“Rufus, I regret to inform you that sometime in the next twenty-three hours you’ll be meeting an untimely death. While there isn’t anything I can do to suspend that, I’m calling to inform you of your options for the day. First of all, how are you doing? It took a while for you to answer. Is everything okay?”
He wants to know how I’m doing, yeah right. I can hear it in the stunted way he asked me, he doesn’t actually care about me any more than he does the other Deckers he gotta call tonight. These calls are probably monitored and he’s not trying to lose his job by speeding through this.
“I don’t know how I’m doing.” I squeeze my phone so I don’t throw it against the wall painted with little white and brown kids holding hands underneath a rainbow. I look over my shoulder and Peck is still face-first on the ground as Malcolm and Tagoe stare at me; they better make sure he doesn’t run away before we can figure out what we’re doing with him. “Just tell me my options.” This should be good.
Victor tells me the forecast for the day (supposed to rain before noon and later on as well if I make it that long), special festivals I have zero interest in attending (especially not a yoga class on the High Line, rain or no rain), formal funeral arrangements, and restaurants with the best Decker discounts if I use today’s code. I zone out on everything else ’cause I’m anxious on how the rest of my End Day is gonna play out.
“How do you guys know?” I interrupt. Maybe this dude will take pity on me and I can clue in Tagoe and Malcolm on this huge mystery. “The End Days. How do you know? Some list? Crystal ball? Calendar from the future?” 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. There are mad things wrong with that theory, but I don’t have time to comment on them right now.
“I’m afraid that information isn’t available to heralds either,” Victor claims. “We’re equally curious, but it’s not knowledge we need to perform our job.” Another flat answer. I bet you anything he knows and can’t say if he wants to keep his job.
Screw this guy. “Yo, Victor, be a person for one minute. I don’t know if you know, but I’m seventeen. Three weeks from my eighteenth birthday. Doesn’t it piss you off that I’ll never go to college? Get married? Have kids? Travel? Doubt it. You’re just chilling on your little throne in your little office because you know you got another few decades ahead of you, right?”
Victor clears his throat. “You want me to be a person, Rufus? You want me to get off my throne and get real with you? Okay. An hour ago I got off the phone with a woman who cried over how she won’t be a mother anymore after her four-year-old daughter dies today. She begged me to tell her how she can save her daughter’s life, but no one has that power. 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. Rufus, I feel for you, I do. But I’m not at fault for your death, and I unfortunately have many more of these calls to make tonight. Can you do me a solid and cooperate?”
Damn.
I cooperate for the rest of the call, even though this dude has no business telling me anyone else’s, but all I can think about is the mother whose daughter will never attend the school right behind me. 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 can’t tell you who hangs up first, but it doesn’t matter. The damage is done—will be done. Today is my End Day, a straight-up Rufus Armageddon. I don’t know how this is gonna go down. I’m praying I don’t drown like my parents and sis. The only person I’ve done dirty is Peck, for real, so I’m counting on not getting shot, but who knows, misfires happen too. The how doesn’t matter as much as what I do before it goes down, but not knowing is still freaking shaking me; you only die once, after all.
Maybe Peck is gonna be responsible for this.
I walk back over to the three of them, fast. I pick Peck up by the back of his collar and then slam him against the brick wall. Blood slides from an open wound on his forehead, and I can’t believe this dude threw me over the edge like this. He should’ve never run his mouth about all the reasons Aimee didn’t want me anymore. If that’d never gotten back to me, my hand wouldn’t be around his throat right now, getting him even more scared than I am.
“You didn’t ‘beat’ me, okay? Aimee didn’t split with me because of you, so get that out of your head right now. She loved me and we got complicated, and she would’ve taken me back eventually.” I know this is legit—Malcolm and Tagoe think so too. I lean in on Peck, looking him dead-on in his only good eye. “I better never see you again for the rest of my life.” Yeah, yeah. Not much life left. But this dude is a fucking clown and might get funny. “You feel me?”
Peck nods.
I let go of his throat and grab his phone out of his pocket. I hurl it against the wall and the screen is totaled. Malcolm stomps it out.
“Get the hell out of here.”
Malcolm grabs my shoulder. “Don’t let him go. He’s got those connections.”
Peck slides along the wall, nervous, like he’s scaling across some windows high up in the city.
I shake Malcolm off my shoulder. “I said get the hell out of here.”
Peck takes off, running in a dizzying zigzag. He never looks back once to see if we’re coming for him or stops for his comics and backpack.
“I thought you said he’s got friends in some gang,” Malcolm says. “What if they come for you?”
“They’re not a real gang, and he was the gang reject. I got no reason to get scared of a gang that let Peck in. He can’t even call them or Aimee, we took care of that.” I wouldn’t want him reaching out to Aimee before I can. I gotta explain myself, and, I don’t know, she may not wanna see me if she figures out what I did, End Day or not.
“Death-Cast can’t call him either,” Tagoe says, his neck twitching twice.
“I wasn’t gonna kill him.”
Malcolm and Tagoe are quiet. They saw the way I was laying into him, like I had no off button.
I can’t stop shaking.
I could’ve killed him, even if I didn’t mean to. I don’t know if I would’ve been able to live with myself or not if I did end up snuffing him gone. Nah, that’s a lie and I know it, I’m just trying to be hard. But I’m not hard. I’ve barely been able to live with myself for surviving something my family didn’t—something that wasn’t even my fault. There’s no way in hell I would’ve been chill with myself for beating someone to death.
I storm toward our bikes. My handles are tangled in Tagoe’s wheel from after we chased Peck here, jumping off our bikes to tackle him. “You guys can’t follow me,” I say, picking my bike up. “You get that, right?”