Denton Little's Deathdate Read Free Page A

to be sixty-two, but right.”
    â€œYeah, I know. This is a challenging time. Let yourself feel that.”
    â€œCan you not lecture me right now?”
    â€œI’m not lecturing; I’m trying to help you. I’m sure your death counselor has told you—”
    â€œMy death counselor is a weird-smelling old dude!” Who happens to have been genuinely helpful to me in the past months. But I’m eager to end this conversation anyway I can. Anger is not something I do often or well, so I usually greet it like a moth that’s landed on my shirt: shake it off shake it off shake it OFF!
    â€œWhoa, all right, Dent,” Felix says, his hands in the air. “It’s all good.”
    â€œI need to go get dressed,” I say, avoiding his eyes and heading up the stairs. I guess even as you approach the end of your life, your family can still annoy the crap out of you.

As I unbutton my shirt and get ready to shower, my mind travels back to some well-worn territory: How am I going to die?
    It is a question that has kept me up many a night, occupied many a daydream.
    I read that during the first years of the Deathdate Movement, the government offered up the option to learn how your death would happen, but it proved to be accurate only seventeen percent of the time, so they scrapped it. Bummer.
    Because sometime tomorrow, I will cease to be. And, man oh man, do I wish I knew how. Car accident? Trip and fall? Stung by a bee and it turns out I’m allergic? Infected by some Ebola-like virus? Mysterious brain thing à la Ashley Miller?
    Or: straight-up murdered?
    With my health records all perfectly normal, whatreason do I have to believe I
won’t
be murdered? If I was sick with cancer, for example, I’d be pretty confident in how I was going to die, which would maybe give me a sense of ease with the whole thing. No murder here! Just cancer!
    But when my grandpa Sid was growing up, as he has never been shy to tell me, nobody knew how
or
when. How crazy is that? No time to mentally prepare, no way to make sure you do all the things you want to do before you die. In a Time with No Knowledge of Deathdates, I could see how getting cancer would be an advantage of sorts. It would either warn you of your upcoming death, giving you time to get ready, or it would scare you into appreciating your life and then not kill you.
    Then again, I’ve known my deathdate my whole life, and have I done all the things I want to do? Not really. “I just want to live a normal life.” That’s always been my party line on my premature death, even dating back to the August afternoon when my dad and stepmom first told me about it.
    Parents are advised to let children know their deathdates around age five, old enough to comprehend things but young enough to accept information without overthinking it. (I guess in our family, “You’re gonna die young” got first dibs over “That’s not your actual mom.”)
    â€œSo, uh, Denton,” my dad said as I sat on the couch with Blue Bronto, the first and best stuffed animal I ever owned, on my lap.
    â€œAre we eating lunch soon?” I asked.
    â€œYes, of course. Absolutely. But, uh…”
    â€œOh come on, Lyle,” my stepmom said, plopping down next to me. “Denton, do you understand what death is?”
    â€œYeah, when people aren’t alive anymore.”
    â€œRight, that’s right. And it doesn’t have to be a scary thing at all. It just is.”
    â€œOkay.”
    â€œWell, your death is going to happen when you’re seventeen years old.”
    â€œI’m five.”
    â€œRight, you’re five now, so that’s…a long while away. We just wanted to tell you now. And if you ever have any questions about it, you can always ask me or your dad, okay?”
    â€œOkay.” I ran my hand down Blue Bronto’s tail. “How do you know?”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œHow do you