim with sharks if you knew they couldn’t bite you?”

  Rufus sucks his teeth. “I don’t mess with big bodies of water like that.”

  Deirdre nods as if she understands all of Rufus’s history. “No prob. I’m here if you have any questions.”

  Rufus and I take a seat and flip through the binder. In addition to hot air balloon rides and swimming with sharks, the station offers skydiving, racecar driving, a parkour course, zip-lining, horseback riding, BASE jumping, white-water rafting, hang gliding, ice/rock climbing, downhill mountain biking, windsurfing, and tons more. I wonder if this business will ever expand to fictional thrills, like running away from dragons, fighting a Cyclops, and magic carpet rides.

  We won’t be around to know.

  I shake it off. “You want to try mountain biking?” I ask. He loves biking and there’s no water involved.

  “Nah. I wanna do something new. How do you feel about skydiving?”

  “Dangerous,” I say. “But tell my story if this goes south.” I wouldn’t be surprised if I managed to die in a place that promises risk-free thrills.

  “You got it.”

  Deirdre gives us a six-page-long waiver, which isn’t uncommon for businesses serving Deckers, but it’s also definitely not uncommon that we skim the form, because it’s not as if we’re going to be around to sue them if something does go wrong. There are so many freak accidents that can happen at any point. Every new minute we’re alive is a miracle.

  Rufus’s signature is messy. I can make out only the first two letters before the remaining letters get lost in curves that look like a sales chart for a business that is rising and failing regularly. “Okay. I’ve signed away my right to bitch if I die.”

  Deirdre doesn’t laugh. We pay two hundred and forty dollars each, the kind of price you can get away with charging people whose savings accounts would go to waste otherwise. “Follow me.”

  The long hallway reminds me of the storage center where Dad worked, except inside the lockers there weren’t happy screams and laughter. At least none that I ever heard of. (Kidding.) These rooms are like karaoke rooms except some are twice, even three times as big. I peek in each window as we go down the hall, zigzagging like a pinball, finding Deckers with goggles in every room. Some are sitting inside racecars that are shaking, but not speeding down the racetracks. One Decker is “rock climbing” while an employee in the room texts away. A couple are kissing in a hot air balloon that is hovering six feet, but not in the sky. A crying man without goggles is holding the back of a laughing girl on top of a horse, and I can’t tell which one of them is the Decker, or if it’s both, but it makes me so sad that I stop looking into the rooms.

  Our room isn’t very large, but there are huge vents, safety mats leaning against the wall, and an instructor who’s dressed like an aviator, with her curly brown hair pulled back in a ponytail. We dress up in matching gear and harnesses, the three of us looking like X-Men cosplayers, and Rufus asks the young woman, Madeline, to take a photo of us. I don’t know if I should wrap my arm around him, so I follow his lead, placing my hands on my waist.

  “Is this good?” Madeline asks, holding the phone out to us.

  We look like we mean serious business, like we refuse to die until we save the world from all its ugliness.

  “Dope,” Rufus says.

  “I can take more photos while you’re diving!”

  “That’d be cool.”

  Madeline breaks it down for us on how this works. We’ll put on the goggles, the virtual experience will begin, and the room itself will play its own role in making this feel as real as possible. Madeline locks our harnesses to suspending hooks, and we climb a ladder up to a plank that looks like a diving board except we’re only about six feet above the floor.

  “When you’re ready, press the button on your goggles and jump,” Madeline says, dragging the mats under us. “You’ll be fine.” She turns on the high-powered vents, and the room becomes loud with wind.

  “Ready?” Rufus mouths to me, dropping his goggles over his eyes.

  I do the same with my goggles and nod. I click the green button by the lens. The virtual reality kicks in. We’re inside a plane with an open door, and a three-dimensional man is giving me the thumbs-up to jump into the open blue sky. I’m scared to jump, not out of the plane, but into the actual open space before me. My harness might break, even though I feel one hundred percent secure.

  Rufus shouts for a few seconds, descending a couple feet away from me, and goes quiet.

  I lift my goggles away from my eyes, hoping I don’t find Rufus on the floor with a twisted neck, but he’s hovering in the air, being blown side to side by wind from the vents. I shouldn’t be seeing Rufus like this, but I had to know he was okay, even if it ruins the experience a little bit. I still want that same exhilaration Rufus experienced, so I put the goggles back on, count down from three, and jump. I’m weightless as I hug my arms to my chest, like I’m speeding down a tunnel slide instead of free-falling through cloud after cloud, which I suppose I’m not actually doing either. I stretch my arms out, trying to touch the wisps at the edge of multiple clouds, as if I can actually grab one and roll it around in my hands like a snowball.

  A couple minutes later, the magic wears off. I see the green field we’re approaching and I know I should be relieved I’m almost there, I’m almost safe again, but there was never any true danger in the first place. It’s not exciting. It’s too safe.

  It’s exactly what I signed up for.

  Virtual Mateo lands right as I do, my feet digging into the mat. I force a smile for Rufus, who smiles back at me. We thank Madeline for her help, take off the aviator gear, and let ourselves out.

  “That was fun, right?” I say.

  “We should’ve waited to swim with sharks,” Rufus says as we pass Deirdre and leave.

  “Thank you, Deirdre,” I say.

  “Congratulations on making a moment,” Deirdre says, waving. It’s odd to be praised for living, but I guess she can’t exactly encourage us to come again.

  I nod at her and follow Rufus out. “I thought you had fun! You cheered.”

  He’s removing the chain from the bike no one stole, unfortunately. “For the main jump, yeah. It got wack after that. Did you actually like that? No judgment except yes judgment.”

  “I felt the same as you.”

  “It was your idea,” Rufus says, walking his bike down the block. “You don’t get any more ideas today.”

  “Sorry.”

  “I’m kidding, dude. It was interesting, but low casualties are the one thing this place has going for it, and that sort of risk-free fun isn’t really fun at all. We should’ve read reviews before dropping bank on it.”

  “There aren�
�t that many reviews online,” I say. When your service is exclusive for Deckers, not many reviews are to be expected. I mean, I can’t imagine any Decker who would spend precious time praising or bad-mouthing the foundation. “And I really am sorry. Not because we wasted money, but because we wasted time.”

  Rufus stops and pulls out his phone. “It wasn’t a waste of time.” He shows me the photo of us in our gear and uploads it to Instagram. He tags it #LastFriend. “I might get ten likes out of this.”

  LIDIA VARGAS

  9:14 a.m.

  Death-Cast did not call Lidia Vargas because she isn’t dying today. But if she were, she would’ve told all her loved ones, unlike her best friend, who didn’t come out and tell her he’s dying.

  Lidia figured it out. The clues were laid out for her to backtrack and piece everything together: Mateo coming over super early; the kind but out-of-the-blue words he’d said about her being an awesome mother; the envelope with four hundred dollars on her kitchen counter; blocking her number, which she’d taught him how to do.

  In the first few minutes after Mateo pulled his disappearing act, Lidia freaked out, called her abuelita, and begged her to come home from the pharmacy where she works. Instead of fielding all of Abuelita’s questions, she took her phone and called Mateo, but he still didn’t respond. She’s praying it’s because he has Abuelita’s number stored in his contacts list, and not because he’s gone.

  She’s not thinking that way. Mateo won’t live a long life, which is bullshit because he’s the greatest soul in this universe, but he’ll live a long day. He can die at 11:59 p.m., but not a minute before.

  Penny is crying and Abuelita can’t figure out what’s wrong. Lidia knows all of Penny’s cries and how to calm her down. If Penny has a fever, Lidia sits Penny in her lap, singing into her ear. If Penny falls, Lidia scoops her up and hands her a toy with blinking lights or one that jingles; some toys do both, unfortunately. If Penny is hungry or needs a new diaper, the next steps are easy. Penny misses her uncle Mateo. But Lidia can’t FaceTime Mateo to say hi over and over because, again, he blocked her number.