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“Can I see your account?”
“Sure.”
I hand him my phone.
My profile is public because I don’t care if some stranger stumbles onto it. But it’s crazy different watching a stranger scroll through my photos. I feel exposed, like I’m stepping out of the shower and someone is watching me wrap a towel around my boys. My earlier photos are pretty amateur-hour because of bad lighting, but there’s no edit button and that’s probably for the best.
“Why are they all in black and white?” Mateo asks.
“I got the account a few days after I moved in to the foster home. My boy Malcolm took this one photo of me, look . . .” I scoot closer to him and scroll down to my first wave of photos, self-conscious about my dirty fingernail for half a second before no longer giving a shit. I click the photo of me sitting on my bed at Pluto with my face in my hands. Malcolm is the credited photographer. “It was my third or fourth night there. We were playing board games and I was freaking out in my head because I was feeling guilty for having a decent time—nah, kill that. I was having mad fun, that’s what made it worse. I walked away without a word and Malcolm hunted me down because I was taking too long and he captured my breakdown.”
“Why?” Mateo asks.
“He said he liked tracking a person’s growth and not just physically. He’s hard on himself, but he’s smart as hell.” But for real, I kicked Malcolm in his giant knee when he first showed me that photo weeks later. Creep. “I keep my photos in black and white because my life lost color after they died.”
“And you’re living your life but not forgetting theirs?” Mateo asks.
“Exactly.”
“I thought people got on Instagram just to be on Instagram.”
I shrug. “Old school.”
“Your photos look old school,” Mateo says. He shifts, looking at me with wide eyes. He smiles at me for the first time and yo, this is not the face you see on a Decker. “You don’t need the CountDowners app, you can post everything here. You can create a hashtag or whatever, too. But I think you should post your life in color. . . . Let that be how the Plutos remember you.” The smile goes away because that’s the nature of today. “Forget it. That’s stupid.”
“It’s not stupid,” I say. “I actually really like this. The Plutos can revisit the times I lived with them in black and white, like a cooler history book, and my End Day will have its own unfiltered contrast. Can you take a pic of me sitting here? In case it’s my last post, I want everyone to see me alive.”
Mateo smiles again, like he’s the one posing for the photo.
He gets up and points the camera my way.
I don’t pose. I just sit here with my back against the wall, in the spot where I convinced my Last Friend to keep adventuring and where he gave me the idea to add some life to my profile. I don’t even smile. I’ve never been a smiler and starting now feels off. I don’t want them to see a stranger.
“Got it,” Mateo says. He hands me the phone. “I can take another if you hate it.”
I don’t care about photo approval, I’m not that into myself. The photo is surprisingly dope though. Mateo caught me looking sad and proud all at once, like my parents looked the day Olivia graduated high school. And the front wheel of my bike makes a cameo too. “Thanks, dude.”
I upload the picture, unfiltered. I consider captioning it with #EndDay, but I don’t need fake sympathetic “oh no, R.I.P!!!!” comments or trolls telling me to “Rest in Pieces!!!!” The people who matter the most to me know.
And I hope they remember me as I was and not as the guy who punched in someone’s face earlier for no real good reason.
PATRICK “PECK” GAVIN
7:08 a.m.
Death-Cast did not call Patrick “Peck” Gavin because he’s not dying today, though he was expecting the alert before his attacker received the call himself.
He’s home now, pressing a frozen hamburger patty against his bruises. It smells, but the migraine is fading away.
Peck shouldn’t have left Aimee in the street, but she didn’t want to see him and he’s not exactly happy with her either. He used his old phone and called Aimee up, but the arguing only lasted so long before she began passing out from exhaustion, and it was so hard not to hang up on her when she said she wanted to make an effort to see Rufus again, to be with him on his End Day.
Peck used to operate by a code with people like Rufus.
A code that goes into play when someone tries to walk all over you.
Peck has a lot to sleep on. But things aren’t looking good for Rufus if he’s still around when Peck wakes up.
RUFUS
