“Nah, we’re with you, just—”
“Not happening,” I interrupt. “I’m a ticking time bomb, and even if you’re not blowing up when I do, you might get burned—maybe literally.”
“You’re not ditching us,” Malcolm says. “Where you go, we go.”
Tagoe nods, his head jerking to the right, like his body is betraying his instinct to follow me. He nods again, no twitch this time.
“You two are straight-up shadows,” I say.
“That because we’re black?” Malcolm asks.
“Because you’re always following me,” I say. “Loyal to the end.”
The end.
That shuts us up. We get on our bikes and ride off the curb, the wheels bumping and bumping. This is the wrong day to have left my helmet behind.
Tagoe and Malcolm can’t stay with me the entire day, I know that. But we’re Plutos, bros from the same foster home, and we don’t turn our backs on each other.
“Let’s go home,” I say.
And we out.
MATEO
1:06 a.m.
I’m back in my bedroom—so much for never returning here again—and I immediately feel better, like I just got an extra life in a video game where the final boss was kicking my ass. I’m not naive about dying. I know it’s going to happen. But I don’t have to rush into it. I’m buying myself more time. A longer life is all I’ve ever wanted, and I have the power to not shoot that dream in the foot by walking out that front door, especially this late at night.
I jump into bed with the kind of relief you only find when you’re waking up for school and realize it’s Saturday. I throw my blanket around my shoulders, hop back on my laptop, and—ignoring the email from Death-Cast with the time-stamped receipt of my call with Andrea—continue reading yesterday’s CountDowners post from before I got the call.
The Decker was twenty-two-year-old Keith. His statuses didn’t provide much context about his life, only that he’d been a loner who preferred runs with his golden retriever Turbo instead of social outings with his classmates. He was looking to find Turbo a new home because he was pretty sure his father would give ownership of Turbo to the first available person, which could be anyone because Turbo is so beautiful. Hell, I would’ve adopted him even though I’m severely allergic to dogs. But before Keith gave up his dog, he and Turbo were running through their favorite spots one last time and the feed stopped somewhere in Central Park.
I don’t know how Keith died. I don’t know if Turbo made it out alive or if he died with Keith. I don’t know what would’ve been preferred for Keith or Turbo. I don’t know. I could look into any muggings or murders in Central Park yesterday around 5:40 p.m., when the feed stopped, but for my sanity this is better left a mystery. Instead I open up my music folder and play Space Sounds.
A couple years ago some NASA team created this special instrument to record the sounds of different planets. I know, it sounded weird to me too, especially because of all the movies I’ve watched telling me about how there isn’t sound in space. Except there is, it just exists in magnetic vibrations. NASA converted the sounds so the human ear could hear them, and even though I was hiding out in my room, I stumbled on something magical from the universe—something those who don’t follow what’s trending online would miss out on. 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. Neptune sounds like a fast current, Saturn has this terrifying howling to it that I never listen to anymore, and the same goes for Uranus except there are harsh winds whistling that sound like spaceships firing lasers at each other. The sounds of the planets make for a great conversation starter if you have people to talk to, but if you don’t, they make for great white noise when you’re going to sleep.
I distract myself from my End Day by reading more CountDowners feeds and by playing the Earth track, which always reminds me of soothing birdsong and that low sound whales make, but also feels a little bit off, something suspicious I can’t put my finger on, a lot like Pluto, which is both seashell and snake hiss.
I switch to the Neptune track.
RUFUS
1:18 a.m.
We’re riding to Pluto in the dead of night.
“Pluto” is the name we came up with for the foster home we’re all staying at since our families died or turned their backs on us. Pluto got demoted from planet to dwarf planet, but we’d never treat each other as something lesser.
It’s been four months that I’ve been without my people, but Tagoe and Malcolm have been getting cozy with each other a lot longer. Malcolm’s parents died in a house fire caused by some unidentified arsonist, and whoever it was, Malcolm hopes he’s burning in hell for taking away his parents when he was a thirteen-year-old troublemaker no one else wanted except the system, and barely even them. Tagoe’s mom bounced when he was a kid, and his pops ran off three years ago when he couldn’t keep up with the bills. A month later Tagoe found out his pops had committed suicide, and homeboy still hasn’t shed a tear over the guy, never even asked how or where he died.
Even before I found out I was dying, I knew home, Pluto, wasn’t gonna be home for me much longer. My eighteenth birthday is coming up—same for Tagoe and Malcolm, who both hit eighteen in November. I was college bound like Tagoe, and we’d figured Malcolm would crash with us as he gets his shit together. Who knows what’s what now, and I hate that I already have an out to these problems. But right now, all that matters is we’re still together. I got Malcolm and Tagoe by my side, like they’ve been from day one when I got to the home. Whether it was for family time or bitching sessions, they were always at my left and right.
I wasn’t planning on stopping, but I pull over when I see the church I came to a month after the big accident—my first weekend out with Aimee. The building is massive, with off-white bricks and maroon steeples. I’d love to take a picture of the stained-glass windows, but the flash might not catch it right. Doesn’t matter anyway. If a picture is Instagram worthy, I slap on the Moon filter for that classic black-and-white effect. The real problem is I don’t think a photo of a church taken by my nonbelieving ass is the best last thing to leave behind for my seventy followers. (Hashtag not happening.)
“What’s good, Roof?”
“This is the church where Aimee played piano for me,” I say. Aimee is pretty Catholic, but she wasn’t pushing any of that on me. We’d been talking about music, and I mentioned digging some of the classical stuff Olivia used to put on when she was studying, and Aimee wanted me to hear it live—and she wanted to be the one who played it for me. “I have to tell her I got the alert.”