by Adam Silvera
Lidia logs on to Facebook. She used to use this account to keep up with friends from high school, but now she uploads photos of Penny for Christian’s family without having to text his parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, or that one cousin who’s always asking for dating advice.
Lidia visits Mateo’s page, which is a wasteland of nineteen mutual friends, two gorgeous pictures of sunrises in Brooklyn from a “Good Morning, New York!” fan page, an article about some instrument NASA created that allows you to hear what outer space sounds like, and a status from months ago that didn’t receive nearly enough love about being accepted to his online college of choice. Mateo has never been good about sharing his own stuff, obviously, but you can always count on him to comment on your photo or show love to your status. If it matters to you, it matters to him.
Lidia hates that Mateo is out there by himself. This isn’t the early 2000s, when people were dying without warning. Death-Cast is here to prepare Deckers and their loved ones, not for the Decker to turn their back on their loved ones. She wishes Mateo had let her into his life, every last minute of it.
She goes through Mateo’s photos, starting from the most recent: Mateo and Penny napping on the same couch Lidia is sitting on now; Mateo carrying Penny through the reptile room at the zoo, where they were both scared of snakes escaping; Mateo and his dad in Lidia’s kitchen, where his dad was teaching them how to make pegao; Mateo hanging streamers for Penny’s first birthday party; Mateo, Lidia, and Penny smiling in the backseat of Abuelita’s car; Mateo in his graduation cap and gown, hugging Lidia, who brought him flowers and balloons. Lidia clicks out of the photos. Memory lane is too painful when she knows he’s still out there, alive. She stares at his profile picture, a photo she took of him in his bedroom where he was looking out the window, waiting for the mailman to deliver his Xbox Infinity.
This time tomorrow, Lidia will put up a status about her best friend passing. People will reach out to her and offer their condolences, much like they did when Christian passed. And after everyone remembers Mateo, whether as the boy in their homeroom or at their lunch table, they’ll rush over to his page and leave comments like a digital memorial. How they hope he rests in peace. How he was too young to go. How they wish they’d taken the time to talk to him while he was alive.
Lidia will never know how Mateo is spending his End Day, but she hopes her best friend finds whatever he’s looking for.
RUFUS
9:41 a.m.
We stumble across seven abandoned pay phones in some ditch, underneath a highway leading north toward the Queensboro Bridge.
“We gotta go in there.”
Mateo is about to protest, but I hold up my finger, shutting that down real fast.
I drop my bike on the ground, and we crawl through an opening in the chain-link fence. There are rusty pipes, stuffed garbage bags that smell like old food and shit, and trails of blackened gum snaking around the pay phones. There’s graffiti of a Pepsi bottle beating the crap out of a Coca-Cola bottle; I take a picture, upload it to Instagram, and tag Malcolm so he knows he was with me on my End Day.
“It’s like a graveyard,” Mateo says. He picks up a pair of sneakers.
“If you find any toes in there, we’re jetting,” I say.
Mateo inspects the insides of the sneakers. “No toes or other body parts.” He drops the sneakers. “Last year I bumped into this guy with a bloody nose and no sneakers.”
“Homeless dude?”
“Nope. He was our age. He got beat up and robbed so I gave him my sneakers.”
“Of course you did,” I say. “They don’t make them like you.”
“Oh, I wasn’t looking for a compliment. Sorry. I’m curious what he’s up to now. Doubt I’d recognize him since he had so much blood on his face.” Mateo shakes his head, like it’ll make the memory go away.
I crouch over one pay phone, and in blue Sharpie there’s a message by where the receiver used to be: I MISS YOU, LENA. CALL ME BACK.
Pretty damn hard for Lena to call you back, Person, without an actual phone.
“This is a crazy find,” I say, mad lit as I move on to the next pay phone. “I feel like Indiana Jones right now.” Mateo smiles my way. “What?”
“I watched those movies obsessively as a kid,” Mateo says. “Forgot about it until now.” He tells me stories about how his dad would hide treasure around the apartment—how the treasure was always a jar of quarters they used for laundry. Mateo would wear his cowboy hat from his Woody costume and use a shoelace as a lasso. Whenever he got close to finding the jar, his dad would put on this Mexican mask a neighbor bought him and he would throw Mateo onto the couch for an epic fight.
“That’s awesome. Your pops sounds cool.”
“I got lucky,” Mateo says. “Anyway, I hijacked your moment. Sorry.”
“Nah, you’re fine. It’s not some huge, big, worldly moment. I’m not about to go off on how removing pay phones from street corners is the start of universal disconnection or some nonsense like that. I think this is just really dope.” I snap some photos with my phone. “It is crazy, though, right? Pay phones are gonna stop being a thing. I don’t even know anyone’s phone number.”
“I only know Dad’s and Lidia’s,” Mateo says.
“If I was locked up behind bars, I would’ve been extra screwed. Knowing someone’s number isn’t gonna matter anyway. You’ll no longer be a quarter away from calling someone.” I hold up my phone. “I’m not even using a real camera! Cameras that use film are going extinct too, watch.”
“Post offices and handwritten letters are next,” Mateo says.
“Movie rental stores and DVD players,” I say.
“Landlines and answering machines,” he says.
“Newspapers,” I say. “Clocks and wristwatches. I’m sure someone’s working on a product for us to automatically know the time.”
“Physical books and libraries. Not anytime soon, but eventually, right?” Mateo is quiet, probably thinking about those Scorpius Hawthorne books he mentioned in his profile. “Can’t forget about all the endangered animals.”
I definitely forgot about them. “You’re right. You’re totally right. It’s all going away, everyone and everything is dying. Humans suck, man. We think we’re so damn indestructible and infinite because we can think and take care of ourselves, unlike pay phones or books, but I bet the dinosaurs thought they’d rule forever too.”
“We never act,” Mateo says. “Only react once we realize the clock is ticking.” He gestures to himself. “Exhibit A.”
“Guess that marks us next on the list,” I say. “Before the newspapers and clocks and wristwatches and libraries.” I lead us out through the fence and turn around. “But you do know no one actually uses landlines anymore, right?”
TAGOE HAYES
9:48 a.m.
Death-Cast did not call Tagoe Hayes because he isn’t dying today, but he’ll never forget what it was like seeing his best friend receive the alert. The look on Rufus’s face will haunt Tagoe far longer than any of the gore he’s seen in his favorite slasher films.
Tagoe and Malcolm are still at the police station, sharing a holding cell that is twice the size of their bedroom.
“I thought for sure it was gonna smell like piss here,” Tagoe says. He’s sitting on the floor because the bench is too shaky, creaking every time he shifts.
“Just vomit,” Malcolm says, biting his nails.
Tagoe plans on throwing these jeans out when he gets home. He removes his glasses, letting Malcolm and the desk officer blur. He’s been known to do this every now and again, so everyone knows when he wants a time-out from whatever is happening around him. The only time it ever pissed Malcolm off was when Tagoe did this during a game of Cards Against Humanity; Tagoe never admitted it was because the card he’d drawn from the deck was making fun of suicide, which made him think about the man who’d abandoned him.
Thinking about if Rufus is alive and well makes Tagoe’s neck ache.
Tagoe suppresses his tic often because his neck jerking around every other minute is not only uncomfortable, but it also makes him look unapproachable and wild. Rufus once asked him what that urge feels like, so Tagoe got Rufus, Malcolm, and Aimee to hold their breath and not blink for as long they could. Tagoe didn’t have to do the exercise with the Plutos to know the relief they were in for once they breathed out and blinked. His tic was as natural to him as breathing and blinking. But as his neck pulls him in directions, Tagoe feels little cracks, and he always imagines his bones crumbling with every turn.
He puts his glasses back on. “What would you do if you got the call?”
Malcolm grunts. “Probably same thing as Roof. Except I wouldn’t invite my ex-girlfriend whose boyfriend I just jumped to my funeral.”
“That’s no doubt where he went wrong,” Tagoe says.
“What about you?” Malcolm asks.
“Same.”
“Do you . . .” Malcolm stops. It’s not like when Malcolm was helping Tagoe defeat writer’s block as he was working on Substitute Doctor and was shy about his pitch about the demon doctor wearing a stethoscope that could read his patients’ minds—that was a great idea. This is something sure to piss him off.
“I wouldn’t look for my mom or find out how my dad died,” Tagoe says.
“Why not? If I knew more about the asshole who burned my home down, I’d get into my first fight,” Malcolm says.
“I only care about the people who wanna be in my life. Like Rufus. Remember how he was nervous about coming out to us because he didn’t wanna stop sharing a room with us since we had so much fun? That’s someone who wants to be in my life. And I wanna be there for his. However much of it is left.”
Tagoe takes off his glasses and lets his neck run wild.
KENDRICK O’CONNELL
10:03 a.m.
Death-Cast did not call Kendrick O’Connell because he isn’t dying today. He may not be losing his life, but he’s just lost his job at the sandwich shop. Kendrick keeps his apron, not giving a shit. He leaves the shop, lighting a cigarette.
Kendrick has never been lucky. Even when he struck gold last year, when his parents finally divorced, it wasn’t long before his luck ran dry. His mother and father were as good a fit for each other as an adult’s foot in a child’s shoe; even at nine years old Kendrick recognized this. Kendrick didn’t know much back then, but he was pretty sure love didn’t mean that your father slept on the couch and that your mother didn’t care when her husband was caught cheating on her with younger girls in Atlantic City. (Kendrick has a problem with minding his own damn business, and could possibly be happier if he were a little more ignorant.)
The first child support check came just in time since Kendrick needed new sneakers; the front soles of his old pair had split, and his classmates made fun of him relentlessly because his shoes “talked” every time he walked—open, close, open, close. Kendrick begged his mother for the latest Jordans, and she spent three hundred dollars on them because Kendrick “needed a victory.” At least that’s what she told his paternal grandfather, who is a terrible man—but that’s not a story of any importance here.
Kendrick felt ten feet tall in his new sneakers . . . until four six-foot-tall kids jumped him and stole them off his feet. His nose was bleeding and walking home in his socks was painful, all resolved by this boy in glasses who gave Kendrick a packet of tissues he’d had in his backpack and the sneakers off his feet in exchange for nothing. Kendrick never saw him again, never got his name, but he didn’t care about that. Never getting his ass kicked again was the only thing that mattered.
That’s when Damien Rivas, once his classmate, now a proud dropout, made Kendrick strong. It took Kendrick one weekend with Damien to learn how to break the wrist of anyone who swung at him. Damien sent him out on the street, unleashing him like a fierce pit bull onto other unsuspecting high schoolers. Kendrick would walk up on someone, clock them, and lay them out in one hit.
Kendrick became a Knockout King, and that’s who he is today.
A Knockout King without a job.
A Knockout King with no one to hit, since his gang disbanded after their third, Peck, got a girlfriend and tried to live his life right.
A Knockout King in a kingdom of people who keep taunting him with their purposes in life, straight begging to get their jaws dislocated.
MATEO
10:12 a.m.
“I know I’m not supposed to have any more ideas. . . .”
“Here we go,” Rufus says. He’s riding his bike alongside me. He wanted me to get on that death trap with him. I didn’t do it before and I’m not doing it now. But I couldn’t let my paranoia keep him from riding himself. “What are you thinking?”
“I want to go to the cemetery and visit my mom. I only know her through my dad’s stories and I’d like to spend some time with her,” I say. “That phone booth graveyard did a number on me, I guess.” My dad normally visited my mom alone because I was too nervous to make the trip. “Unless there’s something else you want to do.”
“You really wanna go to a cemetery on the day you’re gonna die?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m game. What cemetery?”
“The Evergreens Cemetery in Brooklyn. It’s close to the neighborhood where my mom grew up.”
We’re going to take the A train from Columbus Circle station to Broadway Junction.
We pass a drugstore and Rufus wants to run in.
“What do you need?” I ask. “Water?”
“Just come on,” Rufus says. He wheels his bike down the aisles and stops when he finds the bargain toys. There are water blasters, modeling clay, action figures, handballs, scratch-and-sniff erasers, and Legos. Rufus picks up a set of Legos. “Here we go.”
“I’m confused. . . . Oh.”
“Gear up, architect.” Rufus heads to the front counter. “You’re gonna show me what you got.” I smile at this little miracle, one I doubt I would’ve thought to grant myself. I pull out my wallet and he flicks it. “Nah, this is on me. I’m paying you back for the Instagram idea.”
He buys the Legos and we head out. He puts the plastic bag in his backpack and walks beside me. He tells me about how he always wanted a pet, but not like a dog or cat because his mother was deathly allergic, but instead something badass like a snake or fun like a bunny. As long as both snake and bunny never had to be roommates, I would’ve been cool with it.
We reach the Columbus Circle subway stop. He carries his bike down the stairs, and then we swipe our way in, catching the A train right before it departs.
“Good timing,” I say.
“Could’ve been here sooner if we rode the bike,” Rufus jokes. Or I think he’s joking.
“Could’ve been at the cemetery sooner if a hearse carried us.”
Like the train we took in the middle of the night, this one is also pretty empty, maybe a dozen people. We sit with our backs to a poster for the World Travel Arena. “What were some of the places you wanted to travel to?” I ask.
“Tons of places. I wanted to do cool stuff, like surfing in Morocco, hang gliding in Rio de Janeiro, and maybe swimming with dolphins in Mexico—see? Dolphins, not sharks,” Rufus says. If we were living past today, I get the sense he’d be mocking the Deckers swimming with sharks for a long time. “But I also wanted to take photos of random sites around the world that aren’t getting enough credit because they don’t have cool history like the Leaning Tower of Pisa or the Colosseum, but are still awesome.”
“I really like that. What do you think is—”
The train’s lights flicker and everything shuts off, even the hum of the fans. We’re underground and we’re in total darkness. An announcement on the overhead tells us we’re experiencing a brief delay and the system should be up and running again shortly. A little boy is crying as a man curses about another train delay. But this feels really wrong; Rufus and I have bigger things to worry about than getting somewhere late. I didn�
��t observe any suspicious characters on the train, but we’re stuck now. Someone could stab us and no one would know until the lights flash back on. I scooch toward Rufus, my leg against him, and I shelter him with my body because maybe I can buy him time, enough time to see the Plutos if they manage to get released today, maybe I can even shield him from death, maybe I can go out as a hero, maybe Rufus will be the exception to the Death-Cast-is-always-right record.
There’s something glowing beside me, like a flashlight.
It’s the light from Rufus’s phone.
I’m breathing really hard and my heart is pounding and I don’t feel better, not even when Rufus massages my shoulder. “Yo, we’re totally cool. This happens all the time.”
“No it doesn’t,” I say. The delays do, but the lights turning off isn’t common.
“You’re right, it doesn’t.” He reaches into his backpack and pulls out the Legos, pouring some of them into my lap. “Here. Build something now, Mateo.”
I don’t know if he also believes we’re about to die and wants me to create something before I do, but I follow his lead. My heart is still pounding pretty badly, but I stop shaking when I reach for the first brick. I have no clue what I’m building, but I allow my hands to keep aimlessly laying down the foundation with the bigger bricks because there’s a literal spotlight on me in an otherwise completely dark train car.
“Anywhere you wanted to travel to?” Rufus asks.
I’m suffocated by the darkness and this question.
I wish I was brave enough to have traveled. Now that I don’t have time to go anywhere, I want to go everywhere: I want to get lost in the deserts of Saudi Arabia; find myself running from the bats under the Congress Avenue Bridge in Austin, Texas; stay overnight on Hashima Island, this abandoned coal-mining facility in Japan sometimes known as Ghost Island; travel the Death Railway in Thailand, because even with a name like that, there’s a chance I can survive the sheer cliffs and rickety wooden bridges; and everywhere else. I want to climb every last mountain, row down every last river, explore every last cave, cross every last bridge, run across every last beach, visit every last town, city, country. Everywhere. I should’ve done more than watch documentaries and video blogs about these places.