Here we are, two boys sitting in a cemetery as it begins drizzling, trading stories in my half-dug grave, as if we’re not dying today. These moments of forgetting and relief are enough to push me through the rest of my day.
“Weird question: Do you believe in fate?” I ask.
“Weird answer: I believe in two fates,” Rufus says.
“Really?”
“No.” Rufus smiles. “I don’t even believe in one. You?”
“How else do you explain us meeting?” I ask.
“We both downloaded an app and agreed to hang out,” Rufus says.
“But look at us. My mom and your parents are dead. My father is out of commission. If our parents were around, we wouldn’t have found ourselves on Last Friend.” The app is designed mainly for adults, not teens. “If you can believe in two afterlives, you can believe in the universe playing puppet master. Can’t you?”
Rufus nods as the rain comes down harder on us. He stands first and offers me a hand. I take it. The poetry you could write about Rufus helping me out of my grave isn’t lost on me. I step out and walk over to my mother’s headstone, kissing her inscribed name. I leave my toy sanctuary against the stone. I turn in time to catch Rufus snapping a photo of me; capturing moments really is his thing.
I turn to my headstone one last time.
HERE LIES
MATEO TORREZ, JR.
JULY 17, 1999
They’ll add my End Day in no time: September 5, 2017.
My inscription, too. It’s okay that there’s a blank right now. I know what it will say and I know I’ll make sure I’ve lived as I’m claiming: He Lived for Everyone. The words will wear away over time, but they’ll have been true.
Rufus wheels his bike along the wet and muddy path, leaving tire tracks. I follow him, my insides feeling heavier with every footstep away from my mother and my open grave, knowing I’ll be back soon enough.
“You sold me on fate,” Rufus says. “Finish telling me about your afterlife.”
I do.
PART THREE
The Beginning
It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.
—Marcus Aurelius, Roman emperor
MATEO
12:22 p.m.
Twelve hours ago I received the phone call telling me I’m going to die today. In my own Mateo way, I’ve said tons of goodbyes already, to my dad, best friend, and goddaughter, but the most important goodbye is the one I said to Past Mateo, who I left behind at home when my Last Friend accompanied me into a world that has it out for us. Rufus has done so much for me and I’m here to help him confront any demons following him—except we can’t whip out any flaming swords or crosses that double as throwing stars like in fantasy books. His company has helped me and maybe mine will help him through any heartache too.
Twelve hours ago I received the phone call telling me I’m going to die today, and I’m more alive now than I was then.
RUFUS
12:35 p.m.
I don’t know where Mateo is leading me, but it’s all good because the rain stopped and I’m recharged and ready to go after getting a strong power nap on the train ride back into the city. It sucks how I didn’t dream, but no nightmares either. Win some, lose some.
I’m crossing out the Travel Arena because it’s mad busy at this time of day, as Mateo pointed out, so if we’re still alive in a few hours we have a better chance of not completely wasting away in lines. We have to wait for the herd to thin out, pretty much. Shitty way to think, but I’m not wrong. I hope whatever we’re doing isn’t some time-suck like Make-A-Moment. I’m betting it’s charity work, or maybe he’s been secretly chatting with Aimee and arranging a meet-up so she and I can make things right before I kick the bucket.
We’ve been in Chelsea for a solid ten minutes, in the park by the pier. I’m that guy I hate, the one who walks in the bike lane when there’s clearly a lane for walkers and joggers. My karma score is gonna be jacked, legit. Mateo leads me toward the pier, where I stop.
“You gonna try and throw me over?” I ask.
“You’ve got an extra forty pounds on me,” Mateo says. “You’re safe. You said spreading your parents’ and sister’s ashes didn’t do much for you. I thought maybe you could get some closure here.”
“They all died on our way upstate,” I say. Fingers crossed those road barriers our car flipped over, freak-accident style, have been repaired by now, but who knows.
“It doesn’t have to be the crash site. Maybe the river will be enough.”
“Not sure what I’m supposed to get out of this.”
“I don’t know either, and if you don’t feel comfortable, we can turn around and do something else. Going to the cemetery gave me peace I wasn’t expecting, and I want you to have that same wonder.”
I shrug. “We’re already here. Bring on the wonder.”
There are no boats docked by the pier, which is a huge waste, like an empty parking lot. In July, I came by the pier a little farther uptown with Aimee and Tagoe because they wanted to see these waterfront statues, and came back there a week later because Malcolm missed out on account of food poisoning.
We walk across this arm of the pier. It’s not made up of planks, otherwise I’d be too nervous to go forward. I’m straight catching Mateo’s paranoia, like a cold. The pier is all cement and sturdy, not some rickety mess that’s gonna collapse under me, but feel free to put down a dollar on optimism tricking the shit out of me. We reach the end and I grab the steel-gray railing so I can lean out and see the river’s currents doing their thing.
“How are you feeling?” Mateo asks.
“Like this whole day is a practical joke the world is playing on me. You’re an actor and any minute now my parents, Olivia, and the Plutos are gonna run out the back of some van and surprise me. I wouldn’t even be that pissed. I’d hug them and then kill them.”
It’s a fun thought, massacre aside.
“Seems pretty pissed to me,” Mateo says.
“I’ve spent so much time being pissed at my family for leaving me, Mateo. Everyone’s always running their mouth about survivor’s guilt and I get it, but . . .” I’ve never talked about this with the Plutos, not even Aimee when we were dating, ’cause it’s too horrible. “But I’m the one who left them, yo. I’m the one who got out the sinking car and swam away. I still think about if that was even me or some strong reflex. Like how you can’t keep your hand on a hot stove without your brain forcing it away. It would’ve been mad easy to sink with them, even though Death-Cast hadn’t hit me up yet. If it was that easy for me to almost die, maybe they should’ve worked harder to beat the odds and live. Maybe Death-Cast was wrong!”
Mateo comes closer and palms my shoulder. “Don’t do this to yourself. There are entire forums on CountDowners for Deckers confident they’re special. When Death-Cast calls, that’s it. Game over. There isn’t anything you could’ve done and there isn’t anything they could’ve done differently.”
“I could’ve driven,” I snap, shaking off his hand. “Olivia’s idea since I was tagging along. That way ‘Decker hands’ wouldn’t be steering the car. But I was too nervous and too pissed and too lonely. I could’ve bought them a few more hours. Maybe they wouldn’t have given up when things looked bad. Once I was out the car they just sat there, Mateo. No fight in them.” They only cared about me getting out. “My pops reached for my door immediately, same time my mom did from behind. I could’ve opened my own door, it’s not like my hand was jammed somewhere. I was dazed because our fucking car flew into the river, but I snapped out of it. They just gave up, though, once my door was open—Olivia didn’t even gun for the escape.”
I was forced to wait in the back of an ambulance with a towel that smelled like bleach around me as a team pulled their car out of the river.
“This was never your fault.” Mateo’s head is hanging low. “I’m going to give you a minute alone, but I’ll be waiting for you. I hope that’s
what you want.” He walks off, taking my bike with him, before I can answer.
I don’t think a minute is enough—until I give in, crying harder than I have in weeks, and I hammer at the railing with the bottom of my fist. I keep going and going, hitting the railing because my family is dead, hitting it because my best friends are locked up, hitting it because my ex-girlfriend did us dirty, hitting it because I made a new dope friend and we don’t even have a full day together. I stop, out of breath, like I just won a fight against ten dudes. I don’t even want a picture of the Hudson, so I turn around and keep it behind, walking toward Mateo, who’s wheeling my bike in pointless circles.
“You win,” I say. “That was a good idea.” He doesn’t gloat like Malcolm would or taunt me like Aimee did whenever she won at Battleship. “My bad for snapping.”
“You needed to snap.”
He continues moving in his circle. I’m a little dizzy watching him.
“Truth.”
“If you need to snap again, I’m here. Last Friends for life.”
DELILAH GREY
12:52 p.m.
Delilah rushes to the only bookstore in the city that miraculously carries Howie Maldonado’s science fiction novel, The Lost Twin of Bone Bay.
Delilah speeds toward the store, staying far away from the curb, ignoring the catcall from a balding man with a large gym bag, and rushing past two boys with one bike.
She’s praying Howie Maldonado doesn’t move up the interview before she can get there when she remembers there are greater stakes at play in Howie’s dying life.
VIN PEARCE
12:55 p.m.
Death-Cast called Vin Pearce at 12:02 a.m. to tell him he’s going to die today, which isn’t that surprising.
Vin is pissed the beautiful woman with the colorful hair ignored him, pissed he never got married, pissed he was rejected by every woman on Necro this morning, pissed at his former coach who got in the way of his dreams, pissed at these two boys with a bike who are getting in the way of the destruction he’s going to leave behind. The boy in the biker gear is so slow, taking up sidewalk space with the bike he’s walking beside—bikes are meant to be ridden! Not carted around like a stroller. Vin barrels forward, no consequences in mind, bumping the boy’s shoulder with his own.
The boy sucks his teeth, but his friend grabs his arm, holding him back.
Vin likes to be feared. He loves it in the outside world, but he loved it most in the wrestling ring. Four months ago, Vin began experiencing muscle pains, but refused to acknowledge his weaknesses. Lifting weights was a struggle with poor results; sets of twenty pull-ups became sets of four, on good days; and his coach pulled him out of the ring indefinitely because fighting would be impossible. Illnesses have always run through his family—his father died years ago after being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, his aunt died from a ruptured ectopic pregnancy, and so on—but Vin believed he was better, stronger. He was destined for greatness, he was sure of it, like world championships and unbelievable riches. But chronic muscle disease pinned him down and he lost it all.
Vin walks inside the gym where he spent the past seven years training to become the next world heavyweight champion, the smell of sweat and dirty sneakers bringing back countless memories. The only memory that matters now is the one where his coach made him pack up his locker and suggested a new career route, like being a ringside commentator or becoming a coach himself.
Insulting.
Vin sneaks down to the generator room and pulls a homemade bomb out of his gym bag.
Vin is going to die where he was made. And he’s not dying alone.
MATEO
12:58 p.m.
We pass a shop window with classic novels and new books sitting in children’s chairs, like the books are hanging out in a waiting room, ready to be bought and read. I could use some lightness after the threatening grill of that man with the gym bag.
Rufus takes a picture of the window. “We can go in.”
“I won’t be longer than twenty minutes,” I promise.
We go inside the Open Bookstore. I love how the store name is hopeful.
This is the best worst idea ever. I have no time to actually read any of these books. But I’ve never been in this store before because I usually have my books shipped to me or I borrow them from the school library. Maybe a bookshelf will topple over and that’s how I go out—painful, but there are worse ways to die.
I bump into a waist-high table while eyeing an antique clock on top of a bookshelf, knocking over their display copies of back-to-school books. I apologize to the bookseller—Joel, according to his name tag—and he tells me not to worry and assists me.
Rufus leaves his bike in the front of the store and follows me as I tour the aisles. I read the staff recommendations, all different genres praised in different handwriting, some more legible than others. I try avoiding the grief section, but two books catch my eye. One is Hello, Deborah, My Old Friend, the biography by Katherine Everett-Hasting that caused some controversy. The other is that bestselling guide no one shuts up about, Talking About Death When You’re Unexpectedly Dying, written by some man who’s still alive. I don’t get it.
They have a lot of my favorites in the thriller and young adult sections.
I pause in front of the romance section, where they have a dozen books wrapped in brown paper stamped “Blind Date with a Book.” There are little clues on what the book is to catch your interest, like the profile of someone you meet online. Like my Last Friend.
“Have you ever dated anyone?” Rufus asks.
The answer feels obvious. He’s nice for giving me the benefit of the doubt. “Nope.” I’ve only had crushes, but it’s embarrassing to admit they were characters in books and TV shows. “I missed out. Maybe in the next life.”
“Maybe,” Rufus says.
I sense there’s something more he wants to say; maybe he wants to crack a joke about how I should sign up for Necro so I don’t die a virgin, as if sex and love are the same thing. But he says nothing.
I could be totally wrong.
“Was Aimee your first girlfriend?” I ask. I grab the paper-wrapped book with an illustration of a criminal running away, holding an oversized playing card, a heart: “Heart Stealer.”
“First relationship,” Rufus says, playing with this spinner of New York City–themed postcards. “But I had things for other classmates in my old school. They never went anywhere, but I tried. Did you ever get close to someone?” He slides a postcard of the Brooklyn Bridge out the spinner. “You can send them a postcard.”
Postcards.
I smile as I grab one, two, four, six, twelve.
“You had a lot of crushes,” Rufus says.
I move for the cash register, where Joel assists me again. “We should send postcards to people, you know?” I keep it vague because I don’t want to break the news to this bookseller that the customers he’s ringing up are dying at seventeen and eighteen. I’m not going to ruin his day. “The Plutos, any classmates . . .”
“I don’t have their addresses,” Rufus says.
“Send it to the school. They’ll have the address for anyone you graduated with.”
It’s what I want to do. I buy the mystery book and the postcards, thank Joel for his help, and we leave. Rufus said the key to his relationships was speaking up. I can do this with the postcards, but I have to use my voice, too.
“I was nine when I bothered my dad about love,” I say, looking through the postcards again at places in my own city I never visited. “I wanted to know if it was under the couch or high up in the closet where I couldn’t reach yet. He didn’t say that ‘love is within’ or ‘love is all around you.’”
Rufus wheels his bike beside me as we pass this gym. “I’m hooked. What did he say?”
“That love is a superpower we all have, but it’s not always a superpower I’d be able to control. Especially as I get older. Sometimes it’ll go crazy and I shouldn’t be scared if my power hits
someone I’m not expecting it to.” My face is warm, and I wish I had the superpower of common sense because this isn’t something I should’ve ever said out loud. “That was stupid. Sorry.”
Rufus stops and smiles. “Nah, I liked that. Thanks for that story, Super Mateo.”
“It’s actually Mega Master Mateo Man. Get it right, sidekick.” I look up from the postcards. I really like his eyes. Brown, and tired even though he got some rest. “How do you know when love is love?”
“I—”
Glass shatters and we’re suddenly thrown backward through the air as fire reaches out toward a screaming crowd. This is it. I slam against the driver’s side of a car, my shoulder banging into the rearview mirror. My vision fades—darkness, fire, darkness, fire. My neck creaks when I turn and Rufus is beside me, his beautiful brown eyes closed; he’s surrounded by my postcards of the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty, Union Square, and the Empire State Building. I crawl toward him and tense as I reach out to him. His heart is pounding against my wrist; his heart, like mine, desperately doesn’t want to stop beating, especially not in chaos like this. Our breaths are erratic, disturbed and frightened. I have no idea what happened, just that Rufus is struggling to open his eyes and others are screaming. But not everyone. There are bodies on the ground, faces kissing cement, and beside one woman with very colorful hair who’s struggling to get up is another, except her eyes are skyward and her blood is staining a rain puddle.
RUFUS
1:14 p.m.
Yo. A little over twelve hours ago that Death-Cast dude hit me up telling me I’m a goner today. I’m sitting on a street curb, hugging my knees like I did in the back of the ambulance when my family died, straight shaken now over that explosion, the kind you only see in summer blockbusters. Police and ambulance sirens are blasting, and the firefighters are handling business on the burning gym, but it’s too late for mad people. Deckers need to start wearing special collars or jackets, something that’ll clue us in on not flocking in one place. That could’ve been me and Mateo if we were a minute or two slower. Maybe, maybe not. But I know this: a little over twelve hours ago, I got a phone call telling me I’m gonna die today, and I thought I made my peace with that, but I’ve never been more scared in my life of what’s gonna go down later.