Original -- The Truth of It
Title: The Truth of It
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 4,272
Prompt: contest rules came in the form of an outline: primary character hurts secondary character; they make up; plot twist; etc.
Warnings: slightly dark
Summary: In which it comes true.
Author's Note: eltea is behind everything that is good about this story. XD
THE TRUTH OF IT
I was six when I found out how I was going to die.
I reflected later that I almost wished it had been more melodramatic. I like a bit of melodrama, on the right occasion, and that would have been perfect: if I’d somehow wandered into a fortune teller’s cottage-one of those palm readers who works out of her home. If she’d been one of those ageless women who could have been twenty and could have been forty-five, and if she’d worn a dark maroon scarf around her hair, and if the draping beads around her neck had clinked as she moved. If she’d murmured, “Lost, little one?” and extended a long-fingered hand choked with heavy rings and touched my forehead, then recoiled like she’d been burned. If she’d set that hand, trembling now, on my shoulder, leaned down, and whispered it in my ear.
But no.
I was on a walk with my parents, and I was dawdling and dancing around the cracks in the sidewalk, which were many and varied because of the tree roots that had swelled beneath the cement. It was right by the old folks’ home, and I had my arms out for balance, and I was wearing the tiered purple skirt that I loved more than life itself, and I glanced at a patch of yellow grass on the lawn, and I knew.
I accepted it, of course, in that way that children do. There was no question of it, so I asked no questions about it. It hardly mattered anyway; there were timed math tests to worry about-subtraction was a right pill, and I was struggling with it. I was thirteen before I figured out that I ought to panic and therefore did, because at thirteen, “ought” was “must.” This synonym phenomenon also explained the way I dressed, the way I decorated my bedroom, and the fact that I alienated my parents by being a presumptuous brat for no better reason than to be able to report that I’d picked the fights I had.
In any case, by sixteen, I’d become relatively accustomed to the idea that my irreversible doom was imminent and all that. It was part of that white noise background humming of the unpleasant realities of life, like “My parents are divorced” or “My grandpa has cancer.” Only mine was “I’m going to die soon.”
Y’know. The usual.
But nowadays… now that the “imminent” was more prominent… I was starting to wonder. And to doubt.
All of this flickered through my head like one of those ancient film reels as I looked at the wide-eyed girl standing on my doorstep.
She stood center on the bristly Welcome mat, the dark hair draping over her shoulders shining like something out of a shampoo commercial, her thumbs tucked into her pockets, a tiny smile touching her lips. She was flanked by two cherubim, the right-hand one an eleven-year-old boy possessed of a head of thick, springy, chocolate-colored curls and a frown; the leftward a seven-year-old girl wearing a pink bucket hat over short, straight hair like cornsilk.
I’d encountered Veronica DeLogio-or Nicki, as she shyly insisted-more than a few times at school in the couple years since she’d moved in next door, but I had long since filed her away in the “acquaintance” category. Most people met that fate; the vague but persistent fear that I’d see and know too much about anyone I built a connection with-for I did know things, all sorts of things, about people and events and the world, and I absorbed them-had left me something of a loner, though the stigma didn’t bother me. Maintaining friendships required a great deal of work, and if I could avoid both that drudgery and the eventual disappointment of revealing the pitted, seething soul behind apparent virtue… well, who was I to complain?
Nicki, who had received more than her share of crap from advocates of the double K, shifted her weight.
“Sorry,” she began, “but our Frisbee went over the fence…”
“No worries,” I said, though I knew and had known for a good decade that there were many things to worry about. “Here, come on in.” I backed out of the way and ushered them in, leading them through the labyrinth of pathways that snaked between furniture like something out of a magazine ad. It was my mom’s fault. She was never home, so she had no problem with the occasional return to a living room too perfect to be palatable. The sad truth was that we essentially inhabited a housing advertisement. Or maybe a real estate display. I had evidence to support a few different theories.
“This is really nice,” Nicki announced, smiling so strongly that I almost believed she wasn’t just saying it to be nice.
We trooped through the kitchen and out to the yard, where a neon green Frisbee lay, guileless and incongruent, on the even emerald of the tended grass.
“There it is,” Nicki noted unnecessarily, smiling still. Her siblings lingered at the edge of the lawn, glancing at the wicker chairs and the hulking grill, as she sauntered forward and bent to retrieve the Frisbee. With it in hand, she turned to me again, her grin more tentative now. “D’you want to play, too? We’re just next door.”
We were all aware that I knew precisely where they lived; I was fairly sure they’d caught me watching them in their backyard from my bedroom window more than once.
Something in me, however, crushed my better judgment under a work boot heel and blew on the fragments, scattering them to the winds.
“That’d be cool,” I said.
I’d expected it to be fun, but I hadn’t expected my ribs to ache for hours afterward from all the laughing. Evan and Melly were total dolls once they’d warmed up to you a bit, and Nicki was… Nicki. She was affable and effervescent, and her contentment was contagious. All of a sudden, I was appreciating things like the afternoon sunlight slanting through the trees and the rich robin’s-egg-blue of the sky overhead. It was all very histrionic and uncanny, which didn’t seem like a promising start.
I would have had even more fun if there hadn’t been, in the back of my head, an implacable voice muttering over and over that I was going to die in ten days.
That’ll spoil a good mood for ya.
When the sun went down, I knew it was time to hightail it out of there. I wouldn’t really be missed at home for a few more hours, but imposing on the DeLogio’s dinner wouldn’t exactly ingratiate me to them. And, quite in spite of myself, I wanted them to like me, Nicki in particular. Even with everything that I knew.
At the heart of things, though, I reflected as Nicki walked me politely back to my door, I didn’t know much. I knew that I had ten more days (and a few hours of this one to top them off), and I knew that Nicki DeLogio was involved somehow, and I knew that it was going to be messy. I felt like I’d had more details when I’d first found out, but by now, years later, it was a whole lot hazier, which basically meant… nothing and everything.
As I fought my keys out of my pocket, and as they resisted admirably, I mustered up a smile.
“You walk to school, right?”
This was one of those utterly insipid statement-questions, which are useless as questions-since you obviously already know that the answer is “Yes” and all you’re seeking is details-but prove sadly indispensible for broaching new topics.
Nicki, of course, played along, because she was a good and charitable human being.
“Yeah, I do,” she confirmed.
I chewed on the inside of my cheek for a second, because, for that second, everything felt horribly, terribly, gut-wrenchingly wrong, deep down and throughout and all over.
What fun.
Then I shook it off, just in time to salvage social convention from the nefarious clutches of an egregiously long pause.
“I drive,” I told Nicki, motioning towards the garage that concealed my flashy sedan. “I could drive you, too, if you wanted.”
Nicki beamed. “That’d be fun!” she decided. “You want me to come over tomorrow morning at… Well, when do you leave?”
And so it was that, at an obscenely early hour the next morning, Nicki was again on the doorstep, lighting a dim world with her smile.
I, of course, looked like something out of a low-budget zombie movie, which was invariably the case before noon. And sometimes well after.
“Have you had breakfast?” I prompted, waving her in with one hand and covering a yawn with the other.
“Yup,” Nicki replied cheerfully. That was one of the many extraordinary things about Nicki DeLogio: she made general happiness a beautiful disease, rather than the wretched plague it was in the hands of the unforgivably perky.
“Let me grab something,” I said, “and we can get going.”
True to my word, I stuffed a piece of biscotti into my mouth and plucked my keys from the largely-ornamental hook above the counter.
Midway into my crunching gustatory journey through the biscotti, I glanced at my copilot.
“So how’re you?” I asked.
“A little nervous,” Nicki responded, grinning slightly bashfully now. “I’ve got this huge French test, and I’m just not sure I’m ready for it.”
“Ah, mais oui,” I countered. “Really, though…” The words came. “I’m willing to bet you know more than you think.”
Nicki examined her folded hands with a little smile. “My dad used to say that.”
I know. “Really?”
She nodded.
I opened my mouth to ask, then shut it, because there’s no decorous way to ask somebody why she was using the past tense talking about her father. Weird, isn’t it, how much of life revolves around what’s decorous, rather than what’s smart, or realistic, or right?
But Nicki… got it. Got that allaying the curiosity and preventing speculation was sometimes worth a moment of uncomfortable silence.
“He…” She looked out the window and twisted her fingers around each other. “…passed away a couple years ago.”
So then we had our moment of uncomfortable silence.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said.
She found the fortitude for another smile. “Thank you.”
I tapped my fingers on the steering wheel a little and paid attention to the road. Much more attention than usual.
I picked Nicki up by the gym nine minutes after school let out. Kind of funny how you notice a number when it correlates with how many days you’ve got left to live.
Not that you would know, or anything. At least, I hope not.
I played my favorite album on the ride back, and Nicki sang along to every word. And God, did I hate the lava-like warmth welling in the pit of my stomach, sizzling eagerly through my veins. It was over before it had even begun. Wasn’t it always?
All the same, I hadn’t expected it to happen that fast. Maybe it was just the whole someone-actually-caring-whether-I-lived-or-died vibe. Ironically enough.
The drill was the same the next morning, but for the fact that we drowned out the music talking about books-you know, those things with the paper and the ink? Yeah, those. Turns out we had a lot in common there, too. It made me nervous.
For three days, everything went like a dream. We lazed around my bedroom or hers, talking over the music; threw the Frisbee with Evan and Melly about a thousand times; giggled over this, that, and the other. Then came the actual dream.
I was rolling two dice, over and over, on what I somehow knew was a craps table, though I’d never actually played. Only the felt was red, and the only illumination came from black lights. I didn’t know how to play the game, and I was sweating cold and trying to fling the dice against the far wall of the table. There wasn’t anyone else around, but the air was heavy, and there was a sort of guarantee that if I didn’t win the game, something would happen. Something truly and wholly disastrous. So I kept throwing, perfectly round beads of freezing sweat rolling down my spine, and every time, the dice added up to six. Six days left to live.
My eyes snapped open on morning T minus six, and I realized that I absolutely did not want to die.
I also realized that there was a strikingly simple solution to this problem.
When Nicki knocked on the door the next morning-she always knocked; she seemed to think ringing the doorbell was too jarring in the mornings, which was completely accurate as far as I was concerned-I opened it and tried to quell the hot bile rising in my throat at the thought of what I was about to do.
And that was to lie through my teeth and wound an innocent.
“I-can’t-drive you to school anymore,” I said.
Nicki stared at me. “Wh-”
“Sorry. I just can’t.” I scrambled mentally, trying to find someone else to blame, hearing the hint of strain in my voice. “’Cause my mom doesn’t want me hanging out with you. ’Cause she says you’re new money. And that we’re old money. It’s, like, archaic, but that’s what she says.”
Nicki’s eyes widened, then welled. I wanted the six days to disappear and bring me straight to Ground Zero.
“I understand,” she whispered.
No, I thought at her retreating back, my heart wrecking itself on the cliffs of my ribs, you don’t.
I ended up staying home that day anyway. Sick. Mentally unstable. Only had a few more days of existence. Sounded like a more constructive use of my time than staring at a whiteboard disappearing under ambiguous diagrams.
I listened to loud music and cried a lot. You know. All that depression stuff.
After about four hours of unabated misery (except for bathroom breaks), I managed to disentangle myself from my comforter and rustled up a notepad.
Things I Want to Do Before I Die, I wrote.
1. Go skydiving
2. See the pyramids at Giza
3. Tour Europe
4. Publish a novel
5. See the moment that the realization dawns upon my first-born that s/he is stuck with me forever
6. Fall in love
It looked like I had an item for each day. Well, that wasn’t too bad, so long as I got an early start. And defied biology. And assembled my flight schedules very creatively…
But didn’t it take practically a day just to get to Egypt?
Yeah, I was screwed.
My cell phone vibrated on the nightstand like a thing alive. I snatched it from the tabletop and wedged my finger into the crack to flip it open.
Are you okay? Nicki had texted.
I stared at those pixels until the phone screen went dark, pressed a button, and stared at them again. Then I closed my phone, picked up my list, and crossed off the last goal.
That done, I started my biography, making sure to write legibly so that they could decipher it for publication and assign it as an outside reading book for local English classes. Legions of kids would one day resent me for having the gall to jot it down and leave a mark.
After about an hour, that got boring, and I decided I’d work on my posthumous bestseller when I had the purest sort of inspiration: hysterical, last-minute panic.
I grabbed my phone, tossed it from hand to hand, and then flipped it open and dialed.
Nicki picked up immediately.
“Hey, are you okay? I didn’t see you at school today, and I got worried.”
“I’m okay,” I told her. “Just taking a mental health day.” In truth of fact, that was essentially truth and fact.
“Are you sick?” she asked.
“Nah.”
“D’you-d’you wanna come over?”
I chewed on my lip. “Yeah, sure. Thanks.”
Nicki’s bedroom was decorated in a lot of soft blues, and the walls and the carpet were off-white, the shadows on them an icy gray. It gave the whole place a sort of celestial feel, which hadn’t unsettled me until now. Crunch time tends to have that effect.
“Make yourself at home,” Nicki bid me pleasantly, but there was a flicker of something very unpleasant that I was willing to wager would surface soon. I flopped down in a pale blue beanbag chair and awaited the inevitable. It was an activity I was growing accustomed to.
Nicki drew in a deep breath and let it out as a sigh. She sat cross-legged on the floor not far away and gave me a piercing look.
“You can tell your mom,” she declared, “that the whole ‘new money’ thing isn’t true.” Now her eyes darted away, probing the gauzy cerulean curtains instead. “So whoever she heard it from is wrong. We just moved here from the city ’cause it was too loud, and we’d only been there ’cause of my dad’s job.”
The brilliance of this small monologue was that parts of it were genuine. It was quite untrue, of course, that whoever had told my mother about the DeLogios’ money was incorrect, because no one had told my mother anything. My mother didn’t even know that Nicki and I were friends.
It was also a lie that they had always had money. They hadn’t. But it wouldn’t help anything to act like I didn’t believe it.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll tell her. And even if she doesn’t listen, it doesn’t really matter. She’s not around much, and my dad’s off homesteading in Kansas, so… so yeah. Should be fine.” I nodded sagely for emphasis. For five and a half more days.
School didn’t seem like a particularly profitable avenue of endeavor for my last five days on this Earth, so each morning, I drove Nicki up to the front walk, announced that I was going to go find a parking spot, and then went home until it was time to collect her again. I was, however, all the while calculating how exactly it was that one went about elucting the ineluctable (and pondering the fact that “eluct” wasn’t a legitimate verb). I mean, if I wasn’t even in the area, would I still give the bucket a hearty kicking? If I avoided Nicki that evening-and that evening alone-would I still be the proud owner of a new farm? I mean, there was that whole Greek tragedy format to consider, but who was to say, even then, that a god from the machine wouldn’t emerge at the last possible moment?
Then again, I had pretty unenviable luck when it came to things like that.
On the evening of the third day left of my life, we were in Nicki’s room again, lying around listening to clichéd 80s music, which was one of our favorite shared pastimes. I’d brought a mix CD. Journey came on. In perfect unison, we leapt and began a rousing round of hairbrush karaoke.
“Don’t stop… belieeeeving…”
That was the trick, wasn’t it? Persisting in the belief that, somehow, some way, everything would be all right, despite all evidence to the contrary. Despite the clock ticking and the sky going dark. Believing had to come before knowing sometimes, or you’d lose the mind that told you to know in the first place.
Interesting paradox, that.
The night before I was going to die, I took Nicki out for ice cream. As we stood gazing at the rows of flavors, considering enough options to make a despot indecisive, I turned to Nicki.
“What strikes your fancy, Miss Matherson?” I inquired.
It was only when her eyes went wide, round, and horrified that I realized my mistake.
I stared back dumbly for a few long seconds.
“I’m sorry,” I said. My tongue felt like a hunk of steel wool. “I don’t know why I called you that.”
That was a lie. I’d called her that because it was her real name.
Nicki smiled hesitantly. Then, without consulting, we both picked the exact same flavor of ice cream.
After depositing Nicki on the front lawn-I was positive she was on to me and my truancy, but the girl was too good to press the issue-I spent the next morning with my face buried in the pillow. I didn’t want to go. Not yet. Not with so much left to do. Not with a whole world I hadn’t seen, a whole life I wouldn’t get.
I sobbed a lot of it out like coughing up saltwater, and that damp, bone-deep, cried-out emptiness soothed me. More quiet than disquieted now, I rolled onto my back and rummaged through the bits and pieces I had, trying to see the puzzle’s picture with just the corners in place. It would hurt. Nicki would be crying. And everything would go… white. There would be white.
As the afternoon dwindled, I savored a last meal of Rocky Road, apple pie, chocolate milk, and cookie dough. Then I savored a last stomachache, and then I wrote down all my computer passwords on a Post-It note and arranged my various notebooks and diaries in a neat stack under my bed. I had a feeling that I didn’t want to look too prescient, however, and my feelings were rarely wrong.
While I was straightening up my closet, my phone sang out, tinnily and with gusto. I grabbed it from the nightstand again and answered the summons.
“Hello?”
A voice caught. “Hey-” It was Nicki. “I-could-could you come over?” There was a terror in her voice like an undertow, cold and irrevocable, and my blood froze.
Veins tinkling, I worked my mouth.
“Sure, of course. I’ll be there in a second.”
She choked on a “Thank you” and hung up.
I dug through my closet, found my softball bat, and went for the stairs at a run.
Everything was clicking into place. The late Mr. Matherson had, presumably illegally, obtained a great deal of money from someone who wanted it back. They’d caught him, and the rest of the family, partway through the transition to a nicer life, had changed their names and tried to hide in plain sight, but the bad guys were back now to finish the job. And they were coming for Nicki. My Nicki.
What they didn’t anticipate was that I was going to save her.
And die trying.
My sneakers squealed on the dewy lawn, then pattered as I mounted the DeLogios’ front steps. The front door yielded at the pressure of my hand, and I scraped my feet on the mat before pounding up the stairs. They weren’t going to get my Nicki. Not if I had to die for her a thousand times.
The first thing I noticed when I shoved Nicki’s bedroom door open was that the floor was covered in white plastic.
The second thing I noticed was Nicki herself, standing opposite me, tears chasing one another down her cheeks, pointing a pistol squarely at my chest. Her shoulders shook, but her aim was good.
The gunshot rang out like a church choir. It was more of an ambient shattering than an isolated sound, and I stumbled, my footing further compromised by the crinkling plastic under me, and fell. The bat rolled off somewhere. I stared at the off-white ceiling, dyed as it was a delicate pink by the voyeuristic sunset peeking through the broad window.
Oh, I thought idly. I get it now.
Nicki was brushing the hair off of my forehead, stroking my face, smoothing my clothes.
“You knew everything,” she sobbed, the fading sunlight washing over her skin, her hair tangled, teardrops in her eyelashes. “You knew more than you could possibly ever know. You knew the truth. And you couldn’t have known that, we can’t-Evan, and Melly, they barely even remember-”
I was willing to bet they remembered more than she gave them credit for. After all, I was only six when I found out how I was going to die.
“I know things,” I said. I was starting to get dizzy. My chest was very warm, and my fingers were very cold.
“I’d trade this house and this town and this life for him-and you-” Fresh tears, glinting beautifully.
“You’ll be fine,” I informed her. “The mob isn’t going to find you. You’ve essentially disappeared.” Disappearing. That sounded nice. “You’ll have a high-powered job-maybe my mom’ll hire you-no, but you keep your morals. Cute kids. Big house. Husband like a rock star. Maybe he is a rock star. Don’t let him get hooked on heroin; that stuff is the worst.”
“How do you know?” Nicki whispered.
I smiled. “I know things,” I said. It sounded familiar. My head was too light to latch onto the recollection. “I know things about you especially.” I didn’t know if it was her, or the headlong-to-heartache approach I’d taken, but it was true. “And things are gonna be okay.” I raised myself up far enough to touch my lips to a hot, wet, lovely cheek. “I know that, too.”
“But-”
“That’s the truth of it,” I said. Nicki went quiet, and I closed my eyes and curled up against her shoulder. The last few wisps of the world trailed away, and everything faded to… black, actually. Black. Absence.
But that was all right. Everything was.
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 4,272
Prompt: contest rules came in the form of an outline: primary character hurts secondary character; they make up; plot twist; etc.
Warnings: slightly dark
Summary: In which it comes true.
Author's Note: eltea is behind everything that is good about this story. XD
THE TRUTH OF IT
I was six when I found out how I was going to die.
I reflected later that I almost wished it had been more melodramatic. I like a bit of melodrama, on the right occasion, and that would have been perfect: if I’d somehow wandered into a fortune teller’s cottage-one of those palm readers who works out of her home. If she’d been one of those ageless women who could have been twenty and could have been forty-five, and if she’d worn a dark maroon scarf around her hair, and if the draping beads around her neck had clinked as she moved. If she’d murmured, “Lost, little one?” and extended a long-fingered hand choked with heavy rings and touched my forehead, then recoiled like she’d been burned. If she’d set that hand, trembling now, on my shoulder, leaned down, and whispered it in my ear.
But no.
I was on a walk with my parents, and I was dawdling and dancing around the cracks in the sidewalk, which were many and varied because of the tree roots that had swelled beneath the cement. It was right by the old folks’ home, and I had my arms out for balance, and I was wearing the tiered purple skirt that I loved more than life itself, and I glanced at a patch of yellow grass on the lawn, and I knew.
I accepted it, of course, in that way that children do. There was no question of it, so I asked no questions about it. It hardly mattered anyway; there were timed math tests to worry about-subtraction was a right pill, and I was struggling with it. I was thirteen before I figured out that I ought to panic and therefore did, because at thirteen, “ought” was “must.” This synonym phenomenon also explained the way I dressed, the way I decorated my bedroom, and the fact that I alienated my parents by being a presumptuous brat for no better reason than to be able to report that I’d picked the fights I had.
In any case, by sixteen, I’d become relatively accustomed to the idea that my irreversible doom was imminent and all that. It was part of that white noise background humming of the unpleasant realities of life, like “My parents are divorced” or “My grandpa has cancer.” Only mine was “I’m going to die soon.”
Y’know. The usual.
But nowadays… now that the “imminent” was more prominent… I was starting to wonder. And to doubt.
All of this flickered through my head like one of those ancient film reels as I looked at the wide-eyed girl standing on my doorstep.
She stood center on the bristly Welcome mat, the dark hair draping over her shoulders shining like something out of a shampoo commercial, her thumbs tucked into her pockets, a tiny smile touching her lips. She was flanked by two cherubim, the right-hand one an eleven-year-old boy possessed of a head of thick, springy, chocolate-colored curls and a frown; the leftward a seven-year-old girl wearing a pink bucket hat over short, straight hair like cornsilk.
I’d encountered Veronica DeLogio-or Nicki, as she shyly insisted-more than a few times at school in the couple years since she’d moved in next door, but I had long since filed her away in the “acquaintance” category. Most people met that fate; the vague but persistent fear that I’d see and know too much about anyone I built a connection with-for I did know things, all sorts of things, about people and events and the world, and I absorbed them-had left me something of a loner, though the stigma didn’t bother me. Maintaining friendships required a great deal of work, and if I could avoid both that drudgery and the eventual disappointment of revealing the pitted, seething soul behind apparent virtue… well, who was I to complain?
Nicki, who had received more than her share of crap from advocates of the double K, shifted her weight.
“Sorry,” she began, “but our Frisbee went over the fence…”
“No worries,” I said, though I knew and had known for a good decade that there were many things to worry about. “Here, come on in.” I backed out of the way and ushered them in, leading them through the labyrinth of pathways that snaked between furniture like something out of a magazine ad. It was my mom’s fault. She was never home, so she had no problem with the occasional return to a living room too perfect to be palatable. The sad truth was that we essentially inhabited a housing advertisement. Or maybe a real estate display. I had evidence to support a few different theories.
“This is really nice,” Nicki announced, smiling so strongly that I almost believed she wasn’t just saying it to be nice.
We trooped through the kitchen and out to the yard, where a neon green Frisbee lay, guileless and incongruent, on the even emerald of the tended grass.
“There it is,” Nicki noted unnecessarily, smiling still. Her siblings lingered at the edge of the lawn, glancing at the wicker chairs and the hulking grill, as she sauntered forward and bent to retrieve the Frisbee. With it in hand, she turned to me again, her grin more tentative now. “D’you want to play, too? We’re just next door.”
We were all aware that I knew precisely where they lived; I was fairly sure they’d caught me watching them in their backyard from my bedroom window more than once.
Something in me, however, crushed my better judgment under a work boot heel and blew on the fragments, scattering them to the winds.
“That’d be cool,” I said.
I’d expected it to be fun, but I hadn’t expected my ribs to ache for hours afterward from all the laughing. Evan and Melly were total dolls once they’d warmed up to you a bit, and Nicki was… Nicki. She was affable and effervescent, and her contentment was contagious. All of a sudden, I was appreciating things like the afternoon sunlight slanting through the trees and the rich robin’s-egg-blue of the sky overhead. It was all very histrionic and uncanny, which didn’t seem like a promising start.
I would have had even more fun if there hadn’t been, in the back of my head, an implacable voice muttering over and over that I was going to die in ten days.
That’ll spoil a good mood for ya.
When the sun went down, I knew it was time to hightail it out of there. I wouldn’t really be missed at home for a few more hours, but imposing on the DeLogio’s dinner wouldn’t exactly ingratiate me to them. And, quite in spite of myself, I wanted them to like me, Nicki in particular. Even with everything that I knew.
At the heart of things, though, I reflected as Nicki walked me politely back to my door, I didn’t know much. I knew that I had ten more days (and a few hours of this one to top them off), and I knew that Nicki DeLogio was involved somehow, and I knew that it was going to be messy. I felt like I’d had more details when I’d first found out, but by now, years later, it was a whole lot hazier, which basically meant… nothing and everything.
As I fought my keys out of my pocket, and as they resisted admirably, I mustered up a smile.
“You walk to school, right?”
This was one of those utterly insipid statement-questions, which are useless as questions-since you obviously already know that the answer is “Yes” and all you’re seeking is details-but prove sadly indispensible for broaching new topics.
Nicki, of course, played along, because she was a good and charitable human being.
“Yeah, I do,” she confirmed.
I chewed on the inside of my cheek for a second, because, for that second, everything felt horribly, terribly, gut-wrenchingly wrong, deep down and throughout and all over.
What fun.
Then I shook it off, just in time to salvage social convention from the nefarious clutches of an egregiously long pause.
“I drive,” I told Nicki, motioning towards the garage that concealed my flashy sedan. “I could drive you, too, if you wanted.”
Nicki beamed. “That’d be fun!” she decided. “You want me to come over tomorrow morning at… Well, when do you leave?”
And so it was that, at an obscenely early hour the next morning, Nicki was again on the doorstep, lighting a dim world with her smile.
I, of course, looked like something out of a low-budget zombie movie, which was invariably the case before noon. And sometimes well after.
“Have you had breakfast?” I prompted, waving her in with one hand and covering a yawn with the other.
“Yup,” Nicki replied cheerfully. That was one of the many extraordinary things about Nicki DeLogio: she made general happiness a beautiful disease, rather than the wretched plague it was in the hands of the unforgivably perky.
“Let me grab something,” I said, “and we can get going.”
True to my word, I stuffed a piece of biscotti into my mouth and plucked my keys from the largely-ornamental hook above the counter.
Midway into my crunching gustatory journey through the biscotti, I glanced at my copilot.
“So how’re you?” I asked.
“A little nervous,” Nicki responded, grinning slightly bashfully now. “I’ve got this huge French test, and I’m just not sure I’m ready for it.”
“Ah, mais oui,” I countered. “Really, though…” The words came. “I’m willing to bet you know more than you think.”
Nicki examined her folded hands with a little smile. “My dad used to say that.”
I know. “Really?”
She nodded.
I opened my mouth to ask, then shut it, because there’s no decorous way to ask somebody why she was using the past tense talking about her father. Weird, isn’t it, how much of life revolves around what’s decorous, rather than what’s smart, or realistic, or right?
But Nicki… got it. Got that allaying the curiosity and preventing speculation was sometimes worth a moment of uncomfortable silence.
“He…” She looked out the window and twisted her fingers around each other. “…passed away a couple years ago.”
So then we had our moment of uncomfortable silence.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said.
She found the fortitude for another smile. “Thank you.”
I tapped my fingers on the steering wheel a little and paid attention to the road. Much more attention than usual.
I picked Nicki up by the gym nine minutes after school let out. Kind of funny how you notice a number when it correlates with how many days you’ve got left to live.
Not that you would know, or anything. At least, I hope not.
I played my favorite album on the ride back, and Nicki sang along to every word. And God, did I hate the lava-like warmth welling in the pit of my stomach, sizzling eagerly through my veins. It was over before it had even begun. Wasn’t it always?
All the same, I hadn’t expected it to happen that fast. Maybe it was just the whole someone-actually-caring-whether-I-lived-or-died vibe. Ironically enough.
The drill was the same the next morning, but for the fact that we drowned out the music talking about books-you know, those things with the paper and the ink? Yeah, those. Turns out we had a lot in common there, too. It made me nervous.
For three days, everything went like a dream. We lazed around my bedroom or hers, talking over the music; threw the Frisbee with Evan and Melly about a thousand times; giggled over this, that, and the other. Then came the actual dream.
I was rolling two dice, over and over, on what I somehow knew was a craps table, though I’d never actually played. Only the felt was red, and the only illumination came from black lights. I didn’t know how to play the game, and I was sweating cold and trying to fling the dice against the far wall of the table. There wasn’t anyone else around, but the air was heavy, and there was a sort of guarantee that if I didn’t win the game, something would happen. Something truly and wholly disastrous. So I kept throwing, perfectly round beads of freezing sweat rolling down my spine, and every time, the dice added up to six. Six days left to live.
My eyes snapped open on morning T minus six, and I realized that I absolutely did not want to die.
I also realized that there was a strikingly simple solution to this problem.
When Nicki knocked on the door the next morning-she always knocked; she seemed to think ringing the doorbell was too jarring in the mornings, which was completely accurate as far as I was concerned-I opened it and tried to quell the hot bile rising in my throat at the thought of what I was about to do.
And that was to lie through my teeth and wound an innocent.
“I-can’t-drive you to school anymore,” I said.
Nicki stared at me. “Wh-”
“Sorry. I just can’t.” I scrambled mentally, trying to find someone else to blame, hearing the hint of strain in my voice. “’Cause my mom doesn’t want me hanging out with you. ’Cause she says you’re new money. And that we’re old money. It’s, like, archaic, but that’s what she says.”
Nicki’s eyes widened, then welled. I wanted the six days to disappear and bring me straight to Ground Zero.
“I understand,” she whispered.
No, I thought at her retreating back, my heart wrecking itself on the cliffs of my ribs, you don’t.
I ended up staying home that day anyway. Sick. Mentally unstable. Only had a few more days of existence. Sounded like a more constructive use of my time than staring at a whiteboard disappearing under ambiguous diagrams.
I listened to loud music and cried a lot. You know. All that depression stuff.
After about four hours of unabated misery (except for bathroom breaks), I managed to disentangle myself from my comforter and rustled up a notepad.
Things I Want to Do Before I Die, I wrote.
1. Go skydiving
2. See the pyramids at Giza
3. Tour Europe
4. Publish a novel
5. See the moment that the realization dawns upon my first-born that s/he is stuck with me forever
6. Fall in love
It looked like I had an item for each day. Well, that wasn’t too bad, so long as I got an early start. And defied biology. And assembled my flight schedules very creatively…
But didn’t it take practically a day just to get to Egypt?
Yeah, I was screwed.
My cell phone vibrated on the nightstand like a thing alive. I snatched it from the tabletop and wedged my finger into the crack to flip it open.
Are you okay? Nicki had texted.
I stared at those pixels until the phone screen went dark, pressed a button, and stared at them again. Then I closed my phone, picked up my list, and crossed off the last goal.
That done, I started my biography, making sure to write legibly so that they could decipher it for publication and assign it as an outside reading book for local English classes. Legions of kids would one day resent me for having the gall to jot it down and leave a mark.
After about an hour, that got boring, and I decided I’d work on my posthumous bestseller when I had the purest sort of inspiration: hysterical, last-minute panic.
I grabbed my phone, tossed it from hand to hand, and then flipped it open and dialed.
Nicki picked up immediately.
“Hey, are you okay? I didn’t see you at school today, and I got worried.”
“I’m okay,” I told her. “Just taking a mental health day.” In truth of fact, that was essentially truth and fact.
“Are you sick?” she asked.
“Nah.”
“D’you-d’you wanna come over?”
I chewed on my lip. “Yeah, sure. Thanks.”
Nicki’s bedroom was decorated in a lot of soft blues, and the walls and the carpet were off-white, the shadows on them an icy gray. It gave the whole place a sort of celestial feel, which hadn’t unsettled me until now. Crunch time tends to have that effect.
“Make yourself at home,” Nicki bid me pleasantly, but there was a flicker of something very unpleasant that I was willing to wager would surface soon. I flopped down in a pale blue beanbag chair and awaited the inevitable. It was an activity I was growing accustomed to.
Nicki drew in a deep breath and let it out as a sigh. She sat cross-legged on the floor not far away and gave me a piercing look.
“You can tell your mom,” she declared, “that the whole ‘new money’ thing isn’t true.” Now her eyes darted away, probing the gauzy cerulean curtains instead. “So whoever she heard it from is wrong. We just moved here from the city ’cause it was too loud, and we’d only been there ’cause of my dad’s job.”
The brilliance of this small monologue was that parts of it were genuine. It was quite untrue, of course, that whoever had told my mother about the DeLogios’ money was incorrect, because no one had told my mother anything. My mother didn’t even know that Nicki and I were friends.
It was also a lie that they had always had money. They hadn’t. But it wouldn’t help anything to act like I didn’t believe it.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll tell her. And even if she doesn’t listen, it doesn’t really matter. She’s not around much, and my dad’s off homesteading in Kansas, so… so yeah. Should be fine.” I nodded sagely for emphasis. For five and a half more days.
School didn’t seem like a particularly profitable avenue of endeavor for my last five days on this Earth, so each morning, I drove Nicki up to the front walk, announced that I was going to go find a parking spot, and then went home until it was time to collect her again. I was, however, all the while calculating how exactly it was that one went about elucting the ineluctable (and pondering the fact that “eluct” wasn’t a legitimate verb). I mean, if I wasn’t even in the area, would I still give the bucket a hearty kicking? If I avoided Nicki that evening-and that evening alone-would I still be the proud owner of a new farm? I mean, there was that whole Greek tragedy format to consider, but who was to say, even then, that a god from the machine wouldn’t emerge at the last possible moment?
Then again, I had pretty unenviable luck when it came to things like that.
On the evening of the third day left of my life, we were in Nicki’s room again, lying around listening to clichéd 80s music, which was one of our favorite shared pastimes. I’d brought a mix CD. Journey came on. In perfect unison, we leapt and began a rousing round of hairbrush karaoke.
“Don’t stop… belieeeeving…”
That was the trick, wasn’t it? Persisting in the belief that, somehow, some way, everything would be all right, despite all evidence to the contrary. Despite the clock ticking and the sky going dark. Believing had to come before knowing sometimes, or you’d lose the mind that told you to know in the first place.
Interesting paradox, that.
The night before I was going to die, I took Nicki out for ice cream. As we stood gazing at the rows of flavors, considering enough options to make a despot indecisive, I turned to Nicki.
“What strikes your fancy, Miss Matherson?” I inquired.
It was only when her eyes went wide, round, and horrified that I realized my mistake.
I stared back dumbly for a few long seconds.
“I’m sorry,” I said. My tongue felt like a hunk of steel wool. “I don’t know why I called you that.”
That was a lie. I’d called her that because it was her real name.
Nicki smiled hesitantly. Then, without consulting, we both picked the exact same flavor of ice cream.
After depositing Nicki on the front lawn-I was positive she was on to me and my truancy, but the girl was too good to press the issue-I spent the next morning with my face buried in the pillow. I didn’t want to go. Not yet. Not with so much left to do. Not with a whole world I hadn’t seen, a whole life I wouldn’t get.
I sobbed a lot of it out like coughing up saltwater, and that damp, bone-deep, cried-out emptiness soothed me. More quiet than disquieted now, I rolled onto my back and rummaged through the bits and pieces I had, trying to see the puzzle’s picture with just the corners in place. It would hurt. Nicki would be crying. And everything would go… white. There would be white.
As the afternoon dwindled, I savored a last meal of Rocky Road, apple pie, chocolate milk, and cookie dough. Then I savored a last stomachache, and then I wrote down all my computer passwords on a Post-It note and arranged my various notebooks and diaries in a neat stack under my bed. I had a feeling that I didn’t want to look too prescient, however, and my feelings were rarely wrong.
While I was straightening up my closet, my phone sang out, tinnily and with gusto. I grabbed it from the nightstand again and answered the summons.
“Hello?”
A voice caught. “Hey-” It was Nicki. “I-could-could you come over?” There was a terror in her voice like an undertow, cold and irrevocable, and my blood froze.
Veins tinkling, I worked my mouth.
“Sure, of course. I’ll be there in a second.”
She choked on a “Thank you” and hung up.
I dug through my closet, found my softball bat, and went for the stairs at a run.
Everything was clicking into place. The late Mr. Matherson had, presumably illegally, obtained a great deal of money from someone who wanted it back. They’d caught him, and the rest of the family, partway through the transition to a nicer life, had changed their names and tried to hide in plain sight, but the bad guys were back now to finish the job. And they were coming for Nicki. My Nicki.
What they didn’t anticipate was that I was going to save her.
And die trying.
My sneakers squealed on the dewy lawn, then pattered as I mounted the DeLogios’ front steps. The front door yielded at the pressure of my hand, and I scraped my feet on the mat before pounding up the stairs. They weren’t going to get my Nicki. Not if I had to die for her a thousand times.
The first thing I noticed when I shoved Nicki’s bedroom door open was that the floor was covered in white plastic.
The second thing I noticed was Nicki herself, standing opposite me, tears chasing one another down her cheeks, pointing a pistol squarely at my chest. Her shoulders shook, but her aim was good.
The gunshot rang out like a church choir. It was more of an ambient shattering than an isolated sound, and I stumbled, my footing further compromised by the crinkling plastic under me, and fell. The bat rolled off somewhere. I stared at the off-white ceiling, dyed as it was a delicate pink by the voyeuristic sunset peeking through the broad window.
Oh, I thought idly. I get it now.
Nicki was brushing the hair off of my forehead, stroking my face, smoothing my clothes.
“You knew everything,” she sobbed, the fading sunlight washing over her skin, her hair tangled, teardrops in her eyelashes. “You knew more than you could possibly ever know. You knew the truth. And you couldn’t have known that, we can’t-Evan, and Melly, they barely even remember-”
I was willing to bet they remembered more than she gave them credit for. After all, I was only six when I found out how I was going to die.
“I know things,” I said. I was starting to get dizzy. My chest was very warm, and my fingers were very cold.
“I’d trade this house and this town and this life for him-and you-” Fresh tears, glinting beautifully.
“You’ll be fine,” I informed her. “The mob isn’t going to find you. You’ve essentially disappeared.” Disappearing. That sounded nice. “You’ll have a high-powered job-maybe my mom’ll hire you-no, but you keep your morals. Cute kids. Big house. Husband like a rock star. Maybe he is a rock star. Don’t let him get hooked on heroin; that stuff is the worst.”
“How do you know?” Nicki whispered.
I smiled. “I know things,” I said. It sounded familiar. My head was too light to latch onto the recollection. “I know things about you especially.” I didn’t know if it was her, or the headlong-to-heartache approach I’d taken, but it was true. “And things are gonna be okay.” I raised myself up far enough to touch my lips to a hot, wet, lovely cheek. “I know that, too.”
“But-”
“That’s the truth of it,” I said. Nicki went quiet, and I closed my eyes and curled up against her shoulder. The last few wisps of the world trailed away, and everything faded to… black, actually. Black. Absence.
But that was all right. Everything was.