Still Not Dead, page 12
“Am I, though?” My mom smiles. Very scary. “So, Frank.” She is radiating excitement. “We finally have all the test results back.”
I was just starting to find some joy in this new life, and now the game is about to change all over again. On the bright side, it seems like she doesn’t know Veronica was here last night. Thank God.
“Many mice interact with your blood and saliva,” Dane says. “You would not believe.”
“Oh,” I say, trying to ignore the atrocious imagery he’s just conjured up. “What, um, what did the results say?”
For a moment, it occurs to me that maybe I’m not going to survive after all. But my mom seems so happy—smiling at me like a proud, crazy person with the world’s best secret—so I know that can’t be the case.
“Well,” my mom continues while Felix puts down the bowl of salsa and a bowl tortilla chips and takes a seat in an orange puffy chair, “as Dane so elegantly put it, we did extensive testing with mice that we’d specifically procured because their deathdates were all in the week and a half after yours.”
“It was not easy to find those mice, no way,” Dane says. “Not cheap either.”
“And so, we learned some new things,” my mom says. “You already know the virus was injected into you when you were in the womb. The fact that you survived your deathdate is a huge victory in and of itself. It means the other three babies that were injected over the past eighteen years should live through their deathdates, too.”
“Yes, Yuri, for example,” Dane says.
“Right,” my mom says. “Which is a big deal for our movement—it really is. Only a handful of women have been given the virus, but with your survival, so many more will want their fetuses injected.” Those two words should never be used side by side in a sentence. “The babies will be born with deathdates that will prove to be incorrect, and the system will fall apart.
“But that will take time. Decades, really. We were hoping that the movement could progress faster. And the tests confirmed that that is possible. They confirmed something I’d hardly dared to hope for.”
“Dent is immortal, isn’t he?” Paolo asks quietly.
“What? No, of course not.” My mom is temporarily extracted from her dramatic reverie. “Please, just stay quiet a second.”
“Okeydoke, sorry,” Paolo says.
“What the tests confirmed is that your strain of the virus can spread. And not just on your deathdate.”
“What?” I get light-headed for a few seconds, and I need to put a hand down on the couch to steady myself.
“Your saliva saved the lives of three different mice.”
“Uh…” I don’t know what to do with that.
“Fiona, Harold, and Jellyfish,” Dane says. “They now live because of you.”
“Wow,” Paolo says. “Cute names.”
“You’re a very powerful person now, Denton,” my mom says. She must be really excited, because she forgot to call me Frank.
“That’s, uh, yeah,” I say.
“Maybe the most powerful person in the world, even.”
“Unreal, right?” Felix says, grinning proudly at me.
I’m having trouble processing this. “Are you saying that I can give anybody the virus through my saliva, and they’ll…live through their deathdate?”
“Exactly!” my mom says.
I feel a volcano of joy erupt in my chest. Paolo’s going to live!
“Granted,” my mom continues, “they’ll have no idea how much extra time they’ve been given—could be a few days, could be six decades—but it’s everything we’ve been working toward! We’ve always had so many hopes riding on your return, Frank, and maybe that wasn’t fair, but it turns out we were completely justified.”
Paolo and I stare at each other, like we can’t even believe this is really happening. My head’s spinning, but I need to confirm what I’ve just heard. “So, are you saying Paolo will live because I already passed it to him?”
“Oh,” my mom says, looking a little embarrassed, like she hadn’t even been thinking of the way this news would relate to Paolo. “Well, it’s…” She looks to Dane for a quick moment, then back to us. “The timing is critical. You have to pass someone the virus on their deathdate, or the day before. We’ve found that’s when their DNA is open to accepting it. But if you do that, people will live past their deathdates, yes!”
“Oh, okay,” I say, trying to quickly parse through what she’s said. It seems like all I have to do is pass Paolo the virus again on the day of his funeral. Should be easy enough, considering I was able to do it once before, without even realizing it.
Which means my best friend is going to live.
I’m tearing up a little.
“Is more than okay,” Dane says, standing up triumphantly. “Is DIA payback time.” He points at me. “With our powerful weapon.”
I don’t love being referred to as a weapon, but I’m feeling too good to care.
“Yes!” my mom shouts for the second time in the past minute, doing nothing to regulate her volume at this point. “I’m so happy,” she says, grabbing my hand. “I didn’t know if I’d get to see this kind of change in my lifetime.”
“Dude, you’re a freaking superhero!” Paolo says, throwing an arm around me and pulling me close. “Who’s gonna save my freaking life.”
I am kind of a superhero. This is amazing. And nuts.
“Anybody mind if I break the seal on these chips?” Paolo says. “To celebrate the good news?”
“Do it,” Felix says.
“Woo!” Paolo leans over the table to dip a chip into the salsa. We all follow suit and partake of some chips.
“So here’s the deal,” my mom says, rubbing her hands together to get rid of chip crumbs. “Our movement has been working for two decades to get to this moment. And now it’s time to act.”
“What is this salsa?” Dane asks the room.
“It’s got peach in it,” Felix says.
“It is magnificent! I usually am not a fruit person.”
“Seriously, Dane?” my mom says, shooting eye daggers at him. “I’m about to lay out the most important part of our whole mission.”
“I apologize,” he says, his mouth filled with chips. “Please to continue.”
She stares at him a moment longer before she does. “As I was about to say, this part of our mission obviously rests mostly on Frankie, at least at first. But—”
“I’m sorry,” I say, doing my best to pretend she didn’t just call me Frankie, “but when you constantly refer to this movement, do you mean there are more people involved than just us in this room?”
My mom looks offended. “Well, of course, Frank. There are dozens of people all over the country invested in our movement. I’ve been in New York City the past decade, but right after my deathdate, I spent many years in a number of other cities, finding like-minded individuals who wanted to live through their deathdates and who believed in people’s right to choose whether or not to learn their deathdates in the first place. And all of those individuals are counting on you to bring this gift of extra life to people everywhere, while also bringing this wretched system of mandatory deathdates to its knees.”
Well, that doesn’t sound like a lot of pressure or anything. “Gotcha,” I say. “Thanks for clarifying.”
My mom picks up her messenger bag and digs out a newspaper, which she smacks down onto the coffee table near the couch. “Here,” she says, licking a finger and flipping through pages until she finds what she’s looking for, “is our plan.”
There’s a picture of an older, handsome, gray-haired man and his blond wife standing behind their teenage daughter, also blond.
“I don’t get it,” I say.
“Read the headline,” my mom says.
“Rep. Whitney and Teen Daughter Bond During Her Final Days. Is he a member of Congress or something?”
“That’s exactly what he is,” my mother says.
I feel Dane and Felix staring at me, excited to see how I respond to this.
“And his daughter is going to die soon,” I say.
“Well.” A strange smile takes shape on my mom’s face. “She’s supposed to die soon.”
Then I understand.
“Don’t you see how powerful this could be?” my mother asks.
“Um,” I say, my stomach flipping over and threatening to push the peach salsa out the way it came in.
“This is the perfect target. Congressman Whitney here has taken a shit ton of donations for his campaign from the pharmaceutical industry, specifically Epistemex, the company that makes the ATG kits. He’s one of many politicians who make damn sure deathdates remain mandatory. So when his daughter somehow lives through her deathdate, oh man, it’s gonna make a huge statement.”
Paolo is looking back and forth from me to my mom to Dane to Felix, like he can’t quite believe what he’s hearing. “So, D’s gonna waltz into this fancy funeral and find a way to secretly pass on his splotch to that plastic-lookin’ girl? So everyone in the government will be all shocked when she doesn’t die?”
“That’s right,” my mom says.
“Holy shit,” Paolo says. “Dent, you’re like an assassin. An unassassin.”
That does sound pretty badass. “Will they know that”—I search the article for the girl’s name—“Haley Whitney lived through her deathdate because of me?”
“No!” my mom says. “The whole point is that she’s going to live through her deathdate and no one will have any idea why. It’s the first step in making it seem like those horrendous ATG kits aren’t one hundred percent effective after all. Like I said, it’s a statement.”
“So…how am I supposed to pass the virus to her?”
“Whoa, Dent,” Paolo says, a lightbulb flickering on over his head. “You’re gonna get to make out with that chick!”
“No, no,” my mom says. “Frank is going to drink from a glass of water, making sure to deposit a big saliva sample—”
“Well, that sounds heinous,” I say.
“And we’ll make sure that glass of water gets into the Whitney girl’s hands.”
So I’m going to save a random girl’s life by depositing my spit into her water glass. Not nearly as badass as I was thinking. But I can get behind that.
“The fact that she’s a teenager makes it all so much easier. There’s a much smaller chance anyone will question why you’re at her funeral.”
“Right,” Paolo says, gesturing toward him and me. “Because we’re both teenagers.”
My mom narrows her eyes, unable to tell if he’s joking. He isn’t. “Right,” she says, very slowly nodding her head. “Also, teen funerals usually get the biggest turnouts. Because they’re the saddest.” The clinical way she talks about all this makes me uncomfortable. “So you’ll have a generally easy time blending in.”
“Yeah, okay,” I say, propelling myself to my feet, filled with so much nervous energy I can’t sit any longer. “We go in, we pass the spit, and we save this girl’s life. But are we sure this isn’t, like, playing God or something? Like, this girl and her family have been expecting one thing for her entire life, and now we’re changing that?”
“Oh, this is absolutely playing God,” my mother says. “But sometimes that’s necessary. Sometimes people don’t know what’s best for them.”
There’s something not quite right about this, but it’s hard to argue against saving someone’s life.
“Honestly, dude,” Paolo says. “Even though we all know deathdates are one hundred percent accurate—or, at least, used to be—every person probably still holds out a small slice of hope that they’ll be the first to live through theirs. I definitely did. And now it’s coming true. Booyah, mothafuzzers!”
“Well,” I say. “I never held out that hope.”
“Yeah, but you’re weird. You love to follow the rules. You didn’t even drink till the day before you were supposed to die.”
This is true. I am big on rules. “But what happens to Haley Whitney when she lives?” I ask. “The government kidnaps and studies her? Like they want to do to me?”
“It’s hard to say,” my mother says. “The government only wants to study you because they know you’re the first one to survive from a direct injection. And they’ve known about your potential to survive for years, way before your deathdate, which gave them plenty of time to prepare the cover-up. They had an agent tailing you most of your life, for God’s sake. But with the Whitney girl, no one will see it coming; the government will be caught completely off guard. Especially her father.”
“So…she’ll be able to continue living her life like nothing ever happened? Oops! Guess they got the date wrong!”
“Well, I don’t know about that. But people will find out she’s lived. And it will be a huge news story.”
“See, dude?” Paolo says. “She’ll become famous. People love being famous.”
Paolo’s right about a lot of things today. And the more I think about it, the more this actually seems like an amazing gift to give someone. If it felt amazing to write nice things on people’s Facebook Timelines, I can’t imagine how much better it’d feel to bestow someone with more life.
“When’s her funeral?” I ask.
“Wednesday,” my mom says. “A week from now.”
“Okay,” I say, then pause, because I know it’ll make it more dramatic. “I’m in.”
“Yes!” my mom says, flinging her arms out and pulling me into a hug. “I’m so glad about this, Frank. You’re incredible. Thank you.”
Not gonna lie—it feels really good to hear my mom say that, even if she is kind of a nut.
Dane shakes a victorious fist in the air. “This make all the waiting for you worth it.”
“Let’s go change the world, li’l bro,” Felix says, patting me on the back.
Their love and praise are intoxicating, and for the first time since all this insanity began, I’m thinking maybe I’m on the right path after all. I’m going to save this girl Haley’s life. And Paolo’s life. And then maybe I’ll start saving other people’s lives, too. Maybe this truly is the natural extension of the kindness mission I started on my deathdate.
Maybe it’s what I’m supposed to be doing with my life.
My mom releases me from the longest hug she’s ever given me, and I catch eyes with Paolo.
“My boy’s an unassassin!” he says, giving me a hug.
I still can’t believe he’s going to live. I’m about to say something to this effect when my mom puts a hand on my shoulder.
“Don’t go anywhere, you two, okay?” she says, looking at Paolo and me with a decidedly less enthusiastic expression than she had a moment ago. “We need to have a quick talk.”
“Um, sure,” I say, glancing at Paolo to see that he’s just as bewildered as I am.
My mom directs a loaded look at Dane and Felix. “Fellas,” she says, “could you give me a moment alone with Frank and Paolo? Maybe go order some dinner for all of us or something.”
“Oh yeah, absolutely,” Felix says, heading toward the kitchen.
“Is there a surplus of that salsa?” Dane asks as he follows.
My mom sits in the orange chair just vacated by Felix. Her whole vibe is making me nervous.
“Hi,” my mom says, as if by doing that, she’s rebooting our time together.
“Uh, hi,” I say.
“Hello,” Paolo says.
“Um, I’m not sure how to say this,” my mom continues, “but in the conversation we just had, I wasn’t entirely straightforward about one, uh, more unfortunate aspect that the tests have brought to light.” My heart is in my throat. “The past week, we’ve been working with the blood, hair, and saliva samples we took from Paolo, and we, uh, discovered something.”
“Oh no,” Paolo says, concerned. “Did my blood make the mice, like, explode or something?”
“Um, no, nothing like that,” my mom says, confused but trying to be polite. “Frank, when you passed the activated virus to Paolo on your deathdate, it obviously wasn’t Paolo’s deathdate, too. So the virus operated differently on him.”
“Differently how?” I ask, pressing my feet hard into the rug.
“It operated more like a vaccine.”
“But…vaccines are good, right?”
“Not in this case, no,” my mom says, shaking her head. “When you gave the virus to Paolo, his immune system formed antibodies to it. And now he’s immune to the virus.”
“Meaning…?” I ask.
My mom turns to look right at my best friend. “Meaning the virus isn’t going to save you, Paolo. I’m sorry.”
“How can you be sure?” I ask.
“The mice keep dying,” my mom says, sympathy in her eyes. “The antibodies that your body is creating, Paolo, mean that rather than incorporating the virus into your DNA, you’ve developed an immunity to it.”
“But,” I say, “I mean, you said you thought Paolo might survive.”
“I know. That was before the tests. This is new to us, too. And it turns out the virus is like chicken pox. You can’t get it twice. Paolo got the virus already, and his immune system defeated it. And created antibodies to fight it off in the future.”
So, because I shared a bowl with Paolo, I ruined any chance he has of surviving past his deathdate?
“This is so wrong! I can save the life of some random blond girl, but I can’t save my best friend?”
“Dude,” Paolo says. “I appreciate the rage on my behalf, but it’s really okay.”
“No, it’s not!” I say. “There has to be a way to figure this out.” My mind is moving fast now, because if this logic is accurate, I won’t only be losing Paolo. Anyone I make out with or share a glass with or, I don’t know, whose mouth I accidentally sneeze into is going to become immune to the lifesaving powers of the virus. Unless it’s their deathdate. I’m like a superhero who can only save people he’s not close with.
“Look,” my mom says, leaning in. “There are things we still don’t understand about the virus. Maybe if you can successfully pass it to Tom Whitney’s daughter, we’ll figure out new ways that it works, pinpoint some kind of loophole that could save Paolo.”
