They Both Die at the End: Part One

But the noise in my head is quieting down and there’s a Death-Cast herald on the other end of the phone waiting to tell me I’m going to die today at eighteen years old.

And just like that, my last hope is obliterated.

“Mateo, I regret to inform you that sometime in the next twenty-four hours you’ll be meeting an untimely death. And while there isn’t anything we can do to suspend that, you still have a chance to live.”

“Log on to death-cast.com and fill out any special requests you may have for your funeral in addition to the inscription you’d like engraved on your headstone. Or perhaps you would like to be cremated, in which case...”

I can’t journey across dragon-infested lands to retrieve scepters that can halt death.

I’m such a paranoid mess.

Because I refused to live invincibly on all the days I didn’t get an alert, I wasted all those yesterdays and am completely out of tomorrows.

I’ll be gone before I can adjust to my mortality.

Everyone stays speculating on how Death-Cast receives this life-changing information.

Tagoe told me about all these crazy theories he read online, like Death-Cast consulting a band of legit psychics and a really ridiculous one with an alien shackled to a bathtub and forced by the government to report End Days.

And then I had to put in a request to the Youth Department to dispatch a cop just in case the mother is responsible, which, believe it or not, is not the most disgusting thing I’ve done for this job.

At the end of the call Victor gives me that company line I’ve grown used to hearing from all the new TV shows and movies incorporating Death-Cast into the characters’ day-to-days: “On behalf of Death-Cast, we are sorry to lose you. Live this day to the fullest.”

I’m not naive about dying.

Some of the planets sound ominous, like something you’d find in a science fiction movie set in some alien world—“alien world” as in world with aliens, not non-Earth world.

Pluto got demoted from planet to dwarf planet, but we’d never treat each other as something lesser.

The building is massive, with off-white bricks and maroon steeples.

She’s knocking her rings together, topaz, I think, like the kind my mom once pawned when she wanted to buy Olivia concert tickets for her thirteenth birthday.

Malcolm and Tagoe are always mocking the churches that shun Death-Cast and their “unholy visions from Satan,” but it’s dope how some nuns and priests keep busy way past midnight for Deckers trying to repent, get baptized, and all that good stuff.

I sit on his side of the bed—the right side, since my mother apparently always favored the left, and even with her gone he still lives his life in two sides, never writing her out—and I pick up the framed photo of Dad helping me blow out the candles of my Toy Story cake on my sixth birthday.

Dad and I would never have one of those relationships where we had a falling-out and never talked to each other again, not like these Deckers on some CountDowners feeds who hate their fathers so much they either never visited them on their deathbeds or refused to make amends before they themselves died.

This brunette girl, mad pretty, is bawling...

The foster home is a jacked-up duplex with the face of a battered building—bricks missing, indecipherable and colorful graffiti.

We go down the hall, not bothering to tiptoe across the tacky, chessboard-like tiled floor into the living room...

It belonged to Aimee as a kid, a relic from her mother’s childhood.

I was once following this CountDowners feed where this Decker met a Last Friend, and she was slow about updating, sometimes for hours, to the point where viewers in the chat room assumed she’d died.

She was actually very much alive, just living her last day right, and after she died her Last Friend wrote a brief eulogy that taught me more about the girl than I’d learned in any of her updates.

A few months ago this Decker with a sad life unwittingly befriended the infamous Last Friend serial killer, and that was so tragic to read about, and one of the many reasons I struggle with trusting this world.

A few months ago this Decker with a sad life unwittingly befriended the infamous Last Friend serial killer, and that was so tragic to read about, and one of the many reasons I struggle with trusting this world.

It’s the fastest download ever, like it’s some sentient being who understands the whole point of its existence is that time is running out for someone.

The app has a blue interface with an animation of a gray clock as two silhouettes approach each other and high five.

The app has a blue interface with an animation of a gray clock as two silhouettes approach each other and high five.

Francis is wide awake and wearing his favorite-slash-only bathrobe, like he’s some kingpin whose business makes him stacks on stacks of money instead of a technician spending the little he makes on us.

She’s at the edge of her seat, like when we’d watch Tagoe’s favorite slasher flicks, and just like then, she gets up, but not because of some gross spontaneous combustion.

Aimee’s face is so flushed I almost can’t make out the huge birthmark on her cheek.

She isn’t a Decker, just a girl who’s up late looking to console one.

No Subject: My condolences, Mateo (great name)

Tagoe and Malcolm flank me, quiet too since she and Francis already gave them shit for hitting the streets with me way past bedtime to rough Peck up.

I wanna console them and stuff, but I can’t snap out of my daze.

There’s another cliché for you, whatever.

And if I can’t wake up, I want to go to sleep forever where there’s a chance I dream everything beautiful about you, like how you looked at me for me and not because you wanted to gawk...

I rush through the backyard we all hated because of relentless mosquitoes and fruit flies, then hop the fence.

Have to admit it, I feel a little vindicated in how I’ve lived my life because people can be the worst.

The blue bookcase on the bottom holds my favorite books that I could never get myself to purge when I did my monthly book donations to the teen health clinic down the block.

Cove is standing at the start point, idly dangling his staff.

Francis’s character impressions had me dying so hard I’d beg him to shut up because my rib cage hurt.