“Seriously. The thing about the oxygen mask on the airplane? That’s all I needed. I use it all the time. You gave me what you had.”
“I left.”
“Probably a pretty good thing. If it hadn’t been for Dallas Suzuki, I was getting ready to put some serious transference on you. Dang, Marla. You got to pull your hair back and get some horn-rimmed glasses.”
She laughs and the tears still come and she rushes over and throws her arms around my neck.
“I’m all right,” I whisper into her neck. “No shit. I am. I’m doing this right.”
“Forgive me?”
“No forgive to it. You were a lot better than you think. Tell you what; you go give your best to some other kid. You know, after you put on your oxygen mask and all that.”
She leans back, holds me at arms’ length. “I promise,” she says.
“I’ll be watching.”
Marla hasn’t been gone an hour when I look up to see the real Dallas Suzuki standing in the doorway.
“Dallas Suzuki,” I say. Methinks this is my day for hot chicks.
She says, “Hi.”
“Decide to give me one more chance?”
“I don’t know what to say, Ben.”
“Don’t say anything. Just come over here and sit on this bed and let me touch you.”
She sits, takes my hand, then gives a short laugh. “You’re not going to try anything, are you?”
“You never know. I get these spurts.”
“Ben, I’m so sorry. I was more selfish than you. I just…”
“I’ll do the apologizing here,” I say. “I should have told you.”
“But—”
I drop her hand. “Shut up!”
She pulls back.
“Listen!” I tell her. “If I’d told you the truth, everything would have been fine. That’s what I want to take out of here.” I go back to that old thought. Something you learn on the last day of your life is as important as something you learn on the first day of grade school, because you’re not dying, you’re changing. And goddamn it, the truth is a powerful weapon to take into that new frontier. I can’t let Dallas diminish that. “You got to let me have that.”
She looks through my eyes into my soul, checking, I’m sure, to see that I mean it.
“Okay,” she says.
“I’m assuming you came here to sleep with me one more time,” I say.
She laughs.
“So lay your head down, ’cause I am crashing.”
Dallas swings her legs around onto the bed and lays her head on my scrawny chest. I close my eyes. This is better than any sex I ever had.
Epilogue
“I was hoping I wouldn’t have to do this; that my brother could deliver his own address,” Cody says, looking over the darkened bleachers from the podium on the risers at the center line of the Trout High School gymnasium. “As you know we buried him a week ago. I want to thank you on behalf of my family, for your amazing kindness.” He smiles. “The last thing he said to me was, ‘This dyin’, it ain’t for sissies.’” He shakes his head. “My brother was no sissy.”
He unfolds a sheet of notebook paper. “If you close your eyes,” he says, “and picture me pint-size, it’ll be like he’s right here.”
Soft laughter drifts up from the audience.
Cody reads:
“To my fellow graduates and to the citizens of Trout.
“My brother is probably pretty nervous reading this, so please laugh at his/my jokes but not at the sweat pouring off his nervous brow. That was the first joke.
“I performed a kind of forced experiment this year; one I wouldn’t have chosen. Last summer Doc Wagner informed me I had a potentially terminal disease and that I should start aggressive treatment right away. Doc took me to a specialist who told me things looked bad, so I decided to forgo the treatment and give myself a reasonable shot at living a meaningful life in one year. Because I wanted that year to be ‘normal’, I chose to tell no one. That was a big mistake. If you don’t learn anything else from my death, learn to tell the truth.
“The first time I heard the saying ‘Live every day like you’re going to live forever and every day like it’s going to be your last’ I thought it was one of those unsolvable story problems from my fifth-grade arithmetic book, but it turned out to be the truest thing about my year. When I took risks like this was my last chance and at the same time kept it in my head that my actions had consequences not only for me but for everyone I touched, forever, I made my best decisions. I did get a lot of help with that, by the way.
“It took me a while to understand, but in the end, I did my best. I loved like I’ve never loved, cried like I’ve never cried, lived through days of terror and days of joy, days of utter satisfaction and days of shame. I shared glory on the football field I would never have experienced had I not known my fate because I wouldn’t have had the nerve to try. Risk.
“Many of you may remember me only as the pain-in-the-butt Malcolm X referendum guy, and though my early poll numbers are dangerously low, I’m hoping my death will cause enough guilt that you will name a street Malcolm X Avenue. Do it.
“I spent the year anticipating my impending demise. There were times I was paralyzed with fear but in the end I’m glad I knew. Another of our classmates, Sooner Cowans, is also gone—with no warning—and I have to say I’m grateful I had the chance to make my peace. Rest assured that, by the time you hear this, I’ve already found him and told him he is loved and missed—which he already knows—that we are out here throwing the ball around, our earthly differences dwarfed by the vast and glorious universe, creating eight-man plays so clever and intricate we could kick Timberline’s butt on ten Friday afternoons out of ten.
“So, graduating seniors, remember you can keep us alive on Earth with the acts you perform in our names. Decide for yourselves how to do that for Sooner, but for me, I want my Malcolm X Avenue. And by the way, Sooner says his street would be the right one to carry that name.
“Drive carefully.”
Cody folds the paper and wipes his eyes as a light applause turns thunderous.
Cody Wolf and Dallas Suzuki jog easily along the reservoir road exactly two weeks following their high school graduation. Joe Henry Suzuki rides ahead of Dallas in a jogger’s stroller, the wind blowing his fine black hair straight back.
“Your son, huh?” Cody says.
“Yeah. Isn’t he beautiful?”
“Yeah, isn’t I beautiful?” Joe Henry says.
“That you are, big boy,” Cody says back. “That you are. Stick your fingers in your ears and go ‘Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh’ for as long as you can.”
Joe Henry bites.
Over his noise, Cody says, “It took a lot of guts to up and tell the world. I mean, your uncle and everything.”
“It was killing me,” Dallas says.
“I’ll bet.”
Joe Henry demonstrates powerful lungs, “Ahhhhhhhhhhhh.”
“You gonna be able to play volleyball and take care of him, too?”
“I’ll find a way. Have to. No volleyball scholarship, no school. No school, the little prince here grows up in a double wide.”
“Can’t believe we both got scholarships to the same place,” Cody says through increasingly heavy breathing. “Listen, I’ve been thinking. Why don’t we get a place together? No strings. Between us I bet we could cover the bases for this little snot factory.”
Dallas still breathes easily, almost gliding as she pushes Joe Henry toward the bluff overlooking the reservoir. “I’ll think about it.” They run another hundred yards. “I’ll bet Ben would like that.”
They run in silence, save for Cody’s gasps for oxygen, to the top of the bluff, where Dallas takes Ben’s iPod from the pocket on the back of the stroller, finds song 116, listens a moment and hands Cody one of the earphones:
So I will climb the highest hill
And I’ll watch the rising sun
And pray that I won’t feel t
he chill
’Til I’m too old to die young.
Let me watch my children grow
To see what they become
Lord don’t let that cold wind blow
’Til I’m too old to die young.
They watch till the sun sits atop a western peak, then turn and head back for town. Cody is hugely appreciative that the rest of the run is mostly downhill.
They jog easily past the Cowanses, home, dark but for the blue glow of the television screen through the living room window. At the end of the street, beneath a handmade plywood street sign reading MALCOLM X AVENUE, they split and jog to their separate homes.
About the Author
CHRIS CRUTCHER has written nine critically acclaimed novels, an autobiography, and two collections of short stories. He has won three lifetime achievement awards for the body of his work: the Margaret A. Edwards Award for Outstanding Literature for Young Adults, the ALAN Award for Significant Contribution to Adolescent Literature, and the NCTE National Intellectual Freedom Award. He has been a child and family therapist with the Spokane Community Mental Health Center and is currently chairperson for the Spokane Child Protection Team. Chris Crutcher lives in Spokane, Washington.
www.chriscrutcher.com
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Credits
Cover photo © 2007 by Edyta Pawlowska
Cover design by Sylvie Le Floc’h
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
DEADLINE. Copyright © 2007 by Chris Crutcher.Jacket photograph © 2007 by Edyta Pawlowska used under license from Shutterstock, Inc. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Adobe Digital Edition March 2009 ISBN 978-0-06-190831-6
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Contents
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Epilogue
About the Author
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Chris Crutcher, Deadline
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