The Deathday Letter

  There are things that guys do, right? Everyone knows guys do them. Guys can sometimes talk to other guys about them, but they’re not something we sit around and have deep talks about. Shane and I have compared notes, but we don’t chill at lunch going, “I got peanut butter and jelly, and last night I rubbed one out while Gilmore Girls reruns were on.”

  Girls are a different story. You don’t ever talk to girls about that stuff. Not to them, not around them, not even in the same room with them. Ever. Which means when Hurricane starts asking me if I’ve ever medaled in the underwear gymnastics Olympics, I turn bright red and my ears start to burn. I look over my shoulder and Shane’s staring at the ground like it’s got the unified theory of everything written on it.

  “I’ll take that as a yes,” says Pete, and continues without pause. “So you know how there’s that moment at the end where your whole body is relaxed and your eyes flutter like you could sleep and you feel like your skin could float right off ? That’s what getting high is like.”

  I look sheepishly at Hurricane. “Is it really like that?”

  “I don’t really have a penis, so I might not be the best person to ask, but it’s like being in this other place where time’s a little bit slower and your worries aren’t really worries anymore.”

  I reach across and grab Ronnie’s still-wet hand. “You in?”

  Ronnie nods and scoots up on my other side. “After the bridge, this is cake.” I can’t decide whether she’s trying to sound brave for herself or me.

  “Hey!” says Shane suddenly. “Maybe this is what kills you.”

  Hurricane strokes my hair and I kind of feel like I should shake my back leg like a dog.

  “No one’s ever died from smoking pot,” says Nariko. “Don’t be a tool.”

  “Whatever,” says Shane, and backs up farther. “I’ll just be black in the corner over here.”

  Ronnie laughs. “Hello, welcome to Melodrama. My name is Shane Grimsley and I’ll be your tour guide for the afternoon.”

  “Are we going to do this?” asks Klaus. “Ich habe Hunger.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Let’s do it.” As soon as I say the words, my heart starts pounding and my shorts get less roomy and I can feel every single breath as I take it in and let it out.

  “I’m ready,” says Ronnie. She gives my hand a good squeeze and moves even closer. I suddenly realize I’m the filling in a Hurricane and Ronnie sandwich. I kind of wish I were sitting next to Dru or Nariko but I get the feeling that in a few minutes, girls will be the last thing on my mind . . . or at least not the first.

  “That’s four then,” says Klaus. He sticks his tongue out at Pete and GP, who push themselves away from Medusa.

  “All right,” I say. “So what do I do?”

  15:12 AND COUNTING

  The smooth brass end of the tube is frosty in my hands and it bleeds into my fingers. It’s pretty much all I can do to keep myself from shaking into tiny little bits.

  “Just breathe in the smoke and hold it like you’re underwater.” Ronnie nibbles her bottom lip and tries to look like she knows what she’s talking about. She should remember that I can always tell when she’s talking out of her ass. Like right now.

  “Last chance to back out and go to Disney, guys,” says Shane from the corner. Honestly, I kind of forgot that he was there.

  Here’s the thing: Shane, Ronnie, and I never tried drugs. It’s not like we were trying to make a statement or anything, it’s just that we never did them. Never had the inclination to. My Deathday Letter sort of changed that. I have nothing to lose. Which explains why I’m sitting around Medusa about to get silly, but not why Ronnie’s here. Not that it’s a big deal; it’s just a little out of character for her.

  “Ronnie,” I say, nudging her in the ribs. “I get why I’m doing this, but why are you?”

  “Because I want to be with you.”

  That should be the single hottest thing Ronnie—or any girl—has ever said to me. But there’s this droopy knot of sadness in her voice. Sure, she’s smiling at me, but her voice isn’t. Her voice is sitting in a bathtub, listening to some tight pants–bad hair emo band, fondling a straight razor. And I get the feeling that I’m the cause.

  Unfortunately, all the excitement has turned me into a quivering moron lacking the ability to form coherent sentences so all I can say is, “Cool.”

  “Hey,” calls Shane. “If you morons get too messed up to walk, I won’t carry you.” Too bad I know he’s lying.

  “Right then,” says Klaus. I realize that the CUDDLE kids are waiting on me. Not so patiently, either. “Fangen wir an.” Klaus gives us a tentative “all ready” sign, and I nod.

  “Stick with me, kid, and you’ll be all right,” says Hurricane, and kisses my cheek. It’s wet and I resist wiping it off with my shirt. “When he lights the top, suck on the tube. Not too much for your first time. Then hold the smoke in your lungs as long as you can before letting it go. Got it?”

  I nod, even though I have absolutely zero clue what she means. Inhaling smoke is so counterintuitive. Like right-handed wanking.

  Klaus sparks the cheapo green lighter over the top of Medusa, stares at the flame for a second, and plunges it into the weed. Hurricane, Klaus, and Ronnie all have their mouths on their tubes, and it’s maybe five seconds (though it feels like a hundred years) before I realize I’m supposed to be doing the same thing.

  I suck on the tube and I don’t feel anything. I hear a sound like bubbles, only I’m not blowing them, I’m sucking them. Which doesn’t make a tiny bit of sense. But before I can figure it all out, someone’s stabbing me in the chest. With a white-hot knife they soaked in acid. Holy crap!

  The tube’s on the ground and I start coughing. Not just coughing, though. This ain’t like I swallowed a sip of water wrong, it’s like I swallowed a whole lake wrong. With all the boats in it.

  Hurricane slaps my back a couple of times and Ronnie looks like she’s torn between laughing at me and hugging me.

  “Cap it off !” shouts Klaus.

  The smoke is still stabbing my lungs, even as my coughing subsides. Hurricane hands me the tube and puts my thumb over it as she exhales a purplish cloud of smoke.

  “You okay?” asks Ronnie. Her voice is strained with concern but her eyes flutter like she’s about to fall asleep.

  “Yeah,” I manage to croak. Klaus and Hurricane aren’t nearly as dopey-looking as Ronnie, but they’re close.

  “Ready?” asks Klaus. “It’s easier the second time.”

  “Yeah,” I croak again. It doesn’t feel like it can get any easier, though. Thankfully, I no longer feel like my lungs are being ice-picked by a stab-happy psycho, but I do feel like someone’s opened up my chest, pulled apart my ribs, and sanded them down.

  Klaus lights the pot for the second time and this time I’m ready with my tube. There’s still some smoke in the hookah from the last time, so the second I suck the bubbles, I feel it crawl into my chest. I don’t cough, but it’s hard not to. Not because this second time hurts, but because it feels like someone’s in my chest with a peacock feather tickling me from the inside.

  Time stands still, and I feel the smoke inside my chest, invading my cells with a box of Ding Dongs and a copy of Pineapple Express, and saying, “Who’s ready to par-tay?” And yes, the smoke says it exactly like that. Suck it.

  As I blow out the smoke, it leaves behind this feeling of weight loss, like I only weigh ten pounds and all my parts are trying to fight gravity and lift off the ground. Which is totally possible if I could just get some food. Damn, I’m hungry. Where my stomach was just a few seconds ago is a micro black hole that is going to devour anything and everything it can get its grubby little hands on.

  “Is this what being high feels like?” I whisper barely loud enough for anyone to hear.

  Hurricane snorts and laughs. I hear the others—Pete and GP and Nariko and Dru—all laugh too, which makes me laugh. I think.

  “Don’t make fun of the kid,”
says Klaus. “He asked a very serious question and he deserves a very serious answer.” Klaus leans toward me but it feels like he’s getting even farther away. “Does it feel like you can do anything, anything at all, so long as you don’t have to move?”

  Hurricane snorts again, which I find both hilarious and hot. The only problem is that my go-go-gadget arm is off the clock. “Don’t worry,” she says. “You’re high.”

  Ronnie shoves me and smiles. We both look at Shane, who’s still sitting in the corner, but he seems like a mile away.

  “Wieder einmal?” asks Klaus, and the funny thing is that I understand exactly what he said.

  “Yes, please.” Ronnie and I answer at the same time, and though I barely feel like I have the energy to laugh, I do have the energy to pick up the tube and take another hit.

  Once the others get their turn, Klaus goes into the kitchen and returns with snacks, at which point Shane rejoins the group. Shane can’t resist snacks. Especially not when the snacks are sour cream and onion chips, taquitos, salsa, soft-baked chocolate chip cookies, and loads of other bags filled with saturated fat and high-fructose goodness.

  Everything tastes good, and I don’t mean that in the usual way. It’s like someone took all the chips and cookies and foods I’ve had a billion times before and sprinkled them with pure, unadulterated awesome.

  Hurricane nudges me as I guide a bi-wing corn chip into my slack mouth. “How you feeling?”

  “Orange.”

  Ronnie laughs and Shane groans.

  “So what do you guys do, exactly?” asks Shane. “When you’re not baked out of your minds, that is.”

  Pete swallows a handful of this and chases it with a cup of that. “We try to figure out why people like your buddy here get Deathday Letters.”

  Shane shakes his head. “What do you mean? People get a letter, and then they die. It’s the way it’s always been.”

  “Right,” says Pete. “But who chooses who dies? Why your friend and not you?”

  Dru stretches like an awkward cat. “See, we think it’s a conspiracy.”

  Hurricane smiles at me, and for the first time I notice this ginormous Grand Canyon of a gap between her front teeth. “I personally think it’s a population control thing. Some shady world organization selects certain people to die, sends them the letter, and then kills them off.”

  Ronnie and I both glance at Shane, who’s barely controlling his desire to thumb his nose at us and say he told us so.

  I’m trying to piece together some kind of argument but my brain’s barely functioning so all I blurt out is, “That’s stupid. People die every day.”

  “Six or seven thousand in the States alone,” says GP. He’s flat on his back, watching the ceiling fan spin around and around and around an—

  Shane’s the master debater and there’s no way he’s gonna let some stoners out-argue him. Which is lucky because, in my current state, I couldn’t out-argue a can of tuna.

  “Guys, the government doesn’t know how people are going to die. They die from accidents and old age and disease. The government doesn’t give people diseases or trip them down the stairs.”

  Dru sits up. Seriously, she’s getting more catlike by the second. I’m just waiting for her to purr and sniff my butt. “Shane, can you be absolutely, one hundred percent sure?”

  GP also sits up. He touches his wavy Regis hair like he’s afraid it’s moved in the last thirty seconds. Before Shane can answer Dru, GP says, “Here’s a question for you. And I don’t want you to answer, not right away. I want you to think about it. Really think about it. Then answer.”

  We all stare at GP until Pete backhands his knee. “Yo. Ask him the question.”

  GP shakes his head. I’m afraid the question might have fallen on the floor but he finds it and says, “Right. So here it is: Do people get their Deathday Letters because they’re going to die, or do they die because they get their Deathday Letters?”

  Shane starts to answer, and he’s in full-on Exterminate! mode, but Klaus crumples his bag of chips and drowns Shane out, which is probably for the best.

  “There are other considerations,” Nariko says. “It’s not all about conspiracies and aliens.”

  “Then what’s it about?” asks Ronnie. There’s genuine interest in her eyes. All four of them.

  “For instance, if a prisoner on death row receives a Deathday Letter, should his final appeal be denied because of it?”

  Shane finally manages to wedge a word in. A few words actually. “Um. Yeah. The Deathday Letter proves he’s guilty.”

  GP sighs. “So young.”

  “All it proves,” says Pete, “is that he dies the next day. His guilt or innocence isn’t a factor, so his letter shouldn’t be either.”

  “I don’t get it,” I say. The sad thing is that I didn’t mean to say it, I was just thinking it and the words spilled out of my mouth. Mental note: Don’t drool.

  “Let me put it this way,” says Dru. “No one really gets what Deathday Letters are all about. No one’s ever tried to understand them. Everyone just accepts them as a fact of life, but what if we have some measure of control?”

  “Still lost.” Damn, didn’t mean to say that either.

  “Go back to the death row dude,” says Pete. “He’s on death row. He has an appeal. Then his letter comes, so the court automatically assumes that his appeal would have failed and they halt the process. The governor also takes it as a sign that he doesn’t need to review the case. There will be no pardon. How can you be sure that the death row inmate didn’t get his letter because the appeals process was going to be halted?”

  Shane’s eyes get big. Huge. Like, roll out of his head and bounce around on the floor gigantic. “You guys are talking about a causality loop. Do you even know what a causality loop is?”

  Nariko raises her hand and says, “I have a B.S. from MIT. Klaus is in Mensa.”

  Ronnie looks at me and I look at Ronnie and we both say, “I don’t know what a causality loop is.” Then we laugh. Okay, more like we girlishly giggle. I wouldn’t admit that if I weren’t dying.

  “They’re trying to say that the prisoner receives the Deathday Letter, which causes his final appeal to fail, which causes him to receive a Deathday Letter. It’s a loop. Or better yet, they’re trying to say that the Deathday Letter isn’t the cause of the final appeal failing, but rather that it’s the effect, even though the letter comes before the failed appeal.”

  “Oh,” I say. “Like how Ronnie broke up with me for being a jerk before I’d had a chance to be a jerk. Makes total sense.”

  Ronnie looks like I stabbed her in the back, but she doesn’t say anything.

  Shane tries to bury my comment by moving on as quickly as he possibly can. “Let’s just say it’s possible, which it isn’t. It would change everything.”

  All the CUDDLE kids nod.

  “Du sprichst mir aus der Seele!” Klaus throws his hands up in the air, causing a storm of chips to rain down on us. As I scramble to rescue a puffed cheese stick, Klaus goes on. “Even though they say they don’t, doctors factor in whether a person’s got a Deathday Letter or not. Why bother with a liver transplant if their letter says they die in twelve hours?”

  “But you can’t second-guess life,” says Ronnie finally. “You can’t stop a Deathday Letter, and even if you could, how do you know that trying isn’t what leads to your death? Best just to use your time wisely.”

  “What about soldiers?” asks GP. “Men and women preparing to go into battle? They get up and go because they know they’re going to die. Their commanding officers send them because they know they’re going to die. What if they chose not to go to battle that day?”

  “I don’t know,” says Ronnie. “Maybe a mortar shell blows up their barracks. That’s the point.”

  “What do you guys think you can do about it?” I ask. My letter feels like a rock in my pocket. “Do you think you can stop people from dying?”

  Hurricane strokes the back of m
y head. “No one can stop death, we just think that everyone should have the same chance to live.”

  Ronnie stands up. I look up at her, and she smiles and walks toward the kitchen. “Don’t they?” I say.

  “No,” says Nariko. “That’s what we’re trying to tell you. Take you for example. Why do you have to die?”

  I shrug. “Who knows? Maybe I have a tumor or maybe I fall down a well and Lassie’s not around to help.”

  “And you act like you shouldn’t even question it,” says Dru. “What if you do have a brain tumor? Would you even try to have it removed?”

  “I don’t—”

  “See?” says GP. “Most people don’t know either. And even if they did, they’d have a hard time finding a doctor who’d bother.”

  “Some things are just better left alone,” says Shane. “Not everyone needs to know the truth.

  “Well, that’s just stupid,” says Ronnie.

  I try to get a word in, but they’ve hijacked the conversation.

  “Stupid?” asks Shane. “Who are you to say what someone should or shouldn’t know? What if the truth just makes things worse? Did you ever think of that?”

  “We’re still talking about brain tumors, right?” says GP, but Ronnie keeps right on trucking over his words.

  “Shitty truth is better than a lie.” Ronnie seems like she’s suddenly aware that we’re all still here. “I’d rather know I had a brain tumor than die not knowing.”

  “Calm down,” I say, but their voices keep rising.

  “That’s just you,” shouts Shane. “Not everyone believes the same things.”

  “I bet Ollie would,” says Ronnie. “You’d want to know, wouldn’t you?”

  “You don’t have to answer that, Ollie.”

  “Guys!” I yell. Shane and Ronnie both hang their heads.

  “What, Ollie?” says Ronnie. She looks at me through her lashes.

  “What the hell is going on with you two?”

  “Nothing,” says Shane. “Just debating the finer points of Deathday Letters.”