The Deathday Letter

  I don’t want to die. I want to live.

  “Shane!” I whisper. Shane stops writing and looks at me over his thick black glasses. Then he steals a glance over at Miranda. He knows there’s usually only one reason I’d distract him during class.

  “Nice.” He starts writing again.

  “Shane!”

  Shane glares at me and Mr. Barnes looks up, stumbling over the words, “French Indochina.” Shane keeps glaring. I’ve had my hand in my pocket, holding the letter all class. It’s damp from my sweat but I clench my fist and toss it onto his desk.

  Shane knows what the letter is without having to unfold it. There are people who spend their whole lives searching for the 120-watt incandescent white paper that Deathday Letters are written on. It’s unmistakable. Loads of people think it’s sick that a letter announcing final boarding on the plane to Deadville comes in a jolly rainbow-printed envelope. They’re the same people who think it should be written in blood and come on froufrou, lacy black paper or something. Aside from having my name on it, I think it’s perfect.

  Shane stares at the letter. Having known the kid as long as I have, I like to think that I know every expression his face can possibly make, but it’s making one I’ve never seen before. It’s somewhere between the time he accidentally watched an entire program about tiny flies that burrow into people’s scalps and lay eggs, and the time we were playing T-ball and I whacked him in the Wiffle balls with my plastic bat.

  I whisper his name again but he ignores me. Minutes pass. I’ve never seen him this upset. I think maybe I’ve done it. I’ve broken Shane Grimsley. And just when I’m about to give up, Shane groans and falls out of his seat.

  “My stomach!” Shane cries out. “Mr. Barnes, my stomach!”

  I snatch the letter off of his desk and stand up. “Mr. Barnes, I think Shane needs to go to the clinic.”

  Mr. Barnes is the exact opposite of the kind of person you want around in an emergency. He doesn’t move or speak. He just watches Shane squirm around on the ground. I think guys like him spend so much time in the past that they don’t know how to act in the present.

  Finally, he scribbles a pass and gives it to me. “Go. Go ahead.”

  I grab Shane’s bag, help him up, and rush him out of class. The second the door clicks shut behind us, Shane shoves me away and takes off down the hall.

  “Wait up,” I call after him. He walks all the way down to the water fountain before stopping. “What the hell’s your problem, Shane?”

  Let me just say that of all the things I’m expecting my best friend to do at this moment, punching me in the eye isn’t one of them. It’s so low on the list that it’s between writing me a love sonnet and telling me he’s a glittery vampire. But that’s exactly what he does. Shane Grimsley turns around, pulls back his fist, and coldcocks me right in the eye. Hard. So hard, I fall back a couple of steps. I don’t even have time to be in pain before he starts yelling at me.

  “Are you kidding me with this? We do everything together! We got the chicken pox together, we downloaded our first porn together—”

  “Which was a little weird, by the way.” I resist the urge to touch my eye; I don’t want to look like a wuss.

  Shane’s eyes are all whites and I know that talking now is bad. “And we were supposed to go to prom together. Well, not together together.”

  “Yeah, and to Europe together, and college together. Shane, I get it.” My eye hurts like Shane’s taken a lemon, squeezed out all the pulp, mixed it with some salt, and then used it to punch me in the eye. “But it’s a Deathday Letter. It’s not like I sent in cereal box tops for it.”

  “I don’t care.” Shane paces back and forth across the hall. “You’re breaking a blood oath, man. Our oath.”

  “Shane, that was back in third grade. And it wasn’t blood, it was Tabasco.”

  “Still, you don’t break that kind of oath.”

  I pull the letter out of my pocket. “You think I want to die? If I could, I’d just send this back to wherever it came from and tell them I’m not allowed to die yet, ’cause I swore a Tabasco oath with my best friend.”

  “Fine!”

  “Fine.”

  Shane squints at me and I brace myself in case he decides to deck me again.

  “We cool?” I ask.

  Shane picks up his backpack and shoulders it. “I guess staying pissed at you your whole last day would be kind of lame.”

  “Be pissed at me tomorrow.”

  “It won’t be fun tomorrow.” Shane looks up at me and puckers his lips like he’s eating something that he can’t decide whether to swallow or spit out. He says, “I got you good.”

  “You punch like a pansy.”

  “It’s going to bruise.”

  I touch my eye and wince. It already feels like it’s five times the normal size. I hope it doesn’t bruise too badly, ’cause the last thing I need is to look like I’m playing an extra in a zombie flick and like I just got sucker punched by a nerdy black kid with girl hands.

  “Can I tell people I was robbed?”

  “Why?” Shane raises his eyebrow like it’s totally possible he’ll punch me out again if I give him the wrong answer.

  “Because tomorrow I’ll be dead, right? I don’t want the last thing people remember about me to be that you kicked my ass.”

  Shane thinks about it. His thinking face makes him look gassy. “I guess that’s all right. But why tell them you were robbed? Why not tell people that you were in the mall and you saw this totally hot mom getting her purse snatched in the parking lot? You tried to save her, and the guy punched you. You went down like a you-know-what in a you-know-where, and even though the thief got the purse, the mom was really grateful.”

  “Wait. Why do I get my ass kicked and still not manage to keep the hot mom from getting jacked?”

  “Not believable.” Shane nods like he’s imagining the whole thing, which is creepy. “Tell people you got your butt kicked trying to save the hot mom, and that she took a little trip south of the border to thank you for the effort. That sounds like something that could actually happen.”

  “Yeah, on Cinemax After Dark.”

  Shane claps me on the back. “Listen, I’ve known you since you were a baby, man. You’re like a brother. I know everything there is to know about you, and lots of stuff I wish I didn’t. It’s not just my job to tell you the truth, it’s my obligation.”

  We stand in silence until finally I say, “What do we do about my letter?” because standing around not talking about our feelings feels way gayer than actually talking about our feelings.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m not going back to class. I already know how the war ends. We won. And I don’t want to sit around and cry about my letter.”

  One of Shane’s infamous grins begins to spread over his face like pancake syrup. His grin is usually the cornerstone of a crooked path to trouble. “I’m game for anything, Travers. You tell me how you want to spend your last day, and I’ll make it happen. I’m the wizard and you’re—”

  “I’m not Dorothy.”

  “You know what I mean. It’s your last day, dude.”

  I shake my head and lean against the wall. “That’s just it. I don’t want to have a last day. I don’t want to die at all.”

  Shane pats me on the shoulder. “I can’t keep you from going out, but I can make sure you go out with a little dignity.”

  “I can’t die, Shane. I thought maybe if I came here, if I did normal shit, that I’d realize it was all some stupid mistake.”

  “So what?” asks Shane. “You want to go back to class?”

  I start to tell Shane that class is the last place I want to be, but once Shane gets going, there’s no stopping him.

  “No, let’s do that. Let’s go to class. It’ll be sob city. If you live until third period, Señora Schwartz can throw you one of her Deathday fiestas.”

  “Shane—”

  “Oliver,” says Shane, mocking
me. “Weigh it out, man. On the one hand, you have Señora Schwartz and her stupid Deathday flan and streamers and hats and lots of people who wouldn’t spit on you under normal circumstances weeping and telling you how much they’ll miss you—”

  I have no idea where Shane’ s going with this but he’s like the Mississippi and I’m just a bit of flotsam. I don’t stand a chance. “What’s on the other hand, Shane?”

  Shane’s grin widens. I’m increasingly convinced that he’s definitely going to get us into trouble. People don’t understand why I hang out with Shane. But it’s this—the grin and the big piles of crap we jump into and then always somehow dig our way out of. And I have a feeling that he’s handing me a shovel.

  “If you trust me,” says Shane, “I promise not to get you arrested.”

  “I guess,” I say.

  “Let Moriville High be a fondish memory.”

  Somewhere in the back of my mind, I know Shane’s right. I hate school. I’m not ready to die, and Shane’s not ready to let me die a boring loser. School has nothing left to offer me.

  “Okay, let’s go. Maybe we can stop at the store and grab some snacks. We’ll eat and play Halo till we yak.”

  Shane claps me on the back. “Yeah. Um. I don’t really have a plan yet, but that lame-ass suggestion isn’t going to be anywhere near it.”

  I start leading the charge out of school when I notice Shane’s not behind me. “What?”

  “There’s one more thing.”

  “What?”

  “I need your letter.”

  “Shane?”

  “Trust me.”

  I nod and hand Shane my moist letter.

  Shane barrels down the hall and it’s only when he’s standing at the door that I realize where we are. Algebra. Mrs. Alley’s class. Ronnie’s class.

  “Shane, what’re you doing?”

  Shane’s the kind of guy who either does something without thinking at all or spends hours making a pro/con list about whether he’d rather download slutty cheerleaders or slutty ninja girls. Today I think he’s thrown all rational thought completely out the window.

  He steps up to the window and stares inside. I’m not exactly sure what he’s trying to do but he shoos me away when I try to tell him that the fastest way to ruin my Deathday is to bring along Ronnie. I mean, unless the good ship Ronniepop’s suddenly started taking passengers, I’m just not in the mood for any of her girly BS.

  Finally, as I’m about to give up on Shane and take off on my own, he knocks on the window. Rap, rap, rap. Around his ears I see the entire class turn to stare. A second later he takes my Deathday Letter and slams it against the tiny window, holding it there for a count of five before folding it back and handing it to me.

  It takes less than thirty seconds for the door to open. Mrs. Alley is shouting something I can’t understand but Ronnie ignores her and slams the door shut behind her.

  “Where are we going, how long do you have, and more importantly, did you give Ollie that shiner?” she asks without taking a breath.

  Shane shakes his head and says, “It’s not mine.”

  Ronnie points at me and, I admit it, I did a little pointing of my own. “Ollie?” she says without looking at me.

  “Yeah,” I say as noncreepy as I can. “But, you know, you don’t have to come along. It was Shane’s—”

  “So you don’t want me here?” Ronnie turns back to Shane. “He doesn’t want me—”

  “I mean, you can come if you want. I don’t care.”

  Shane rolls his crazy, marble eyes and growls. “Ronnie, you’re coming. Ollie, you’ll thank me for this tomorrow. Or later today. Whatever. Can we just go before we get busted?”

  Ronnie smiles at me. It’s the first time all day that I’m not wishing I wasn’t on death’s most wanted list. If dying’s what it takes to get Ronnie back, then I’ll be a stiff. You know what I mean.

  “Let’s do this thing, Grimsley.”

  Shane isn’t just handing me a shovel, he’s handing me the keys to a bulldozer.

  22:02

  Thbbt pidda ith so goot,” says Shane.

  “Yeah, awesome.” I weave to the side to avoid the spray of marinara. Ronnie does the same thing and gives me a little grin, which, in spite of myself, I almost return. Broken up or not, Ronnie’s just about the raddest girl in the universe. Definitely the raddest girl in the kitchen.

  “Are you going to eat, Ollie?” asks Ronnie.

  The pizza box is spread open on Shane’s kitchen island and we hover around it, not unlike vultures.

  I love Shane’s house. It’s a crazy collection of science articles and sticky notes. But since Mr. Grimsley’s an honest-to-God rocket scientist and Mrs. Grimsley does something with computers I’m not even sure there’s a proper word for, the sticky notes aren’t just sticky notes. They’re part of a game. One Grimsley starts by putting up a note that has a random piece

  of information on it. Like 3,134 kelvins. Then the others put up notes guessing what it is. It’s the boiling point of iron, by

  the way.

  “I don’t really feel like eating right now,” I say. I don’t really feel like talking either, but since they’re both here and tomorrow I won’t be, I’m trying to make the best of it.

  Shane dribbles mushy bits of mostly chewed pizza as he tries to speak before swallowing. “Since when do you not feel like eating?”

  “Leave it, Shane,” says Ronnie. “It’s not even nine in the morning and he’s already had two breakfasts.”

  “That does—,” Shane and I say at the same time before we both stop and laugh.

  “Go ahead,” I say.

  Shane shakes his head. “No way, man, it’s all you.”

  “Really, Shane,” I say slowly, looking through my eyelashes at Ronnie.

  The kid’s pretty dense for being a genius, but he finally gets that I’m not ready for a lot of talky time with Ronnie. “You should know this Ronnie, it’s like Dude 101.” Shane points at his stomach. “In here is an unlimited capacity for food. It defies all known laws of physics and anatomy. It’s the ninth wonder of the world.”

  “You boys never change,” says Ronnie. “It’s stupid the way you stuff yourselves silly.”

  “It’s not stupid,” I snap. “It’s science.”

  Ronnie plants her hands on her hips. “Are you a dictionary now, or just a dick?”

  I roll my eyes. “Don’t you mean an encyclopedia?” I hike my thumb at Ronnie while still looking at Shane. “Why is she even here?”

  “I just thought . . . ,” mumbles Shane.

  “Good job with that.”

  “Ollie—,” starts Ronnie, but I cut her off.

  “This isn’t exactly how I want to spend my last day.” Listen, here’s the deal: Ronnie rocked my socks for the best week of my life, then she put my heart through a wood chipper. Do I still want her? Absolutely. Do I really want her around on my Deathday reminding me of what I lost? Not so much.

  “Me neither,” says Shane.

  “You invited her.”

  Ronnie slams her hand down on the counter. “Fine. I’ll leave then. Nice knowing you, Ollie. Good luck, I guess.”

  “Good luck? What the hell’s that supposed to mean? I don’t need luck to die. All I need is for you to stab me through the heart a few more times. Oh, hey! We’re in the kitchen; let me get you a fork.”

  “Forget it.”

  “No forgetting it.” My temples are pounding and my stomach is spewing acid into my throat. “You dumped me, remember? You don’t get to be here and pretend like you’re still my best friend and everything’s all right.”

  Ronnie’s face is pinker than normal and the little muscles in her jaw twitch like crazy. “I’m not the one who—”

  “Jesus, can you both drop it?” Shane turns to Ronnie. “Try not to forget Ollie’s dying.” Then he turns to me. “How about you cut Ronnie some slack, man. She’s here; she’s trying. Do you really want to leave things like this?”

&nbs
p; My own face, I’m sure, is as red as a cherry and my ears feel blistered. “Sorry if this death thing is a little hard for me.”

  Shane drops his pizza with a sickening slap. The warmed-over grease leaches into the cardboard. “And you think this isn’t hard for me? I’m losing my best friend, dumbass. Tomorrow, when I want to tell you about something I saw on the Internet, I won’t be able to. You can be mad at me and Ronnie and the whole stupid world if you want, but tomorrow you’ll still be dead.”

  “You don’t understand,” I say.

  Shane looks to Ronnie for help, but I know her well enough to see that she wants nothing more than to walk out of the house. “Fine,” says Shane. “You’re right. I don’t understand. But if your big Deathday plan is to piss and moan and yell at your friends, then count me out.”

  “I just want you to be here.”

  Ronnie looks like she’s about to snap but she takes a breath and says, “Ollie, what happened between us blew. I’ll apologize if you want me to, I’ll leave if you want me to, I’ll spend the whole day letting you treat me like a punching bag, but I’m hoping that we can put everything behind us and go back to being friends. For today.” Ronnie sticks out her hand.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “It’s hard—” Shane snorts and it’s all I can do not to snicker. “You know what I mean.” I stare into Ronnie’s eyes looking for something, anything, that’ll help me, but she’s harder to read than Beowulf. “Fine.” I take her hand. “Friends. For today.”

  “Great,” says Shane. “Now that there’s peace in the Middle East, I’m going to enjoy every second that I have left with you.” Shane does a drive-by grin and turns his attention to the pizza. “Let’s start with this pie. So oily, so greasy.” He picks up his slice, closes his eyes, and shoves as much of it in his mouth as he can. I won’t lie; it’s grossly impressive. “Ohh uud.”

  I pick up my own slice. The grease has already congealed into a squishy mess, but I take a bite anyway. I’ve had plenty of pizza before, but Shane’s leftover pizza is the best I’ve ever eaten. The cheese is salty and creamy, and the marinara oozes down my throat. Shane peeks at me through his nearly closed eyes and smiles. We don’t need to say anything. It’s already said.