Denton Little's Deathdate (13 page)

“Goodbyes are hard,” Taryn says, completely misreading the look on my face.

I nod.

“But,” she continues, “so, you really weren't hanging out with Veronica?”

Damn. I thought I had been saved by Aunt Deana, but Taryn's persistent. If I'm gonna be interrogated, I decide to return the favor. “Who were you texting before?”

“What?” She squirms.

“You were texting. During Veronica's story.”

“Oh, that, nobody, it…it wasn't a big deal.”

“Nobody?”

“No, well…It was Phil, okay?”

Rage sneaks out from a trapdoor and floods my entire body. It's not rational, but Phil has that effect on me.

“You're texting that jerk-bag during my Sitting?”

“I see what you're doing, how you're flipping this away from your googly eyes to make this about me and Phil.” She's smart. “There's nothing happening with me and Phil, Denton, and there never will be.”

“So what'd he say?”

“Hey, my babies,” Paolo says, appearing behind the couch, his arms around both of us. “Life is precious; let's not argue.” He's always had a keen friend-in-distress radar.

“You're right,” I say. I dive into the shiny magenta bag sitting at Taryn's feet and flail around in there until my hand finds the plastic rectangle it's looking for.

“Stop! Get out of my bag, Dent! Seriously!”

I keep her at bay with one arm as I check the messages on her phone. Paolo stands back with his hands up, trying to disengage.

There, at the top of Taryn's queue of texts, is what I'm looking for:

Fucking Phil.

“Whoa,” Paolo says, looking over my shoulder. “That dude is cold.”

“Yes, he's a total jerk,” Taryn says. “Which you'll notice is what I told him in my text back, that he's a jerk and that you're still totally alive.”

“Oh wow, thank you for that bold display of loyalty. So glad you told
Philly
I'm alive.”

“That's old. I just never got around to changing his
name back to Phil in my phone. Because I don't care about him!”

“Then why did you text back?”

“Aarrgh! I'm just trying to do the right thing here, okay? My boyfriend is dying, and I'm trying to do the right thing.” Tears are streaming down Taryn's face, and I feel bad and angry and tired as she propels herself off the couch and out of the room.

“Taryn, wait…,” I say halfheartedly, even though I genuinely want to stop her. Millie sits across the room, having witnessed this whole scene, her eyes still focused in my direction, as if I'm a semi-engaging movie.

“Your neck is purple,” she says.

I lean back on the couch and close my eyes.

“Are you dead yet?” Paolo asks.

I wake up to the sound of Phil shouting outside.

I hadn't wanted to fall asleep. Sleeping during your Sitting means you might die in slumberland, so
holy crap, don't do it!
But it turns out deathdates are kinda exhausting.

One moment, you're pissed at your girlfriend and your dad; the next, your eyelids are sandbags. I'd draped a throw blanket over most of myself—so my parents wouldn't see the small bit of ominous splotch that had made its first public appearance—and reluctantly fallen into a strange cycle of groggy wakefulness and short bursts of sleep.

I awoke at one point, still unsettled by the surprise appearance of Brian Blum at my funeral. Couldn't he have reached out first by phone? Or email? It occurred to me that maybe he
had
reached out via email. As my deathdate got nearer, I had cut myself off from everything Internet and put up a vacation responder (
Hey, hey, everybody! I'm done with email! Yes! It may have something to do with
my upcoming deathdate. Or maybe I'm just one of those cool people who disassociate themselves from all technology to make some statement about society. No, it's the first thing. If you wanna tell me something, call me on my cell! And/or come to my funeral on Thursday! Love, Denton
) because, really, what's important in life? Whenever I hear of those rare cases where people died while checking their email—in spite of the fact that they knew it was their deathdate—it makes me incredibly sad. Your last time on earth, and you're staring at a little screen with words on it?

But in that moment, that was exactly what I felt I needed to do.

And there was indeed a message with an address I didn't recognize and a subject line that read
for denton
—
IMPORTANT
. I got excited, as one does when faced with an all-caps personalized message. But it was just spam encouraging me to use Viagra for
huger erections! !!
No thanks, happydinosaur@​happydinosaur.​com! My erections are perfectly huge already.

There was also an email from Dave Chu, a close friend of Paolo's and mine, who graduated last year and is now at NYU. He apologized for not being able to make it to my funeral. He had a final he couldn't miss.

But nothing from Blum. Otherwise, my in-box was filled with notifications from my Facebook wall, which was completely blowing up. That was nice. I know, a series of completely superficial messages (
Gonna miss you!
or
Love you, Dent!
or
RIP DENTON!!!
) ultimately means very little, but it made me feel like People Care.

Just as I was about to turn the screen off, I noticed—stuck amongst the nettles and thickets of homogeneous
four-word goodbyes—an email from the government. The subject line read
Your deathdate
, and it was a standard form letter, apologizing for my upcoming loss (of life) and thanking me for my time as a US citizen.

Niceties out of the way, it proceeded to go into a checklist of things Uncle Sam wanted to make sure I'd handled before I took my leave: Had I handed over my ID, passport, birth and death certificates, etc., to a trusted loved one or stored them in easy-to-find places? Had I given permission to have my organs donated, if that was my preference? And then lots of questions about my will and my dependents and any student loan debts I might have, queries I could assume didn't apply to me based on my inability to understand them. (My parents always said that my bank account—$312.88—and my belongings—even with my extensive movie collection—didn't merit creating a will. I tried to write one up just for dramatic effect, but then I found myself thinking way too hard about who should get what, which was making me sad.) The email was signed by one Karen Corrigan, Secretary of the US Department of Life Conclusions (USDLC), and my last thought before I fell back into sorta sleep was that her closing (
Finest regards and thank you, Karen Corrigan
) was irritating.

The next time my eyelids raised—what could have been minutes, seconds, or hours later—Taryn had made her way under the crook of my right arm, snuggled up against my chest. I registered her presence like I do sunlight, aware of a pleasant, warm feeling without thinking too much about its source. My eyelids lowered.

And then: indecipherable, aggressive shouts from the front lawn.

And now: I am awake, my dreams have evaporated, and I am confused.

“Wha?” Taryn says as she stirs.

“Did you hear that?” I say.

“Hear what?” Her eyes have the look of someone who is only sixty percent awake.

“I don't know, it sounded like Phil shouting.”

“You heard that, too?”

“Yes, that's what I'm saying.”

“Oh. Yeah,” she says. “Oh no.”

My stepmom appears in the doorframe, looking concerned. She lifts the dimmer switch on the family room lights, which has, at some point in the past hours, been lowered. I can see Veronica and Millie just behind her in the kitchen, also seeming freshly awakened by the garbled ramblings outside.

“What is this, Denton?” my stepmom asks.

“I don't really know, Mom.”

My dad, Paolo, Felix, and Grandpa Sid must still be asleep.

“You awake in there?” Phil slur-yells from outside. “Wait, no, I mean: you ALIVE in there?”

In her semi-alert state, Taryn slumps forward on the couch, face in hands. “Ohmigod,” she says.

“If you aren't dead yet, come out here and face me,” Phil yells. “Like a man!”

“I'm so sorry,” Taryn says through her hands.

Is Phil actually outside challenging me to a duel? Maybe I'm still dreaming.

Something hard, maybe a rock, plings off one of the front windows of the living room. “COME AWN!”

I'm not dreaming.

“Do you know who that is?” my stepmom asks.

“I do, yeah. It's Phil, from my cross-country team.”

“Ooh,” my stepmom realizes. “He's the one you talked about during your eulogy, isn't he? The one you called a tooler?”

“A tool, yeah.”

“And he used to be going with you, right, Taryn?”

“Well, yeah,” Taryn says, letting her hands slide back down to her lap. “I guess you could say it like that.”

“Okay,” my stepmom says, decisive and sure as she strides across the family room toward the front door.

“Whoa, whoa.” I'm up on my feet and blocking her path to the door. “Come on.”

“I'm going to tell him to leave.”

“Well, that's great, but…”

“But what?” my stepmom says.

“I dunno, it's a little, like, embarrassing that my mom has to go out and fight my battles for me.”

“Denton. You're the one person in this house guaranteed to die in the next few hours. This is just common sense.” I was gonna suggest that none of us should go out there, but now this feels like a challenge. “Please move, sweetheart,” my stepmom says. “This'll be quick.” But my adrenaline faucet is on, and I'm feeling fairly ferocious.

“No, Mom, sorry.”

She looks at me with a brew of anger, defiance, and shock that I'm not instantly deferring to her.

We stand face to face, neither of us willing to budge.

“HEL-LOOOO?” Phil shouts. “Are you dead or just deaf?”

“I'll go talk to him,” Taryn says, rising from the couch. “This is my fault anyway.”

“Yeah, like I'm gonna let you go out there alone with him,” I say. “We can both go.”

“Dent—”

“Don't argue with me on this, Tar.”

My stepmom, in a masterful feat of agility, wriggles behind me to block the front door. She bolts it shut as a new shower of rocks cascades against the house.

“More where that came from,” Phil says, followed by some angry muttering, which, under other circumstances, would crack me up.

“No no no,” my stepmom says. “None of us are going out there, 'kay? We're going to pick up the phone and call the police.”

Yay, that's what I wanted to do in the first place! “Cool. Good idea, Mom,” I say.

“That's not necessary, Mrs. Little. He's just drunk.” I hate hearing Taryn talk that way, like she knows him so well. “Really, I can go out there.”

“Nope. Sorry, Taryn.” My stepmom smiles sympathetically as she slowly shakes her head side to side.

“I guess the
LITTLE
in your name is because you're a LITTLE PUSSY BOY!”

I'm officially outraged that this guy is even a small part of my last night in the world.

“Sorry, Mom,” I say. “Come on, Taryn.”

I lead the way toward the back door.

“Denton! No! No!” my stepmom calls after me as we pass through the kitchen, through the laundry nook, and out the door.

“Where's he going?” I hear my now-awake dad say.

“You are a coward, dude!” Phil yells from the front yard, his words getting louder as we curve around the side of the house. “Taryn! Are you still in there? Send your boy out! Unless he's DEAD!”

“I'm not dead, dude.” We emerge from the shadows next to the house as the sun is just beginning to rise. I imagine it looks pretty cool. “Calm down.”

Phil, however, is visibly jolted by my emergence from somewhere other than the front door. He staggers a couple of steps to regain his balance. He's about as drunk as I've ever seen another human being. Probably a pretty close approximation of where I was at two nights ago.

“Taryn, get back inside!” he yells. “This is about me and…” He points messily at me.

“Phil, you shouldn't be here,” Taryn says in her sweetest voice.

“GET THE HELL INSIDE!” Phil says, bending over and awkwardly fumbling around in the grass. As Taryn and I exchange a confused look, Phil rises up, his hands gripping a rifle.

My stomach drops.

Whatthefuck.

“Yeah, okay?” Phil says, pointing the long neck of the big brown rifle at me. “See why you should go inside, baby?”

“Ohmigod, Phil,” Taryn says, panic-breathing. “Don't, stop, don't.”

“Go.”

Taryn's eyes are drenched in apology as she slowly backs up.

“Yeah, go inside, Tar,” I say, surprised I'm able to find words.

“Shut up, man!” Phil yells. “I'll use this!”

“Whoa!” My hands involuntarily fly up into the air. “Okay, okay, chill out, dude.”

“Oh, Mr. Cool over here. ‘Be chill,
man
.' ” Phil's face is a sweaty mess. He looks mildly insane. “ ‘I'm Denton, and I'm so chill, dude.' ”

The front door swings open, and Taryn slides in.

“I don't want anybody else coming out here either!” Phil says.

It's just the two of us now. I can't believe this is how it's going to happen.

“I could kill you right now, you know,” Phil says. “I could be the reason today is your deathdate.”

I feel like we're playing a game of pretend, reenacting something we've seen in dozens of movies. We stand in the early-summer air on my front lawn, me with my hands up and him with his gun pointed at me, awkwardly tremoring as he tries to keep it steady. It's the first gun I've seen in real life. A subtle breeze grazes my scalp and the back of my neck. I hear Phil breathing.

I make a split-second decision to apologize for declaring Phil a tool during my eulogy.

“Look, Phil, I just want to—”

“You guys have sex?” Phil asks.

The question catches me off guard, and at first I think I've misheard him.

“What guys?”

“Did you and Taryn have sex? Do it? Have
intercourse
?”

So this isn't about being shamed in front of his classmates. It's about Taryn.

Well. Which answer will get me the least shot?

“No, man, no.”

“You did! I know you did!”

“Look, Phil, I'm gonna be dead one way or the other in the next eighteen hours, so I mean—”

“That's not the point!”