Denton Little's Deathdate

by Lance Rubin

  Or, at least, that’s what I experienced. Your funeral might be different.

  As I stand there about to eulogize myself, I spot Taryn with her parents in the second row of chairs on the left, and on the other side of her is Phil, that toolbox track star she used to date before me. And—it’s worth mentioning—the guy who took Taryn’s virginity. She says they only slept together twice, but that’s two times too many, as far as I’m concerned.

  She doesn’t necessarily look happy to be sitting next to Phil, who is for once without his trademark fedora, but she hasn’t moved to a different seat either. And Phil is leaning toward Taryn and laughing about something. At my funeral. Nice. If I didn’t know his deathdate was many years from now, I might contemplate killing him. Murder wouldn’t work, but I could at least put him in a serious coma.

  Okay. It’s time for me to talk about myself to all these people.

  “Hello, hey, hi, everybody.” I notice a bunch of my elementary school teachers about seven rows back. Mrs. McGeehan, Mrs. Pond. That’s really nice. “Thanks so much for being here. This is obviously an incredibly weird day all around, and it’s, uh…it’s just…” Even the parts of my speech I remembered two minutes ago are now nowhere to be found in my brain folds. All I can remember is that I wanted to be sorta angry. But that’s not helpful. “It really means a lot to me that you all are here. I wrote a whole thing out, obviously, because this is an important day and these are my last words, so to speak, but…um…I left it on my dresser in my room. At home. Whoops. So bear with me—”

  “I can run home and get it for you! I’ll go!” My stepmom is already up out of her seat, headed toward the exit like a crazy lady.

  “Mom, no. Please don’t, I’m fine,” I say into the microphone.

  “This is important!” She continues her bouncy run away from me. I have no idea how we’ve so quickly gone off the rails.

  “My mother, everybody!” I say, presenting her, trying to work with this moment, as if it’s a bit we had planned together in advance. There’s mild laughter from the crowd, but mainly confusion. “Mom, honestly, I think I remember most of it.” A lie. “Please don’t leave right now. During my funeral.”

  I seem to have said the right thing, and my stepmom walks back to her seat.

  “Yeah,” I say, refocusing my attention onto everyone else, “my mom loves me.” Big laugh from the crowd. The tension has been defused, and we are back on track. And of course it’s a big laugh; these people are probably ready to laugh at anything even slightly resembling a joke. That’s why Paolo’s eulogy went over so well (except for the joke he made about getting all of my coolest Blu-rays once I’m dead, which I found a little depressing). I am feeling confident. “And I love her.” The crowd gives a quiet sitcom-style “Awww.”

  “And I love my dad. And I love you guys. And I love Maggie, my favorite lunch lady.” Another nice laugh. I can’t see Maggie in the crowd, but if I could, I’m sure she’d be shaking her sixty-something-year-old head back and forth and smiling like, Oh, Denton, what’m I gonna do with you?

  “And I love the school lunches, for that matter! I will miss them most of all.” Huge laughs. I’m on fire. “Like, everyone’s always complaining about school lunches and how much they suck, but can we just agree that they have a certain charm?” I have no idea where I’m going with this, but there is yet more laughter, and I’m enjoying it. “I mean, honestly, everyone’s always complaining about everything. Like, the stupidest stuff. Like, please, let’s just take this in for a second: I am going to die tomorrow. So could you not, like, complain about all the homework you have? Or that your computer’s really slow? Like, can we have some perspective on this?” This is a close approximation of a section of the speech that I had written, except here I think I’m saying the word like too much. “People are like, ‘Oh man, my life sucks. I didn’t get a part in the spring musical.’ And I’m like, ‘No, MY life sucks because tomorrow I won’t even HAVE a life!’ ” I’m expecting this to get a huge laugh, but there is only silence. “Right? Right?” I am struck by the sudden realization that comedy and anger may, in fact, be closer together on the map than I thought, as I’ve found my way from one to the other surprisingly easily. Many faces in the crowd seem to be saying, You poor bastard.

  “I, uh…Sorry, sorry. I thought that would be funny. That wasn’t in the speech I wrote. Maybe you should have run and gotten it after all, Mom. No, please sit down, don’t actually get it.” My stepmom sinks back into her seat. “But thank you.

  “What is there to say, really? I mean, I don’t want to die. Who ever wants to die?” My attention is diverted to a man in his late forties standing alone in the back of the room. He’s shifting back and forth from one foot to the other as he stares at me. “Well, I guess suicidal people wanna die, when they’re depressed and stuff. But that’s a chemical thing happening in their body that’s not their fault.” That man is kind of freaking me out. Do strangers often show up at random funerals? Is that a thing? “I know not everyone believes that, but it’s what I believe.” What am I even talking about? I need to ignore that dude and get back on track. “So…yeah. I guess my point is, I’ve had a good life, and I want all of you to have good lives.” All of a sudden, I fully grasp the idea that tomorrow I will be nonexistent. It takes my breath away.

  “I won’t be here tomorrow. Please remember me. Remember to live. I don’t care if your deathdate is in a week or seventy-five years from now, please appreciate the people in your life.” I’m spouting weird Hallmarkisms that don’t even make sense, but I truly believe what I’m saying. “I appreciate the people in my life. I appreciate my amazing parents. Thank you, Mom and Dad, for being the best. And I have a great older brother.” I find Felix, sitting right next to my parents, and he gives me a tiny brotherly nod. “He is smart and funny and…even though he’s busy a lot, he always makes time for me.” Sorta. “And I appreciate that.” Felix smiles.

  “And I appreciate my friends. Paolo, thank you for being the best friend a dude could have. You always crack me up. I’m really sorry you’ll be dead in a month, too. Maybe we’ll hang out in the afterlife. Or wherever. As chipmunks. We’ll be the new Chip and Dale. Not like the male dancers. I mean like the…cartoons.” That got weird for a second. “Or, you know, maybe we won’t be reincarnated at all. Maybe we’ll go to some place with lots of other dead people, where we can see everyone we’ve been missing. Like, I’ll see my grandma Sarah. And Mima. And my great-grandparents. And maybe I’ll even get to meet my biological mother. Who would obviously never be as great as you, Mom. Anyway, I have no idea, but the point is, Paolo, you rock.”

  “GAY!” someone shouts.

  “Uh…I, uh, also want to thank all the guys on the cross-country team,” I say as I watch three adults beeline toward the seat where the “GAY!” came from. “You guys are the best. I don’t know what I’d do without you. Running with you guys was always so fun and great.”

  Fun and great? I’m listening to the crap coming out of my mouth as I’m saying it, and it’s true enough, but it’s the exact shit I promised myself I would never say.

  And yet. I can’t stop.

  “Oh, and Taryn! My girlfriend. Pretty, awesome Taryn. Pretty and awesome and pretty awesome, too.” I smile at her. “Wordplay,” I acknowledge. I pretend not to notice that as I directed my attention toward Taryn, Phil was leaning over to snicker something in her ear. “You are…simply…the greatest girlfriend that ever was. I very like you very much.” Taryn is smiling, tears running down her face. “Correction: I very love you very much. Yes, that’s right! I said it, folks! The L-word! All we need is that, right?”

  I’ve never been less in control of my words.

  Maybe this is why everyone’s self-eulogies always suck so much; maybe it can’t be helped. Maybe everyone is suddenly gripped by a love for everything and everyone, by an overwhelming desire to hang on for dear life. I am everything I don’t want to be up here, and this makes me angry. I rebel against
my urge to keep repeating how beautiful life is.

  “And, Phil,” I continue, “I just want to say that I don’t like you. I have this reputation for being such a nice guy, a really good guy, so people think I’ll just put up with lameness. But I really don’t want to. You’re a tool. You were the worst part of being on the cross-country team, and I hope you excluded yourself from that nice thing I just said about everyone else on the team. Because it didn’t include you. You suck.”

  That felt kinda good.

  “And to the guy who yelled out ‘GAY!’ earlier—you know, during my funeral—I’m sorry your penis is so small. I really am.” Laughter. Applause. “I’m sorry for everyone in this high school who’s derisively said anything like that to me or to anyone. Unlike me, you will live, but your lives will be much sadder than mine.”

  This feels great but also dirty, like maybe this isn’t the way I should be saying goodbye to the world. I don’t care. If I have to die tomorrow, this is what I deserve today.

  “And, Mrs. Donovan, if you’re out there, I gotta say, you are mean. You’re a mean lady and a terrible teacher. I think I actually know less about calculus because of you. We talk about how much you suck a lot, but we would never say anything to your face because we are terrified of you. So, there it is. You could consider therapy, maybe? I don’t know, just spitballin’ ideas here.”

  Somebody on the side yells, “Woo!”

  “I don’t want to be a dick, you guys. In a way, I’m glad for the mean people. Adversity makes us who we are, you know? But I just want to be real about it. I want us all to be real. The realest people that ever were. Really. Because life is now. These moments are all we have. You know?” I’m getting freakin’ deep.

  “Because all this…I mean, the SATs are not real.” I catch a glimpse of my parents, who are looking at me as if I just produced a shockingly huge fart. “I mean, they’re real, they’re fine, you should probably take them, but are the SATs what life is about? No! I sure as hell didn’t take them!” I really wanted to, actually, just to see how I would do, but then on the testing day, I accidentally drove to the wrong testing center, and by the time I made it to the right one, it was too late.

  “What is real is us. We are real. Friends are real. Love is real.” And just as I say that, I finally spot Veronica in the crowd, standing amongst all the folks in the back behind the chairs. There she is, in her red Friendly’s waitress uniform. We have this moment of direct eye contact, and a chill goes down my spine. That has to have been some kind of sign. Right as I mention love, I find Veronica?

  “You’re real, Denton!” somebody shouts.

  “Yeah, Denton!”

  I look back to where Veronica was standing and she’s no longer there. Seeing as I can’t even remember basic details about what I did last night, I’m not sure I have any right to be telling these people how to live. Probably time to wrap this up. Way beyond time.

  “So, um…thank you. Seriously. Please stick around for the dance party. Otherwise…see you never! Denton Little OUT!”

  I’ve flung my arm up in the air triumphantly, and now it’s just hovering there, and it suddenly occurs to me that maybe you’re not supposed to applaud at funerals, or maybe no one wants to applaud, and maybe I should leave the podium before the crickets get too loud.

  But then the crowd erupts, with all of my friends and classmates spontaneously jumping to their feet, total standing ovation. They chant my name. My parents look appropriately sad and happy and everything, but I also see in them a whiff of disappointment, as though they maybe expected my self-eulogy to have gone a little differently. Paolo catches my attention, wildly gesturing and pointing behind me, and for a split second, I think he’s warning that someone is trying to kill me.

  Of course he’s not; he’s just reminding me about the huge bucket of candy we set up for the end of my eulogy, to either add to the joyous celebration or save it in case I totally bombed. (“Those things always end on such a sad note, dude. Why does it have to be that way?” “I know!”) I grab the huge yellow plastic bucket from behind the wooden party divider thing and start lobbing handfuls out into the crowd. They’re loving this. I am some sort of demented sugar god, raining gifts upon my disciples. The power goes to my head a bit. I spot Phil, looking like a sullen little boy, and I am inspired. I try to whip a peanut butter cup at him really hard, but my aim is off, and it nails Taryn in the face.

  I’m glad the dance party portion of my Final Celebration is limited to two hours, because if it were up to me, we’d bypass it altogether. It’s an old-fashioned tradition that was way more popular in the decade or so after deathdates first became mandatory, and my stepmom seems to think that if we don’t do it, she’d be depriving me of the full death experience. “I’m telling you,” she’s often said, “Sheila Hammer’s Final Celebration party—my sophomore year of college—was one of the best nights of my life.” Gonna go out on a limb here and assume Sheila might have had a slightly different take on it.

  To add insult to injury, the DJ my stepmom hired is pretty lame. I’m like a pioneer person headed west, except instead of being weighed down with ropes and supplies and rations, I’m buried in plastic novelty crap. And instead of heading west, I’m doing the Cha-Cha Slide. (Hop two times!) I’m wearing a glittery green top hat, extra-large sunglasses, and—around my neck—two glow-stick necklaces, one disco ball, one neon blue whistle, and one faux-blingy dollar sign. I like to think I’m being hilarious and wearing all of it ironically, but I guess from an outsider’s perspective, it’s impossible to tell; probably everyone thinks they’re wearing this stuff ironically. Whoa, that feels like a profound realization about humanity.

  I’m still juiced from my self-eulogy but trying not to think too hard about it. “That was amazing! You said the word penis in your eulogy,” Paolo said, standing amongst a sea of people, moments after I left the microphone. “And then you ended it with ‘Denton Little OUT!’ So incredible, I might have to steal that next month for mine.”

  “I said that?” I asked. “It’s kind of a blur.”

  “You definitely did, dude, and it was amazing.”

  Now Paolo is dancing right next to me, working his classic moves, which have always seemed like a strange but charming parody of how an old, slightly sleazy man might dance. At this moment, they seem to be effective; Lucinda Delgado and Danica Riegel are cracking up at everything he’s doing.

  Paolo leans over to me. “Are you seeing this?”

  I high-five him. “They both seem really into you. You still crushing on Danica?”

  “Yeah, I think so. Her breath smells like walnuts!”

  “Is that…a good thing or a bad thing?”

  “She must have eaten walnuts before your funeral! Maybe during!”

  Paolo and I have at least one sort-of miscommunication like this a day, and it is a huge part of why I love him.

  “All right, evvvverybody,” the DJ says into his microphone, sweating profusely under the terrible fluorescent lights, which have remained on the whole time. “We’re gonna slow things down a bit now. Dexter and his girlfriend are gonna head to the center of the dance floor, and then I wanna see all you other couples come on out and join them.”

  “DEN-ton,” my stepmom shouts. “Not Dexter, DENTON.”

  As a poorly written pop ballad starts to play and I wonder why this DJ didn’t think to get my opinion on what I’d want to hear for my Last Slow Dance Ever, I look around for Taryn, who told me she was going to the bathroom at least ten minutes ago.

  “Come on up here, Dexton, and start us off.”

  “Uh…hold on a sec,” I say to SweatyMan as I weave a path toward the ladies’ room. There’s a line of seven or eight girls and women, but Taryn isn’t one of them. Maybe she’s inside?

  “Hey, guys,” I say as I politely skip to the head of the line. “I mean, ladies.”

  “Hi, Denton,” some of them say, in identically sunny, sympathetic voices.

  “You can go ahead
of me if you really have to go,” says Millie Pfefferkorn, the one closest to the bathroom door. She’s wearing a bright yellow headband and a patchwork Raggedy Ann dress. Her parents are both lawyers who make a lot of money, but you’d never know it from her clothes.

  “Oh. Thanks, Millie, I don’t. Have to go.”

  “I thought maybe you’d want the women’s room experience before you died.”

  “Hmm. Okay. I’m looking for Taryn. Is she in there?”

  “Taryn who?” Millie asks, not fully making eye contact. I can’t tell if she’s joking. I turn to the other females in line, like, Are you hearing this? They give me compassionate looks, which probably have more to do with my deathdate than my current interaction with Millie.

  “Taryn my girlfriend.”

  “Oh, Taryn Mygirlfriend. I’ve never met her. I thought you meant Taryn Brandt, that girl you’ve been going out with.” Millie grins in the subtlest way possible, more in the eyes than the mouth.